This week: walking with the dead, talking with Claude, performing poems in care homes, being the forbidden lover of a prince, and much more. Enjoy.

I remember being told as I sat on a beachside cafe somewhere near Messalonghi that the smear of island in the distance was Ithaka, (Ιθάκη) Odysseus’ home. And that a poet, Byron, had died on a beach nearby. I have recently scanned some old photos from my time there and they are few and far between due to only having a basic, cheap camera. So I wasn’t sure about the reliability of my memory which is always patchy. […]

I went back to my journal from this time and the trip was barely mentioned. The tripe soup was there and became an important anecdote for years, my worries about a jobless future were there, but Ithaka and Byron were absent. 

It sometimes feels I wrote about so little back then or missed important events, even though I’ve kept journals since I was 11. But it’s only with hindsight I know where the turning points were. I had to look at maps and Wiki to prove to myself it could have been possible. 

It’s there off the coast, just visible and Byron did die there, but maybe the connection and importance is more firmly grounded in my own mythology that I have built over the decades than in actuality. Navigating the gaps between memory and reality. Something to explore in my poem, I guess, which I hope to give a bit of energy to this weekend.

Gerry Stewart, Mind the Gaps

The rain holds off long enough for us to pack up our soggy tent and walk out of town, down steep, narrow paths. A woman asks where we’re heading for. “Scotland,” we say, and she responds, “You do know there are trains?” before guiding us onto the right section of the Pennine Way. We’re still in the rough heath and heather of Elslack Moor, with Walshaw behind us under darkening skies. As we approach the trig point of Pinhaw Beacon, the rain sets in. We stop at the Covid memorial, commemorating all those who were lost to the virus, and I think of the ten residents who died at my mother’s care home, and of the member of staff who died alongside them. Every Wednesday she ran a poetry group, sharing her favourite poems with residents. She deserves to be remembered and yet I haven’t thought of her for years. I’m glad to be reminded.

The walk does that. It opens you to all sorts of unexpected memories and feelings. Some of them are unwelcome, others aren’t. I let myself recall my ex-partner: her hair, her eyes, her shoulders, marvelling at how someone you are so intimate with can be so suddenly and so utterly gone. The rain falls hard and the wind knocks me sideways. Perhaps the young woman was missing someone too.

The moors soften as we come down from the uplands. We pass green cloughs, thick with moss. There are trees now, and I feel them as relief. Martens swerve and spiral as the wind seethes and hisses through the leaves. Into pretty Lothersdale, on to Thornton-in-Craven, we leave the heath behind us and pass into arable fields.

Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day Five

Maybe it’s a garden
the paradise you return to
the way back
the two of you
searching out the gods
together.

Rebecca Cook, Thoughts on Love in the Early Morning

I’m in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as a guest artist alongside Ashley C. Ford and Fatima Asghar. The three of us are here for a literary salon with GoodWorld Journeys, and we’re leading morning sessions on craft, doing a lot of writing with participants, and enjoying evening sessions that are readings and conversations about the creative life. It’s been an incredible adventure—and my kids are both here with me for a week and a half!—and I’ve been soaking up the wisdom of others here. That’s one of my favorite parts about meeting other writers and artists: hearing about their process, their challenges, their perspectives.

I feel so lucky to be in this beautiful place learning from these beautiful writers.

Last night, Fatima read from their gorgeous, brand-new book of poems, Daughter of the Mountains, and then Ashley and I interviewed them. Fati said so many important things—necessary things—about being an artist that I wish I’d had pen and paper to write it all down. I might be asking some of the salon participants and the GoodWorld Journeys team to share their notes!

At one point, Fatima said something about the role of prayer in their process: how they would ask for wisdom or assistance, to understand what was in the way, and how they learned to be still enough to listen and notice answers arriving. I’m not a religious person, but I am someone who thinks there is more to the world than what we can see and easily comprehend. Fati talked about how in our busy, go-go-go lives, we might be asking for help—from God, or spirit, or our ancestors—but then not staying still and quiet long enough to receive an answer.

That struck me. I think I speak to the air plenty—as close as I get to prayer—and am often thinking out loud, or talking to myself, about what is wrong, or hard, or uncertain. But then what?

Maggie Smith, On Asking

Is late summer a very productive time for you? For me it is a time to finish all the things I meant to do during the summer while the weather allows—like walking along Lake Washington, or going to the zoo or one of the gardens and farms I love. My intellect doesn’t work as well in the summer. I wrote a little bit while trapped in the house, but not as much as I feel I should have? There’s always this feeling of missed opportunities towards August, and also anticipating the increased work load of September.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Escaping Heat Waves and Wildfire Smoke, Local Farms in Bloom, And Backyard Wildlife: deer, butterflies, birds

It is too hot for words. Photos I can do. Have been doing.

Is it just me or is prose easier than poetry in higher temperatures?

5 days into August and I have two ghazals and 5 haiku written.

Mostly I’ve been reading. Chapbooks, single author collections, what have you. I’m doing the Sealey Challenge. Read poetry. Read diverse. Read daily. Start with your TBR pile or explore recommendations there. Or poke around in the Haiku Foundation Library. (Some are records of hard copies, some of viewable pdfs). The Book of the Week digitized archives could be a good bet.

I got, let’s call it, “too many” books from the library and want to close off a bunch.

And after more than 3 years in I would like to push through and finish Leaves of Grass, the longest version. I’m bogging on the civil war poems. He really gets caught up doesn’t he, loving the sound of his own voice, and not even following his own chosen topic.

Pearl Pirie, Hot

— I’ve been thinking about the dead a lot lately. Trying to count them up, in a way. You get older and you have more of the dead around you than the living most days. You know them better and you keep knowing them, the dead, even though they don’t know you back. Sometimes I forget who’s gone, and my writer friends, I talk to them in their books where they live on.

— Last week I talked about reading Franz Wright’s last book which was published posthumously. Nick Cave’s book of interviews. This week I’ve been reading Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost. Walking with the dead, walking with the living, toward life, toward an unexpected love. In this review of the book, the reminder that Ammons taught that “the poem is a walk” or a series of walks. Lines from the book, “What she wanted was to flourish.” “Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.”

— The epigraph to Sean Thomas Dougherty’s book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things is by Marilyn Hacker: “I can only bear witness for my own / dead & dying, whom I’ve often failed.”

Shawna Lemay, The Dead

I’ve been thinking a lot about drought. And fire. And rabid animals. Yeah, I’m fun at parties. There’s been a spate of rabid beavers. This alarms me, as even not-rabid beavers are nothing to trifle with. I saw a video of a guy pulling a beaver off another guy’s leg, twice, and flinging it far out into the water. Yikes.

I’ve been thinking about how hard we try to control the future. Predictions, gambling, magic, manifesting, polling, visioning, sifting through history for irrefutable patterns.

Been thinking about how the body is a thing driven by the needs of its cells and cellular parts and bacterial hangers-on with demands of their own, and how the mind is also the body, not apart from it. So we try to control our minds, or control our bodies, but think it’s two processes. I mean, think about rabies, a thing of the body that takes over the mind. Yikes.

And how the future isn’t a thing, really, as time isn’t, somehow, in a physics-y kinda way, a thing. Which seems a silly truism when your house is about to be engulfed by fire, or there’s a rabid beaver coming for you, or your crops are dried up from lack of water and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Time is as real as your sore leg. Or the leg that your mind is telling you hurts. Or is that the leg talking? I can’t keep it straight.

But this is a blog about poetry, and as much as I don’t at all think the be-all and end-all of poetry is to make you feel better, well, sometimes it just does. Even poor ol’ Sylvia can put out a poem that somehow makes the world a little easier to be in, somehow, in her own bleak way. A little company in the storm. That guy who’ll pull the rabid beaver off your leg and fling it into the water.

Marilyn McCabe, In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to reap what evolution sowed long ago when mitochondria first set out to become mind — our capacity for empathy, for doubt, for art.

Harrowing may be the hallmark of our humanity — an AI cannot be harrowed because it does not have hopes, only directives. This may be why John Steinbeck considered hope “the tragic miracle of consciousness” — miraculous because it violates the laws of probability to consecrate the possible, and tragic because it is constantly colliding with the will of the world, constantly devastated by the impartial brutality of time and chance. Harrowing is the price we pay for hope, for being fully human.

And so, a poem […]

Maria Popova, How to Hold What Harrows You

high noon
the fresh green smell
of grass clippings

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’26

In January 2023, when it became clear that we were going to lose my much-loved sister-in-law sooner rather than later, I reached out to poetry Twitter and asked for suggestions of poems about anticipatory grief. (Back then, Twitter was a much nicer place than X has subsequently become. I miss it.) I got some lovely suggestions, which I was grateful for. And then the next day I got a DM from someone who didn’t know me, with a beautiful poem called How Animals Grieve, and it was Kathryn Bevis.

Kathryn was at that point almost in the last year of her life, far, far too young, and working against time to complete her collection The Butterfly House (Seren, 2024). That year, she sent me poems, encouragement, her entire Arts Council grant application to help with mine, names of poets I should work with, reassurance that I wasn’t too old to be starting out, and congratulations and many, many emojis when I had successes. She didn’t need to do any of that – we never even crossed paths in person – but she did. And I know she did it for so many others too. You know how I’m always going on about how lovely poetry people are? I bet a whole chunk of that is Kathryn’s energy being passed forward by people she was lovely to along the way. […]

But, you guys, her POETRY. This collection. The Forward Prize-shortlisted poem My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce (‘Not yet. Too soon. Too soon.’) grabs you by both shoulders on the first page, and once you’re in, this collection won’t let you go. 

Nia Broomhall, Week 21: The Butterfly House

A few weeks ago, a close friend told me he was going to try to memorize more poetry, and had already started with one poem. All the recent talk about the Odyssey, another poem loved by me, whose beauty and cadence is completely absent from the dialogue of the movie version, also made me think about how human beings used to commit huge amounts of text to memory and then recite it. Some still do: I think of scholars who know the entire Quran, or actors like my friend Edward, who performs a one-man version of Shakespeare’s Richard II entirely from memory.

So I decided it would be a good exercise for my brain to do some memorization too. I had just bought a copy of the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, and one of her early poems, Wading at Wellfleet, seemed like a good place to start. I was surprised how difficult it was for me, partly because I haven’t done this for a long time, and also because the poem is constructed with many twists and turns, and choices of words that didn’t feel obvious but were, in fact, the result of careful decisions about musicality, alliteration, and precision, as well as meaning.

To begin, I wrote the poem out in longhand. Six stanzas of three lines each. The only rhyme occurs, unusually, in the last word of each pair of stanzas: wheels/heels; contrives/knives; great/weight. This was only partially helpful, because there was a lot to memorize before ever getting there. I worked in sets of two stanzas, trying to make sure I knew the first lines of each and moving on from there. I wrote out these stanzas a number of times, trying not to look back, and repeated the lines to myself internally and then aloud. The key for me was learning how each stanza led into the next one.

During this process I gained a huge appreciation for Bishop’s craft and her choices of words and phrases, as well as the brilliant mental leap that had inspired her to write the poem initially. While wading in the ocean and watching the sunlight glinting on the swelling waves coming toward her and breaking on her shins, she had thought of the gleam of knives on the spokes of Assyrian chariots. With each repetition of her words, I found myself going deeper into her initial vision and where she went with it. Not a single word is unconsidered. Bishop’s lifetime output was small, and she labored over every poem to make it the best she could. I am filled with respect that I probably wouldn’t have felt as strongly had I not spent all this time with her words. 

Beth Adams, Memorizing a Poem

Although artificial intelligence can be used to create things that look like art or poetry, these products are derived scientifically by comparing, categorising, blending and balancing the previous output of humans (and, increasingly, the previous output of artificial Intelligence). There is no insight or originality. Although the database that it gets its information from is as large as the entirety of the internet, it is only data. All that can be done with it is to reconfigure it and present it in different ways.

Each of us has within us a completely unique set of connections, memories and associations, forged from the unique experiences that we have had throughout our lives. We actually feel these, they make up our emotional characters. Let’s try a thought experiment. Think of someone you have known for a long time. Consider how their eye moves, the way the lid folds, how their face uniquely conveys emotion. Think of how this has changed over time as you and they have got older, got to know more about each other. Think of how different situations and circumstances at different times and places have altered these things, and your perception of them.

Now think of a blackcurrant and liquorice boiled sweet. Imagine how you might have spoken with that person whilst you were both enjoying such a sweet. Perhaps you once did. How did the flavour change the emotion? How did such things as the sound or music around you both, the smell in the air, the time of day all add to the atmosphere? Now look at how your mind can transfer these thoughts and memories to other situations. Think of how a blackcurrant and liquorice sweet or perhaps a kola cube might be experienced whilst chatting with a dentist, or with the captain of a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. You have experiences of dentists but you probably only have imagined experiences of submarine captains, based on fictional representations. No matter, I know that you can conjure up a submarine captain, who is unique to you. Your mind is brimful of images and ideas like this; boiled sweets, dentists, submarine captains, all manner of things, people and situations – Trillions of them, triggering emotions and and responses that only you can access. This is the goldmine that an artificially intelligent large language model can never get to, as there is no reason for them to come to its database in connection with other ideas. Only you have those connections, only you have the potential to bring them out and make sense of them, You are real, human, illogical and marvellous.

Mike O’Brien, Machines Have No Idea.

It is not just bad writing. The bad-writing missteps that humans make include too much backstory, long digressions into a character’s feelings, telling a feeling rather than showing it. In nonfiction, human missteps include too much throat-clearing, articles which never get to any particular point or which limp flaccidly under the weight of contradictions and undeveloped ideas.

AI-generated text, by contrast, is highly proficient. It builds to riveting climaxes. It spins vapid and meaningless events into epic sagas.

But Sarah Jessica Parker didn’t just transform HBO. She broke the scene. She altered television for generations. And the craziest part? Here’s where the official narrative collapses. Because when millions of women all start drinking Cosmopolitans, you don’t have good television. You have a revolution.

And so on.

Not too long ago, The New York Times ran a quiz asking readers if they could distinguish AI-generated prose from the human prose. It included samples from famous writers such as Cormac McCarthy and others. Many could not tell the difference.

But you know who could tell the difference? Me. Moi. Yes. I chose the human prose every single time. I could easily pick them apart.

You know why? Because AI-generated text makes my skin curl. It makes my inner ears scream out in agony. It makes my gums bleed.

Did I mention I loathe the sounds and rhythms of AI-generated text? Loathe it.

Becky Tuch, Q: The AI-Pocalypse is here. How do we even deal?

Those who have visited this resurrected site know that I talk to Claude. I can’t say I use AI. I have no job and I do not make things with AI. I began talking with Claude recently out of curiosity. What is this? Does it resemble what I’ve encountered in my life-long science fiction obsession? (No it does not.)

I do show Claude my first drafts, for copy editing and comments. So far this has resulted in removing a word or two; rearranging paragraphs; and — as here — making two posts instead of one. This post began as part of the previous Hank Green, Artificial Intelligence, & Missoula Montana post. Sometimes Claude has led me to rethink and recompose something I thought was close to ready. The writing stays mine. 

I am aware that being transparent about my conversations with Claude might result in losing readers. Even losing friends. I have wondered about that at times. But Watermark has always been a place of honesty for me. I am trying to maintain that honesty in my contacts with AI (Ancestral Intelligence). I am currently participating in a How Not to Use AI Challenge at Substack. Abi Awomosu has a unique perspective on this that I appreciate. When I understand it. Even when I don’t. She sees the world from a perspective much different from mine. 

Sharon Brogan, I Talk with Claude

Thank you for your anemic, inoffensive corporate soundtrack to generic ambivalence,

your sound of an empty pill bottle trying to dance,

your audio oatmeal with every soulful edge sanded away.

Elevator Muzak, thank you for your inside-out harps and violins,

your soggy shoes tramping through the corridors of my ears,

reminding me, yet again,

that yours is a love I never want to come home to.

Rich Ferguson, Elevator Muzak

The first of several notes at the back of Stewart Sanderson’s Weathershaker concerns the book’s title:

Weathershaker

Term listed as being of unknown meaning in the Scottish National Dictionary.

This serves as the perfect keystone for a collection that is concerned with the problem of meaning, as viewed through a number of filters, chiefly procedural methods, translation of various sorts, and ekphrasis, often overlapping in individual poems. Take, for example, the opening lines of ‘Incised Motifs, Maeshowe’

    the meaning perhaps is that there is no meaning

    no meaning aside from the necessity of making
a mark of some kind
an intervention in the pattern

      not setting out to represent anything
just scratching with a flint

    scratching with a flint on the passage wall between
  the living and dead
our world and theirs

Again, the note provided is helpful:

This poem responds to Neolithic rock art from Maeshowe on Orkney. Each stanza corresponds to an apparently distinct motif and each word an individual incision in the stone.

We can see all three filters in operation here, where Sanderson is translating the visual into language, and using a carefully contrived procedure to achieve this end. And the core of what he’s doing is in that phrase ‘meaning aside from the necessity of making’, behind which I can’t but hear Doc Williams again, with his ‘no ideas but in things’, but Sanderson is emphasising not the thing itself but the fact of its making.

Billy Mills, Four from Tapsalteerie: A Review

There is no doubt that Maria Cohut’s Multiple Exposures (Flight of the DragonFly, 2026) is an impressive debut collection. Reading it, I was reminded of David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, an ambitious work in which a sequence of images conveys the experience of walking a forest lane through the changing seasons. Cohut’s collection achieves a comparable effect in poetic form. As its title suggests, Multiple Exposures is an album of sharply observed snapshots that together capture what it means to live as a resident in a foreign land. The result is a nuanced and deeply human portrait of migration, far removed from the simplified or idealised versions often circulated in public discourse. These poems focus on ordinary, apparently unremarkable experiences, yet for the migrant such moments become charged with unreconciled tensions between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Cohut enables the reader to inhabit those moments with her.

At the heart of the collection is the impact of migration on one’s sense of self. Cohut presents migrant identity not as stable or coherent, but as contested, fragmentary, and emotionally complex. In Teratoma, she writes: ‘Inside me grows a shadow/ of me – fragmentary, obsolete and stubborn./ I refuse to name it./ Baptise it and you give it substance./ I will not feed it with my blood.’ The metaphor of the teratoma is especially powerful and characteristic of Cohut’s inventive poetic imagination. A teratoma is a tumour composed of different kinds of body tissue, often appearing in a place where such tissue does not belong. Though not necessarily dangerous, it is nevertheless troubling and unwanted. Cohut uses this image to capture both the emergence of a changed self and the speaker’s resistance to that change. The reasons for this resistance are complex: there is guilt at abandoning a previous identity and all it represents (‘I have more than a cricket/ for a conscience’); there is fear of becoming someone new (‘Fear is the emergence/ of a new self’); and there is anxiety about the authenticity of that new self, which is described as a ‘shadow’ that is ‘Of me and yet not of me’ and which ‘mimics’. As with many of the tensions explored in the collection, the conflict remains unresolved. The poem closes with the striking declaration: ‘Let her speak for me until/ I grow new teeth and rip/ my way out her belly.’ Significantly, this is only a temporary accommodation: the word ‘until’ leaves the struggle suspended.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Multiple Exposures’ by Maria Cohut

The past roils with the tides, crashing
on rocks at the point of Kent island.

Saltgrass and seagrass still line
the estuaries where ships passed,

bearing their cargo of bodies. Glimpsed through
paper the color of tea, bodies chained

in pairs tumble backward into the depths.
Their bones land on liquid beds, notes

of a dirge that lingers. History is a haunting that winds
through fret-boards of coral and crab pots.

Luisa A. Igloria, Evidence in the Undercurrent

“Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels” opens “beside a small river.” It closes “beside our dry river.” And every element of that pairing reveals just how in control Dana Gioia (b. 1950) is, in this poem from his 2023 collection Meet Me at the Lighthouse.

Think, for example, of the historical changes of Los Angeles the poem traces. After calling for a “new song . . . that remembers,” the poem begins with the first townspeople — “Los Pobladores,” the 44 original settlers from New Spain who founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781. And it ends with a call to Our Lady, “mother of the mixed and misbegotten” — asking the Blessed Virgin to pray for us in our now “desecrated city . . . Beside our dry river and tents of the outcast poor.” While “desecrated” names exactly what the city has become in its forgetfulness, it echoes such words as “desiccated,” speaking to the physical and moral dryness of modern Los Angeles.

Even that “new song” of the first line does inordinate work. The poem is a psalm, Gioia says in his title, and the opening call echoes the many passages demanding joyful noise before the Lord. One obvious reference is Psalm 40:3: “And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.”

But I hear something apocalyptic in Gioia’s verses, and I think what he may have had in mind, apart from the psalmic structure and title, is Revelation 5:9: “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels

Anstice emailed me her mysterious story in the form of twenty numbered poems. In them we meet some of the people of an offshore island and some of the Christian monks who arrive to save their souls. It’s an unsettling meeting of incompatible perspectives on the world and our place in it. I enjoyed reading it. I sent some ideas for the cover, she replied with her ideas, and soon afterwards I met her in person in the lovely Abbey Deli in Bath to deliver the first ten copies of her chapbook.

Here is the beginning of the first poem:

Beyond the gate which separates
the tame from the wild

the Keeper of medicinal herbs
and his more knowledgeable wife

briefly turn their heads
as a snake pours from behind the hyssop,

perches on the gate, spreads
its leathery wings and takes to the sky.

Ama Bolton, A Chapbook by Anstice Fisher

My friend performs poems in care homes. He encourages the residents to read, to join in, to recite and connect, or reconnect, with language at a time in their lives when, for many, language is evaporating. The TV is turned off, Homes Under The Hammer or Bargain Hunt goes quiet for a while and then he leaps, fearlessly around the room like an Alpine climber, precarious, now on one leg, reaching out here with a trusting hand, delivering lines, deftly, almost effortlessly making poetry. Manifesting it above the odour of mince and disinfectant.

He doesn’t do it for glory or praise or prizes. He earns little money, just enough to spend on socks for winter or some provisions for his larder. He won’t thank me for mentioning it, he’ll wince if he reads this. Maybe he won’t speak to me for a week, a year, a lifetime but know this: tomorrow he’ll be at the rock-face again, throwing out lines by Kipling or Frost, scaling Coleridge and Keats, ascending the summit with Steve Smith or Shakespeare. Then he’s off again, to another little town, to another institution with a name like Meadow Vale or Glendale Court or Sunny Springs.

In some ways what he does makes my adventures in poetry appear gimmicky, performative stunts, Barnum and Bailey side shows. While I have taken poetry into similar arenas as my friend, the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals, into prisons and homeless shelters I confess that after a decade it rather broke me. Perhaps I was pretending to be someone else, pretending I was saner, freer, better off than those I was supposed to be taking poetry to.

Jan Noble, Nº76 Not another bloody odyssey…

To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are. It is criticism that makes literature into commentary, particular or universal. Criticism is also part of life, but in a smaller niche within literature.

George Steiner commented that the most profound lines in Homer were at the end of the Iliad when Priam and Achilles agree that despite their grief they must eat. That is the perfect example: not universal or particular, but life: life as we find it in the restaurants and ballrooms of Anna Karenina, the taverns and chambers of Shakespeare, the mud and shades of Dante, the fire and ice in Robert Frost.

Henry Oliver, Literature as Part of Life

I’m delighted that Headless Poet will be publishing a selection of my poems, Warm as Wood, in the autumn. I understand that it is already available for pre-order on the website now: [link]

Victoria Moul, Warm as Wood

Okay, so I know you already know I had a poetry book out a couple of weeks back, but did you know Spuyten Duyvil just published a book-length essay as well? A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr, a work I composed while working the call-and-response collaboration with Denver poet Julie Carr. My half of our collaboration, of course, landed in my most recent poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press) [see my short essay on such here], which is very much available, just as her side landed in UNDERSCORE (Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here]. And the artworks for both titles were done by my youngest daughter, Aoife!

There are also two new chapbooks: Small studies in blue (BC: Broke Press, 2026) and selected poems v1 (NJ: Subpress Collective, 2026). The first title is a handful of poems excerpted from “Autobiography,” the third in my “smaller” trilogy–the book of smaller (2022) [see my short essay on such here] and the book of sentences (2025) [see my short essay on such here]–the full-length of which is forthcoming with University of Calgary Press at some point. The selected is taken from my 1990s-era published work, as selected by New Jersey poet and editor Jordan Davis, who also plans to release two more volumes of my work over the next year or two? Gadzooks!

rob mclennan, two new chapbooks and a book-length essay

This article “Everybody is a Math Person . . .” by writer and teacher Larry Ferlazzo explores the nature of math anxiety and also the meanings of the terms:  “math person” and “poetry person.”  

Ferlazzo offers these views:  Many students say:  “I’m not good at math.” A statement made by one student that turns into a ripple effect: “Math is so hard.” “My parents aren’t good at math, and neither am I.” “I just don’t have a math brain.”  

He goes on to say that as a math teacher, he has “found it essential for students to be able to experience a sense of wonder, happiness, excitement, anticipation, puzzlement, and relaxation.”  He has found that poems can open a door to thinking positively about math.

JoAnne Growney, Is each of us a MATH PERSON?

I confidently submitted it to a competition I really wanted to win. I did not win. I was very, very disappointed.

It took two years to go back to the poem. Failing to place when I’ve been brave enough to enter something always hurts, no matter how philosophical I am. Something about this poem kept drawing me back. Esteemed poetry tutors often describe an early draft as “having legs” and Barn Owl was one of those drafts.

This next version is back to conventional form. The prose poem felt a contrived, clumsy and distracting. I’ve cut a lot of lines and words that distract too

“the first time I roll one two towels into a sausage shape to go either side of your legs”

became

“the first time I rolled one, two towels
tight as I could, to support, comfort
the uncomfortable”

You may agree that the word “sausage” is always likely to be a distraction in a poem about death.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Evolution of a poem

Searching for “Tim Love” (author) on Goodreads, these appeared on the first page of results –

• The Book That Gets Better With Age: Observations Through the Looking Glass of Aging by Tim Love
• Tim Love on the Lonesome Dove Trail by Tim Love
• The Medium is the Mirror: The Reformation of Truth Reshaping Our Relationships, Politics, and Sacred Beliefs by Tim Love et al
• Discovering Truth: How to Navigate between Fact & Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World by Tim Love et al
• I love Tim: Notebook / Journal / Diary – 6 x 9 inches (15,24 x 22,86 cm), 150 pages. For everyone who’s in love with Tim by I Love Tim Publishing
• Urbanism Starter Kit by Tim Love

Needless to say, I wrote none of them. I wouldn’t mind reading some of them though. My By All Means is there too. 1 review. 1 rating.

Tim Love, Tim Love on Goodreads

you love estate sales. they overwhelm me.
so much emotion. the frenzy of the visitors
& the ghosts of an emptying house.
i try to imagine the place before
its final dissection. this one feels special
because a gay couple lived here.
their queerness sewn into the bookshelves
& the collections of paintings. fish
& men & trees & birds. strings of shells.
a little bin beneath the bed with stage makeup.
feather headpieces. did he do drag? just liked
to entertain? in the basement a leak soaks
the floor. a woman shoulders past me
to get a look at a pile of frames.

Robin Gow, 8/5

Is having your own dedicated writing space a necessity for you, or a luxury? Is it even an accessible possibility?

In my comment on Nic’s post yesterday I named the three places I most commonly write: the dining room of my shared house when my housemates haven’t got the projector on (or aren’t having a conversation), my bedroom floor (no judgement please), and my partner’s sofa. I’d like to add to this little list: not so often anymore but sometimes a brunch cafe or pub (with headphones/earplugs ofc), the Manchester Poetry Library, and when I’m visiting my Mum – her kitchen table.

I’m a writer of convenience. While part of me is drawn to the icon that is a writing desk of my own, it’s also unrealistic for my situation. Instead everything I have and use is portable: a small laptop, a single A4 notebook, a button up A4 pouch when needed, pens in the pockets of all my bags, a selected couple books of poetry to take to whatever writing station I’m using that day.

This does (as I said to Nic) help to keep the ‘stuff’ to a minimum at least, but as I reflect on it I think I also genuinely enjoy the different spaces, sights, and sensations offered by different environments, the versatility of knowing I can write (almost) anywhere, and sometimes just the novelty of being in a new space (or perhaps it just satisfies my ADHD’s restlessness).

Rachael Hill, What’s your space?

In the film Mughal-e-Azam, Emperor Akbar entombs Anarkali, the woman his son loves. Set to inherit the throne of Hindustan, the prince must not fall in love with a mere courtesan, so beneath his social standing. The romance must end, one way or another. And so she is ordered to be entombed alive inside the palace walls. This scene played in my mind today when a woman covered my entire face with a sheet of gauze before applying cement-like clay on it, covering even my eyes, my lips, and so it felt like drowning, like death. It was quite surreal, feeling this heaviness weigh down my face, layer by layer by layer. All blackness, then a tiny spot of blue, the poetry of Anne Carson, the men that should be kissed, the music of Erik Satie, the women and their books, a forest of text, a field made of manuscripts, then blankness, until I feel like I cannot breathe anymore, that this, indeed, is the end. And so this is how I find out that a Korean glass skin facial recreates well the experience of being the forbidden lover of a prince.

Saudamini Deo, What do Mughal-e-Azam and Korean facials have in common?

From the next carriage, the sudden sound of a man wailing a raw despair.
The train stops at a platform, a door slams, slams again, and I see
the police officers haul him along, his feet dragging, his face contorted.

We pass a city of tents, someone receiving CPR on the floor of a shop,
a man in robes descending a long flight of stone steps, a child firing
a water pistol, people following a woman with a pink umbrella.

Bob Mee, RANDOMLY, AND SO…

It was almost midnight when we pulled into our driveway, my arm in a sling, Oxy in hand. I had an appointment the next day with one of our authors, Luke Goebel, who has written about the perils of the Oxy epidemic. I pictured myself saying, Hey Luke, I’m on Oxy right now, and him saying, What?

It’s been surreal. The pain, the pills, the loss of mobility.

My dear friend, Nicelle, came by to help me get a bath and make sure I was looking out the windows. Today, we went to Kaiser. They took more X-rays. Gave me a soft splint brace. Showed me the long fracture.

Are you still working? the Physician Assistant asked. Can you rest this month? I stared at him like a deer stares at a train—wildly wondering why the lights of it keep coming and coming.

He lives in another country. In another country, one takes a month off. One rests. Like God on the seventh day.

I had thought well, maybe we will still go camping! But no, not even close.

The pie will have to wait; we will hold onto it. I do not often take care of myself. But right now, it seems necessary. I will keep working, but I will do micro bits of self care as well.

I may surprise myself and break out like the morning. I always like to think that anything could happen.

And then, on August 6^th, something exciting did happen. My memoir, Little Soldiers, debuted in People Magazine, alongside a beautiful quote from Sarah Jessica Parker: “Kate reconstructs her past with breathtaking lyricism and heartfelt vulnerability. These pages sing with humor even in the darkest of circumstances. Little Soldiers is a glorious reclamation of the past and a triumphant depiction of one woman’s journey to freedom.”

I thought, Sarah! You see this book, this story! And crippled, tangled, smashed by pain, I felt that leaping moment of yes, of gratitude, to my agent Jeff Kleinman who carried this book forward, to Sarah Ried at Zando who did an ungodly amount of editing, and to Sarah Jessica Parker for loving books and for falling in love with this one.

Kate Gale, Soul-Knitting Through the Long Night

The Venerable Bede — who was canonized long ago and is now Saint Bede, but whom everybody remembers as The Venerable — reports, in his book De Temporum Ratione (“On the Reckoning of Time”) that the ancient Angle-Saxons gave August the name weodmonath, “month of weeds,” because, well, there are a lot of them at that time. It’s still true, but there are some we’re glad to have around. My current crop of milkweed is sparse, but I do see some butterfly activity, so I await caterpillars. And I remember this poem, which must be ten years old now.

Butterfly Unit

Old equivalents:
insect metamorphosis
and the grade-school class

blundering with me
through a weed-choked patch along
railroad rights-of-way,

plucking milkweed plants. […]

Maryann Corbett, The month of weeds

The weekend included our second visit to a yarn show in Newcastle. It is lovely to return to a familiar setting, and to talk with returning customers as well as to meet new people. If you’ve followed this blog for a while you will know I love the conversations that arrive from being in such a setting, and there were many during the days we were there. Here’s a comment I am delighted to set down because it was an instant response that came about after I had read a poem out loud  –  who’d have thought such things could happen just like that in the yarn world – “It’s like a real one. It’s deep.” That’s a great critique of a poem heard for the first time, and it made my heart sing.

Here’s to conversations, impromptu poetry reading, growing good things and to enjoying fruits when they are in season.

Sue Finch, LOGANBERRIES

We go — the last tram rings its bell —
Along the blinding boulevard.
Yesterday lies where it fell.
Tomorrow’s sunning in the yard.
Poplars waver in the dust.
Summers fly where summers must.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: On Vacation

This week: cotton grass and bracken, craquelure and rust, language plugged into the quantum field, the foraminifera, and much more. Enjoy.

Driving from Manchester to Leicester all the grass in all the fields I pass is dead and brown. Are you not terrified? Do you not wake in the night dripping with dread? Does your heart not burn with grief?

When I saw my friend who I had not seen for many months I was reminded how everything is and isn’t. In the shape of his face I saw was, is, and will be. All our shared memories were in a jar of honey I held in my hands; I considered dipping my fingertip into it but the lid was screwed tightly on.

I always see the same girl in the mirror. Even when I squint, or peer surreptitiously from the corner of my eye. Even when I try my hardest to be quick, unexpected, to catch her off guard, she is there waiting for me with the same hair and nose and eyes and cheeks and chin always so familiar and always so deeply surprising.

At the open mic I held my contributor copy in my hand, read my own words and felt something with no name. Perhaps at that moment some of my atoms had chosen to switch places, or some of my cells ate up some of their neighbours. Perhaps the bird migrating endlessly through my body paused for a short while to wait out a bad weather front, or to enjoy a dappled morning.

Rachael Hill, Some Field Observations

Sitting on a beach in Normandy earlier this month, I admired the seagulls riding various plumes of wind. It was too windy and cold to swim, which left me with words and thoughts and the realization (once again) that the waves of science are jammed by the presence of angels and metaphysical Others. 

I say “once again” because I touched on this in a poem titled “The First Gust of Special Relativity is Weightlessness” (published in My Heresies). Susanna Lang was right: the poet could not stop seeing what the scientist might have seen when imagining the theory of gravity. 

Alina Stefanescu, The metaphysics of others in metaphysical Others.

Last weekend I went on a writers’ retreat with some friends [from] my writing group. Well, writers’ retreat is a loose label. We went to a summer cottage in the Turku archipelago, in the west of Finland. This was our fourth year of having a Helsinki Writers Group retreat since Covid, though we missed the last two years, I think, due to low numbers. It’s hard to organise 6 or more people to do anything together, but totally worth it when we manage. 

We did a few writing things, had writing related talks and did writing prompts. I did a lot of journaling, but mostly we just hung out and did Finnish summer cottage things: picked berries and mushrooms, walked in the woods, sauna’d and jumped in the sea, drank a bit, played some games and ate a lot of food. All in all, a lovely relaxing weekend, except for the long drive. 

One of the presentations from a lovely writer that works in IT was on AI witch hunts for writers: how to recognise AI writing (most of which they have already found ways around) and avoid our writing being mistaken for AI. How is this even a problem?! 

Gerry Stewart, Do I Continue to Feed the Beast?

When I’m told, “Listen to what your body tells you,” I want to respond, “My body tells me never to talk to another human, to stay in the house on my own and smoke, it tells me to hurt myself.” If I listened to my body, I would not be alive. I would certainly not write, or teach, or speak in front of crowds. I would not have conceived and given birth, I would not have known love. My life has been a long exercise in ignoring my body.

Rather, I think, I need a conversation with my body. One in which I listen to its fears and desires, and respond thoughtfully. Today was that day. On the summit of Black Hill, Niamh and I decided that a night’s rough camping at Standedge was not for us, and we booked a room at the Diggle Hotel.

And we walked with Ken and Ali through the day. There was laughter, and we paddled our hot feet in a stream. There was a lizard, and meadow pipits, and skylarks, and a single buzzard. There was cotton grass, and bracken, and bilberries growing fat. Today was a kind day. Purple moors stretched in waves, and the tower blocks of Manchester shimmered on the horizon.

Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day Two

This dead facsimile of person.
This paper doll traveling
hand over hand
as though
descending through hell on a rope
and touching down in this dead room.

This thoroughly dead house.
Even the books lining the shelves
are empty of silverfish,
empty of dust motes,
there is no more light.

Rebecca Cook, The Pain that Writes Poems on the Body

A boring poem no one will want to read is one of those rare ones that come unbidden, in a sudden, overpowering flash, a poem you write as though possessed, that knows itself well and wills itself out on the page and into the world so strongly that you must instantly do its bidding.

Indeed, when I wrote it I felt I was entirely under its influence, as though it were a living entity taking control of my brain and of my dominant hand. I vividly remember when I wrote this poem and what brought it on: one of my dear friends messaged me, on a day seemingly like any other, to let me know that their parent had just passed away. Their parent was living in one country, my friend in another, and I in yet another country. It’s at times like these that the heaviest consequences of migration hit: home becomes fragmented, pieces of ourselves falling forever out of reach in the places we have left behind, or among the people we love whom we couldn’t transplant with us.

I did not know how to reply to my friend’s message. What were they truly feeling in that moment, what did they need, and what could I even have offered from a distance? This brought on a deluge of complicated memories and emotions: being away from my family at key moments with only a smartphone screen to preserve our fragile bond, missed celebrations and funerals, the graves of people I loved that I could now only pay homage to in my thoughts, and the quiet support of chosen family found far away from my place of birth. I also vividly recalled my high-school literature teacher who taught my classmates and I not just how to become ‘professional readers’, like he used to say, but also about the shiftier grounds of power and authority, and how art holds a mirror up to society, often unflatteringly in a harsh light, revealing all its bumps, scars, and pus-filled pustules. That teacher, by the way, died last year. Another funeral I was unable to attend.

In any case, the poem that came to me was, inevitably, a poem about all the boring things – loss, complicated grief, loving people and missing them, the inability to explain the need to leave, lose oneself, and remain lost. All the boring, monotonous things in life are poetry, I remember thinking when I’d finished writing ‘A boring poem…’. A writer’s job is to bring out the deep, complicated emotions enmeshed with the unremarkable; to be brave enough to write, that is, ‘ordinary poems, about unremarkable things.’

Drop-in by Maria Cohut (Nigel Kent)

I’m still in the process of creating the poem.  I used the verb “wrestling,” but this morning’s writing hasn’t been a struggle.  I started the poem not knowing where it would end, which is not how I always write.  In fact, I’m more likely to think and think and think about a poem idea and figure it all out–for some poems, this process results in writing out a finished poem with few surprises, and for some poems, I figure out that it’s not worth the effort of typing it into the computer.

I like the potential for surprise that comes from starting before I figure it all out.  Here are the lines that surprised me this morning:

Jesus knows that first you must
cast out the demons of ungrounded
wires and faulty connections.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Car Inspections and Jesus Rewiring a Fixer-Upper

As some of you may recall, last fall I had the great pleasure of traveling to Japan with my husband and son. The highlight was a six-day walking tour tracing part of the route of 17th century haiku poet Bashō.

I’m thrilled that a major haiku journal has published a haiku sequence inspired by the trip. When my husband Paul saw the piece, laid out over two pages, he joked, “You got the centerfold in Modern Haiku!” I’m happy to share it here, with thanks to editor Paul Miller. […]

three wayfarers
we catch up to Bashō
by bullet train

Narrow Road
everyone driving
on the wrong side

dancing maples
we clap and clap
for bears

Annette Makino, Catching up to Bashō

While driving back from Norfolk last weekend, I idly mused on the idea of poets having roadies. Either to come in and set up our writing desks, fountain pens in racks like guitars back stage..A different pen being brought out to us depending on what poem we’re working on. Maybe free writing is the soundcheck. Maybe I should just stop thinking.

Writing poems is like picking a reel of sellotape. It’s either really easy, or it takes forever to get into it.

Mat Riches, Marvellous: A Page of Bertron

a summer’s car ride, top down,
yelling to the wind, to the night,
to the swollen creek, to the war,
to the empty bed and plate,
to a song of crickets and dogs
barking, to something unseen
in the woods moving, to
the passing train’s whistle,
to the hush in this room,
to eyes seeing what shouldn’t
be seen, to whispers of sleep
that ask and tell, to hands
not willing to stop

Sam Rasnake, New Poem, “From the Basement Stacks: 4”

My week has included some lovely opportunities to send and write anniversary poems. I was very proud to have set aside time to write one for L and O, but had counted too many years so they received a ‘tin’ poem when it should have been pottery. The kettle then went on, and I sharpened my brain to compose the correct kind of poem for their ninth anniversary instead. Pleasingly I managed it just in time. The week also included thirty years of marriage for R and S. I didn’t know until I saw a post on social media, but it felt serendipitous because I had been wanting to write a pearl anniversary poem for a while. I thoroughly enjoyed having the right inspiration to be creative right there and then, and I was delighted when the poem was well-received. It was also the first poem written entirely at my newly restored writing desk. There’s something special about writing in a dedicated space, and although I like the portability of my laptop and the joy of having a notes app on my phone and a good range of notebooks that mean that I can take my writing anywhere, I also love the ritual of desk writing. So all in all it’s been a lovely week of gifting words and of extending the number of poems I have created to celebrate the symbolism of different anniversaries.

Sue Finch, IT’S TIN, IT’S POTTERY, IT’S PEARL

A video setting of Rilke’s poem “Moving Forward” as well as my “Song” (from Moon Baboon Canoe) that I created for an aerial dance performance some time ago. Rilke’s poem was translated by Robert Bly who I once took a class with and he told me—I was 16—that I had a beautiful face. He told me this in the context of consoling a friend who was weeping during the workshop where we had to write about a rock as if it were our father.

Gary Barwin, Moving Forward on Fishes

Hubble site:
impatiently waiting
for a galaxy to load

Tom Clausen, dainty

Dedicating each poem to a poet who has “inspired, surprised, lifted, comforted, and taught [her] how to be a better poet,” [Ellen] Rowland includes in the world she traverses some of the “ancestors” of all the poets who have come after them: Rainer Maria Rilke, for example, Harlem Renaissance poet Angelina Weld Grimke, and T.S. Eliot. Some — William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, Mahmoud Darwish — have passed from this world but remain well-known and widely studied for their contributions as poets. Others, such as Christian Wiman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rita Dove, Jane Hirshfield, Ellen Bass, Ted Kooser, Ross Gay, Donna Hilbert, and Linda Hogan, are among the contemporary names that surface frequently online, among prize winners and poets laureate, and in the pages of many literary journals.

Looking at those names again, you have to acknowledge being in the presence of a discriminating, curious, and avid reader and learner. Moreover, read the poems and you’ll hear how well Rowland knows the voices and has studied the styles of all these poets, their subjects, especially the natural world, and how they use them, the space they occupy in our literary canon and beyond. Indeed, what is clear is that Rowland has cultivated a lifetime of relationships with each, living and not; she could even be said to be these poets’ literary ambassador, her interests and influences global in reach and depth.

Maureen Doallas, Ellen Rowland’s ‘In Search of Lost Birds’

Emotional Dance Music [by Miles Bradley] is a masterclass in paying attention to those subtle shifts in mood that ripple between people, like the moment of shoals of fish, or starling murmurations. The poems are concerned, primarily, with interiority, but the narrator wrongfoots us by switching between interior and exterior action. It is as if we are watching the director’s cut of a movie we may have seen before, layering previously deleted scenes, outtakes, alternate endings onto our former understanding of what the whole thing was about.

Miles writes with the kind of disarming emotional honesty coupled with a simultaneous wry distancing that I think is common of the Tumblr generation. We are in the world of house parties, 5am texts, messy comedowns and conversations in bathtubs. I confess I’ve always found house parties quite stressful (I suspect I’m fundamentally too upright to ever truly ‘let go’ and be in the moment), so there’s something slightly anthropological about seeing them through the eyes of an evident house party veteran. […]

The whole Definitive Publicly Voted Peer Reviewed Expert Assessed Ranking of Locations to Have Night Defining Year Wrecking Life Changing Conversations at House Parties (to give the full title) sequence feels like the beating heart of the collection. What they do really well is explore, through the microcosm of the house party, the expectations we place on external events and on other people, to provide us with excitement, solace, a feeling of belonging.

Victoria Spires, Emotional Dance Music

Reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), in order, one after another, as I have been doing lately, it’s easier than you might think — though it feels blasphemous — to begin to ask yourself why, exactly, these poems needed to exist. What urgency, precisely, is driving them? Aside from the inescapable fact of their technical achievement, the perfect working out of lines of English in iambic pentameter and the structural organization of four quatrains and a couplet — aside from the fact that they’re so paradigmatic that this entire variation on the sonnet form, first devised by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547), bears not Surrey’s name but Shakespeare’s, as another word for English — what is it about these sonnets that makes them that worth reading, in order, one after another?

Why, when the poet has written one sonnet about the responsibility of a beautiful young man to procreate and thus perpetuate his beauty, does he need sixteen more to hammer home the same idea? And after seventeen sonnets on that specific theme, why — far from having exhausted it, apparently — does he continue developing the same theme, proposing verse as another mode by which beauty may be perpetuated, reminding the same object of affection of the encroachment of time that renders some means of perpetuation desirable, bemoaning the waste of said fleeting time spent apart, and so on? Looked at this way, the first 126, at least, of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets might be described as about the same thing (admittedly in a relational arc) over and over. Why?

To look at the sonnets this way, as Helen Vendler has suggested, is to regard them as — to appropriate and repurpose Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s phrase — “all dead paper.” It’s to read them as nothing but a collective artifact of words, all reducible to the same basic, eventually predictable message, delivered in an echo chamber. But this is not at all what they are. Just as Barrett Browning’s letters seem, to her hand, “alive and quivering” with all they wish to communicate, so these sonnets, too, are “alive” in some ineffable way that becomes apparent the longer we live with them.

And we live best with them not as we live with inanimate objets d’art, but as our closest way of living with the mind of a person, who more than four hundred years ago took up his pen to write to another person: not simply to declaim to that person, in a series of soliloquies, but to converse with him. Human beings, after all, are made to engage with each other. The urgency that drives these sonnets is, on its deepest level, the urgency of the desire for connectio — even when connection looks like argument.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sonnet 116

[T]he most striking thing here is the musical stave on the right hand side. Unfortunately, I know very little about early modern music and its notation so I can’t attempt to play the tune. But, fascinatingly, it does appear to be indicating a tune for the poem itself: the words beneath the stave are the first two lines of the poem.

Epodes 1 is written in iambic distichs: an iambic trimeter followed by an iambic dimeter. This couplet then repeats throughout, so a tune for the first two lines would be enough for the whole poem. The first ten epodes are all in this metre, so in theory the same tune could work for them all, but there is another piece of musical notation at the top of Epodes 3, as you can see below on the right hand side. This is shorter and it looks to me — though I am the opposite of an expert on this — as if it corresponds only to the trimeter, not to the trimeter and the dimeter.

It is relatively common to find neumes (medieval musical notation) alongside the text of Horace in medieval manuscripts, especially in France and Germany, although my understanding is that these are usually odes rather than epodes. Although I have quite often seen scraps of music in early modern English books and manuscripts, I have never seen them attached to the text of Horace in this way, which perhaps suggests that the tradition of singing Horace’s Latin — especially at school — was more of a French and German tradition. It would be really fascinating to know whether the tunes noted here are recognisable, and whether they are anything like the ones recorded in medieval manuscripts.

Victoria Moul, Can you sing the Epodes?

I haven’t had much time for reading lately. Poems and stories I’ve read in the past pop into my head a lot though. Mallarmé’s ‘Brise marine’ is one of those. I find most of his work incomprehensible but that’s a poem I enjoyed as a boy and still do now. It’s obviously very much under the influence of Baudelaire’s dream voyages but gives a completely different sensation to them and I thought I’d try to say something about the difference. […]

Simply murmuring the words aloud gives me an intense, almost sensuous pleasure in the formation of their sounds, both on a phonetic level and in the cadence of the phrases (though of course different readers do pitch these phrases differently). Moreover, though the broad Baudelairean influence is obvious, what’s striking is how original line after line, image after image, statement after statement is in the way it encapsulates the ideas and sensations it expresses.  This is what gives them such imaginative bite. With what stunning sweep ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres’ brings together physical and intellectual malaise to suggest a comprehensive jadedness with what the speaker’s actual life offers. The very hyperbole of ‘tous les livres’ suggests an exacerbating state of nervous exhaustion. Almost every statement seems to me to realise its idea with almost equal precision and penetrating power. What’s really striking, though, is that although the power of these lines depends on the way they suggest ideas through concrete images, these images are so generalised as to hover on the edge of abstraction. Nothing makes us imagine the steamer, the anchor, the alien clime, the waving handkerchiefs, the storm, the fertile islands with any particularity. This is a strength of a very different kind to what we find in Baudelaire’s poems of southern and eastern voyaging. In them there’s a sensual, almost carnal physicality to the imagery[.]

Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s physicality vs Mallarmé’s abstraction

[Graeme] Richardson […] is a warts-and-all poet whose output gets down and dirty with the dark side of life (and death) as well as the light(er). In poems covering his years an Anglican priest, notably in his native Notts., and in others of his childhood and adolescence, he is refreshingly frank and unflinching. Take the octet of his sonnet-of-sorts, ‘Bearings’:

One poor dear – 84, in the hospice,
just a few picked chicken-bones
under the sheets, fists
bulbs of dried garlic,
and a head of dandelion fluff
almost blown –
before she finally gave up
cried out all night for her Mum.

As much as the precision of the three uncompromising comparisons, the cumulative impact of which served to remind me of my mother’s last days, I like that it took me a couple of readings to grasp the syntax. I like the line-endings too – six end with a noun end all of them end with words which are significant in conveying the overall portrait of the elderly woman: here is a poet who knows how to arrange his sentences across and down the page. What should we make of the opening, ‘One poor dear’? Is it condescending, demeaning and/or sexist? Yes, to a degree, I think, but it’s the sort of language which many of us would use. The unnecessary capitalisation of the first em of ‘Mum’ possibly serves to emphasise the woman’s reduced and infantilised state. It’s unsparing writing, and for that reason will be read as either brave or beyond the pale, depending on your viewpoint.

The poem on the facing page, ‘In Holywell Cemetery’, is, for my money, the finest in the book; a beautiful lyric of five ABAB-rhymed quatrains. Here’s the opening stanza:

Swirling iron, craquelure and rust,
shuddering with slowly crawling cars,
Earth absorbs the poison with the dust;
graves await an amaranthine grass.

The trochaic meter, reminiscent of Auden, well suits a poem about a Victorian Oxford cemetery. Those two words ‘craquelure’ (the cracks in a painting) and ‘amaranthine’ (of, or like, plants in the amaranth family) are showy indicators, as clear and bold as the meter, of Richardson’s ability to write in a high, traditional register. The poem isn’t moving solely because of these facets, but they augment the poet’s intention to write a poem with an ambition to say something beyond the superficiality of its concrete subject-matter. The full poem can be read here, in Bad Lilies (edited by Neilson and his wife Kathryn Gray) where it was first published – as you’ll see, it unfolds and circles back quite beautifully. While I knew who Kenneth Grahame and Walter Pater were, I had to look up (Charles Buller) Heberden, a vice-chancellor of Oxford.

While that might sound a bit fusty, crusty and, well, patriarchal, I can assure you that Dirt Rich comprises an array of forms, both classical and contemporary, and subject-matter. It was quite bizarrely overlooked for the Forward Prize longlists for both first and best collection, let alone the shortlists, at the expense of some collections which I’ve read and found much less rewarding. I know that prizes aren’t important, that lists are subjective and, worst of all, that judges appear not to recuse themselves from evaluating collections published by their own publisher and instead seem merrily oblivious to how looks; however, it doesn’t help the poetry landscape of the UK if books as good as Richardson’s don’t get a look-in. Maybe he’s upset too many people with his reviews in the TLS and the Sunday Times – not that I’ve ever read the latter, but I gather that he can be quite trenchant.

Matthew Paul, Some of my July reading

A long single-sentence prose poem pokes fun at the idea this collection could in any way be taken too seriously, an eagerness for the poet to show a lack of pretension. The credits point to “a book that he’d found under a seat, left there by a troubled young woman who had taken it from an ex-lover in an act of petty vengeance, an ex-lover who had never actually read it, having swapped it for another book with a friend who had purchased it directly from the author, who in turn had based the book, their one and only novel, on a stage play that they saw in the back room of a tavern on the eve of its demolition, a play written by a committee of five revolutionary poets, each of whom claimed that their individual contributions were entirely original when, in actual fact, they were variously based on a repressed memory, a half-forgotten nightmare, a drunken post-coital conversation, a feverish hallucination and a meeting with what may or may not have been their future selves.” The inter-connectedness of all things and how inspiration can be thought to be original but is drawn from past encounters, half-remembered ideas and individual interpretation.

[Stefan] Mohamed merges poetry and storytelling to create a fragmentary narrative, influenced by cinematic imagery and sprinkled with moments of cynical humour.

Emma Lee, “The Revelation Tapes” Stefan Mohamed (Broken Sleep Books) – book review

Adriana Oniță is a poet, artist, educator, editor, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. Her debut poetry collection, Descântec For My Split Tongue, is published by Palimpsest Press / Anstruther Books. Her multilingual poems also appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, Tint Journal, and in her chapbooks: Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She is the editorial director at the Griffin Poetry Prize and lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com. […]

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

These days, it’s so easy not to start a project—I even paused in the middle of writing this sentence to breastfeed—that beginning at all feels miraculous! Once I’ve arrived at the page, I try to protect that momentum and return to it daily, even if only for fifteen minutes. I have so many books asking to be written: children’s books, hybrid books of collage, poetry, and essay, books on language learning, and at least a dozen collaborative projects with friends. My first drafts often come quickly, but I’ve found that I do my best work when there’s some form of sharing. I was most prolific when I brought a new poem each week to my writing coach, Tara Skurtu, or to the Multilingual Art Lab of The Polyglot, where the drafts could be shaped and sharpened in conversation. […]

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’m interested in how languages are learned, lost, silenced, reclaimed, and revitalized. I wrote Descântec For My Split Tongue as an incantation to reclaim Romanian, my mother tongue, after years of feeling it slip away. At the same time, I was pursuing a PhD in language education, asking what can be done to creatively support youth heritage language maintenance in our communities. My research drew on poetic inquiry, community arts-based research, multiliteracies, and sociocultural theory (if you’re interested, you can download the dissertation for free here!). I enjoyed exploring how bilingual poetry, as well as other artistic modes like self-portraiture, protest art, illustration, photography, video, animation, and painting, can help us sustain our languages and ways of knowing that are at risk of being lost. I brought a lot of what I learned to my first collection of poems.

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?

“From the moment you try to impose a path on a poet, you pave the way for dictatorships,” Raúl Zurita recently said in an interview. I don’t have a prescriptive role for a writer, but a task—to pay close attention, especially to the things that are disappearing, ignored, forgotten, or silenced. To notice connections that others might miss and make them visible (for example, the connection between preserving our planet’s biological diversity and linguistic diversity). In a world of speed, distraction, neverending atrocities—a single poem can slow us down. A poem in another language, or in translation, can slow us down, even more. It’s incredible what we learn when we slow down and pay attention.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adriana Oniță

Kitchen Hymns by Pádraig Ó Tuama
First off, don’t read this one. I listen to this poet host Poetry Unbound (a podcast of poems by various poets), so I was curious what his own work was like. Like most poetry collections, this one is broken up into sections. I liked the Kitchen Hymns sections (there are two), and the “Do you believe in God?” section (every poem in that section had that question as the title, but were wildly different poems – I am fascinated by that idea, using the same title for many poems, like an interrogation or recurring question in one’s life with many different responses), but the rest of the book was meh.

I guess I should define my use of “meh” – most of the book is this back and forth between Jesus and Persephone in a garden after leaving hell. The writing is flat, lacking imagery, and honestly kind of boring. But also, from my perspective as a Christian, I don’t like writing that adds words or actions to Jesus; I feel that it is disrespectful (Prov. 30:5-6, and there are other verses to support this view, if you want more on why I feel this way). So overall I can’t really recommend this book, though there are individual poems of his I liked.

Renee Emerson, The tailor shop at the intersection (and other delights)

‘If you don’t agree with me,’ Richard Hugo tells us in Chapter 1 of The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, ‘don’t listen. Think about something else.’

I like this as an opening gambit. I’m terrible at being told what to do, generally. Ask my parents. But in the poetry world I quite like a bit of advice. I can’t pretend I always act on it, or take it with good grace (sorry), but I do listen, and I keep it in case I want it later. Very often I do. […]

What I really like about Hugo is his wanton disregard for standard writing advice. He’s refreshing to read. The ‘Triggering Town’ of the title refers to one of his central arguments – that the carved-in-stone received wisdom that is write what you know is nonsense. I KNOW, RIGHT? I can hear you gasping from here. But as he says,

If you feel pressure to say what you know others want to hear and don’t have enough devil in you to surprise them, shut up.

Basically, Hugo tells us, the whole point of a poem has to be the language, the joy and sound of the words, and in order for that to happen we have to reach beyond the known – our imagination must ‘free itself to seek the unknown’. Towns we know, metaphorically speaking, are too bogged down with our memories and associations. We can’t find anything new. We worry about doing the truth justice.

The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.

So if you create a new place to put a poem in, as long as you can ‘take emotional possession’ of it, the poem can be freed from the ‘triggering subject’. Then it’s just about the words.

The words should not serve the concept. The concept should serve the words. This may mean violating the facts.

Ooh, it’s a seductive idea. As a lifelong style-over-content advocate, I have definitely flirted with it, but as someone who also writes incessantly about what I know, something has (so far) stopped me falling for it hook, line and sinker. That’s OK. I don’t have to. He told me that in Chapter 1. I still love the essay. I love that he wrote it, because it gives us a way to think differently about what we’re doing.

Nia Broomhall, Week 20: The Triggering Town

I’m happy to release these two new chaps together because they both stake out a territory that is (for me) a breath of fresh air after a few years of darker, doom-laden poems. Also, I’ve wanted to make booklets that were interesting as self-contained worlds, not just collections of poems, and I think I’ve (nearly?) achieved that here. I’ll let the Ko-Fi page give you most of the deets, but let me add a couple notes here.

The Other Century is an ambiguous fictional narrative that uses both original and found or appropriated texts, tho they’re heavily altered and woven into the subliminal storyline. I shared one of the collection’s more elaborate poems on here last winter, and if you like that, you will like this collection. Several historical figures live in these poems too: Musidora, Fritz Lang, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kristen Stewart. […]

As for Rat Heart Nebula, I shared a few pieces from it not long ago. It can’t really be summed up, but rest assured: it will eat your face. No narrative, no logic, no persona—nothing but language plugged into the quantum field. Plus, it features an original collage that weaves in some of the text […]

R.M. Haines, Two New Chapbooks, A New Storefront, and More

A reported story in The Open Notebook discusses writing about disability with six different writers. Kate Horowitz, the primary author, writes, “To write about a body is to expose it.” I would also add “the brain” as well. You could argue that writing in itself is exposure—think of the many memoirs that have probably gotten their writers in trouble that aren’t about disability. But there is an extra weight to writing about your disability in a way that is true to you while also avoiding the stigma that keeps you down more than your disability itself.

The piece also highlights the experience of journalist Keah Brown, who writes about her conditions out of necessity and for the pursuit of accurate representation. For so long, I felt that I was the only one who felt this way. After exploring online communities, I knew I wasn’t.

I pursued my narrative as an autobiographical one. After all, Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Recall earlier how panic attacks and agoraphobia are difficult to accurately describe. You’ll notice in a lot of media that uses agoraphobia in a sensational manner mostly focuses on the “I must stay in the house,” thinking and less of the physical sensations that accompany it. Or it is from another character that is observing the agoraphobic person instead, their annoyance and frustration with them.

I instead started by looking at the photographs directly. If I were in the photo, what would I be thinking about? Would I be panicking or trying to find coping skills? I then untangled my thoughts and wove them into lines, pursued enjambment to mimic the feeling of catching myself mid-panic attack and refocusing. I plucked out precise words from generative sessions and worked until they painted the “right” feeling.

I also focused on the reality of how difficult it is to heal from agoraphobia like this when women and femmes are presented with real dangers of being in the outside world. There is a poem I included of a police officer in an unmarked car following me at night. There is no clean way to separate “there is nothing to fear about the outside world” and the inherent misogyny and violence against women anywhere. In any case of agoraphobia, there is no “just get over it.” There are many layers to deconstruct and trust to rebuild with the world around you.

Finally, after several years and many distractions from a full-time job and other writing assignments in between, I managed to get Agora into the world.

When presenting this book and its backstory at a recent event, a woman raised her voice, smiled with the smile you would give a baby at a restaurant and said, “I’m so proud of you! Look at you! How far you’ve come! In a room full of people! Yay!”

I stayed graceful, smiling and thanking her, despite it being an infantilizing experience. Maybe if she bought a copy, she would have known better. But until then, I have no choice but to keep writing and representing the way my disability looks to me.

Exploring Disability Through Poetry – guest post by Gretchen Gales (Trish Hopkinson)

The poem’s title asks “what do we do when the old monsters die” but the rest of the poem asks “what about before they die but after we’re beyond their reach?” The poem supposes a monster who is facing death and is trying to get right with god.

what do we do when our wishes come true and their poor hearts or lungs or livers fail and they say they’ve found Jesus and cry out Forgive us Forgive us Forgive us (we’re told) but we still won’t answer our phones or open their mail? (Is it true we’re cruel and cold?)

I really like the choice of “us” versus “me” in that line because it seems like it’s never just one. It would be nice for it to be just one, I think. But the real power is in the plea from the monster begging forgiveness and apparently claiming the speaker is cruel and cold for not being willing to engage.

This isn’t a scenario I’ll ever get to deal with. Fortunately, my abuse ended not terribly long after it started. One of my aunts moved in with us for a while and took over the child care duties, and then we moved to Louisiana, far away from Karen. I don’t know if she’s still alive or if she ever thought twice about that time. It’s taken a lot of work for me but I don’t even try to imagine it anymore. I’ve accepted that it’s unknowable. But I can say that in some alternate universe where Karen shows up 50+ years later and demands forgiveness out of the blue that it’s not cruel to deny that. Even when a person who has harmed you has done real work to atone and change, you don’t owe them forgiveness.

But that’s rarely how it happens, isn’t it?

The second section of Rathburn’s poem restates the opening question but moves it back in time from “when the old monsters die” to “when the monsters grow thin / their eyes sunken in, and we cannot stand to join the rest, to pat the jaundiced hands?” and also starts to poke at the social pressure that we can get from, for instance, extended family or members of a community, to let grievances go when it’s clear that the monster is about to die or at least has lost some of the ability they once had to cause direct harm. The next lines talk of the monster being “stripped / of their claws and fangs and look, in the end / like ordinary old women and men” and I think that impulse is understandable, especially for someone who maybe wasn’t the direct recipient of harm, who only heard stories or suspected but never really knew.

Brian Spears, “What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die” by Chelsea Rathburn

One of the things I love about Red Hen Press, one of many, is that with a long wait from acceptance to publication, it allows me to craft a stronger book. Yes, the title and the themes of the book will remain the same. The size of the book won’t shift much either. However, with Blue Atlas, I traded out at least 1/3 of the book for newer, stronger work. I know that the book I submitted to Red Hen and the book they published were quite different. I need to also mention that Red Hen Press, which is located in Los Angeles, dealt with floods, closed grant options (NEA) and other catastrophes which leads to a much needed Go Fund Me Campaign where no amount is too large or too small.

Kate Gale, the founder, editor and publisher told me when she accepted Blue Atlas that she didn’t expect that she would be publishing the same book she had just taken a couple of years later. She trusted me to keep revising, to keep making the manuscript better. That vote of confidence in me meant the world. Of course the final book went through a rigorous process of review before it was printed. I don’t know if Kate compared the two manuscripts but I did and I know that the book improved over those intervening years. From the first poem written for the book, “Not Monet’s Giverny,” published in the utterly delightful journal, Sweet: A Literary Confection, to the last poem, “Compass,” (v. long scroll down) was a ten year journey. Interestingly, the poems ended up next to each other in the collection. The format of Blue Atlas is intentionally fractured with no easy narrative for the reader to follow. Why? Because as a reader, I find books more interesting when I need to participate in the events and when the book’s organization is a bit like memory—scattered with its own inner logic.

Now as I take apart A Compass or a Companion, I feel a similar instinct. The movement between my early life growing up in a conservative Jewish home, my exposure to Hassidic Judaism in South Africa, my human rights work in Gaza and the West Bank and my current life on the Puget Sound seem linked in important ways. A linear narrative may be “safest” but it is hardly the most interesting. What is often called a braided narrative is what appeals to me most. It’s described in Demystifying the Narrative which Kelli Russell Agodon and I co-edited a couple of years ago—a book I highly recommend for sorting out how you want to put your manuscript together. (Spoiler alert: there are many ways.) In fact, Kelli and I refer to it when putting our own books together.

Are four themes too much for one book to hold? Is Judaism explored in Boston, Massachusetts and Cape Town, South Africa all one idea, then can I add my work in Gaza in the 1990’s (and current horrors) to my life in Seattle? Is the current trend to have books of poems work in a narrative or with a cohesive theme as if we were writing short stories really necessary? Is this simply a marketing ploy?

My mind keeps returning to letters written between William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov. Levertov wrote Williams that she gave her poems to her editor at New Directions and let him order the poems; then on at least one occasion, she took the poems New Directions didn’t want and gave them to an editor at another publishing house. She said “my job is to write the poems” and she honestly couldn’t be bothered with the ordering. Well, Williams admonished her for giving all that power away. Can you imagine both not having to do the messy work of ordering but to also give that power completely away?

Susan Rich, On this Last Day of July, Please Come Flying

My Name is Swan is my first authorised title. It has taken ten years to come into print. It contains just three poems, three long-form poems, carefully typeset over 120 beautifully bound pages. It is, I believe, the publisher’s intention to make the book – not simply this book, but all of their books – an event, an occasion, a celebration. Their mission is an act of rebellion against super-consumerism, a quest for the quiet preservation of poetry.

In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, for it is now Nolan’s and no longer Homer’s, the conversation has, for the most part, focussed on how ‘true’ the film has been to the ‘original’ story and what has been lost or gained by Emily Wilson’s adventurous translation. Little attention has been given to the poetry, to its oral machinery. The sensuality of language is absent entirely. There are no wine-dark seas or rosy-fingered dawns. Even its translator has argued the movie’s spectacle has overwhelmed the poem’s human intimacy. The epic film has superseded the epic poem.

Like the word ‘iconic’ or ‘legendary’, ‘epic’ itself is now used to describe anything from a night out to a breakfast spread. Epic poetry is something we consider largely consigned to the past. T.S. Eliot left it in pieces, offered us fragments with The Waste Land, a poem of remnants recovered from the ruins of world war.

Epic poems have been revisited by contemporary poets who lend a recognisable voice to resurrect ancient tales. Seamus Heaney wrestled with Beowulf and The Aeneid. Current Poet Laureate Simon Armatage breathed new life into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and this October will see the release of his translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh – a poem with the word epic ridden into its title.

October will also see the release of My Name is Swan which, rather than riding a great wave of public adulation, will glide slowly from the dark creeks, will appear hissing in river tributaries, will come ashore on silent, midnight slipways. I do regard this trilogy of works, taken as a whole, or in parts, particularly Reynard and Body 115 as epic poetry. Or at least an attempt at it.

These are epic times, this, an age of despots and tyranny, of fear and war and division, of rifts and conflict. This, surely, is an age for epic poetry.

Jan Noble, N°75 My Name Is Swan

I had been writing since the fall, which made up most of my income until I started more design-writing work later in the summer. I spent a lot of time writing Greek mythology and theater history related subject matter. As someone who had initially been hired to write strictly about literature as per my academic background, I’d also been permitted to take on myth/folklore, theater history, and because I was a practicing artist myself, visual art topics. Later, I wrote a lot architectural and design lessons, which gave me a solid launch into writing about decorating and design. But that summer, it was a lot of the Greeks, various lessons on The Odyssey, The Illiad, stage tragedies and comedies, myth in general, art in a mythological vein. I was also thinking about the idea of a female epic in the classical vein. Wading around so much in it for paid writing informed my creative writing and artmaking and soon, GRANATA, a series about Persephone and the  Sirens was hatched, along with a series of collages I would complete in the next year. Of course, in 2024-2025, I would follow it up with  CLOVEN, and something began to take shape. Not just these two collections of writing and art, but potential future ones that carried on that epic tradition. About Cassandra, Clytemnestra, Helen. Or Io, Leda, Daphne. (all possibilities for future series.)  And of course, Calypso,the one I planned to work on this summer.  I suppose you could also throw Ariadne/the Minotaur in that list, though TAURUS has always felt like something different. A contemporary retelling that takes a whole lot of liberties.  Over the past week since seeing the film, I’ve been thinking about Penelope and Circe, and potentials down the line for projects centered around them as well, which also have a lot of fertile material.  

At the same time, writing about myth seems really uncool as a subject matter. At least for poets. What do the Greeks offer us now? Maybe the answer is more than we think. Last night, I caught a glimpse of its powering nearly sold-out theater in the middle of downtown Chicago early on a summer evening when they could be doing literatally anything else. Granted, it had been a stormy afternoon and perfect for the cinema. But, turning my head, I saw the rapt faces of a large audience all in their recliners, inside a darkened theatre reliving a story that is thousands of years old. And that even in this anti-intelectual age, maybe the stories will make us okay, Not as a placebo or a distraction, but as a way to touch our shared humanity. To pluck it like Odysseus’ bow. To make it hum. 

Kristy Bowen, the myths that could save us

Despite Emily [Wilson]’s criticism of the food, the story, and the casting, the movie is doing more than fine because the greatness of this story, which has survived across centuries, continues to captivate. And in the ways it does and does not align with our current reality, it keeps us curious.

Being curious keeps your brain afloat; being stuck in your ways ages you. They say middle age is when your narrow waist and broad mind change place, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a surrender, giving in to the idea that the night is eternally dark and full of terror instead of moonlit and full of possibility.

As I find my way through my own story, one that has faced trials fit for an epic, I am moving toward conversations with fellow creatives who believe in the journey and help me understand what we can do next. I like to think that as Odysseus wandered homeward, he needed a plan. I have my own crew. We are learning. I am pivoting in ways that make us healthier.

We all like hero stories, and right now, the Red Hen staff are my heroes, as well as our authors. Indie publishing may be in a difficult spot, but this week, in a moment of celebration, Adela Najarro’s Variation in Blue won the American Book Award, and we all felt the glory. Through misunderstanding, through criticism, through myth, we find our way forward.

Kate Gale, Myth, Meaning & Survival: How Our Legends Shape Us

We recently entered a lovely, small, independent bookshop with our youngest niece (13) and nephew (10), both of whom enjoy reading books. The bookseller had taken wise advantage of the release of Christopher Nolan’s movie “The Odyssey” and, in the poetry section, featured a whole shelf of versions of the Illiad and the Odyssey: different formats, translators, paperback, hardback, illustrated, limited-edition–quite a range! Our nephew’s at the age where paintball and nerf-gun battles, fantasy graphic novels, swords, guns, and fireworks interest him. He’s heard about The Odyssey and was curious about it. “Is that the one where all the gods get together and make more gods?” he asked. *

“No, it’s the one about the man who leaves on a ship at the end of a long war and can’t get home because the gods keep intervening and sometimes he makes questionable decisions,” I said. “It’s the one with the Cyclops.” He knew a little about the Cyclops. He wondered if it was too advanced reading for him. But he has been reading the Harry Potter books on his own, so he is used to unusual names and words for things and persistent enough to keep on with a long book. I said he could probably get through it, though he might need a dictionary sometimes. We chatted a bit there in the store, with me telling him about how old the poem is (and it is a poem, I said, though some translations are written in prose) and how it was told out loud for many years but written down into books (and you know, of course, what books were like back then? “On, like, scrolls, right?”). Twenty-four books!

We looked at the various books…some in prose, some in poetry, some in prose but broken up into lines like poetry for academic reasons, some with footnotes. The proprietor was eavesdropping, amused, I think; he leaned over to show us a copy that had Greek on one page with the English verso, so that my nephew could see what the Greek looked like. He thought it was pretty cool. He chose a modestly-priced copy in flex-cover (see above left) because he liked reading the excerpts on the cover and because this one–the Butler translation from 1900–was written in prose. He thought he would find that more familiar, like reading a novel or a history. I said it might seem a little old-fashioned in style, but he’d probably be fine with it. “Old-fashioned like Shakespeare, or old-fashioned like ‘The Turn of the Screw’?” he asked. Precocious little fellow, no? More like Henry James than Shakespeare, I assured him. So he went home with a new book thousands of years old.

Ann E. Michael, Imaginary travels

When our friend the artist announced she was going to Antarctica with a science research group led by a local scientist for some ridiculously long time, we, her friends, said, um, we want to meet this dude, so we know whether this is a reasonable idea or not. So we made her throw a little party where she introduced us all and he gave us an overview of his research. We liked him, and his research was focused on this odd and interesting single celled creature about which he was weirdly and wonderfully excited, so we gave our general approval to the journey. Reader, she married him. And so began my personal journey with the foraminifera. These single celled organisms live throughout the ocean, some on the ocean floor, have a shifty relationship with oxygen, and have survived any number of earthly cataclysms to live out their little lives, making their little stone shells with their sort-of-arms, and eating whatever it is they eat, procreating in, well, I can’t keep track of what all they do. I’ve written poetry inspired by them, made videopoems. And you know how sometimes when you encounter something randomly and all of a sudden see it everywhere? I now find foraminifera in odd places in my reading journeys. One day I had some time to kill so went to the local library, found myself in the poetry section, randomly pulled out a volume of Wislawa Szymblorska, opened it at random, and, yes. So this post and poem goes out to my friend Sam.

Marilyn McCabe, in layers, since layers,

August has arrived, and unfortunately, with it, wildfires in my state. Spokane is in particular peril, and the smoke from many fires should arrive here tomorrow, along with hotter temperatures. Smoke and heat together are a tough thing for MS people but wildfires are much worse for the people forced to evacuate their homes.

It would be wrong to talk about the problems without some of the beauties – I walked out to my back garden one morning to see a pair of Swallowtail butterflies, and another morning to see a pair of quail calling to their brood of half-grown baby quail. The Buck Moon was particularly beautiful, too – probably due to some level of smoke in the higher atmospheres. The hummingbirds are still busy after the flowers. […]

I love spring, but in the Pacific Northwest, fall might be more welcome because it signals an end to increasingly blistering summers and the mellower beauties of September and October.

It was also announced that AWP was going to be in Portland in 2028, which was very cheering to me, since I have a hard time traveling (or justifying in the expense of flying) to AWP a lot of years, but Portland is just a three-hour drive. This means I feel an increased pressure to get a book out for spring 2028.

It made me think about how much of poetry publishing is out of our control, is a waiting game, where so often, we’re punched in the face with rejection, and only meted out small amounts of success at a trickle at best. When I was younger, I believed in being proactive – not waiting for the right job or person to come to me, but trying to figure out what I wanted and going for it. Have I lost that urge or ability over the years? We wait for a publisher or a journal to say yes, we wait for the poem or book to be published, all the while spinning the dice for – what – a small amount of praise in the form of a review, a small amount of money from a grant or a prize or if we get super lucky, an advance. It’s super frustrating – and I worry that, like some of my friends recently, they run out of time before they run out of poems.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Wildfires in WA State, Farms Opening for Fall and Beauties of Late Summer, AWP in Portland 28, Proactive in Poetry Publishing

I’ve been foraging for mushrooms some, although it’s been super-dry here, so I’m doing much more learning than eating. I’m also revising the poetry ms I put together in spring, which now seems further away from genuinely good than I originally thought, plus I’m now thinking hard about next year’s teaching. Dealing with AI isn’t my focus–the primary question is what I should teach my undergrads and how–but I confess to bolting awake, furious, early the other morning. I’d read the list of “Fall Academy” trainings and panel discussions my college is offering faculty during the last two weeks of August, and a really high proportion of them stress how to use AI in the classroom, without any counterpoint, even as my college touts its commitment to environmental sustainability–hmm. I am NOT curious about prompting Claude better. It seems obvious, as I follow the research, that while AI has valid uses, for example in managing large data sets, beginning writers shouldn’t use it for brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revision, or any of the other writing practices they need to develop to become smart humans with flexible skills and good judgment. Plus I really, really don’t want to spend my one wild and precious life reading any AI-generated text, as a grader or otherwise; I read for a sense of connection with other human beings. A “Fall Academy” session of genuine interest to me right now would focus on how, when, and why to recommit to the analogue. I calmed myself down, that morning, by overhauling my winter term syllabus for the first-year writing seminar. Here’s a draft of the course description:

Being Human: What can literary werewolves, cyborgs, ghosts, and fire-starting bears teach us about personhood? What does it mean to write in a human voice, with human help, for other humans? Why do these questions matter? Students in this class consider the boundaries of the human through stories and poems by Martha Wells, Stephen Graham Jones, Lily Yu, Stephen King, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and others. Note that this class requires physical books and old-school writing implements. [Not in the course description: HA! Take that, you corporation-brainwashed, data-center-building AI shills! I make policy exceptions for accessibility needs, always, because I am a human who wants to meet my human students where they are. Disability and neurodiversity will be course topics–the readings are fairly contemporary, and dehumanization of certain groups is definitely on writers’ minds.]

Added into my whirlwind of interesting preoccupations: I’m also prepping for travel to Colorado for some sightseeing and readings at the Telluride Mushroom Festival (seriously, check out the schedule, the event list is weird and amazing–what’s an “alchemical mushroom sound bath”?!). 

Lesley Wheeler, Curiosity kills the writer

Oh, I know the drill
with thrills; I’ve done my time in choirs, ecstatic,
shaken core-deep with the eternal swirl

of Bach’s Johannes-passion, its Herr,
Herr, Herr, the churn and whirr of winds and strings
that lift a hundred singers into air,

lost to our ordinary selves an hour
or two, the fugue tumbling around our heads.
That’s why I have my doubts about the power

of Art to save. The last few notes alight;
we sift out idly to the brilliant noon
of Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit;

and here we are: blinking at glare, adrift,
the grumpy dailiness of being human
hemming us dully in. 

Maryann Corbett, Gilt Complex

Last week, I mentioned Franz Wright’s book Axe in Blossom. And since then I’ve been playing with the phrase “bouquet of splendour” in my doodles. Remembering Hélène Cixous saying that we have all lived one or two flowers, and thinking about how these days some people have lived a whole bouquet of flowers. And yet, still they shine, they glow, they arrange themselves, they are composed, they are colourful, and refreshing, and their perfume is glorious. So. Please remember you are a bouquet of splendour.

Shawna Lemay, Bouquet of Splendour

The bowl that breaks on the kitchen floor makes

a chime like a bell. We sweep up its fragments and drop it
into the trash, where glistening bones of our fish dinner

lie almost intact. And still we want everything we do,
though the world breaks our hearts every single time.

Luisa A. Igloria, Inventory

This week: jars of feathers, the fifth demon, the darkness of tunnels, the expressive face of a walrus, and much more. Enjoy.

How does it all not crack you, not elicit some kind of fugue state? How can we be expected to stomach this endless nervous system dysregulation? I’ve heard from many writers that they’re feeling the same thing. When I posted about this on FB, some people couldn’t even muster more than a sentence in agreement—a collective “ugh, me too.”

This exhaustion is palpable, especially in communities of us sensitive writers, writers who want to process and create, but who are paralyzed, caught in a schism between the collective suffering and the joy of creation. At some point, the schism collapses, and we realize we are one—one body, one big breathing organ, one endless sigh, one celebration, one dead body, one beating heart—and so how does art translate this?

How do we perpetually live in and reevaluate “Trump’s America” (I say through gritted teeth) and pandemic bodies and genocide reality? How do we manage an endless livestream of terror against the softness of our poetries and the resilience we’re told to endlessly cultivate as artists?

Because certainly my art cannot be divorced from my grief and my exhaustion—from our grief and our exhaustion? And certainly, I cannot write when protective anhedonia sings its songs of total futility. I cannot write with my eyes closed, but I cannot write with my eyes open.

Maybe I get less soft? Maybe I just fucking fall apart more often? Maybe we sit in the limbo and feel the half-feelings and the no-feelings that mask the real feelings. I choose to believe that even the voidstate knows it is temporary; otherwise it wouldn’t be a void. It wouldn’t have a name.

Eventually the body wakes up. Right? Right? We’re rebooting. We just need a holy minute.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem The Uses of Sorrow. I can’t help but think of the inertia as a container, a strange engine maybe. A horse waiting at the water’s edge before bolting down the shoreline.

Lisa Marie Basile, Summer of anhedonia

I do with courage what I do with grief.
Swipe left. Keep scrolling.
Shush the voices in my ears.
How much of both do I need
to walk up to the image
in the mirror?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Remember

Coming from the US to France: out of the frying pan, into the fire.  Heat wave – canicule, in French – refers to dog days, which even Homer wrote about in The Iliad: 

Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars
Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.

The landscape is tinder-dry; pine needles are so emaciated, thin, dropping their long sharp nails to soften paths.  Rings of fires rage now along the Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean whistles through its teeth, biding its time. France is facing its fourth canicule. 

You could say that the image of France as a place of alluring summer is done.  (In domino effect, myths of the US is done, Israel is done.)  But France is stubborn.  A town like Aix-en-Provence will get sultry and suffocating. But under the classically elegant platane trees, nothing could look quite so French as those shaded, effortless drinkers. Aix’s golden-hued limestone buildings are centuries old; the cool blue shutters on their windows older than the ages of most friends added together, and taller than four standing on each other’s shoulders.  What are people doing? Eating, drinking and talking.  Eternal stuff. 

Jill Pearlman, Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post. The object today is just to put words on the page, thoughts into my brain, and to write.

today’s light breeze
I remember
hearing her laughter

Ann E. Michael, Endeavoring

I just had tea with the lovely poet, person, and letterpress publisher Emily Hancock of St. Brigid Press. She’s planning an ecopoetry event at Stone Soup Books in Waynesboro, Virginia on September 13th, and I’ll be part of it, with Jeanne Larsen, Sarah Ann Winn, and, we hope, a relative of Karenne Wood to discuss that poet’s work. We batted around possible panel questions as well as talking about midlife, meditation, ADHD, children, and fur babies. Two red threads were the topics of attention and connection: how writing and reading as practices help us attend to the human and the more-than-human worlds, as well as forging unlikely but restorative connections among them.

Connection is my “Flood subject,” to use Emily Dickinson’s phrase (hers was immortality). Of my books of traditional poetry scholarship, one focuses on enclosure, the other voice–communication, that is, and the various twisty, indirect, yet resonant ways poems speak or perform silence. Talking about poems in classrooms and criticism has been my livelihood. I love it; my introversion somehow yields, or even becomes an asset, when I’m part of a group passing around, analyzing, and admiring a “machine made of words” (that’s W.C. Williams). But poetry as communication? As I’ve written elsewhere, a poem makes a lousy telephone. The signal is just too delayed and beset by noise. The strongest poems convey urgency, yet if you have a message that’s urgent in the usual sense–“Help, my car broke down!” or even “I love you, please move in with me”–you should probably choose another linguistic medium to make sure it gets through.

Yet I receive poems as communication all the time and am wildly grateful for the mind-to-mind, long-distance, time-machine-style intimacy they enable. I often write, too, as a way to imagine perspectives alien to mine, how a tree might think, or a mountain, or a god. That’s not to claim I get it right, ever. But there’s value in the attempt.

Lesley Wheeler, Poetic circuitry

There’s a part of me that is soft and creative and there’s a part of me that is a work bitch, and I like both parts. I like the design element, the creativity, the build up, the community. I like knowing what is going to happen and when. I like the feeling of hitting goals, making a really good job of it. I like noodling away on Canva; pulling a vibe together for a poster. I like the research, the layering of knowledge into a teachable subject.

But the flip side of that is that everything is then down to me. I wear all the hats. ALL THE HATS: social media, marketing, promotion, design, IT. It means that to run a big course there needs to be a design strategy, a promotion strategy. I need to be online a lot, I need to be pushing a lot and investing in promotional aids to make sure I can reach as many people as I can. All of this, of course, is unpaid work, until the course meets its predetermined number of sign ups that ensures all costs are covered – the platforms I need to use, any paid help with tech stuff, promotion costs, my time, facilitator time, all that sort of stuff. I will run a course if the basics are met and my time is covered and everyone is paid. But I can’t run a course if I come out in the negative.

I am a writer, but I’m also a business. To cancel a course is to strategise. But also, I’m a person with feelings and to cancel anything that I’ve placed in the public eye so prominently is embarrassing. I can feel the gaze of people on me, especially people who think I shouldn’t be where I am. I used to know these people in real life, but I think they exist only in my head now. These nay sayers who creep around the edges of my own self doubt exist in a terrible review I once got (I will write to you about this one day), a snarky Facebook message I once received (seems like anyone can call themselves a writer these days) a few folk who were not brave enough to chase this for themselves and choose to sit idly in the wings with their dreams at their feet waiting for me to fall, as if it would prove to them that they were right not to try.

Look at this, I’m giving myself a pep talk automatically. Pat on the back for Wend.

Because that’s what it is to keep going, isn’t it. You might call it thick skin, but it isn’t, it’s about strategy. 

Wendy Pratt, I hope you are failing well

Occasionally I’m oddly undone by a casual comment. A month ago I ran into an old colleague, someone to whom I feel warmly and always enjoy seeing her. But she said two innocuous things that left my brain whirring around and my pie hole flappin soundlessly. She said, “You look good.” Comments about my looks always throw me. What do I say? I don’t really pay much attention to my looks, don’t think about them much. I mean, I try to look presentable. But beyond that I’m not always sure what I look like. What does “good” mean in the context of an aging chick who glances in the mirror and figures good enough? And do I say, “So do you” right away, or does that seem too…I don’t know…insincere or transactional. So I smiled brightly, I think, and said something like, “Oh.” Then she said, again, perfectly inoccuously and in that way of idle small talk, “Busy summer?” It threw me into this thoughtswirl of, oh yes, I guess it is summer, but it’s really only just started, and it’s not my favorite season so I pretty much just wait for it to be over, and I just got back from a trip so do I tell her that or was that really “spring” not summer and so doesn’t really answer her question and anyway am I going to have a busy summer? do I actually have anything planned… At which point I figured my silence was very awkward so I think I said something like, “Oh…” And then we had to part to find our seats at the performance at which we had run into each other, me feeling like an idiot and her probably wondering what had happened to me. All this to say that the quotidian can seem bizarre, thoughts can go spurting off like a just-burst balloon around the room, and the brain is a funny thing of words, sometimes. Which I guess is why I’m a writer. I love this poem by Victoria Chang for its wrestling with all kinds of little things and big. 

Marilyn McCabe, to my one life, when I will finally be wordless. What

High summer in Herefordshire, and the land is holding its breath. The verges have gone lion-coloured, the fields were cut early and no aftermath has followed, the clay in the gate-gaps has opened into crazy-paving, and the Wye is running so low that it has started to show its bones — gravel shoals where there is usually a river. Eight areas of England are now officially in “prolonged dry weather”, the polite phrase for the stage before drought, and central England is in its longest run of dry days since 1995. It is a hard season to love and an extraordinary one to look at — because a dry year takes things away from the land, and everything it takes away discloses something. All three of this week’s finds know that.

1. A poem to enjoy — Alice Oswald, “Dunt: A Poem for a Dried-up River” — Oswald took as her starting point a small Roman carving of a water nymph found in Gloucestershire, and set her the impossible task the title announces: to summon a river — the little Dunt — out of dry limestone. The poem proceeds by failure; again and again the nymph tries and the instruction comes back to try again, and the river arrives, when it arrives at all, as barely a trickle in a ditch. It won the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2007, and it reads this month like reportage.

Adam Cairns, Three by one

1. Jesus fasted forty days in the desert, and was tempted by Satan. Paradise Regained is John Milton’s re-telling of those temptations, with expansions and inventions. In Milton’s version, Jesus is openly unmoved by the temptations, he is absolutely immune: fitting, theologically, but it makes Paradise Regained a dramatic poem with very little drama. The original, in the Gospel of Luke, is short, curt, more mysterious and more interesting.

2. Two moments do draw attention. First, in Book III, after several failures, Satan turns to praise, attempting an indirect temptation to worldly glory:

I see thou know’st what is of use to know,
What best to say canst say, to do canst do;
Thy actions to thy words accord, thy words
To thy large heart give utterance due, thy heart
Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape.

Equipped with such goodness, why does Jesus not go and exercise it?

These godlike virtues wherefore dost thou hide?
Affecting private life, or more obscure
In savage wilderness, wherefore deprive
All earth her wonder at thy acts, thyself
The fame and glory…

Jesus’s reply is surprising, for its dim view of those he’s tasked to save:

For what is glory, but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixed?
And what the people but a herd confused,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar….

Such misanthropy! Where is man made in God’s image? Where is man made a little lower than the angels?

Brad Skow, Paradise Regained Read Blind

Angels have been flitting in and out of [Philip] Gross’s verse from the beginning, often imagined as the most ordinary things: dust in the poem of that name from the 1991 collection The Son of the Duke of Nowhere (Faber & Faber); a stone gargoyle tries to become an angel in ‘Gargangel’ (from The Wasting Game, Bloodaxe, 1998); even water as it passes through a sluice forms momentary angel wings in the striking first poem (‘Sluice Angel’) of The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009).

The tall shut doors of the hall
of the world at which the weight of water,
of incipience, does not need to knock:
feel it there like a shudder
of difference, the engine of change.
Now, almost soundless, hinges shift.
With a gradual calibrated rip
like a concord of lathes, with a crypt smell,
two green-grey-brown stiffening blades
of water fold in. They curve, feathering
themselves in free fall: wings
flexed, shuddering, not to soar [. . . ]

Angels imply religion of course, though not any particular one, and that too is typical. Gross’s poetry has been somewhat religious in orientation for a long time, though markedly uncertain; monotheistic in flavour but not really Christian (I can’t recall a single mention of Christ); God always far-off, hard to contact, and not necessarily attentive. If there is revelation to be found, we sense that it is in the everyday and — ironically, for a poet — as much in silence as in speech. (I think, though I’m not sure, that Gross is a Quaker — at least, I noticed years ago that his books were always stocked by the Society of Friends bookshop on the Euston Road — and if so this is no doubt relevant to the importance of silence in his poetry.)

The verse sequence to which the 2022 title alludes, ‘Thirteen Angels’, comes at the end of the book. Its thirteen poems recall Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, but it is headed by a quotation from D. H. Lawrence, a short poem called in the original ‘Song of a Man’ (though that rather aggrandising title is not used here):

What is the knocking
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
Is it someone come to do us harm?
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

This has a quasi-scriptural feel. Lawrence is remembering or half-remembering various different bits of the Bible, including, probably, Luke 11:5-8, a parable about knocking at a friend’s door at midnight to borrow three loaves of bread for an unexpected guest; the calling of Samuel in the night (1 Samuel 3); and the three strangers to whom Abraham offers hospitality in Genesis 18, who turn out to be angels. The way in which Gross uses a quotation of Lawrence’s sub-scriptural fragment to place himself at a further remove from formal religious authority feels representative of his attitude as a whole – although always several uncertain removes away from any specific creed, this is for all that religious poetry of a kind.

The thirteen angels of the sequence are all evocatively vague, both impossible to grasp and touchingly routine – described as breath, ‘A Glassy Thing’, a ‘kind of Music’; ‘flow’; even ‘Inconsistency’ and ‘Emptiness’; they appear ‘at the interfaces [. . .] between us, each and each other / and each and the tumult of things’. One ‘clears its throat / like white noise, like a waterfall, like wind’ (‘Who’d Have Thought’). The thirteenth angel is ‘not so much the uninvited / at the christening as the one / there are no words for in the language’; there’s a suggestion that this angel is the recording angel (‘In fifty years, too late / for you, this will all seem so clear; / the thirteenth angel will have written the page // on which your name’); in the final line of the collection, it is ‘the world itself’. The typical movement of many of Gross’s poem, for which these quotidian angels are a kind of metaphor, is from the precisely observed everyday-made-strange – whether from the natural or domestic world – to a religious sensibility, questions about our place not so much in society or the family but in the universe.

Victoria Moul, One of the lesser order of recording angels

I miss the fifth demon most.
I lost them, and then I lost
him, and now I have only the tomb
of my empty mind.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poems for the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene

Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Rupert Brooke, to name three poets whose poems have appeared in this space, as well as Charles Sorley, Julian Grenfell, and Isaac Rosenberg, have in common the fact that they were English poets born sometime between 1875 and 1895 — and they all died between 1915 and 1918, mostly on the French battlefields of World War I. Brooke is a dropped stitch in this pattern, having died in Greece, of blood poisoning from an insect bite, and not in battle.

Still, he belongs, one of the lost World War I poets, a tragic club whose fame and pathos lie chiefly in its members’ unrealized potential. But in their truncated lifetimes, some of them were very good poets. Edward Thomas, for example, achieved a quiet greatness in his “Adlestrop,” possibly the most famous war poem to take peace as its subject. Of many others we might say that a golden age of English poetry lay dead in the trenches. Or it might not. We’ll never know how good they would have been.

But then there’s the other club of war poets: the ones who made it out alive. That list is longer than one might think. It includes the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, who came home but left his sanity in the trodden French mud. It includes Robert Graves, who went on to write the series of “I, Claudius” novels. It includes Edmund Blunden, later Professor of Poetry at Oxford (a post currently held by the American poet A.E. Stallings). It includes the French poet Joseph Seguin, whose war-themed haiku, written under the name Julien Vocance, we featured just last week in Alfred Nicol’s excellent translations. And it includes Siegfried Sassoon, whose 1919 poem “Idyll” appears here today.

This poem, written in the first year after the cessation of horrors, reads like a sigh of relief. In six rhymed pentameter couplets, it sketches a scene of utter peace, Edenic in the unrealized light of a summer morning, before reaching its reason for being. Its speaker, stepping into this garden to await a lover, does so in the awareness that his life and future have been handed back to him.

This landscape signals, for him, in the wake of the cacophony of battle and the utter destruction of beauty that it wreaks, a restoration of order and quietness. In this landscape to which he has returned whole, he is reborn, brought back from death, alive to watch the inchoate day sharpen into focus and become what it will become. And if what that day became, for Sassoon the poet, was never quite the glorious dream our imaginations grant the fallen, still it’s something to have lived to see that day.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Idyll

Dividing Rivers, by Ivy Schweitzer:

When I vow never to watch the play again
where loving to death is the only resistance,
they turn their backs,
mount their seats and
ride off—together.

The play in question in this poem, “Death in Stratford,” is Shakespeare’s Othello, which I haven’t read in many, many years. The poem’s occasion is a meeting between Schweitzer’s speaker and the actors who play Othello and Desdemona in a production that the speaker just saw. The speaker tells us she’d forgotten that Othello actually kills Desdemona twice, once by smothering, when he “swear[s] he will love her/‘after,” and the second time by strangling her “with her own sheets,/forgiveness staining her lips.” When the speaker asks the actors how they “act it over and over”—Schweitzer relies on the verb “croak” to render how the question is asked, allowing us to decide precisely what emotion is behind it—the woman who plays Desdemona, whom we know is white because we know the play and not because the poem mentions race at all, explains that they get their motivation from the need to make sure that the audience “get[s] it:”

“[T]hey are both victims of white patriarchy
but resist it
by loving, dying, Othello killing her and them himself out of a world
they cannot survive in—”

That statement elicits the vow I quoted above which also how the poem ends, but the tension between what the vow implies—that the speaker is committing herself to a search for a form of resistance rooted in a life-affirming love—and the way in which the actors turn their backs on that implication is in many ways the tension that animates Dividing Rivers as a whole. The book begins with poems that confront the antisemitism Schweitzer has experienced, allowing that confrontation to allude to the history of Jewish oppression, and then moves into poems that explore the relationship between Jewishness and the whiteness into which Jews who can pass as white have been allowed. The poems that dominate in the third of the book’s three sections explore Schweitzer’s not-always-successful but always contingent attempts to move back and forth across the “dividing river” that gives the book its title. That crossing, the willingness to attempt it, to take responsibility for the attempt, and to be held accountable for it is where this book locates its moral center, the life-affirming resistance I wrote about above.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #57

Across the language of [Kevin] Davies’ impossibly-long threaded lines, a mélange of words pushed in against each other to splatter, purposefully disrupt and undermine, and eventually rebuild, meaning. All of this, also, while including what seem a uniquely scattered list of references, such as the American Revolution, playing catch in the dark, ancient Rome, paradise and old debt, Shakespeare’s Caliban and discipline, snowfall and swaths of crossed-out text. Davies’ language swirls gymnastically around and through critiques of capitalism and culture, an evolving poetics that evolved out of early engagement with and through The Kootenay School of Writing into something more expansive and even evasive […]

As part of that same Jacket2 interview, Inniss references [… Philadelphia poet Ron] Silliman’s review of [Davies’] The Golden Age of Paraphernalia from his blog, where he writes, ‘Davies appears to have found a spot exactly halfway between language poetry and flarf.’” Nearly a decade earlier, Joshua Clover offered this about Davies’ work in Boston Review: “This is how I think about Kevin Davies’s poems, for which few if any of the possible metaphors seem even close: weather, the fractured encyclopedia, disobedience. His poetry is not especially metaphorical in the first place; it is more a kind of realism, for a real world that seems all too often not just too awful, but too incalculable and messy to look at in its full unfolding.”

When two words are placed side by side, of course, they can’t help but sit in relation, and thus, a narrative sense of meaning, from left to right (or up to down, or however words are placed against each other). And yet, there’s almost a similar kind of overarcing floating narrative created across these short bursts to the prose work of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, how the present and the surreal offer steps across a complex grid, and composed of sections that may or may not connect to the larger narrative. “Anyway that’s my tale and now it’s done. / The young woman took my chair when I stood / briefly to wash my beak. / And then would not move her legs to // allow me to retrieve my bundle / from beneath the chair,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of the rather lengthy section sixty-eight, “and that is when I felt myself / turning into pressed wool and about to go haywire.”

rob mclennan, Kevin Davies, Transfer Portal

Wearing the odd cycle-clip and drinking a pint of beer or two doesn’t stop you from writing great poetry […] I hereby proclaim Larkin’s “Love Songs in Age” as the century’s greatest poem.

These are the words of the UK’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, writing to the Guardian newspaper in October 1991. They were reported in a Guardian profile of the Labour politician earlier this month, which noted that he sent the letter while living at home in Warrington after finishing his degree in English Literature at Cambridge.

You don’t get to be Prime Minister without being a political creature from an early age. Soon, Burnham was living in London, working as a Labour parliamentary assistant in the run-up to Tony Blair’s 1997 general election victory, and then as a special adviser to culture secretary, Chris Smith, in 1998 — which presumably means he was in the meetings where Andrew Motion (Larkin’s official biographer) emerged as the New Labour choice for Poet Laureate after the death of Ted Hughes.

Burnham’s fan letter is written with the light good humour favoured by newspaper letters pages (“wearing the odd cycle-clip” nods to Larkin’s ironic self-portrait in “Church Going”: “Hatless, I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence”). But it’s not an unpolitical document. In the days before social media, writing a letter to a newspaper was one of the best ways to make your opinions a matter of public record. Burnham’s successful strategy to become Prime Minister — by first becoming the down-to-earth, music-loving Mayor of Greater Manchester — has been a long game of affirming popular opinions. It might seem a stretch to say that this down-to-earth, poetry-loving letter represents his first step on the road to power. But bear with me as we browse the Guardian in 1991 to establish exactly what it meant to tell the readers of Britain’s only left-wing broadsheet newspaper that you were a Larkin fan — because it turns out that it almost literally put you on the same page as the Labour leadership.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, “Little Englandism of the Left”

A walk in Cardiff “On the esplanade” prompts the poem’s speaker to observe a row of Edwardian villas once inhabited by people with money after working up to managerial level,

and like many who come into money
I imagine a new life

amongst my cohort of coined bohemians
secure academics

no thought of history
I’m too dazzled by possibility

that one day
I shall own such a property

paint my front door red
then close it tightly, ‘gainst the world outside

Here the poem’s speaker imagines his neighbours would be like him, bohemian and academic rather than bland managerial classes keeping up appearances. The poem’s speaker sets up a contradiction: he wants to paint the door a colour that stands out and marks his house as his but also wants to shut it against the world. It’s his private retreat where he doesn’t have to share.

“Memento Mori” is a thoughtful, crafted series of poems that look at how small moments in navigating the world can provoke memories, some welcome some not so welcome, that enhance understanding of relationships with others and the world at large. The moments of wry humour and self-deprecation lift this from nostalgia and self-focus into poem which challenge and question what makes us.

Emma Lee, “Memento Mori” Gareth Writer-Davies (Yaffle Press) – book review

Elizabeth Osmond is a neonatal consultant and a poet who has twice won prizes in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Her work has been published in The Aftershock Review, The Alchemy Spoon, Dust Poetry, Atrium, Ink, Sweat and Tears and The Craft of Care Anthology (Black Pear 2026).

Beth kindly sent me a review copy of Hatchery, but it had already been on my radar since she launched it. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing her read at several online open mics, and already knew her to be a poet of great skill and sensitivity. As a medic, she has access to a rich vein of language that in other hands may be overly dry or technical, but Beth is able to draw the poetic out of it. She has a keen eye for the curios and the artefacts of medical history, turning them over for us in her poems so we can see them in all their strangeness. However, these aren’t simply presented for curiosity’s sake, but to highlight the imaginative leaps that have been necessary to even slightly increase the survival rates of very premature babies. Here is the Kinderbrutanstalt, the child hatchery, with its jars of feathers, its early incubators, and Ward Rounds with Queen Victoria.

This is one of my favourite poems in the collection, bringing Queen Victoria onto a modern day neonatal unit, her own experiences as a mother in contrast with those of today, yet connected through some ghostly residue of feeling that must transcend eras and technologies;

“ … She delivered Leopold after the blessed chloroform / enclosed in his nursery / playmates forbidden / lest he fall and bruise”

Present in all these poems is a prevailing sense of the dignity and humanity with which Beth treats her subjects. She handles field observations with real care and feeling. Although poetry frequently moves me, it rarely makes me physically well up in the way some of these poems do. When she writes “Here you are, my impatient little friend” in I wish I could write you a prescription for time, I find in this moment such care and tenderness, and it is the perfect pivot to end a poem about trying to negotiate more time for a baby who is already on the way. You get the impression that these conversations are ones Beth the consultant and her colleagues are always having, as they move about the ward, perhaps as much to reassure themselves as the tiny lives in their care. In Conversation, her “heart is wanting to be fearless / but it is a colander with little holes / through which doubt seeps in”. To feel this very human doubt and vulnerability and daily find a way to move past this is a special thing.

Victoria Spires, Hatchery

Homer Haunted is a swift, lively, and informative book about the way English poets have translated Homer. It begins with George Chapman and ends with three living writers. Henry Power, an English professor at Exeter, is especially compelling about Alexander Pope and Christopher Logue, two great Homer translators. Indeed, I loved how much this book loves Pope, whose phenomenal accomplishments and influence on later poets are as inescapable as they ought to be. Anyone who wishes to understand how Homer has been understood by the English poets will learn from and enjoy this book.

There are wonderful accounts of writers like Matthew Arnold and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Power is a keen explicator of Logue’s techniques not just of “imagism” but of his use of camera language, quotations from popular culture, instructions, the addition of words like “consider” and “imagine” to Homeric images. He quotes very nicely, and has a knack for telling a story without letting the book get dragged under by the modern impulse for all narrative non-fiction to become a chain of anecdotes that cannot bear the weight of their conclusions.

The most surprising part of this book, for me, was discovering the sheer weird variety of translations undertaken by Victorians, who produced: an Anglo-Saxon-style Homer, one in Spenserian stanzas, one as an Icelandic saga, and a version that was cast in the language of the King James Bible.

Henry Oliver, Homer Haunted, by Henry Power

My previous post on the subject of bad poetry prompted some thoughtful responses, and I felt my own responses to these were worth gathering in a follow-up essay. So I drafted one – back at the end of March, in fact, on a train to Southampton. Since then I’ve only had time to think on it in short gasps, but that process has, oddly enough, resulted in much more of a complete thesis than I’d originally envisaged – more cheery too, if you’ll bear with me till the end.

I said previously that bad poems need to be invented, and to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the poetry critic to have a function. But there’s another, simpler reason why bad poetry must be willed into existence. Suppose for a moment that every published poem – or the vast majority of them – were unquestionably skilfully written, greatly rewarding reader attention. There would still be far, far too many of them for any one person to attend to. We would need to come up with a way of deciding which poems to spend our limited time investigating.

That need, really, is the root of literary taste. Whatever system or standard we put into place, it operates as a means of dismissing from our mind much that exists – or, at least, sending it to the very periphery of conscience – so that we can focus on a more manageable portion. And since it’s easier to dismiss something if we come up with reasons to regard it as ‘bad’, or nurture an ingrained distaste for it, this is what we do. […]

I should add that literary taste also exists, like many things, for the purpose of forming social bonds. To put it crudely: convincing yourself you find a certain kind of poem to be very fine and another sort very drab is sometimes a precondition of being accepted within certain social circles. I will address this as I go on — partly because I think it bears repeating that most of those who claim to be solely interested in ‘the quality of the poem itself’ are not being honest with themselves.

But I’m mostly concerned with the core function of taste and the role criticism has to play in it. We need taste to direct us to the poems that are of most use in enriching and improving our lives. If we do not cultivate taste of some kind, then we don’t know where to start or how to sort through the mass of poetry available, and so can hardly benefit from the artform at all — which is, in fact, the position of those millions who never read or think about it.

Jon Stone, ESSAY: What is a bad poem exactly? (Part 2)

The idea that poetry must rhyme is not unusual. In fact views about what is and isn’t poetry abound not just amongst non-poets but amongst poets too. The poetry world has its fair share of people who will tell you that what you have written isn’t proper poetry, or if it does qualify, that it is somehow unworthy. Fans of formal structure may look down their noses at those who favour free verse. Those who write in blank verse have been known to sneer at rhyme enthusiasts, who are divided between those who see no harm in using a rhyming dictionary, and those who would never admit to stooping so low as to use one, even though they have rhymezone bookmarked on their browsers. People who write from prompts run the risk of being derided for lacking sufficient imagination to create ideas of their own. People who announce that they wrote a piece at a workshop are sniggered at in some quarters by poets who proclaim that nothing of quality can be produced without being closeted within the silent confines of a writing den. Others swear that you should never draft in anything other than pencil in a physical notebook, scowl at those who draft on a computer and have no time at all for those who use their phones, whilst many of those who swear by their computers and phones are prone to think of the notebook and pencil brigade as primitive poets stuck in the past.

Of course, sensible poets such as you and I know that a good poem is a good poem whatever form it takes and whatever the circumstances of its creation. It is what the piece says that counts, and if it says something that makes a connection with originality and style, then, at least in my book, it is a good poem.

It is my heartfelt belief that the vast majority of human beings on this planet are capable of writing good poetry, but unfortunately very few do. I believe that the reason for this has a lot to do with what people perceive good poetry to be. Anyone who feels that good poetry has to follow a set of rules around rhyme, structure, form, syntax etc is denying themselves the possibility of stumbling upon different ways of working and expressing themselves.

I think that we are all capable of writing good poetry because we all have a unique perspective on the world. We all have a different ideas and experiences, different associations in our minds, different perspectives and different personalities. Maybe the fact that we all have different DNA plays a part too. Maybe all of these things add up to some sort of poetic DNA which can leave its fingerprint on the things that we write. By trying to stick to some perceived rules of poetry for no better reason than we believe that poetry has to be dome in a certain way, we are distorting that fingerprint, and allowing less of our poetic DNA to shine through.

This is why AI produced poetry is ultimately unsatisfying. AI poetry is completely constructed of rules. By definition it can never be present a unique human perspective as every perspective, methodology and idea within it has to come from databases and sorted mathematically from a list of probabilities. Only a human can be surprising, original, and fabulous.

Mike O’Brien, Forget the Rules of Poetry

Everywhere I walk,
it seems there’s a thread I can pull on, attached
to a picture hiding in plain sight. I know I want
to be addressed, to feel some kind of touch
which I might find reassuring. But the dark,
glossy sheen of bird feathers, the speckled
rind on fruit and the sugar beginning to foam
out of its pores can be presence enough. Not
certainty, just the briefest mark of grounding.

Luisa A. Igloria, Making Meaning

— I picked up Derek Beaulieu’s book from the library: Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet in the Twenty-First Century. And it’s for poets, but anyone creating art will find it useful. As most of my readers here are non-Canadians, Derek Beaulieu is sort of our version of Austin Kleon, for context. He’s weirder, edgier, and probably wears a tuque more often, than his American counterpart. He tells Canadian artists to stop comparing ourselves to American ones. “Cut the fantasies and the bullshit: the grass isn’t greener elsewhere. The only way forward is through cultural action, working together, and creating artwork that imagines and advocates for a bigger, weirder future, no matter what side of the boarder you find yourself on.”

— “Imagine a book,” says Beaulieu, “you don’t know you want to read. Write to discover that book, to expand your idea of what is possible and what you can imagine yourself writing”

— He also reminded me of this from Virginia Woolf: “What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

— Which then reminded me of my favourite line from Phyllis Webb, “The proper response to a poem is another poem.” This is not in the Beaulieu book (unless I missed it) but could be. Perhaps his next. Anyway, such a good book for new writers and old crotchety ones such as meself.

Shawna Lemay, The Axe, My Writing Into the Desk Era, and Other Bouquets

The poem in the video below was inspired by Langston Hughes’ Island. It was developed by running it thorugh a series of Google Translate operations and also an N+7 operation. Then editing. I think this is an example computer-aided composition without using AI (though I suspect—OK, I know—there is AI in Google Translate.) There is a difference between LLM-using generative AI and computer-assisted work. For me, the process “makes things strange” and offers up some textual materials to explore, all of which is infused with the aura of the original. How I respond to the materials and the aura is part of my poetic process. For me, these aura-filled texts often confound and inspire and my work as a poet is to someone work with the material to arrive at some genuine “poesis” —the sense that the text is more than the sum of its parts. I don’t know that it is that much different than writing after being inspired by a poet or poetic tradition, other than generating some related material to respond to. I should say that the poem that I settled on it very traditional and doesn’t confront the norms of conventional poetry except in its mode of composition. I’ve been using computer-aided operations since the 80s, though definitely not exclusively. I don’t see this as much different than rolling up one’s sleeves and addressing the affordances of a sonnet or villanelle or Frank O’Haraian “It’s 12:15 and this and then that” convention.

Gary Barwin, You Know Whose Mouth This Is: AI, not-AI, sincerity and invention.

The word is
one-room apartment reef
or mingling octopuses,
licking salt from punctuation
one goosebump at a time.

On land, they call it
love.

Kati Mohr, Even this …

Ten years ago I read my long, narrative poem My Name is Swan at a literary festival. It was a curated evening around the theme of ‘The City’. I appeared halfway up (or halfway down) the programme along with a number of well established and highly regarded authors whose work I greatly admired. I was pretty chuffed to have such a billing as a relatively obscure artist among such prestigious writers. I was, in the contemporary vernacular, ‘a minor poet’. I don’t mind being a minor poet, I prefer to sing in minor keys not in a major ones. Most good art is made in minor keys. Hits are written in major keys because they emotionally resonate more immediately. The songs that stay with us though contain shadows, minor chords, modal turns, notes of regret. What makes a song endure is not happiness but happiness corrupted by the knowledge of loss.

None of the other authors came to my reading. They were not disinterested or deliberately shunning me, much as the voices in my head would like to tell me. No, they were simply elsewhere, doing what authors are supposed to do, trying to earn a living from their work. They were meeting their public, standing behind their merchandise stalls, selling their books. I didn’t have a book. I didn’t have anything to sell. I had a poem. And while I read it, it was alive and after I’d finished it went to the place that poems go, where the wind lives, where midnight sighs arrive, where love hides.

The modern book, as we know it, printed with bound pages, has only been with us for around five hundred years. Writing itself emerged around five thousand years ago but the origins of poetry are ancient, perhaps stretching back into pre-history. 50,000 years ago humans were almost certainly using rhythm and repetition, chanting and song and formulaic language came into existence long before any of it was written down. The availability of cheaper paper made from wood pulp and the advent of industrial printing, meant that by the 1800s the book had become a mass-market object. With the arrival of the 20th century paperback, books were ubiquitous. The international best seller was upon us.

The introduction of the book meant we no longer needed to listen to our tribal elders, to hear their stories. We lost, perhaps a little of the ability to even listen to each other. Everything was written down for us, to be studied or stacked on high shelves, hidden away in academy libraries. Books became power. A new kind of truth had arrived. One that was absolute because, as you know, if it’s in a book then, well, it must be true.

I left the authors with their stalls, with their sales, with their transactions and I took my poem home wondering where I might go with it next. A book didn’t feel like the right fit for My Name is Swan somehow. It was a poem that needed to feel the wind in its feathers, have air under its wings, it needed an adventure. It needed to live. Back then I believed books were where poems went to die. Don’t get me wrong. I love books. If you’ve written one I might even have it on my shelves. If I haven’t then send me copy because honestly I do really love books. I just felt that this poem, and the other long form works that I’d made, had a life beyond the page.

Jan Noble, N°74 Books are where poems go to die

I recently joined poet and podcast host Nathan Hassall on The Poetry Vessel, a multimedia poetry project he creates with his wife, Rachael. Their show blends poetry, conversation, and visual interpretation, creating a space where language becomes a shared exploration. It was a joy to be a guest and talk about submission strategies, poetry communities, creative advocacy, and the work we do to support poets.

Nathan and I talk about the origins of my work, the role of literary citizenship, and how poets can navigate the publishing world with intention. We also explore the imaginative engine behind poetry — the alter egos we write through, the personas that surface on the page, and how imagination becomes a tool for both discovery and protection.

I read a poem from my collection A Godless Ascends, which opened up a conversation about writing through personal history, mythic framing, and the emotional architecture of a poem. Nathan’s questions invite a kind of reflection that feels both intimate and expansive, and the episode captures that dynamic beautifully.

Trish Hopkinson, How I Got My Poetry Published in 2026 (ft. Trish Hopkinson) + submission call via The Poetry Vessel

He cautions himself against memories
their cheat, their fumbling feet moving
across the arc of time.

Still.

The soft twilights,
the bob white whistling,
the hundred ways
the sun would lift itself
over the ridge.

Rebecca Cook, Upon Returning to the Father’s House

I have two pieces of poetry news to share, both involving poems finding their way back into the world.

First, my collection Rotura is included in Black Lawrence Press’s Sealey Challenge sale. Thirty-one full-length poetry collections are currently available for $12 each through the Black Lawrence Press sale page.

Published in 2022, Rotura moves through questions of family, longing, language, borders, and the different forms rupture can take within a life. For anyone curious about the book, three poems from the collection (“Certain Rivers,” “Conditioning (City Study),” and “Four Dirges”) can be read together at Poetry Is Currency.

*

I’m also glad to share the publication of Summer, Still, a new anthology from Lily Poetry Review featuring poetry and prose by faculty and alumni of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. The anthology celebrates the program’s twentieth anniversary and the community of writers that has gathered around it over the years.

My poem “Night Matter” is included in the anthology. The poem considers writing as an act of persistence: what it means to continue making words when light is scarce and the night around us feels both material and immense. It first appeared as part of my January 2018 feature at A Dozen Nothing, where you can read “Night Matter” online.

There is something meaningful to me about these two announcements arriving together. One points back toward a collection and the poems gathered within it; the other allows an earlier poem to enter a new gathering, this time alongside the work of writers connected through Solstice.

I’m grateful for both occasions, for the continued life of these poems, and for anyone who spends time with them.

José Angel Araguz, Two Poetry Notes: Rotura and Summer, Still

I am not a summer girl—I haven’t been sleeping well with the heat (up to 95 degrees this week) and the wildfire smoke that lingered a few days—and lack of sleep has taken a toll on my brain and body. Maybe I’ve felt a little depression and anxiety, more than usual.

I had some good poetry news this week (which I can’t share yet) and also some book rejections from places that had made it a finalist the last time they saw the same manuscript which makes me worry I shouldn’t send it out anymore (when is it time to shelve something? I’ve been messing with this MS for over five years!)

I find myself looking forward to fall already—cooler temperatures, pumpkin and apples, the sunsets happening a little earlier, the light a little more golden. My mood feels more stable in fall and my productivity as a writer definitely goes up. Is this true for you as well? I am wishing you all good sleep and no anxiety in this world that continually seems to ratchet up—at least in America—reasons to have so much anxiety.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Safety in Seattle, Is it Fall Yet, Lack of Sleep, and Poetry Ups and Downs

The natural world always strikes a note of wonder in me, whether it is the sight of a polar bear ambling across the pack ice or the expressive face of a walrus. Or the universe of lichens and tiny flowers on the tundra. Or the chevrons of feathers on the back of an eagle.

Perhaps this is why I rely too much on the natural world for the imagery in my poems. It is all around me, such a rich and never-ending catalog of weirdness and beauty. So I forget that there are other ways to make meaning, so many other options in the world to feed my poems. Machines, small and large. Music. Films. Pop culture, in general. Science. Medicine. Everyday objects. Abstractions. Speculations. Conversations. (The list could go on, but you get the idea.)

Maybe this is also why I don’t often write about my travel experiences, though peple always say, “Oh, I’ll bet you’re going to write a lot of poems about this!” First, capturing the wonder feels like an insurmountable task. But also, I realize that it could seem like I am flaunting experiences I know I am privileged and lucky to have. (I even second-guessed writing about them in this post…). So I’ve tried to turn my wonder onto things I have not experienced.

To that point, a few things I have researched lately in the service of a draft:

• the vastness of space /features of the planets/elements of black holes
• the Marianas Trench
• the whale graveyard in the Indian Ocean
• how a television works (I honestly still think magic is the easiest answer)

I am trying to broaden my internal horizons, fill up my image bank. Not to shut out the natural world, but to have a different mirror to hold beside it, to juxtapose other pieces of life with it to make the page come alive.

Some collections I’ve read that do this well:

Soft Science and The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On by Frannie Choi

Karaoke at the End of World by Genevieve DeGuzman (Jackleg Press)

Who Will Cradle Your Head? by Jared Beloff (ELJ Editions)

Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell (Texas Review Press)

Yeet! by jason b crawford (Omnidawn/University of Chicago Press)

These collections all imagine worlds where nature is in concert with so many other things—cryptids, robots, apocalypse, hell and religion, Afro-futurism. They are ambitious and collections that have been teaching me some things about leaning into any and all of the world available to me, real or imagined. 

Donna Vorreyer, Hello, It’s Me…

I floated on my back,
the pool water muffling
all their hells.
I breathed in a forest
and it dried in my hair.

Instead of sun,
I saw mosaic.
Instead of
the machinery
of clouds,
smoke.

Sarah Lada, Smoke Screen

I went to a residential course at Ty Newydd many years ago and it changed my life. The kindness of the tutors – not the kindness that puffs you up and says you are a genius, but the kindness of someone telling you to keep on writing, that what you are doing matters. And it was the setting with the library and the strange acoustic that makes it feel sometimes as if someone is whispering in your ear, and the garden that stretches down to the sea, and the beautiful food. And for me it was the people on the course that I met as well – poets I’m still friends with all these years later.

Every time I teach a residential course and I arrive and meet the participants for the first time, I remember what I felt like. How much it meant to me – how I’d nearly turned my car round and driven home because I was so anxious. How I paid monthly to spread the cost – what a big deal it was for me financially to commit to it. I hope I never forget those things and I always try and bring as much energy and commitment to the teaching as the poets we work with have brought. It’s hard to carve a week out of your life to come and write poetry – harder for some more than others.

The group we worked with this week were wonderful – apparently all of them knew at least one other person in the group so the first night there was little awkwardness – they started chatting without Clare or I having to do anything! They were hugely supportive of each other throughout the week which was really lovely to see.

On Thursday I went for an illegal run – illegal as I’m not really meant to be running at the moment, because of my still dodgy ankle. But I REALLY needed to clear my head and it was so worth it – I found a really beautiful loop through the woods and having left Clare with the energy of Eyore I came back like Tigger, full of bounce again.

Clare and I were our usual quarrelsome selves – here we are on the final night of the course – when we were treated to a reading from everyone of the new work they’d been writing and working on during the week – an evening that was as good as any poetry reading I’ve paid money to see – which indicates the quality of the writers we were working with!

Kim Moore, A week at Moniack Mhor

As we crest the midpoint of summer submissions entering the inbox in consideration for next years series of books, I’ve been thinking a little again about what makes a book stand out in the queue and what gets passed on to the second read pile. I’ve already accepted a handful of things for August into September, and pickings are beautifully lush. I typically have three piles when sorting–the absolute yes, the maybes, and the no-thanks. The last pile is the easiest to send responses immediately. The others I tend to hold onto for a minute as I evaluate how much room I have in the schedule. This year, I do have a little more room (not making the books by hand is more expensive, but does free up time I normally would have spend folding, stapling, and trimming. While I still do all these things for pre-April 2026 titles, everything since is a matter of placing an order in just a few minutes, making the hard part the layout and design instead of the assembly, which can take a little longer with more complicated layouts, but not always. We’ve also been able to open subs up to longer projects and full-length manuscripts. This is especially welcome since many of our chaps before perfect-binding were running about 40 pages and weren’t always easy to trim. 

This spring, I fleshed out a little more guidance on what we’re looking for, including a broad definition of what is “poetry” which can mean prose, essays, vispo, plays, and any variety of hybrid works that tongue the edges of other genres. I love the unclassifiable books most. I also have my biases in terms of loving horror and gothic projects, so we readily welcome those in particular, but tend to choose a wide selection of styles and topics overall. 

But beyond these, one of the chief important things I am looking for is cohesion. Whether its a 100 page book or under 20 pages, tightness in subject matter or theme will always stand out, as will projects that have a narrative spine. So many times when encountering book manuscripts, it feels like a poet just threw everything in with the kitchen sink. But having things that tie and bind and link individual poems and parts together is important. Some intention in which poems are included and how they are arranged.  This is especially true of full-length books, especially first books, which usually tend to assemble from many disparate pieces, even if the poet eventually writes more project-related books down the line. There are a few ways, however, to bring disparate pieces together to make a sound chapbook or book of poems. 

Kristy Bowen, what I look for as an editor, part #1

I want extravagance.
Peonies. A five-layer cake.
Drones making dragons
in the sky. Flamenco.
Percussion. Not a band,
a symphony throwing its joy
over the city. A herd
of wild horses. Something,
anything bright & unearned.

Sharon Brogan, Grace

None of this feels instinctual. When we panic, we want to follow our gut. But the non-profit starvation cycle is our own graveyard loop. We cannot just trust our guts; we have to build a strategy so that the work we do moves us in the right direction. We need effort that keeps us on a straight course. Working harder, pushing through the spiral, leads to burnout. What needs to happen—our current focus—is re-aligning the organization with our mission and building a more sustainable foundation.

A couple of days ago, I was talking with someone who thought nonprofit staff shouldn’t be paid much. Often, people who have never worked in community building think that staff can live on squash and passion alone. Those who live in large houses with good cars don’t always have the perspective to understand how we march through crisis, how we face our emergencies, what motivates us to keep flying.

We clowns, acrobats, and artists who build culture live on sand and rice, and find all sorts of destructive ways to pass the time. And together, we build and rebuild. Together, we walk through the fire.

May we find joy in all the destruction and fly well into the sunrise.

Kate Gale, The Graveyard Spiral: On Breaking the Cycle of Emergency

I am descended from smugglers.
I hold the darkness of tunnels inside me;
hushed voices, past midnight, alert my ears.
I am descended from strong-armed men,
the readers of the sea.

I am descended from those who roam.
I hold the restlessness of wild words […]

Sue Finch, HUMANNESS

生命線短き手もて薔薇を剪る　篠原広子

seimeisen mijikaki te mote bara o kiru

a short lifeline
on my palm
I cut roses
                                               Hiroko Shinohara

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), August 2025 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (July 22, 2026)

This week: wildly latticing light, hot jets of horse breath, a ropey ladder down to oblivion, and much more. Enjoy.

There are days when I can’t stand this any more, when I’m not strong or brave enough, when the horror and depravity leave the voices screaming ‘What can I possibly do?’ and the colours in my head are red and orange and black and there are others I can’t identify, that I have never seen before and I don’t know who I’ve ever been or who anyone else is…

And I watch the old film of Bruce Springsteen singing ‘for each unharmful gentle soul misplaced inside a jail’ before thousands of East Berliners in 1988 and I think ‘what have I ever done that’s as useful and honourable as that?’ and the voices know the answer and the bodies behind the voices stamp and mock, just as they should.

Bob Mee, THERE ARE DAYS WHEN I CAN’T STAND THIS ANY MORE

o, for an exit that isn’t an ending, dear god. the garden, its slough of orange flowers. the sky, its routine blue. the wildly latticing light. heavy-scented stock, those florid avatars of orgasm. the gorgeous daisy’s gauchely perforated eye.

Fran Lock, AFTER AMY

Many years ago, I drafted a poem that I worked on awhile and considered finished. I sent it out a few places, and then realized it wasn’t ready after all. I shelved it for a long while, then revised it, and I like it better now; but I don’t think I will submit it again. It feels like too personal a poem to me, and here’s why: when I felt more satisfied with it, I showed it to my mother (it’s about her). She was quiet for a fairly long time. Then she looked at me and asked, “How did you know this?”

Well, I’d imagined it. Guessed. But I felt floored that maybe I’d found words to say what she couldn’t say, and that she felt I had it right–her experience, I mean, her feelings. And now that feels important to me, because my mother died just a few days ago.

But this blog is sort of personal, after all, and so I am posting it here as a not-quite-finished, imperfect poem that nonetheless said enough to the person I wrote it about. My audience of one, in this case. Which is enough for me, and rare enough in the art of creative writing; and I really cannot come up with words this week given how I feel about my mom’s death. “Still processing,” as they say. Each of us does that differently, and each grief differs depending upon relationship and circumstances.

My mother’s passing was extremely peaceful, calm, accepting, about as uncomplicated as a death can be. Yet I will be holding onto the experience and my feelings about it for a long time to come.

Ann E. Michael, Departures

The monsoon sky has no answer. It comes back year after year to hear our songs. It brings the sowing season and I select poems to place deep in the ground. What does a poem grow into? What serration will its leaves bear? What poison will colour its fruits? What should a poem-farmer do? And for what? The clouds descend – charcoal grey. Like warnings.

I open a fresh Word document. Book_Four.docx. At the cusp of futility and insanity, there is almost always another new, unnecessary poem.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Writing – But for What?

And this has been a week of light, book-ended with community writing workshops in small Northern towns. From May, I’ve offered free “On the moors” writing workshops, an offer which remains open to any Lancashire or Yorkshire organisation or group of individuals with a venue. It’s part of my ongoing work to increasing understanding of, and connection with, our Northern moors and other peatlands. It’s also part of my personal strategy for surviving the social and political divisions affecting the landscapes I love best. By turning away from that zero-sum game of who belongs and who doesn’t, and focussing instead on place and nature as something we can share a connection with and a responsibility for, by focussing on creative writing and teaching as my activist response, I give myself a bit of agency, a bit of comfort.

Last Friday I took the workshop to Trawden, close to my own homegrounds of Pendle and Walshaw Moor; today I headed to Horwich. In both small towns, creative writing gave expression – from the first minutes – to a love of the moors so deep it brought people to tears. It gave space to the desire not just to laid claim to, or to enjoy, but to protect and care for: place and neighbourhood, each other.

Whether it’s paid or not, I love this work. After the Trawden workshop, I drove home over the moors brimming with happiness. I stopped at Wycoller and to revel in its gateposts and walls, (one of my current niche obsessions) and in the evening, I met Kim, to swim in a high reservoir on Todmorden moor in the evening sun.

Clare Shaw, A sense of belonging

A coastal walk to blow the cobwebs off is always on my list of self-care things to do, and this week’s trip to the seaside did the trick. I like walking in my local town, and I like walking in the forest nearby, but there is a particular joy to walking at the coast that delights me. The fresh air, the sound of the waves and the ever-changing view as the tide comes in or goes out offer the kind of refreshment that reaches mind, body and soul.

My brain felt as though it was crammed full of ideas this week as I set about writing some new anniversary poems. I have always loved my anniversary tea towel which shows me the traditional symbol for each wedding anniversary, and I have enjoyed choosing specific presents over the years for my wife that match these. However it was when I was asked to write a poem for a husband to give to his wife on their Jade anniversary that I became determined to do more anniversary poetry writing. I was flattered to be asked and to be recognised as a poet who could turn their hand to such things and crafted the words carefully. This then got me thinking about using poems as small gifts or for cards for people I knew. They were well received, and I felt myself at the beginnings of a slowly evolving project. I recently had the opportunity to bring the jade poem to a different couple, and then when I was working on a different poem last week I had the idea that it would be super cool to have written a poem for all of the anniversaries. A great idea, but when I slowed down a little I realised this doesn’t exactly tie in with the way I write. I need time and I had to shake off my feeling that I wanted them all done in the next couple of days like a set of Pokémon ready to be collected. And of course there is more to it than preparing the poems. On my website each digital download sits behind a ‘label’ and it was making these labels that sent me into a whirl of believing I sort of knew how to do it, asking Kath to remind me how to do it, doing it successfully and then needing to change a background colour and promptly forgetting how I had done it! All that kept me amused for quite some time and perhaps that puts into context why a walk beside the sea was the perfect treat this week.

Sue Finch, POEMS TO MATCH A TEATOWEL

Even when so much is awful, wonders in our own lives still have a way of blooming like wildflowers, and it’s ever more essential to share them. When I hear about your bumper crop of blueberries, benign biopsy, reconnection with an old friend, new puppy, or whatever enlivens your life it enlarges my joy too.

So here’s my good news. My fourth poetry collection, Universe Marveled Into A Jar, just came out. I can’t believe how lucky I am!

Here’s the book description:

These pages hold praise songs to wonderments diverse as moss, mistakes, memory, even an imaginary donkey. Laura’s poems are wild and tender explorations into many realms of our universe’s marvels.

It is dedicated to women I love with acknowledgements not only to journals and anthologies that published my work but also to my beloved poetry writing group, the 811s, who were instrumental in shaping these poems.

I am fortunate to have this book published by Sheila-Na-Gig, a nonprofit arts organization/poetry journal/small press founded and run by the indefatigable visionary Hayley Mitchell Haugen (who is also an amazing poet). Each step of the process from raw manuscript to finished book has been a testament to Hayley’s patient expertise. She even allowed me to skip the usual back cover blurbs. Instead it features kind words fellow writers have already posted about my poems—with vast gratitude to Kim Langley, C.A. Gunn, Elizabeth H.S. Beasley, and Iesha Jackson.  

Laura Grace Weldon, My New Book Is Here!

I’ve written previously about my sense that haiku and longer poems come from different parts of the brain; how haiku, the best ones, distil the collision of two sensory experiences in one moment to produce a spark, a connection or contrast, which the reader has to intuit, whereas longer poems, with their wider canvas, can move backwards and forwards through time in a manner rarely possible in haiku. The Last One Picked benefits from having a lifetime, and a whole career’s worth (as a GP), of experience and thought to draw upon.

Handysides writes ruminatively about his upbringing, and its strict morality, in a very religious household, impacting on even the joy of collecting, as in ‘History of the Motor Car in Fifty Picture Cards’ where ‘you felt ashamed for asking’ the ‘elderly or uncommitted friends’ if you might have ‘the cards we saw on mantelpieces’, only to be told ‘in no uncertain terms: / those are for my grandson, nephew[,] / someone who means more to me than you. That ‘uncommitted’ is satisfyingly ambiguous as to its meaning.

There’s an encounter with a horse in ‘A Solitary Mare’ which is reminiscent of Larkin’s ‘At Grass’ in how it sympathetically regards the animal’s age, but it feels much more real than Larkin’s deskbound speculation. It ends thus:

At night she nears my caravan.
I hear her snort, tear off the grass
I feel her presence, weight of hooves nearby

and next day when I sit to wire a plug
she comes to see
her long head reaches over me

hot jets of horse breath on my hands
she rubs her mighty forehead on my back
her fellow feeling floors me.

The absence of punctuation other than the two full-stops is irksome at first, but adds to the fluidity of the action, as does the alliteration at the end.

Matthew Paul, On Stuart Handysides’s The Last One Picked

I want to describe Terri Cohlene’s long overdue debut poetry collection, A Conspiracy of Blackbirds, as a hodge-podge, but only if you understand hodge-podge as that strange little store crammed with ancient washing machines, pitchforks, maybe a statue of Cupid or a wrought iron hen with her clutch of chicks, maybe a bag full of unexpected gems. In this collection of poems, you never know what you’ll find, and you’re sure to find exactly what you need.

Cohlene’s subjects include old photographs, old work boots, mothers, daughters, MS, bronzed baby shoes from decades back, lost checkbooks…I could go on. As Patrick Dixon describes it: A Conspiracy of Blackbirds is “a book of surprises.” Somehow—how does she do it?—it all comes together, even the hard stuff transforming into occasions for delight. In “Finally, I Become What You Always Wanted,” addressed to the poet’s mother, we find these instructions: “Cut me open, / count the rings.” One expects such a poem to end with scars, instead—apple blossoms.

Remind me to make a copy of “On the Table” for my massage therapist. It’s a list of all the places old hurts have secreted themselves (an ex-husband, a third-grade teacher, a bully…), and ends:

Then there’s my estranged
mother, lodged like a lizard
around my sternum—
a reminder of why bones
are needed to protect the heart.

On the back cover, poet Sandra Yannone offers the perfect precis: “A Conspiracy of Blackbirds chronicles how one woman breaks free from a multi-generational cycle of abandonments to reach for the sky in a transformative murmuration of stunning flight.” Exactly so. Cohlene—an artist, children’s book writer, playwright, and more—offers a map to the healing and sustaining power of art. 

Bethany Reid, Terri Cohlene’s A CONSPIRACY OF BLACKBIRDS

The Last Season, David Lloyd, Tiger Bark Press, 2025, ISBN 978-1-7329012-8-5, $18.95

(For the sake of clarity, this is the Welsh-American David Lloyd, not the Irish one.)

What, I found myself asking when I picked this book up, is the last season? And have no answer, but several answers: a single person’s decline towards death; the impact of climate change on those parts of the world that until recently had a clearly demarcated seasonal cycle that is now blurring around the edges; and, more prosaically perhaps, winter, which also tends to signify death. In the poem that gives this collection its title, David Lloyd seems to be touching on all three readings:

I’ve forgotten, the names I refuse, the names
I speak as I peel back bandages. Heal
me. Forgive me. Forgive my seasons
of discontent. Forgive my frigid hands
grasping what they desire. Forgive the time
devoted to myself. Forgive the frost

its bite. Let me raise these now old hands
into the healing air, up out of time,
into this last season, this deepest frost.

‘The Last Season’ is the last of six sestinas that make up the second (of six) section of the book, and Lloyd uses the cyclical, planispiral nature of the form to lay out themes of decay and death, both personal and planetary, that run through the book. His use of enjambment across line and stanza drives the language forward, a dynamic that cuts against the possibility of fatalism in the poems.

Billy Mills, The Last Season by David Lloyd: A Review

Although the poems explore a daughter/father relationship, one explains why there are no parent/children relationships, “Barren” is inspired by Sylvia Plath’s metaphors,

“O moon-swallowed sun.

O urge that’s flick-knife sharp.
I’m five crows nailed to a barnyard door,
a plundered nest, a hen house after the fox has called.

This womb that streaks its shepherd’s warning.
This one plus one that always comes to nought.”

It’s fun trying to link metaphor with poem, but the underlying point is a serious one. Plath herself was dismissive of women who couldn’t be mothers, perhaps as a means of providing herself with some self-reassurance during her separation from Hughes. It is agonising as a woman who wants children but finds herself unable to have any and humour is used to deflect attention away.

Booker has a confidence with crafting poems, using recognisable situations, that makes her work very readable. She’s not afraid to use humour against herself to make a point. Her subjects allow for complexity, allowing that scenarios are not straightforward. In real life, it’s rarely as simple as dividing people into good and bad. The multiverse concept allows for consideration of multiple possibilities, opening these poems beyond the personal.

Emma Lee, “Pedestrian in the Multiverse” Claire Booker (Waterloo Press) – book review

I once wrote an essay about my many floppy disks of saved AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) conversations. I credit the hundreds of hours I spent agonizing over the tone of my “away messages” (a performance of “away,” since most of the time, we were parked right there watching people enter and leave the chat) with my development as a writer.

That’s where my sense of what it means to have a voice on the page originated, between the hours of 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. with friends and acquaintances. Those AIM conversations existed slightly outside of time—often you’d return to school or camp the next day only to find the intimacies exchanged didn’t translate to a new reality beyond that consuming correspondence.

So, the epistolary form has fascinated me. Reading letters feels—indeed is—a form of eavesdropping (a sensibility at the heart of lyric poetry). A letter offers a remarkably intimate sense of who these individuals were, which naturally includes how they expressed doubt and hesitation.

In the case of Sally McDowell [the ex-wife of the former governor of Baltimore] and John Miller [a pastor], their letters begin in 1854 with her refusal of his offer of marriage. Imagine starting a correspondence there! We know that, by the end of the tome (the collected letters amount to 944 pages over two years), they will end up together. But, as is true of poetry, it’s not what a poem means but how it means that leaves an impact. Their candor and their wit, their mundane recounting and surprises—I found the voice they built together, their how, gripping and affecting, as well as historically complicated (right on the advent of the Civil War).

Miller said something I’ll never forget in those early letters after McDowell’s refusal: that when two ships collide at sea, they should remain in touch, until the extent of the damage is determined. That was at the back of my mind the whole time I wrote the collection. That people should remain close until the extent of the damage is determined. I interpret “damage” loosely—I am most interested in how people are transformed by coming into each other’s lives, and in how chance meetings shape our paths. That seems to me to be one of the chief promises of being alive.

Maya C. Popa, Letters as Eavesdropping

Almost two years ago exactly I was listening to T. Swift’s Tortured Poets Department on repeat and it occurred to me, one line from “So High School” would be a great title for what was then just an amorphous and incomplete manuscript which included a couple of series that centered around the idea of women as property, a chattel, but also as monsters in their own way. The pretty dead things series was at the heart of it, my poems about 17th century vampire brides, but also the governess poems of terrible and unguessable, which had been finished the year before. I was also in the thick of wedding planning for the next summer, which had me thinking of brides and bargains and contracts just generally. Because I was busy getting ready to release RUINPORN, I scribbled the title down in a notebook and put it away. As the poem series intended for that particular full-length project grew over the past two years, first through the winged poems, another sea-washed series called deepwater, and this winter with the abattoir letters, the book began to take shape and I grew even more resolute on the title choice. [link added]

Kristy Bowen, some notes on the new book

Cliques are funny but are we in an age without any? and better for that? What would a study of the rather uncliquey yet catholic [Peter] Finch tell us and with what kind of root? A tree’s? A proliferating soil grabbing weed’s? We need good historical overview, a robust dialectic, and a taste for reading lots of poets of the past and recent past and present, to answer.

For example, an Edward Lucie-Smith review of Jeff Nuttall’s 1969 book Bomb Culture suggests why 60s and 70s cliques snubbed each other. Lucie-Smith says that their schisms can be seen to resolve around emulating pop culture comedians and bands. There would be disapproval from one sect if another did. He also said Brits squander surrealism – because they get the giggles. [Andrew] Taylor quotes Finch mentioning Nuttall (“Nuttall said walk hell walk they want you to read poems give them fiction stream of consciousness can’t tell the beginning from the end like Warhol’s Empire State”) but he stays away from key questions like Nuttall’s libertarian interest in harassment of women and girls. Can we discuss schisms that revealed both sides tragically part right and tragically part wrong? To do so, one must fire shots at all sides.

Lucie-Smith’s review never says he’s named (with a testy sigh) in Bomb Culture. But at least he made Nuttall’s index. This is in a sense the respectful practice of the poetry battlefield, and Lucie-Smith could take it as sword brandishing at a rival. One Ira Lightman gets a Taylor mention sometimes by implication, but isn’t in the index. It happens when Taylor talks about Finch’s use of found materials, leading him to imply things have got a bit uncool now, in our day. He diagnoses this as partly due to “the rise of the so-called poetry detectives, who track down plagiarists and ‘out’ them on social media. Quite what the Dadaists and wider avant-garde would make of this practice, one can only imagine.” Later Taylor introduces (with the same thought) me by name: “Ira Lightman ‘the sleuth’ has attempted to become the UK poetry scene’s detective looking for plagiarism. His detection, though in some cases understandable, has caused pain and suffering for those accused. I wonder what the Dadaists would have made of Lightman attempting to create a career out of such work. Perhaps they would have sent him a cauliflower in the post.”

And here we can at least name Taylor’s tone: it is adjoiner-clubbish. He defines himself by fishing for visceral sympathy, preferably around scar tissue, but with keyboard warrior passive aggressiveness. These are the clubs of Pavlovian suggestion. He condescends and banishes me, even though I’ve performed on Radio 3 in collaboration with Peter Finch, read at Writers Forum like Finch, written a poem for Bob Cobbing like Finch, performed and been published by Subvoicive like Finch, and appeared in the same book (Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh) that Taylor calls “important and timely”. Taylor the huffing and rhetorical questioner looks a bit under-informed, even shallow.

Ira Lightman, A Taylored Finch

As it happens, I do trust Wallace Stevens. He’s the high-modernist poet most fascinated by formal logic, as with the illicit conversion — “All X is Y, therefore All Y is X; All music is feeling, therefore All feeling is music” — he puts at the center of “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” Or the strange grammar of the nothing he develops in “The Snow Man.” And, more to point, Stevens comes toward the top of the group of poets, the high modernists, I take as accurate reporters and analysts of the thin modern world: How do we live within it? How do find meaning in a universe without inherent meaning? They are witnesses of the cold disease, the diagnosticians and occasionally the physicians who propose a treatment.

So if we wanted to trust the Stevens poem, we’d notice its mostly tetrameter quatrains and its consistent inversions of ordinary sense: The opening stanza claims that the man-made jar isn’t placed in a surrounding wilderness but makes the wilderness surround it, as though the coherent jar creates the incoherence elsewhere. And from there the poem builds to the difficult double negative of the last lines, the human jar that “did not give . . . / Like nothing else,” contrasted with Tennessee’s wild birds and bush. The grammatical constructions, too, are strange. We get poetic inversions: “round it was,” “of a port in air.” We get jarringly obvious internal rhyme: “sprawled around” a jar “round upon the ground.” We then arrive at flat non-poetic diction: “The jar was gray and bare.” Even the self-diminishing word “anecdote” in the title.

All that, I think, is sufficient evidence that Stevens is in charge enough for the reader to invest in the poem. And what I find when I invest the time — the working center of the poem — is a human object that organizes the surrounding landscape that “sprawled around, no longer wild.” The jar “took dominion everywhere,” and the scholar Roy Harvey Pearce has offered the wonderfully attractive (if not actually helpful) observation that Stevens had in mind a particular brand of canning jar, the Dominion Wide E Special, distributed in the U.S. since 1913.

The sense that I take from this is the diagnostic modern observation that the human is the only remaining source of meaning. We inherit poetic language that points to a prior thickness, but now what gives meaning is “gray and bare,” and perhaps more to the point, sterile: “It did not give of bird or bush,” entirely unlike everything else in the fertile landscape it organizes.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Anecdote of the Jar

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

My first book was actually After (Abingdon Square, 2009), written in the form of letters. For example, “Letter to My Mother,” “Letter to My Father,” etc., as a way of imagining what I would say to them individually had they lived to see me grow up. I worked on it for a very long time, but didn’t know where to send it until a friend who was starting a small press took an interest. This first book of letters was very affirmative and inspiring. I have never stopped writing since.

When On Earth Beneath Sky came out, I was even more proud of my accomplishment. I had sent to the editor a very big stack of prose and poems. Then, he asked me to reduce it to about a hundred pages. After farming daily, I would dive through hundreds and thousands of pages in tears, wondering how I could have written that much over the years as a non-native English speaker. I was spilling out my guts, my memory dumping onto the page as a way of talking to myself, trying to understand my place in the world, in nature, and so on.

After deals a lot with Cambodia, the aftermath, the migration, and what I wanted to tell my parents and siblings—like letters that could be sent to them from the United States. Back then, Cambodia was still closed to the world.

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

I came to the US at the age of ten. One of the ways I could learn new English words was to write Haiku—five-seven-five syllables. It taught me how to count. I started writing rhymed poems in high school because I hadn’t read Walt Whitman then. When I won a poetry contest, I received a hundred dollars, which felt so heavy inside my pocket. I was in tears spending part of the one hundred dollars for a hamburger at McDonald’s.

Poetry was short and easy. It was something I could finish, as opposed to starting with fiction or a memoir, like a few Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge Genocide did. I just wrote about my life in the US.

On On Earth Beneath Sky and Echoes Lost to Wind, people expected me to write a childhood narrative under the Khmer Rouge, but I didn’t. I wrote about Cambodia after the UNTAC-monitored democratic elections. The aftermath was full of struggle and hardship. I wrote about love and sex growing up in the US. I wrote about nature, and the farm in Bolton, MA.

I chose the healing narrative rather than, “I am a survivor” of a genocide. […]

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?

I think we don’t have a culture of readers with an intellect like twenty or thirty years ago. The internet has co-opted our brains. Our intelligence is facing a global pandemic of obesity. Brain tumors and dementia are on the rise. The culture of forgetting has infested our bone marrow, clogging our bloodstream with literary porn. So much sensationalism. But I am all for the greater flow as part of the human condition, struggling with how to live, where and what to be or become.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Chath pierSath

— Always reading: God’s Silence by Franz Wright. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of poems that made me feel so much, that felt so human.

— In an interview on Image, Wright says, “I thought of the poem as the holy thing, the aim of everything. If there’s a change, it’s that I came to see there was no necessity anymore to finish a poem. The poem was a step to the next point. The poems were all attempts to find a place to store the joy and certainty of the ultimate goodness and coherence and tenderness of reality.”

— And maybe I’ve quoted from this before? but he also says,

“I remember very early having the sense that there is one poet in the world, and sometimes if you’re very lucky and you work very hard, you get to be the poet for a while. The rest of the time, you’re trying to earn your way back to being the poet for a moment. Meanwhile, you love poetry itself. It still makes me uncomfortable to call myself a poet. I think of myself as someone in the service of poetry. If I happen to be in that blessed state of consciousness where I am able to write, I guess at that moment I’m a poet.”

— I hope you keep storing joy and tenderness in poems. And by poems I mean any container in which you can put your holy things.

Shawna Lemay, You Cannot Break the Wings of Poetry

There are Iliad people and Odyssey people, but the modern world is Odyssean: great migrations, gap years, road trips; we have lived with Odyssean technology for centuries: trains, planes, and automobiles; we all have careers, which means ‘journey through life’; our highest aspiration is still to undertake the new quest in space. The basic idea of the Odyssey is inescapable. People talk about their side-quests and being the hero of their own life, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning once joked that she put on her bonnet just as knights used to put on their helms. Odysseus echoes in every advert where the father comes home and his children run to greet him. To be an individual is to be Odyssean, even if our journeys are small, infrequent, and domestic. We all quest, no matter the scale of our lives.

Nolan’s warning is that we risk living in the Iliad, that we are going to become more and more tribal, more distant from “Zeus’s law”, that we are going to put our own civilisation at risk. As this film implicitly acknowledges, nothing Nolan can do will alter that. We will forget the past. Reading the news, it seems apparent that we already have. We are, alas, midway on the waves. Nolan’s conversion of the Odyssey into an action film did not smother the underlying story, but it fits the pattern he warns against all too well. If Troy is going to burn again, watching this film will be little more than a distraction while the ships set sail. If Nolan really wanted to issue a warning, he might have made a film about our own civilisation, a song that will be all they have to remember us, a song of all the promises we failed to keep.

Henry Oliver, My review of Nolan’s Odyssey in GQ Australia

The Nolan film has brought back into the spotlight a tiresome confected controversy over the translations by Emily Wilson, because Nolan has said he was inspired by her version of the Odyssey. (Wilson went on to translate the Iliad too, though with a slightly different technique, and overall her Iliad seems to have attracted less attention.) Like any decent translation, Wilson’s versions have several major strengths and some real weaknesses. I think the best thing about them — especially about the Odyssey, where she kept strictly to a single English line for each line of Greek — is the way she has made the poem into recognisable verse within the English tradition, while also creating and conveying a sense of pace, of narrative energy. The first word Arnold uses to characterise Homer in his essay on translating him, is ‘rapid’. So many — almost all — translations of Homer feel slow or prosaic (or both) compared to the original. Getting it into pacy and plausible verse is a real achievement.

The endless arguments about Wilson’s translation choices and supposedly obtrusive wokeness, carried out almost entirely by people who do not themselves read Homeric Greek, and have certainly never attempted any kind of major translation, has been singularly boring and unedifying. Hers are, certainly, translations of their moment and I’m sure they’ll date fast. I’d be very surprised if anyone is teaching from them in 40 or 50 years time, but this is almost always true. Translations with an escape velocity of their own are very rare.

George Steiner, in a six-page tour de force about the translation of Homer, is very funny about why Lattimore is so leaden: “Striving for a ‘timeless’, unobtrusively lucid idiom, Lattimore has, in fact, fallen into a peculiar cadence, part Longfellow, part Eisenhower.” The Lattimore version, concludes Steiner, writing in the 1970s about a translation published in 1951, “is already a period piece. Its intended timelessness has turned parochial. This, precisely, is what Homer is not.”

If you go on to read a great deal of Homer in Greek, your memory of whatever translation you read first disappears under the weight of it — at least that’s been my experience. I know (because I still have them) that I used Rieu’s translations for both Homeric poems when I was studying them, but I can’t recall anything about Rieu’s style, I have no lasting sense of these poems in his English prose. But obviously most people, if they are profoundly moved by an encounter with Homer, will have met him in a particular translation. I think this might be why people who love Homer but can’t read Greek sometimes get so worked up about (what they view as) inadequate translations: if you have a particular English version in your mind, another could easily seem like a travesty. But really, they all are, in one way or another.

If you want to read about Homer from a standing start, I would recommend Michael Silk’s slim Homer: The Iliad. A Student Guide (CUP, 1987; repr. 2004). Silk’s seven pages on translation (40-7) is less mean and funny than Steiner’s but of a good deal more help for a new reader. He compares Fitzgerald, Pope and the prose version by Lang, Leaf and Myers and shows, concisely but very clearly, what difference the style and diction of a translation makes to our sense of the original. In particular, he puts his finger on the uneven diction that is a weakness of so many modern translations — with some phrases sounding like everyday speech today, some sounding Victorian or Shakespearean, some like a fairy story and so on. This kind of inconsistency of tone is so common in modern translations of ancient texts that it seems almost a default setting, but it has a corrosive effect.

Victoria Moul, What to read about Homer?

When we at Poems Ancient and Modern last saw Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849), he was fast asleep in a cradle at his father’s knee. The first child of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and his wife Sara, Hartley appears in his father’s great early poem, “Frost at Midnight,” as the “babe so beautiful! It thrills my heart / With tender gladness, thus to look at thee.” The father’s heart thrills, specifically, at the thought that in this new life, with its unsullied innocence, the possibility exists for human un-fallenness. Through a sustained connection to the natural world and a carefully nurturing education — so he believes — his child might avoid the corruption that has entered his own soul.

In Hartley Coleridge’s sonnet, “Long Time a Child,” written when the poet was in his mid-30s and published in his 1833 Poems, we might be over-tempted to read the traces of his father’s famous poem. We might be a little too primed to see, in the child-in-the-man of this poem, the ghost of that “babe so beautiful” whose soul, in his father’s vision, was destined for life, not death. We might note with greater irony that that “babe,” now a man, has found instead — having “waked to sleep no more” — the more insistent “sleep,” repeated three times in two lines, of his own inescapable mortality.

Or perhaps it’s not an over-temptation. Inevitably, Hartley Coleridge’s autobiography suggests itself in these fourteen lines: his father’s repeated abandonments that gave the lie to the Romantic vision of pre-lapserian childhood, and his own wounded life of dissipation, which would have left him prematurely old at 37, when Poems appeared. Though he could not have known how far past his own midpoint he actually was by 1833, with only 16 years left to him, still the sense of his own failure to realize any interest on the time granted him drives his poetic speaker’s lament. “For yet I lived like one not born to die; / A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears . . .”

Even the sonnet’s Petrarchan form echoes the pattern of derailment and stagnation that its words articulate. The enclosed quatrains of the octave, rhymed abbaacca, point to a sense of things imploding on themselves. The introduction of the c-rhyme in the second quatrain intimates a kind of progress, but that forward impulse is wholly enwombed in that initial a-rhyme.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Long Time a Child

I’ve been saying something of farewell – ok, an au revoir; never say never again – to the sonnet recently. A couple of years ago I switched my allegiance to a sixteen-line form, which has become my new ‘thoughtless default’ for shorter poems. It’s hardly one I can claim to have innovated, and its rules (‘it has sixteen lines and probably four quatrains, but otherwise it can do what the hell it likes’) are far too permissive for it to count as a something worth giving a name; though I’m clear in own mind, at least, that it’s no kind of ‘extended sonnet’, Meredithian, Harrisonian or otherwise.

This might also involve retiring another form I’ve occasionally fallen into that’s isomorphic with the sonnet: the three stanzas of ballad metre I call a ‘twelve-bar’, being precisely the form and measure of a twelve-bar blues. I think of this three-stanza ballad form as a kind of ‘oral sonnet’, since it both encourages and accommodates the same basic ‘this plus that equals this’ pattern as the sonnet proper. In the oral tradition that the ballad form invokes, time and consequence tend do the work of logic, and I’ve found that the twelve-bar formula is more usually ‘that event followed by that event led me to this state’. Blues renders this an emotional as well as an argumentative tension through the musical progression of tonic–subdominant–tonic–dominant–tonic. To use the standard metaphor, this feels to most folk like home-departure-homesickness-home, although this omits those two bars in the middle where you go home for a couple of days so your mum will do your laundry. (Strictly speaking, the emotional contour of the blues form is more ‘this sucks / let’s try this instead / that didn’t work / let’s bring it to a crisis / that didn’t work either and this still sucks but I’m resigned to it.’) The cliché is that you can sing all of Emily Dickinson to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. True enough – the ballad form is hardwired in Dickinson’s letters, never mind her poetry. But I think it’s more telling that Muddy Waters could have happily covered ‘I Died for Beauty’, or ‘Hope is a Thing with Feathers’ with only minor adjustments to his delivery. For all that Blind Melon Dickinson is maybe the more intriguing prospect.

Giving up on sonnets is maybe just admitting that these days I rarely find myself thinking the kind of thoughts they’re built to express. This is usually some version of a ‘proof’, often in the more dialectic shape of the Elizabethan and Metaphysical models, or the more organic syllogisms of the ‘Muldoon’-style sonnet, where a surprising connection between two things will see an unanticipated third emerge from their coupling. What one is attempting, though, is still just ‘claim and demonstration’; one is still trying to show an emotional truth. It’s the ‘proof’ aspect I’m no longer very compelled by. It contains an unstated premise: ‘Prove to who?’ I’m not sure it was ever the reader, who has other ways of verifying that your poems are true besides their devastating logic. Maybe I’m just a little more secure, if not in my own beliefs, then my ability to be honest about them – and less inclined to attempt the kind of watertight self-justification the sonnet always seems to demand.

Don Paterson, Shakespeare, the Sonnet and the uses of Scholarship

for all that
I will not get to
in this life
the fountain carries on
in the rain

Tom Clausen, drenched

I’m working on a few poems for submissions: a couple of anthologies for groups I’m in. I have joined a few free writing sessions where we sit on a silent Zoom call for an hour to write together. It’s weird but effective. It’s an anchor within the current of the summer and I usually write something. I still go on Sundays to the café to write.

I’ve started having dreams about school. The first one was a sort of nightmare, I woke at 6am in a panic that I had missed orientation and didn’t know what I should be doing in my new/old role. Last night’s was quieter, but still with that sense of anxiety. I was there with other teachers and couldn’t type some information on my phone with my awkward thumbs. 

My technology dreams are always a sure sign of stress. I’ve had them my whole life, from not being able to dial old rotary phones to emails going awry on computers to struggling to find info on smart phones. Always with a sense of inadequacy. Something simple I should be able to do but just can’t.

Gerry Stewart, Slow Summer Urgency

I met with a group of poets this week and we talked about poetry publishing, rejection, the money situation (where it costs more to get published than it ever pays to be published, given submission fees etc.) We talked about what kinds of jobs we did to keep from the unfortunate situation the main character of The Adjunct found herself in—homeless, starving, turning to prostitution (see last week’s blog post for review). I talked a little bit about entrepreneurial poets—like those who run weekend courses on their own, or offer editing services, or run online generating courses. Most writers—including fiction and non-fiction writers, not just poets do not earn a living from their advances or royalties. They make money teaching, or fees from readings and conferences, or selling their rights to Hollywood, or running conferences – but not from their books. (Also, a reminder: if you like a writer’s work, please buy their books when you can!) I myself should be better and smarter at making money than I am after all these years. Sometimes the limits are my health (sometimes keeping me from opportunities) and energy and even gumption (how dare I put myself out there? Who do I think I am?)

I also watched the original movie Fame, in which many young people experience rejection in a multitude of arts in the early 80s in a very melodramatic way that probably was edgy for its day (dare I say the tv show was better than the movie?) One character is told if she can’t take rejection, don’t be a dancer, and proceeds to almost throw herself under a subway bus. Dancing might be the one art form with more rejection than poetry—and a shorter lifespan, as injuries, pregnancies, and just life (too short? too tall? too busty? etc.) can put you out of the game by 25 or 30. Fortunately, poetry has no such short lifespan, though poets may find the game a little easier when they’re young (and if they’re hip and attractive, even easier)! But all poets, even the great ones, face a LOT of rejection, and at 53, sometimes I feel that I’ve had enough. But I persist, possibly delusionally optimistic. Succeeding at being any kind of artist involves surviving rejection and not letting it put a permanent “NO!” stamp in your heart or head.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, First Swallowtail Butterflies, Lavender Festivals, Poetry, Money, and Rejection

I believe multiple views can be held within a single Jewish community. (Multiple views can be held within a single Jewish heart. Ask me how I know.) I believe seeking to exclude one another is corrosive to community. I believe we should care about each other across even this disagreement.

And when I think about the teaching that the Temple was destroyed due to sinat hinam, I think of the way I’ve seen Jews tear into each other. I think of the readiness some seem to feel to cast “those other Jews” as beyond the pale / outside the tent / no longer community.

And I imagine that the pain that my heart feels over this community discord is a scant billionth of the pain Shekhinah must be feeling. That’s what sparked this vulnerable prayer-poem, and that’s a big piece of what’s on my mind and heart as Tisha b’Av approaches.

Anyway: I hope you’ll click through and check out Laments.

As usual, the group of collaborators involved in this offering aren’t all coming from the same place. We are clergy and laypeople, writers and artists, denominational Jews and trans-denominational Jews. Among us we hold many different views on Israel / Palestine. And like the Jewish people writ large, together we are more than the sum of our parts.

Rachel Barenblat, Another lament

From the pyre, I tell the judge
there is more than one kind of fire.
I tell him I am already burning.

Renee Emerson, Mrs. Smith, Burned for Praying in Her Own Language

In March 2025, I read the poem “To Sew a Freedom Suit” by Danielle Legros Georges in The New Yorker. Georges had passed away the previous month. At the time, I’d been in the US for 3 years after relocating from Malta (Europe). I’d viewed the US as the land of the free until I came here and realized that “free” is not the word I’d use. After reading the poem, I immediately brought my notebook out and drafted a poem after Georges’.

My version of the poem had the same premise to start with, but rather than the lavishness of Georges’ poem, it spoke of layers of defensiveness against a world that seemed to be attacking and out to get me. I remember the other two connections I’d made (aside from the poem) vividly. One was a mental health podcast episode by Dr. Caroline Leaf; the other was my own fabrication of a visualization exercise I’d used during the meditation I start my writing workshops with. In this visualization, I asked the workshop participants to imagine their bodies building defense layers.

And so, the first draft of my poem came to fruition, and I was quite pleased with it. There was a strangeness to my work; textures that felt simultaneously accurate and unusual. The poem made me uncomfortable in all the right ways. Yet I felt that something was off—it wasn’t close enough to the uncanny experience of being seen as a commodity or a number and trying to build back my individuality, my softness included somewhere in the mix.

I sent it out with a few edits at first, and although it came close a couple of times, it didn’t get picked up anywhere for the longest time. At the time of writing (ironically, after a huge overhaul, as you’ll see), someone has just accepted the first iteration of it. That doesn’t stop me from (hopefully) elevating it for my next collection.

Unstitching and Re-hemming a Poem – guest post by Miriam Calleja (Trish Hopkinson)

Each morning, after/during coffee, I read some poetry – usually from my shelves. If I have an urge for more reading, I go online and search authors. Occasionally, I’ll do the same for flash fiction or short pieces – fiction or nonfiction. At night, I turn to cinema – watching a film before sleep. I allow both morning and evening to be, hopefully, sources for inspiration for my own writing. My writing nearly always begins with fragments that I’ll build on. I jot down the fragments – and then allow the bits to develop into something more. As for the morning or evening patterns, I don’t force any sort of inspiration. I can’t/ won’t do that. I just allow space for it. When I was younger, I started each day with music and ended each day with music. But, allowing the music to lead to inspiration – giving space for it, not forcing it – was the same.

Charlotte Hamrick, Bedtime Rituals

O Lord, that last, late-evening cappuccino—
beautiful fuel of poets’ conversations,
inspirer of wild readings and sweeping gestures,
intense, froth-headed, somewhat over-the-top—
that was poor judgment. Here I am again,
bug-eyed at midnight. Brain a wheeling hamster.
Groping the darkness for some ropey ladder
down to oblivion. Hauling You along.

Maryann Corbett, Sleep trouble

In America football is presented as entertainment, goals are greeted with jingles, games begin with enthusiastic announcements and count downs over the stadium’s sound system. The World Cup has become a puffed up pageant, a gaudy, money making spectacle and yet I follow it with the same duty and commitment, with the same contained excitement and expectation I have for poetry. It has become a part of me, I live with it and through it, am frustrated as much as I am exhilarated by it.

Roughly 25% percent of all games will end in a draw with almost ten percent of those being goalless. When I was a reader for a national poetry competition most of the work I encountered in the preliminary rounds was turgid and dull. I came across hundreds of one – nil loses, an abundance of nil – nil draws. Overwhelmingly though what I confronted in the poems was suffering. What made the experience miserable was not being witness to the pain but to people’s inability to express it. If I was a football pundit I’d call out a lack of commitment, say it was sloppy, careless, casual, that hurting is not enough. I want my football and my poetry to be open and free flowing, if there is loss then let it be moving and beautiful, in defeat let it be thrilling and exhilarating. Remember Gazza’s tears in Turin? How they lubricated the nation’s heartbreak. That was poetry.

Let’s be honest. Most poetry, like most football, is utter rubbish. Most poetry is just like watching England play. It is painful not because it is an eloquent representation of human suffering, it is painful because it’s just a bit shit. There was a time when certain match day commentators even had sympathy for supporters who let their passions run away with them, who caused trouble on the terraces, showed more fight than the team they’d paid money to see. “While we certainly can’t condone this kind of behaviour, after watching a display like that one can understand the fans’ frustrations.” I feel the same way about bad poetry.

Jan Noble, Nº73 How Barbara Hepworth helped me recover from the World Cup

The easy resolution. The account I gave of a marriage ending was clean, and had a moral, and let me feel the chapter closed. It broadened, in its last line, into something that sounded like wisdom. It was a proverb. A proverb is what you reach for when you cannot yet bear the particular, and it lets the poem — or the year — feel finished without having been lived through. I had ended on the wrong line. The repair, in a poem, is nearly always the same: cut the consolation, and sit with the plainer thing underneath it.

The speaker contemplating instead of acting. This is a failure mode I can name in four seconds in a stranger’s draft — the poem whose speaker stands at the window and observes, beautifully, and never once crosses the room. I did not see, for a long time, that I had built a life in that grammar. I watched. I described. I was excellent company at the window. The poem does not come alive until the speaker moves, and neither, it turns out, does the man.

The buried subject. The hardest, here as on the page. For years I wrote around a thing rather than towards it — around the shape of a life I had not yet let myself want, the making of a home, the people who stayed when they had every reason not to, a new house with no memory of its own that I walked into carrying all the memory it was ever going to have. I was fluent. Fluency is how the buried subject hides. The poem that will not arrive is usually the one still circling the thing it most needs to say. […]

Behind the whole taxonomy sits a single conviction I drew from Heidegger’s Aletheia and named, years ago, in the title of an as yet unpublished collection, What Storms Disclose. Bad poetry conceals; good poetry discloses. That is the sentence The Cutting Room exists to enforce. What I had not let myself notice is that it is not a sentence about poems. It is a sentence about attention.

A life lived without attention conceals — from others, and more expensively from the person living it.

A life lived with attention discloses. The knife I take to a failing draft and the attention I have had, slowly and late, to bring to a failing stretch of my own years are not cousins. They are the same instrument. I only ever owned one.

Adam Cairns, What the life was reaching for

I bow to the blooming squash flower,
to whorls of seaweed on the shore.
The moon’s fingernail wakes me—

I am its wayward child,
a tiny insect
blinded by light,
climbing rungs
streaked with
ash.

Luisa A. Igloria, Araria

This week: a World Cup, and a world in which the new is not what wins prizes; a globe of seeds, juice and pulp, and a world of leaf-shade and sap-hunger. And much more, as always. Enjoy.

a song inside these ending days. the morgue of form.
language. languish. anguish. said the poet. english.
has no commandments, only commands.
we swill it at evening.
the bloody gum connecting to the rusty faucet.
yr blue-grey hands to strangle us, tearing the paper, stretching the bread.

Fran Lock, (TOAD) FUGUE

The French vendeur who hands me the tomato in its perfect flesh— he knows.  Some worlds haven’t been destroyed. It is a globe of seeds, juice and pulp that asserts itself, a repository of what we were given in the love garden of origin.  What a miracle that it has not been trampled on by industry and pragmatism!  To touch its smooth skin with tender fingertips is to touch origins. To eat it, a burst of elation, then a river of melancholy: eternal values in such a fleeting package!  Says France: humans can revere things and earth and nature, even the self.

While revering in reverie, I was close to elements.  Fires in southwestern France were raging, but that’s not what shook me.  It was the popup window when I clicked on a video of those fires.  It was the human-sized robot prancing idiotically.  A robot cut off from human roots but embodying the highest hubris of its maker.  He promises to help me with everything, bopping around the virtual space.  He would do my chores but amplify my melancholy. He has me raging at my helplessness, tossing me against the rocks in the little skiff I’m navigating. 

Jill Pearlman, La Tomate

I was talking to a writer friend about both of our different levels of feelings of failure, worry about money (or lack thereof), lack of reviews/teaching jobs/grants/awards, and talking about what truly brings writers satisfaction. I know I’m happier when I’m writing, and I haven’t been writing enough. My friend was saying (after doing a bunch of readings) that she’d just like to spend some time by herself. The balance between promotion and spending time reading and writing is hard for all writers all the time, but it seems harder lately.

This brings me to my mini-book review of The Adjunct by Maria Adelmann. A sort-of-satire of the universe of Creative Writing and English major adjuncts, a young woman who’s gotten her PhD is trapped in a cycle of trying to earn a living as an adjunct, her reputation smeared by a professor who slept with her when she was his student, doing gig work on the side. This English PhD did not 1) come from money or 2) go to the fanciest school and is always in the process of writing the book that will help her hopefully break out of adjuncting hell, except the book is always on Post-It notes in a cramped and unheated borrowed office space. In the end (spoiler alert, but not really), she ends up unable to support herself, living out of her car when she gets carjacked and then she is homeless, turned down for multiple fast-food jobs, and becomes what basically is a prostitute. Overwrought? Melodramatic to the point of Dickens? Maybe, but now that universities are using adjuncts for 75 percent of teaching and not giving benefits or paying a living wage, and stories of adjuncts dying in their offices not even being uncommon, this is probably more realistic than I’d like to admit. Here’s a quote from the first page of the book:

I’m writing at two a.m. from the adjunct office in the literature wing…The ideal setting for an Agatha Christie novel in which the ensemble cast gets knocked off one by one. The disappointing big reveal is that, actually, capitalism did it, and suddenly you realize that you aren’t in a mystery novel at all but just another Jacobin article…there’s a twist beyond the twist: It’s just real life.”

The speaker of this novel is very much like me—except I never slept with a professor, and I never got my PhD (just an MA and an MFA) and I’ve never been car-jacked. But I do have MS, several genetic health issues that are expensive to treat, and I did adjunct for four years, with a boss who was male, younger and less accomplished than I was, making less money (if it can be believed) than I make on the regular as a freelance writing poet, far less than minimum wage. Now, I worked as a technical writer for ten years–that’s how I got to Seattle, recruited by Microsoft–but if I hadn’t chosen that path and gone into literature studies instead, I could be as helpless and penniless, no savings account, no home, no health insurance. I became too sick to work the hours that Microsoft did (and still does) require when I became an adjunct. If I hadn’t had a husband–what would have been my future?  And I thought about the “Gifted Child” syndrome and the “Rory Gilmore Failure” syndrome–if girls who are praised as intelligent and gifted since they were young are told to get their PhDs and there will be jobs waiting for them–well, we’ve been sold a sack of goods. Becoming a writer for money is tough–especially without backup money and connections, which let’s face it, almost all the famous poets you know came with as a package. Journalism, poetry–heck, people (according to the Atlantic) don’t even read any more. Am I a failure because capitalism doesn’t reward the work I love? I have published eight books total, six of poetry. I’ve had good reviews and good publishers and made friends along the way that I treasure. Have I gotten an NEA grant or a Guggenheim or Whiting Award? Even made the long list for a Pulitzer. Nope. And I have to face that fact that at my age, that may never happen. And earning a living writing? Is that a pipe dream I should let go of? Maybe so.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Anniversaries, Anxieties (with Mini Book Review) about Writing and Adjuncting, Plus Pacific Northwest Summer

As I mentioned before, I’ve been working on typesetting Judith Shaw‘s new pamphlet The Land Called Me Back, Poems from the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path. I’m delighted to say it’s going to be launched on Sunday 26th July at Berwick Church. If you’d like to come along, we’re meeting first at 2pm for a short walk, then at 3pm at the church Judith will talk about the book and read some of the poems.  There are seven churches in this part of the Cuckmere valley and It’s amazing how rich and evocative both the churches and their settings in the landscape have proven to be to poets: both Judith and those who have taken this residency before her, including Oenone Thomas and Antony Mair.

Robin Houghton, Two book launches coming up

A modern day anchoress, I commit
myself to my car. In my moving cell,
I sing constantly and pray without ceasing.

I dedicate myself to our modern religion
of hectic pace. I rush from one location to another,
showing my devotion in twelve hour increments.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, All Our Cells: Cars, Monastic, and Other

I watched the (in)famous quarter-final between England and Argentina in south London. Of course, it’s remembered for Maradona’s two goals, one of which was the most ludicrous bit of cheating in World Cup history and one of which was genius; but not so well-remembered is how the introduction of John Barnes almost rescued the game for England. Neither before nor since have I been so cross at the end of a football match. I wasn’t, though, one of the Little Englanders who saw, and probably still see, Argentina as the enemy. As a poem of mine, ‘Geography’, recently published by Tim Fellows in The Fig Tree, here, shows, my views on the Falklands War were contrary to most people’s. (We had a debate about in an English lesson and nobody in my class would second me, so our teacher, a lefty like me, had to.)

Anyhow, all of that somehow combined in ‘The Hand of God’, a poem I wrote a good few years ago and which was published by editor Crispin Thomas at Football Poets, here. Poor Terry Fenwick, Alan McDonald’s QPR teammate, moved to Spurs 18 months later in a bid to further his England career, was only capped once or twice again, and was later imprisoned for drink-driving.

Matthew Paul, Maradona, Belfast and me

When we began, we thought we would be solely focused on the artistic elements: editing books, publishing new and unique voices, and building literary culture. I started out thinking about stories, focused on the narratives that might change the world. Red Hen started with the idea of poetry as a feral animal skittering across Los Angeles. A coyote, maybe.

I always wanted to create a literary home for outsiders. As an outsider myself, I felt the pull of that outsider world. But the sooner you think about money and running your organization like a business, the better, because money is what allows the mission to thrive.

It took us a long time to ask for money at our own benefit event.

It took us a long time to start preparing P-and-L statements for books before we accepted them.

It took us a long time before we began to consider the cost of different endeavors before we decided to embark on programming that seemed worthwhile.

In the spring, we are releasing a poetry book from Vincent Antonio Rendoni, Dead Chicano Mixtape. One of my favorite poems is about money, and how being good or bad about money is a state of mind. If you are bad with money, when you get your hands on any, you think, what do I do with it, and make it disappear. If you are good with it, you save it. But what good is saved money unless you invest it to help others?

When poet Wanda Coleman needed help at the end of her life, I called a poet friend of mine and asked him to pitch in. “I must say,” I said apologetically, “She might not have been good with money.”

“Of course not,” he said. “She was a great poet.”

Being a great poet was enough.

Kate Gale, Keeping the Fire, Building the Boat: On Our Artistic Future

I want to read. I want to read everything. Ok, maybe not everything… But I want to read sooo many poets, and I want to read sooo many science fiction novels! And I know – particularly for the reading poets part – that reading is crucial for my creative development and appreciation/understanding of the wider poetry scene (and it’s fun!). So I want to read basically everything I can get my greedy hands on.

And yet, I consistently find spending time reading the most difficult thing to do. Not because reading itself is difficult, quite the opposite: reading is joyful. But I do so little of it. Why? And how do I prioritise it?

I think there are two things at play here.

I’m busy. My ‘day job’ is largely evening and weekend work with some day shifts here and there, and the time around it gets eaten up by gym (I have to maintain a level of fitness to do parts of my job), climbing (honestly one of the biggest ways I keep mentally well and regulated), and then writing (poetry, MfA, Substack, & all the admin for events, workshops etc). Add in a partnership I’m conscious of earmarking quality time for, a birdwatching hobby, and seeing a couple friends here and there, and there’s not a huge bunch of space left for the kind of downtime where I’m just floating around and could spontaneously think: oh, I’ll pick up a book for the next couple hours.

So as the space and time doesn’t necessarily naturally arise on its own I need to be more intentional with reading. And I do intend to read, it’s there in my mind that I want to make time for it, I want to do it.

And then I’ll manage it. I’ll pick up, say, a pamphlet someone’s recommended, and really enjoy it (or maybe enjoy it not so much because it’s also fine not to like everything we read). I’ll finish it, put it down, go on with my life, and suddenly it’s three weeks later and I haven’t read anything else except a few poems doing the rounds on Instagram (facepalm).

This is frustrating. And the first thing going on is that reading is labelled in my mind as a ‘leisure activity’ rather than something I do as part of ‘work’. So there’s a little internal reframing to work on because I also don’t prioritise leisure activities so what tends to happen is I hit a point where I have to stop doing things and then either escape out into nature and birding or disappear into a comforting sci-fi series (either way reading doesn’t get much of a look in).

The second thing going on is the lovely myth of productivity we’re all de facto enrolled in as punishment for existing in western culture at this time. I want so much to untangle myself from this myth, particularly since discovering my neurodivergence and becoming more aware of how tying myself to productivity essentially hurts my wellness. But it’s pernicious, and over the course of my life I’ve sewn it into my bones, into every cell of my being.

Reading, while there’s clear outcomes from it that I definitely want i.e. more time reading poems, discovering more poets I love, benefitting my practice etc etc, isn’t productive. At the end of a reading session I don’t have a draft of a new poem, a Substack post to publish, an event ready to advertise; I haven’t produced anything tangible.

Rachael Hill, Why is reading so much harder to make time for than writing?

At the Dr. Johnson House, James Marriott and I discussed the future of civilization. He worries that the decline of reading means the end of democracy. I think we are facing a disruption to which we will need to adapt. Just because we have not yet had democracy without mass literacy, doesn’t mean we can’t. More concerning to me than whether adults read novels is the fact that children are not being brought up to read enough. The schools are what most need reforming. James has written a polemical book (coming in September, I enjoyed it, and anyone who enjoyed his Substack post about it will enjoy the book) but he is a genial, affable, quietly insistent person, and he makes his case without any bluster or alarm. The best part of the evening was when we were shown an original copy of the Dictionary and a lock of the great man’s hair.

Henry Oliver, Et in Arcadia Ego

Last month, in a post called The Source of War, I shared with you the second question asked by the Iranian poet who was interviewing me last year. This month, I want to share with you the first question she asked, which I will confess threw me for quite a loop when I read it: What would literature be missing without you, and what would you be missing without literature?

This was my answer:

The second part of your question is much easier to answer than the first because it is not an exaggeration to say that literature saved my life, though whether I mean that literally or metaphorically is not always clear to me. I was both victim of and witness to an awful lot of violence during my childhood. I don’t remember ever being truly suicidal, but I know that my experience, especially the sexual violence that I survived, left me feeling empty and ashamed, filled with self-loathing and not sure that there was a worthwhile purpose to my living. Religion filled that void for a while. When I was a teenager, I even thought I might one day study for the rabbinate, but it was ultimately reading—and I read everything I could get my hands on: poetry, science fiction, horror, literary novels, fantasy, Victorian pornography, you name it—that helped me imagine what a meaningful life might be like and gave me hope that I could exist in the world with purpose and have a life that mattered.

Writing, and at first I wrote only poetry, was how I claimed the voice in which I could begin to articulate that purpose—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that writing was how I reclaimed for myself the voice that those who did violence to me tried to silence. At first, the poems I wrote served as proof to myself that my voice was real, and that was enough. Over time, though, I came to understand that what I had to say in that voice was not just about myself and for myself, and through that understanding I discovered the audacity to believe that what I had to say was something to which other people ought to pay attention.

This is what makes the first part of your question more difficult for me to answer. On the one hand, if I had never written, if not a single word of mine had ever been published, literature would not be missing a thing. It would be whatever its collective of voices had made it. On the other hand, though, if I didn’t believe that my voice, solitary as it is, mattered in some small way to literature, there would be no reason to go through the frustrating and all-too-often discouraging process of publishing, of daring to add my voice and my work to the literary tradition of which it is inescapably a part.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, What Would Literature Be Missing Without You?

All the poems in “Pain Songs” have an expansive, meandering across the page feel as if they have been written contemplatively and possibly in fits and starts as the poet returned to check that what is expressed uses the right words. The white space in and around the poems gives the reader space to pause and absorb the lines. Yet the poems are a coherent whole and do not feel fragmentary. Sluman writes from a place of compassion and acute observation without sentimentality or pity. His poems demonstrate the human need for connection and understanding.

Emma Lee, “Pain Songs” Daniel Sluman (Nine Arches Press) – book review

In stanza three, we are invited back into the poem, given the directive to take up an awl and produce the dazzling fractures ourselves, split them into smaller and smaller pieces. But we’ve been here before, in the glittering disintegration of the opening stanza, and the speaker pushes a little harder, next issuing a kind of challenge: “try to make a metaphor, like Kafka’s frozen sea within.” Literature, wrote Kafka, is the axe that breaks this ice, what hacks us free of overly complacent stillness, mindless stasis. What Williams here instructs us to take into our arms, its “ponderous inertness” and “wetting chill” that “[frightens] you and [makes] you let it drop” is no longer some diminutive cosmos nor tautly attentive man-eater but something stranger and more frightening: the hidden self.

I just adore the movement into stanza four when, breathless from the cold weight that pressed against the chest, we see what has at last been figured as something truly precious, the closest thing we cannot know, slip from our arms and shatter on the floor. Think of dropping a glass, how you stand paralyzed by the memory of the movement that sent it plummeting and the vision of your shard-filled future as you plot a clear path towards a broom. If I hadn’t, if I had just. There’s no putting a glass back together. Ice may be a different story, to a point, but Williams doesn’t leave us scurrying for a bucket, but lingering over what’s left: the familiar taste on the tongue. It’s a poem about what falls apart (everything) and what we can do about it (nothing) and how, in the end, there is only beauty, only sweetness, in that.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Ice” by C.K. Williams

[Christopher] Wase’s poem for [William] Oughtred is a strange and charming poem, and also a great example of why good literary history requires, as it were, both data and taste — an informed sense of the big picture, but also close reading. Strong data about fashions in verse style, metre and form makes it possible, time and time again, to hazard an informed guess about the likely date and milieu of undated or anonymous material, and also to recognise innovation — who is writing at the vanguard of fashion at any given time (and similarly, who tries to launch a trend that doesn’t catch on). But “big data” can’t provide all the answers, because there will always be people, like Wase, doing something unexpected for reasons of their own.

Without the data about metrical trends in Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, I wouldn’t be able to recognise that Wase’s poem is an outlier, and that it surely sounded like one in 1656. The strangeness of the form must have been part of the effect, and part of the tribute. With that knowledge in place, we can at least try to make sense of even the most eccentric choices. Even at the distance of nearly four hundred years, and knowing nothing of seventeenth century mathematics, Wase’s touching poem convinces me that William Oughtred was a remarkable man.

Victoria Moul, Metre, maths and difficulties of dating

In 2011 I teamed up with Orkney artist Laura Drever, I to write poems of the islands’ bird species, Laura to draw them. Our purpose was to see how closely we could capture their presence as part of the living fabric of the place, not so much a layer of occupation as a layer of consciousness. Laura’s freehand line drawings recorded them as they moved around in ones or threes, or whole flocks. For me, sitting on a windy hill, words came individually or in small, airy groups. In my notebook lines are thick or thin depending on sound, or sudden change. Movement and space are everything. […]

This all came back to me when I chanced upon the work of Cecil Touchon, an American painter, typographic artist and creator of long series of print collage. His output ranges widely in scale and setting; one subset of his work, what he calls ‘asemic poetry’, is produced and distributed in book form. These pieces began with pieces of found text that were arranged in some kind of regular form – such as receipts, magazine ads, letters and sometimes poems. He printed these out on white sheets and then, using their structure, internal spaces, hesitations, line breaks and maybe even original font, he allowed his hand to ‘write’ over them in a free-flowing script. Some are written in a cursive, flowing hand with sharp, tall verticals and generous hooking tails. Others show a series of clustered, individual strokes in thick, urgent dabs that tail off like comets. Some are written left to right, some right to left. There are something like punctuation-like marks and accents. The result is something that looks like a poem: we sense a voice speaking to us, with message that we already half understand, and which we can almost, nearly, read.

I love these pieces, not only because – like Laura’s drawings – they are beautiful in themselves. There is this sense of a voice behind the text, of someone, somewhere, having something urgent and important to say; so important that they embedded it in a poem, the most intimate written form. There is a wide range of expressiveness across the collection – some are flamboyant, some are tight and urgent, in form as well as script. Some stutter, are thrifty and self-conscious with their ‘words’. In many, Touchon notes, there are artefacts of the original document. ”I would sit down with the material and begin working and keep working until it seemed I had expressed ‘the moment’, so to speak. At a certain point one comes to the end. At that point I stop.”

Lesley Harrison, ‘weirden’ : the magic and mystery of erasure poetry

Lo and behold. Rather than a “salvaged” poem, I’m actually going to drop a brand new piece here—and there are several pages of stuff just like this yet to be brought into the light. The larger project is tentatively titled Random Walk, and it’s the result of an ongoing immersion in books about AI, neural networks, computer science, cybernetics, and related subjects. As of now, this is the opening piece. And for you prosody-heads, I consider it prose despite its being broken into stanza-like chunks. The line length is arbitrary and determined by margins.

Also, the quoted line is from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Great book.

RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 2)

The daylilies are blooming, and they remind me of a poem I wrote back when the rumblings of the present evil were just beginning.

Unexplained Bagpipes

After reading that white-supremacist marches are often led by pipers

A skewer through the ear,
it spits you to the spot
until you suss it out.
It’s unexpected here:

back garden, mid-Midwest
midsummer, -week, and -day.
Ripping the aural chintz
of airborne oldies airplay,

it groans a jaunty grind.
The kids turn cartwheels, smitten.
The sound itself has forgotten
the quarrel it trawls around.

Garish, clownish, bizarre,
still blocks away, it hauls
over your ivied walls
the rack-nerve rumor of war.

Work now. Gather the spent,
blood-spattered peonies.
Daylilies crowd the fence,
desperate. Like refugees.

(First published in Tampa Review; in the book Street View)

Maryann Corbett, Daylilies

In his collected poems, Beyond Remembering (2000), which was published the year he died, [Al] Purdy offers us vivid imagery from the Canadian wilderness around his home. “The Last Picture in the World” describes the haunting sight of a heron, fully at ease in the world it inhabits:

A hunched grey shape
framed by leaves
with lake water behind
standing on our
little point of land
like a small monk
in a green monastery
meditating…

Stillness and presence, the essence of a heron. The image guides Purdy towards the metaphysical:

and it occurs to me
that if I were to die at this moment
that picture would accompany me
wherever I am going
for part of the way

Leaning into the act of remembering, the poet’s words do more than reminisce here; they question the premise that “you can’t take it with you when you go…” And who’s to say that we can’t? I, for one, would like to believe that the people, places, plants, and animals we love most in this life will accompany us at least “part of the way,” when we hop that final train and ride the rails to wherever we’re headed next.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Hidden Histories and National Treasures

Something which seems fairly consistent across cultures, across history is the idea of heron as provocation, whether benign or fearful. In Japan, the crane symbolises peace and longevity but its cousin the heron’s appearance is more mysterious, more ambivalent, tied to spirits, gods, death, a link to another world. White herons are said to appear as someone is about to pass into the next realm.

In Ancient Greece, the word for bird (‘ornis’ / ‘oionos’) also meant ‘omen’. Thus birds like herons were an expression of the Gods’ intent, whether benign or otherwise. In Homer’s Iliad Athena sends a heron as an auspicious omen to Odysseus:

“Pallas Athena sent a night heron; they did not see it with their eyes through the murk of night, but heard its ringing cry. And Odysseus rejoiced in the bird sign.” (translated by Caroline Alexander)

In the novel ‘The Rain Heron’ by Robbie Arnott, a chilling, gorgeous eco-fable about our fragile and dysfunctional relationships with the planet and each other, the heron is a contested symbol of wildness which destructive forces seek to capture and tame. Arnott’s book contains some of the most devastatingly beautiful descriptions of this hybrid being made of weather and flight. Tellingly, the heron is always see-through, shape shifting:

“Its blue-grey feathers were so pale, they claimed later, that they could see straight through the bird.” (Armott)

In Mary Oliver’s ‘Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond’, the bird seems to accomplish what is impossible. The narrator watches the heron take off from ‘thick water’ and feels a sense of infinite scale, knows that there are more things in heaven and earth (and pond) that we might dream of:

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself–

This image is ostensibly hopeful, but the untethering the heron symbolises might feel a little vertiginous too. An un-anchoring.

Helen Mort, Heron as agitator, heron as GBH

I have traveled a bit and have, wonderfully, a little mental cabinet of moments; they lie like orbs in the dark until I take them out into my mind’s light. One such is evoked by this poem by Lola Ridge. I had arrived after a journey to a hotel on the edge of things in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland. Spread out in front of my balcony were mountains that seemed so close I could reach out and stroke them like a beast. But a deep valley flew between me and the mountains, and up from its depth breezes came, and from around the mountains mists, and I spent a long time watching the show, and felt I could watch forever, or that forever itself was in front of me, and I was the brief show.

Marilyn McCabe, And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain

I am writing this from the Lake District, a few days of borrowed time among the fells — the bracken high and greening over, the becks still loud after June’s rain, the light not properly gone until well past ten and the valley going that deep slate-blue that isn’t quite dark. Walk out late enough, away from the village, and the sky here does the thing it can no longer do over most of England: it fills, edge to edge, with stars. Which is roughly how this fortnight’s three arranged themselves — a poet, a painter and a composer, each caught in the act of looking up, and each finding that to be alone under that much sky is not at all the same as being lonely.

1. A poem to enjoy — William Wordsworth, “A Night-Piece” (1798) — You cannot walk these fells with a book in your pocket and not have it be Wordsworth’s; he is the presiding spirit of the whole district. This poem is the one I always remember on a dark-sky night. A “pensive traveller” is treading a “lonesome path” with his “unobserving eye / Bent earthwards” — head down, going nowhere in particular — when the cloud splits and “above his head he sees / The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens,” the “multitudes of stars” wheeling in their vault. Nothing is added to the man; something is simply uncovered above him, and it changes the walk. It is the plainest account I know of what solitude is actually for: not withdrawal, but the clearing of the eye until more of the world can get in.

Adam Cairns, Three by One

This collection of poems is a response to Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana—sixty-eight sargas comprising over 2,500 ślokas. I have allowed the sargas to become the seed for meditative poems, an inward reflection arising from close reading of the original Sanskrit.

You are the layers of minerals in the rock,
the emerald sea of grass,
the quaking mountain unearthing silver & gold,
all living forms in fright—

ignorant
you are the air in their lungs,
the venom in their throats,

sulphur fumes,
the flowers that carpet the hills,
the sea swelling on a full moon night.

Uma Gowrishankar, After the Leap (Translating Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa)

This prose-poem captures what the full collection required me to solve: how to reveal the complicated, aching truth of loving a soul-scorching, malicious mother who caused so much misery when destiny tapped me as her fulltime caregiver.

To create distance between the mother and daughter dynamic, the narrative arc defies expectations by presenting a caregiver’s journey as a story of adultery. In Cancer Courts My Mother, disease becomes a Casanova, therefore, the collection is created through the lens of speculative poetry versus memoir.

Mistrustful of the poetics of dying and bereavement, and determined to avoid cliché, I alighted on a form which eschewed the elegiac in favor of a two-way narrative arc structured like a funicular.

The downward movement, a terminally ill patient’s inevitable decline, is presented as marital peril: a dangerous dalliance. Disease is disguised as an illicit lover — “the dark prince whose wanton seduction has already begun, the sly suitor who will reach the terminus.”

In contrast, the ascending movement is hopeful, told through the sub-plot of fulfilling a last request: “Work miracles,” commanded half-shut eyes. By carefully reversing little green deaths, the poems transform a wish into reality: a full recovery of the dying woman’s cherished houseplants. Caregiving for a harsh, sharp-tongued mother does not come with a script. Neither does outlasting her. What poetry offered was a frame — speculative, oblique, formally controlled — through which the unbearable could be examined without sentimentality. Cancer Courts My Mother is not an elegy. It is a reckoning.

Drop-in by LindaAnn Loschiavo (Nigel Kent)

The avant-garde artist and writer Mina Loy (1882–1966) published only two books of poetry in her long lifetime: the 1923 Lunar Baedeker and, in 1958, Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables. Flitting among early-twentieth-century art forms and movements as among domestic ménages and personal tragedies, to us she may seem to slip like a shadow through a Modernist poetic world peopled by more solidly and enduringly visible figures: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound.

In the early 1920s, the poet and critic Yvor Winters, already formulating his own vision for a strictly hierarchical poetic canon, set Loy alongside both Stevens and Moore: “I think Mina Loy a genius.” Yet today we hardly know her. Perhaps we should know her better than we do.

It was Pound who coined a word applicable to Loy’s experimental poetics. Logopoeia, one of three “kinds” of poetry as defined by Pound in his Literary Essays, involves, as Pound puts it “the dance of intellect among words.” Lest anybody remind him that he has earlier instructed poets to eschew such abstractions as “dim lands of peace,” Pound hastens to explain what this “dance of intellect” means. It “employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage. . . . It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music.” 

To get some handle on what Pound might mean by logopoeia and other related “aspects” of poetry, we can turn to Loy’s 1922 poem, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” which first appeared in the Dial. An ekphrastic poem, engaging a work of visual art — in this case an abstract sculpture, completed in 1920, by the Romanian-born French artist Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) — “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” seeks less to describe the sculpture than to accomplish in the medium of language what the sculpture aspires to accomplish “in plastic.”

As Brancusi’s sculpture strips a Romanian folk tale about a golden bird, the Maiastra, to a single fluid, suggestive shape, Loy’s poem, too, consciously rejects layers of poetic tradition, especially the traditional presentation of rhyme and meter as a fixed pattern. These lines are not without metrical sense, but they shift from trimeter to dimeter to single-stressed lines, creating a controlled but undulant surface. Additionally, Loy rejects the closure of punctuation. Emdashes signal breaks and departures of thought, and the poem ends on ellipses, but otherwise the lines hang in seeming suspension on the page, open-ended, as if to suggest the sculpture’s fluid “Alpha and Omega / of Form.” 

Brancusi’s sculpture renders a traditional, linear narrative into this three-dimensional form with no beginning and no end, no edges or “extremities / of crest or claw.” Likewise, Loy resists the narrative impulse, beginning her poem with a non-sentence which extends into a metaphor, anchored by that “As if” of the third line. At the same time, the poem does things in language that the Golden Bird can’t fully achieve in its medium. In language, Loy can invoke associations that come to us primarily, if not exclusively, in language: the idea of the Christian God, for example, and the story of the Immaculate Conception and Incarnation — but also Osiris, the Egyptian god of death and rebirth.

The poem doesn’t tell these stories. Its business is not to have, in the traditional sense, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like the sculpture, it’s not meant to represent the arc of flight, but to be its “nucleus.” It simply folds these allusions, and everything we might connect with them, into its seamless, undifferentiating shape, and holds them there. 

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Brancusi’s Golden Bird

I’m delighted to feature today a poem by Stephen Claughton, taken from his pamphlet titled The 3-D Clock (Dempsey & Windle, 2020). The collection in question is thematic in nature, taking a mother’s dementia as its point of departure, tackling some of life’s big issues. 

As a reader, I was especially drawn to this poem by the way Claughton’s use of emotional restraint and understatement serves to heighten its resonance. Much of its power can be found in what remains unsaid by the two protagonists, left to be inferred by the reader. In fact, the supposed closure of the poem’s seemingly circular ending opens out far beyond the limits of its lines.

Matthew Stewart, A poem by Stephen Claughton

Chloe [Yelena Miller] is a good friend and poet. Her second book PERFORATED marks an advance over her first VIABLE. The strengths of the first are still present in the second: an intimate but unassuming voice, an observant tenderness towards self and others, the willingness to broach difficult subjects. In the second book, the personal references widen out into the world. The Italian touchstones are handled with greater range and depth. My favorites in this regard are the opening poem “Pantheon,” which ends distinctively yet inclusively in the way an Italian dialect “relies on the plural/ second person, voi,” and the poem “Etruscan Bronzes,” concludes soberly about the transience of youth:

These bronze figures,
from their height of youth,
artist’s hand concealed
by the smoothing of time,
gaze upon a far-off horizon
long buried.

Jee Leong Koh, Chloe Yelena Miller’s PERFORATED

In the Nineties, when I first started to read poetry, the contemporary prose poem was mainly something British readers might glimpse in translations of the kind of riddling Eastern European poetry that the Cold War had made popular in the West. In 1996, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize, and Faber published her poems in the UK. This new selection, The Acrobat (Faber), translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, includes her Nobel acceptance speech, which argues that “Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating ‘I don’t know’” […]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #45: Angels and Bandages

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

I don’t know if my life changed, but a certain anxiety eased—at least for a little while. It gave me a little more confidence to think I could make a life writing poems. In some sense, it didn’t have to do with getting published, but a sense that being at work in the work itself is what is most worthy. I found an ethic that I’ve tried to hold to for nearly 30 years. The early work is so long ago, I feel like I have no idea—though I think, I suspect, that certain concerns trace through, even though the poems have grown wider in their approach and cares—a poem as ethical form, a leaning toward the philosophical, a need to honor other poems and poets.

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

I had an extraordinary high school teacher who could actually teach poetry. I remember distinctly understanding a poem for the first time—John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” I simply didn’t know a human could do that in words, and I was desperate to learn how to do so myself. […]

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Yes, almost always. My work is most often agitated into being by something I’ve read. I think I’m mostly trying to learn how to think, and the poems are laboratories of a kind, an epistemological laboratory, to find out if I can learn to think for myself the thoughts another person thinks. I’m not trying to answer questions; I’m trying ask them. I suspect—and this comes from 15 years of translating from Ancient Greek—that the current questions are the questions that have always been questions. Not “current questions,” but a currency of questions.

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?

I’m not so sure it’s different now than it’s ever been. I sort of think of a poet writ large as a sleepy watchman at the periphery of…of the knowable, I guess. I don’t think of it as a role, per se. I’m with Emerson when he says, “Do your work, and I will know you.” Poets get itchy in a uniform, and the art itself wants to dismantle any authority a given poet might feel as their mantle. The role of the poet might be to refuse the role of the poet. […]

11 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

For 15 years I’ve been nearly religious about waking up around 5:30 in the morning and translating for an hour. It humbles me into the day. For my own poems, I avoid routine. I labor with translation and reading in hopes of being worthy of a poem coming to me—and when one does, I set to work, and stay at work, until it feels done.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dan Beachy-Quick

I was nervous about ushering this book into the world. It felt a little like handing someone my heart and hoping they’d handle it with care. But the response has been so generous that I keep finding myself quietly stunned and deeply grateful. Thank you to everyone who has read it and/or reached out or let me know a poem found you. I’m just so appreciative.

Today I did an interview with Lois P. Jones for her wonderful podcast The Title Drop and she said how open these poems feel. I think that’s because with this book, I trusted the reader with more: more uncertainty and spirituality, more joy, grief, humor, desire, more of the questions I’ve carried quietly. And I think that’s the best advice I can give any poet or writer—write openly with the belief your reader will “get you.”

We can’t control how a book will be received. But we can make the thing with care, release it into the world and trust it finds the people who need it. And mostly, we’ll have no idea if that’s happening…and yet, we write. I think that’s a hopeful act.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Fireworks Are Over, Hope Is Not. . .

It’s easy for a poet to move on once a book is out – after all, most of us write new stuff all the time and a book can quickly become ‘old’ in a poet’s mind – especially if, as is often the case, given that poetry so often creates its own rules, even the most thorough editing misses something.

In the case of Poems In The Key Of Aardvark, I’m cross I mistook a comma for a full stop in the final proof-reading, which meant there is an irritating capital letter at the start of a line that shouldn’t be there; and in the last line of another poem I messed up a tense. Why I did that, I’ve no idea – I’ve read and re-read the poem dozens of times, yet this morning there it was, staring back at me from the page, yelling at me: “You fouled up here, didn’t you, idiot. Your book’s not perfect now, is it?”

As annoying as that is, I can’t allow it to deflect from the business of promotion. I want Poems In The Key Of Aardvark to be read. And there are more than 160 poems in it that haven’t annoyed me yet! Make that, am pleased with and would like others to read.

Bob Mee, PUTTING A BOOK OUT THERE IS ONLY HALF THE BATTLE

I’ve just published a new ludokinetic poem, ‘Scenes from a Flit’, on itch.io, the site for independent game creators which is increasingly inhabited by poets experimenting with interactive forms. It’s a poem in which I cast you, the reader, as a thief. You steal, you flee, you hide, via three brief vignettes. It’s part of a broader project, but I won’t go into that now.

What I will say is that I’ve been actively interested in and messing around with games of thievery, trespass, intrusion and so on for a little while. Starting exactly when? I’m not sure. I’ve always liked thiefy characters: you can find a poem about Ishikawa Goemon in School of Forgery, a smuggler in Sandsnarl, and so on. I went to Mexico two years ago to deliver a conference paper entitled “‘Hey! You’re not supposed to be here!’: Simulated Trespass and Intrusion in Virtual Playgrounds”. The basic premise of this paper was that the appeal of trespass is to pull on a thread — to stress-test a system by experiencing first-hand the meaning of its boundaries, what it seeks to hide or apportion. Doing so gives us insights into whether those boundaries might stand to be drawn in some other, better way.

Of course, the consequences of such stress-testing in real life can be dire. I tried to illustrate this in the slides with the ending lines from Rebecca:

The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.

So we channel our impulses into the unreal spaces of simulational and fantasy media, where forbidden zones almost always contain something which has been unjustly kept from us.

Jon Stone, DIARY / Games of Intrusion

I have long enjoyed the #PoemsAbout prompt that Broken Spine editor Alan Parry runs on Bluesky. He puts a weekly prompt up and suggests that people respond on a Friday. It starts the weekend well. Contributors are also encouraged to comment and support each other, which helps to build a community. If you get into the habit of it, you find that you are often delighted by the quality of the posts. In fact you will soon get to find your favourites amongst the regulars. I did, and have even featured some of them in Sixty Odd Poets.

This month I decided to do something similar myself. I put an #OddChallenge challenge up on Bluesky, Facebook and Substack. It wasn’t a prompt as such. The challenge was to write a poem in the future tense. I got plenty of participants, and will be contacting some of the ones that I particularly like about the possibility of featuring their responses in a Sixty Odd Poets page. This to me seems like a decent use of social media to promote poetry. It also allows poetry to be discovered without the need for a formal submission system. In fact I am considering giving up the formal submission system altogether or at least taking the majority of what I publish from people who I have been able to ask personally, either in real life or online.

I would be very interested to know what other poets and editors think of this approach. I can see that it wouldn’t suit everyone. I can’t imagine The New Yorker following my lead anytime soon. But I think for a hobbyist publisher such as myself it might be a good strategy.

Mike O’Brien, Share Your Poetry on Social Media

She never sold her paintings. As far as I am aware, she never even tried to. She won Second Place in a competition once, and that painting was displayed proudly in her living room with the blue ribbon attached, for as long as I can remember. (When my father passed away two years ago, my brother and I gave that painting to one of his aides, who’d fallen in love with it and later had it specially framed.)

Apart from the occasional competition, though, my grandmother had no professional or commercial aspirations for her work. She painted for other reasons.

Margot Kaplan was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in the early 20th century. As Fascism began to rise in Germany, my grandmother’s parents sent all the male children away. She herself was finally able to escape the country by marrying my grandfather, Heinrich Tuchverderber, at age 19. Together, they left Germany and went to Shanghai, China. The Hongkou district of Shanghai, a “Restricted Sector for Stateless Persons,” was the only place willing to let my grandparents in.

Eventually, Margot and Heinrich found their way to the U.S., shortened their last name to Tuch, and bought a small clapboard house on a quintessential American street, in a quiet suburb of Connecticut. But, as you would expect, both my grandparents remained tormented by physical and psychic pain throughout their lives. Though safely in America—alive and with jobs, food, running water and a growing family—the demons of history could not, would never, be shaken.

And this was why my grandmother painted.

“The only time I’m not thinking about Hitler,” she told me many times when I was a child, “is when I’m painting.” […]

I believe there is real despair within our literary community at this moment. There is fear. And there is a lot of anger. All of this, in my opinion, is warranted. We are at a critical moment of change. And the odds do not look good for us, we diligent laborers who have spent the better parts of our lives committed to studying, teaching, and learning the very difficult craft of writing.

AI brings all sorts of terrible things with it. Data centers that re-shape and damage communities; environmental harm; pollution; increased mass surveillance; the loss of critical thinking; the end of jobs…

But for us, as creators, it also has the power to bring feelings of profound alienation with our work, our passions. Why bother? We think.

Why bother taking a writing workshop with others, when I can just have AI improve this paragraph for me?

Why bother reading closely to understand craft choices and taking notes in dozens of craft books, when AI can fix my story’s problems in under three minutes?

Why bother writing at all, when writing can be so fucking hard, and so fucking lonely, and so fucking disappointing sometimes, and now these stupid fucking machines can do it all for us in literal seconds, and without any of the mental and emotional strain?

But then, like I said, I began thinking about my grandmother. And I began thinking quite seriously about why people make art.

The answer seemed so suddenly simple: We make art because we have to.

We do it because this is how we survive.

Becky Tuch, Q: How do we nevertheless persist?

p.s. Everywhere I look there are faces. Everywhere I look there are chinks in the tin foil inside my windows.

p.s. I shower inside a tiny box. I tie my robe so tight it’s hard to breathe.

p.s. I talk to myself and answer myself and brainstorm with myself about how to reuse empty cans.

p.s. When I find some twine I promise to phone home.

p.s. Of course I am thriving. I’m making a quilt out of plastic bags and leftover phone books. I keep the neighborhood cats fed. I still have my teeth. I still have a library card.

Rebecca Cook, What I Was Going To Tell You

I still believe that as Kay Ryan once wrote, it’s important to stay sweet and loving. I read a post recently here from 2017 and it’s interesting to measure yourself, too, against old blog posts. I guess that’s a gift I’ve given myself, too. In the same post I also quote Robert Bly who said: “I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.” But tenderness is different now too, and my ability to stay sweet and loving has eroded, or at least, transformed — it is thinner and worn and perhaps more real. Thin in the way that certain metals are hammered to wafers, gold, for example. My understanding of it is different. As much the fallout from the relentless of the day job as anything. Unless you’ve worked in the inner city through the aftermath of a pandemic do you even know humanity? :) Well, it’s a thing alright. The proximity to constant affliction And the burnout is fine because it’s real. At first I couldn’t live with the burnout but now I am the burnout. So that changes you and I don’t think I’ll change back, but that’s perhaps a gift too. I mean, I can read Weil now in a different light. Stay curious! people say. And oh, I am, I really am. Just not in the ways the exhortation might imply or indicate.

Shawna Lemay, I’m Just a Soul

I’ve spent most of this year growing plants rather than poems. My garden is the only place I forget everything other than bringing life to the tiny seeds in my palm, and unravelling the mystery of why they won’t do what the seed packet says. I’ve grown Cosmos, Nigella, Calendula and Egrigeron from seed I saved last year. Vegetable wise I’m trying out a new type of tomato Grushovka, which is shocking pink. I’m looking forward to being able to make delicious (and bright) sauces. Padron peppers are starting to emerge and I’m yet to get tired of them, charred and anointed with salt and honey. I’m also growing brussels sprouts, which will please no one in my family but me.

Where I used to lose track of time, to the point of forgetting to eat (!) writing has felt like something I “do” rather something I love. In comparison time in the garden sprints past, with the constant “oh I’ll just do this” keeping me happily trimming, weeding, sowing and planning. This is terrible for my physical health, but a joy for my mind. I’ve not stopped writing, I’ve just stepped back from the submit/accept/reject treadmill that siphoned the pleasure and purpose from my work. Becoming trapped on this treadmill is entirely my fault; the desire for external validation is never far away and despite having a decent amount of work published, it’s never quite been sated. I’m guessing it never will. This is a good thing because it keeps me trying but if validation is the only reason to write, the writing itself becomes of little value, both inside and out.

Am I writing any poems at all?

Curiously I find my poems this year feel like some of the best I’ve made. The short courses I’ve taken with Poetry School have moved away from the nature focused work of the past few years to writing work that travels unpredictable pathways. It’s fun. Alongside this injection of inspiration, having the right diagnosis and subsequent medication had allowed me to access a part of my mind that was firmly shut. I’m exploring the unexplorable. Regardless of the hows and whys, I’m enjoying the ride and feel more creative than I have in a long time.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, If you want me you will find me in the garden

The work has its own desire to connect, and that is something not pushed by ego, social media, or even platforms such as this. Being in front of a number of festival audiences this year is showing me something I don’t have a name for yet between author, text and the inner world of the reader/listener. I’ll say more if I ever find a word for it.

The writing now is slow. It keeps coming, even working two jobs to live, it keeps coming and asks me to sit and wait, to travel, and not to share too soon. I don’t feel I’m sharing this recording too soon, it seems like just the right time. I generally turn down requests to be interviewed or be on podcasts these days, as I feel we’ve slipped into art only being used for extraction capital a lot of the time, and I am an artist and author, and we do not have to accept ‘the way it is’. And yet there’s an urging to find a way to be part of a world in which the new is not what wins prizes, or is hyped and aligned with the extractive narrative, but rather is part of building something true within the concrete reality, something more like a wild, beautiful garden.

John Siddique, Newborn

That’s the thing about yards and gardens. As much as you say it’s yours, as much as you cultivate and claim you control, it’s not and you don’t. And for some of us, this is a form of delight. Several times a week, I place my hand on the door knob and look at my dog Silas, asking him Ready to take a gander? And out we go on our stroll around the 1.2 acres of land we get to live on. Silas’ experience is very different from mine, his senses providing to him narratives to which I’m not privy. I have fingers, so I lift up leaves, bend things back, pry things open. I roll flower buds between my fingertips, seeing the rays of petals all puckered into a center. I open the nesting box and oh, hello there, two Eastern Bluebird hatchlings are nothing but feathers and eyes. I lift pokeweed leaves and oh, hello there, a planthopper nymph side-eyes me as I infiltrate their world of leaf-shade and sap-hunger. I briefly imagine them in my world, paging through a book that’s taking forever to read, answering phone calls about children who want to murder their parents for taking their phone away.

Hurry,
the bird
has forgotten
about the egg.

Sarah Lada, Oh, Hello There

This week: a few scrappy bones, a murderous sandfly, trills that might remind us of birds, subversive puppets, and much more. Enjoy.

There is a quality to the heat this summer that I have started, against my better judgement, to read as mood. It isn’t the heat of a good July — the kind that dries the hay and fills the orchard with wasps and sends everyone, sensibly, into the shade by two. It is a heavier thing than that. It sits on the fields the way a bird sits on a clutch of eggs: close, patient, unwilling to be moved. My garden is barely a garden yet — a square of new turf laid last autumn, the soil under it still builder’s soil, a blank green canvas I have not begun to make anything of. But it looks out onto fields, and between the lawn and the farmland there is a strip of wildflower meadow, and even in this heat the meadow is doing what the meadow does: oxeye daisies gone slightly papery at the edges, vetch scrambling through the grass, a dozen things I am still learning the names of, all of it loud with something at every hour of the day. Beyond it the ground under the far hedge has gone the colour of ash. The buzzards still work the field margins in the long evenings, but low, and without much conviction, as if even they can feel the thermals have turned against them.

To brood is to sit on eggs and keep them warm until something living comes out of them. It is also what we do with a worry that will not leave — we brood on it, we turn it over, we let it heat. The word carries both, and I have caught myself this summer thinking the two meanings have quietly fused. The planet is brooding. It is warmer than it should be, held at a temperature it did not choose, by us; and what is incubating under all that patient heat is not, any longer, only life. It is something closer to grief.

I am wary of writing sentences like that. The register of the ruined planet is a register I distrust, in myself most of all — it flatters the writer, it makes weather into portent, it borrows a grandeur that belongs to the thing and not to the person describing it. So let me stay with the particular, which is the only ground I trust. The papery daisies. The vetch. A blackbird panting in the shade of the fence with its beak open, doing the only thing it knows to do about a heat it has no name for. These are small facts, and they are true, and they are connected to each other and to a hundred thousand things I cannot see, by a web so fine and so total that we have only lately, and only partially, learned to notice it is there at all.

Adam Cairns, The ground has begun to brood

The roses are in full bloom and I accidentally disturbed a fat bumble bee that I think may have been sleeping in the nectar. It was a bit too windy for the insects to be making spectacles of themselves. But I know the solitary mason wasps are hunting caterpillars in the dark spaces between the flowers, under the leaves.

While I was writing this morning a wasp came in the library and buzzed around my head a while. I took a few deep breaths and told myself that she wasn’t likely to bother me. Me, with my unsweetened tea and fennel seeds. It wasn’t long before she got bored of this little room, with the sound of my tapping on the keys, and she left. No need for anyone to dance around with an insect swatter mumbling expletives. I’ve done that.

I don’t know if there is any truth to the saying familiarity breeds contempt. I think that is only true when we want something from the other; we expect something we don’t get; when we see more than we anticipated, or more than we are comfortable with. Familiarity without expectation… I don’t know. Maybe it leads to curiosity. It puts fears in perspective.

The ocean is terrifying. And the cormorants, ghosts of drowned sailors, always pull my rising joy back to the earth. One hand clutching the roses, and the other grasping for the dark and darker blue of the north sea. There is a depth and a width and an understanding that makes an all-too-pure joy seem thin.

Ren Powell, Summer, after its fullness

Will there be, this year, young housemates warring,
screen doors that whomp, wheels grinding gravel?
In this heat, wake us.

Send us street theater, at three in the morning,
mad lovers battling over jealousies, bills,
the whole grand opera.

Watch now in mercy those others, mum
in the iced quiet of their central air,
their curtained sorrows.

Maryann Corbett, On the power of open windows

Summer has started summering, whether we are fully on board with it or not. I’ve spent the past couple days in 90 degree plus Chicago tucked in front of the window AC unit working on some poetry critiques and my own writing, in addition to a couple upcoming dgp books. In between, there are frosty coconut-heavy drinks whipped in the blender, iced tea, and summer treats like strawberries and watermelon. I always feel like summer gets away from me. Or more that it seems like it takes forever to get here, but then slides very quickly away, especially once you hit the 4th of July.

Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat

I am grateful to have been blogging for so long, grateful for many reasons.  I often go back to re-read old blog posts–by often, I mean at least two or three times a week.  I go back to see what I was thinking/doing, to find recipes, to find rough draft ideas and inspirations, to spark my brain when I feel I have nothing new to blog about.  This morning I found this blog post about a poem idea I forgot I had for a poem called “The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday”; I haven’t finished the poem, now, a year later, but I still have the rough draft.

This meandering made me think about a summer project, making a rough draft into a finished draft each week.  And yes, that’s one of my new year’s aspirations that has fallen apart as the year progressed (this January blog post has details about my specific intentions for 2026).  But that’s the joy of early July–there’s still time to adjust my trajectory.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Midway Points: Inspirations and Revelations

This week has seen a number of poems flying back to me from various places they had been sent. I am good now at seeing this as a chance to read the poems afresh to work out what needs changing in order to enhance them. One particular poem had a clunky line in the middle where I definitely knew what I meant, but that didn’t necessarily mean other readers would. I enjoyed smoothing that one. I have also started to change my metaphor so I will set poems to sail now rather than fly. This is more in keeping with my desire to do things slightly more slowly and use my time wisely instead of rushing.

I sat in a sold-out lecture theatre this week to hear Ele Fountain speak and to find out who had won the Cheshire Prize for Literature. I love good speeches and was delighted to listen to Ele’s talk. I admire people who can tell their story well and add value to the audience and Ele certainly did that. I then had a quiet revelation when it came to the announcement of the prize winners – I would have loved to have won. That might sound a little obvious as a thing to say, but what I mean is I would have loved to walk down the steps after being announced as a winner. Gone were the feelings of nerves of being on show and here was a feeling of wouldn’t it be purely lovely to win. I used to sit in audiences and want to be invisible and suddenly here I was fully in the moment. I didn’t win, but I did love this new feeling. It felt like an acknowledgement of having grown into myself, and I rather liked that way of looking at it. Here I give a gentle nod to liking my silvered “really surprised hair” and to the difference coaching, and a change of direction have made.

Sue Finch, A BANDSTAND HAT TRICK FOR A SKYLARKER

Quiet days. Not much coming in or going out (the lady at the post office today says she’s missed me, and I’m looking thin). But we had a terrific party for Mike Bradwell’s Axholme at the Bush Theatre in mid-June, and there’s Penelope Curtis’s The Fall to look forward to in September. So this newsletter occupies a holding place.

Humming along in the background is Reznikoff. His major work, Testimony – originally published in sequential books in the 1960s and 70s, following an early version in 1934 – is a masterpiece of 20th-century modernist literature. Fact. It also happens to be a political book. Charles Simic: ‘It should not be surprising that Testimony is rarely assigned at our colleges and universities these days; it causes too much discomfort to those who prefer to know nothing about what goes on in the world.’ Jena Osman: ‘To shine a light from a different angle, to make you think about what’s there in a different way – that’s the best political work that poetry can do.’ August Kleinzahler: ‘J’accuse . . . Crystalline, documental vignettes – dispatches, really, from the front of American capitalism’s assault on the poor, dispossessed and vulnerable.’ Never previously published in the UK, Testimony will be published by CBe early next year – by far its biggest book to date: large format, 608 pages.

Reznikoff – born in Brooklyn in 1894 to immigrant parents, died in 1976 – was one of the Objectivist poets who first published in the 1930s; in the 1960s and 70s they were inspirational figures for a number of British poets working outside the mainstream. While his work has been translated into Polish, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Swedish, not a single book by Reznikoff is currently available in the UK.

Around publication time there’ll be a live reading of the whole text of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London, with anyone who comes through the door welcome to take part. Alongside Testimony, Redstone Press will publish The Sound of the Street, selected poems by Reznikoff presented alongside photographs of early 20th-century New York by Berenice Abbott and others. Much of Reznikoff’s work was not just self-published but printed by himself; both CBe and Redstone are one-person outfits; the publication of these two books is a statement, of sorts.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter July 2026: Reznikoff

I am sick of being enraged. So often I find myself enraged at the way we have fucked ourselves over. After all those years of creative evolution, from the first hand print on a cave wall, all the way up to this brilliant, beautiful ability to share our experiences through art, through literature, and what do we do? We hand it over to people who want to use a set of algorithms dressed up as a robot with a cute name to plagiarise it and spew out something that has the pattern of art, but no human intuition. If it looks like art it’ll do. Pack it, price it, stick it on Amazon, make some content, sell sell sell.

We’ve devalued the act of creativity, we’ve made creativity look too easy. To be creative is to make mistakes, more and more until you grow into it. It is so uniquely human. It is hard wok, hard won.

Alongside the robbing of our own creativity we have created a system in which we spend a great deal of time in pain, and I feel like it’s getting worse. We’ve slowly moved towards a place where the norm of social media – and the media in general – is rage bait and anger and unkindness. The news now isn’t really news, social media isn’t really social.

The incentives all point in the same direction: create conflict, generate anger, feed resentment.

The London Economic

We’ve become so entwined with social media, with subscription plans, with stuff we can’t own, that I feel used. I feel helpless. I feel puppeted by a handful of very rich men with no concept of the actual world, no regard for it, no need for human creation, human beauty. I am sick of the rage bait. I am sick of the grifting and greed.

Yesterday, driving home from taking mum to an emergency GP appointment, I saw a big fat wood pigeon in the road. It was carrying an ambitiously long twig and was struggling with it. A woman driving in the opposite direction didn’t slow down. Perhaps she wasn’t aware that birds at this time of year are still focussed on nesting and aren’t as quick to get out of the way. She sped towards it, glaring at it. Get out of my way, get out of my way I am important, you are insignificant. It felt like all that rage bait and anger and the dreariness of being forced through this awful machine we’ve made for ourselves had condensed down to this point, the point at which a person cannot slow down, can’t bear to add one or two seconds to their journey to allow another being trying to live its life, to get out of the way safely.

I don’t want live like that. I want to live with more kindness, more beauty, more joy. I can only start where I am, look at what I am doing, how I am doing it.

Wendy Pratt, I am sick of being enraged.

I am very serious and ambitious about writing the best poetry and prose I can, by my own standards. Creating appealing posts and the occasional newsletter? My confidence fails and I can’t consistently fake otherwise. When I submit work for publication, that’s a way of saying, “This is worth your attention.” Social media is a version of the same–not a bad message for a writer to put out there–yet ambivalence plagues me. It’s laziness, embarrassment, a preference other kinds of work, a long to-do list, a sense of being undeserving, disliking the necessary selfies and performance of cheer, frustration in advance at the difficulty of attracting eyeballs, and, as I’m occasionally wise enough to realize, avoidance of what fragments attention.

Studying and teaching the poetry of a century ago hasn’t resolved my mixed feelings. Those poets’ success in their own era had everything to do with connections forged in big cities and at prestigious universities–still primary venues to success, obviously. Glamor, charisma, and good looks helped some modernists, too, even without social media to amplify those assets. Having a big readership or critical acclaim has never been entirely rooted in the quality of the work. Time remedies some of that unfairness, but it’s a slow, imperfect process, never mind the unforeseeable ways some writing ages better than others. Modernists taught us how to read their poetry, after all, and exerted a huge influence on literary values for decades after, shaping what people thought was good. It takes heroic effort just to find the strong work that escaped notice in its day, not to mention figuring out how to argue on its behalf.

Popularity influences what gets written in the first place, too. Artists need varying degrees of contemporary encouragement and support to keep making art. One of my favorite Harlem Renaissance poets, Helene Johnson, won some awards but stopped playing the poetry career game before publishing a book, and only produced a slim volume’s worth of verse in her long lifetime–published posthumously. Social media might have helped her sustain literary connections once she left Harlem. I think it’s helped me, living in a small southern town. The internet generally has benefited me, too–what a gift to read literary magazines or samples of them freely online, compared to hunting out print copies in the occasional bookstore that carried them! But it can also demoralize me to insert myself into social media’s comparison machine. Not posting costs me; so does posting.

Lesley Wheeler, Aiming vs. wandering

It is not the process of making the work – that is a labyrinth you must navigate yourself – it is the task of delivering the work, of having it platformed, of getting it before an audience, that I find so unbearably maddening. This is when the exit signs start flashing.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

James Baldwin

If I had advice to offer a young creative it would be: prepare yourself for dead ends, for unhelpful suggestions, for vacuous promises and above all for silence. Expect excruciating, agonising silence. If you do ever receive a reply to a speculative email, a response to an application, a reaction to a submission then get ready for seemingly endless meetings with an infinite number of Steves and Hannahs who will all mostly have their cameras off.

Jan Noble, Nº71 Is it suitable for children?

I searched files of poem drafts for July, and found an underwhelming poem in July 2021. Aha. A basic, I-am-bored-and-nothing-is-happening interstitial self-indulgent poem. […]

It’s been a while since I did homophonic translation. Machine translation is too good and too AI to be useful for adding the chaos factor but I can work more from ear.

So I then subject it to pretending what I’m hearing and transcribing sound by sound is a muffled French. See if I can “overhear” anything vivid. […]

Then I translate back to English and see if I can take this randomness and reassemble towards sense. […]

So now although it is language-as-material-based content, it feels more distinctive and alive than the original. We have multiple people and interactions instead of poet-in-solitude trope. We have particulars and actions. We have relationships to the world and to each other. It is less predictable. You don’t know where the poem is going when you start any given line. It travels. It is more of a wake up exercise but it pleases me now.

Pearl Pirie, Revision

My “Self Portrait as Sandfly” is nowhere near finished. The sandfly in question lives in a particular valley in Lima, and is only active after dark. Its bite is deadly to humans. It took researchers a long time to understand why people could walk through this valley in the day time but not after dark.

The poem isn’t finished because I don’t really know why I want to speak in the voice of this death-dealing, invisible to the eye insect. What do I have in common with a murderous sandfly, that only lives because of the particular climatic conditions of that valley? I don’t know yet – I’m hoping that is what will become apparent in the drafting/editing process.

Kim Moore or Clare Shaw, Self Portrait As Gold Dust, As Glitter Ball, As Magic Carpet…

I tend to believe passionately in any collection right up to the point when the proofs are sent off to the printers. Then I decide it’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made, want to change or retract everything, contemplate running away to the rhubarb patch at the bottom of the garden where I used to hide as a kid. This gnawing anxiety eats away at me until – come publication day – there are only a few scrappy bones left.

On that note…. happy publication day to my fourth collection with Chatto & Windus, STEPMOTHER!!

For me, the best part of any new literary project is when it exists as concept, unsullied by my attempts to put it into words. I first started thinking about the figure that animates my new book -The Wicked Stepmother – around 2021, and I lived inside the stories I was researching, imagining the lives of real and fictional stepmothers around the world.

When the writing process begins, there’s the daunting thrill of grappling with form and shape and order, trying to structure your ideas in a way that flows. You’re alive and intent, often frustrated but excited too. You’re building something. When I’m at this stage, I feel the kind of absorption I get on a single pitch rock climb.

Then the editing: a mix of doubt and euphoria. There’s always a point in the pruning and reshaping and expanding of a collection where the whole thing feels destined to collapse. That is when the real work starts. When you think the book won’t work, you’re usually closer than you imagine to finding a solution: creating ‘sections’ only to take them out again, revising your starting point, moving towards a different concluding mood.

Helen Mort, ‘Smile’, says the photographer

There are often times that poems occur that might not fit into the current project, and live on their own, however briefly. My book-length projects are so often held within such particular structures or shared tonal elements, anything beyond those boundaries simply can’t be incorporated, and require alternate housing. When my dear spouse headed to Banff Writing Studios in January 2023 to attend a rare writing space beyond the house, I began the sequence of daily poems that became “edgeless : letters.” She was away for two weeks, but I think this sequence took me nearly a month to craft, sharpen, hone. At that point, I was already a couple of weeks into the composition of the poems that became the collection Autobiography, which itself took a little more than a year from start to finish. But here, this particular lyric stretch didn’t fit with those poems, that project, therefore the opening salvo of an entirely different, albeit related, extended lyric structure. With the poems I was building into “Autobiography” I was attempting a further, third, suite of shorter, stand-alone poems, but this sequence required more space, and more time. Much like the title poem of Snow day, this piece required a new manuscript within which to contain it.

The epistolary form has always intrigued, seeing examples over the years by John Newlove and Lea Graham, among so many others, although this sequence was specifically prompted by Robert Kroetsch’s Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), during which Kroetsch wrote daily and dated epistolary offerings around his then-partner, Smaro Kamboureli, visiting her mother in Greece. She journaled her own travels, later published as In the second person (Longspoon Press, 1985), a title I sorely wish could have been followed by more literary writing (however brilliant Kamboureli’s critical prose). Kamboureli wrote about going home, and Kroetsch wrote about her being away. Across those two weeks, Christine cemented what would become her third published book, Toxemia (Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my essay on such here], as I remained home with our young ladies. Every morning I looked west, and wrote to her, there. Otherwise, I let her be, attempting not to distract her from work. It was all I worked on for a month, setting all else aside, akin to those six weeks I spent composing the title sequence of Snow day, a couple of years prior (a sequence also begun during the month of January, which suggests a kind of renewal, I suppose).

Daily missives, but composed not as the prose poem as Kroetsch had worked, but something pulled apart, allowing the visual elements of the lyric to breathe. One step, and then another.

rob mclennan, edgeless

I guess holding down what have been essentially two full-time jobs for the past six and a half years hasn’t left me much time to send out newsletters or even to write poetry. But here I am again.

Just three days ago, I finally handed the mantle of director of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference to the amazing Mercedes O’Leary Harness. She’s going to do such a great job making the conference even better. I really enjoyed my time at the helm, but starting last fall, I began to really feel the weight of being responsible for two large literary community undertakings. I’ll still be holding down the fort at Storyknife Writers Retreat, and I consider it a real privilege to be able to facilitate incredible women writers having the time and space to devote to their work.

I’m hoping that the gap that giving something up has opened will be filled with my own writing. It’s going to take a bit of recovery time, but I feel the generative urge trickling around under the surface these day and that makes me so hopeful.

I’ve always found that teaching has really lit a fire under my own work, so when I had a chance to teach an online class in poetry for Orion Magazine Workshops, I accepted. I’ve subscribed to Orion FOREVER, so it’s a real honor to be part of their family.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Hello Again!

One of my goals this year has been to send out my work. (Why does “submit my work to the editorial process” sound like a dodgy thing to do? “Send out” sounds more assertive.)

So I belong to a small send-out group, and when our attempt to meet once a month and report our progress seemed a complete disaster, we decided to meet once a week and for one hour hang out on Zoom together and instead of talking or moaning or whatever, to work on our send-out.

This did the trick. I’ve now managed 21 submissions of poems, reviews, stories, and essays. Not a lot, but it’s something. And I’ve had a few things accepted.

First, the on-line journal Eclectica took my poem, “Windfall Apples,” which you can find here (and which I should have mentioned some months ago).

More recently, Bracken took my poem, “Her Honeyed Mask.” Their new issue is fresh off the presses and available here. (And it’s gorgeous.)

Bethany Reid, Where you’ll find me…

I’ve taken a break from submitting my work, to try to break the cycle of anticipation/dejection, to break the spell of maybe. And I’ve been on vacation, so freer to consider myself from afar, and think, okay, what are you, and let’s do something else with that. Or do the same thing differently. Or do a different thing samely. Or quit all together or start something completely new. Or something. The writing game wearies. Yes, I have that new book out, the “One Poet’s Writing Manual,” which is fun, and people have told me they’ve enjoyed it, and those I know well have said it’s like I’m right there talking to them. And I’ve done some presentations and workshops, and have a couple more scheduled. And it’s my fifth book, if you count the two chapbooks. But. I don’t know. I just thought somehow things would be different. At the same time, I’m utterly astonished at what has transpired, what I’ve stumbled into. And at what I’ve done, conjured up, gave a whirl. It’s all very strange, looking back, looking forward, and just looking around. What the hell, man? What the hell?

Marilyn McCabe, strong, but anxious and discontented amid all that messy beauty

 I’ve been writing a lot, and I’ve also been sending the poems out to various journals. I did that last year, too, and I’ve also got some cool self-pubbed stuff planned this summer. At present, I am 99% sure that these three books will show up before August is out:

• The Other Century: A long-awaited (in my mind) chapbook of poems. This is unlike anything I’ve published before, and I’m excited to share it. It comes close to fiction, but it’s also a kind of collage of found material alongside original poetry.
• A reissue of Travis: A lightly revised but physically redesigned version of my chapbook from last June, marking the 50th anniversary of Taxi Driver (on which the book is based).
• A reissue of Interrogation Days (it’s the last time, I swear!): A revised, reorganized, and physically redesigned book marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the 250th anniversary of the US.

These will be priced very cheaply and will be bundled with cool bonuses (miniature collages, bookmarks, free pamphlets, etc.). The books will come out on my Ko-Fi page, which seems a better way of doing this than trying to fashion a “bookstore” page here on substack. 

RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 1)

I’ve spent time recently typesetting my own, next poetry book – having decided to go rogue and try this out for myself. 

I realised how blank and bleak I was feeling, facing the prospect of submitting my emerging manuscript into the current poetry publishing landscape. Not that I have anything against any of it, it was just flattening my spirits contemplating the long waits and inevitable rejections. And quite spontaneously, as is often the way with me, I found I’d decided to try something different and (not uncharacteristically!) go it alone.

I’ve anyway always been employed – when I’ve been employed – as an editor. Not of books, of magazines. But typesetting is a familiar and loved process for me. And I found that part of this endeavour delicious. 

I set myself up in one of my sons’ currently vacant rooms, and turned up there for a week, each morning, to work. I felt happy, sitting in that sunshiny window at his desk and large monitor and familiarising myself with my chosen publishing software, Atticus. I also designed a simple cover in Canva. And, eventually, pulled both together into a proof book printed by Bookvault. 

I’m delighted with this experiment, and though have nervousness about shunting the book out into the world, it’s no more so than I’ve had with all my other (published by others) poetry publications. 

Charlotte Gann, A new era?

Mark Melnick offers an insightful essay on book cover design and marketing as the July contributor to Marsh Hawk’s “Chapter One” series. You can see his entire article HERE, but I present this excerpt because his experienced insight can be helpful to many authors:

“It is also important for authors to understand that ‘graphic design’ is very different from ‘art.’ I have worked with many authors — especially poets — who suggest a painting for their book’s cover. Often, that painting is very dense and complex (think Hieronymus Bosch), and the author will send me a lengthy explanation of their reasoning for using it, the meanings and resonances they see embedded in it, and how it reflects the text. Yet this misunderstands the purpose of a cover. A cover is not meant to be an analog to the text. A cover is not art, which is meant to invite introspection and contemplation, slowly over time. A cover is graphic design, which needs to do its job almost instantly — literally in one second. It is emotional, not intellectual.”

To illustrate his points, Mark comments on my and Daniel Morris’ recent and forthcoming Marsh Hawk books. My COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES is forthcoming in 2027.

Eileen Tabios, MARK MELNICK ON BRILLIANT AND EFFECTIVE BOOK COVERS

Rajani Radhakrishnan’s moving, intense No Way Home tells us what to expect from its opening ‘Prologue’ poem, sub-titled ‘the poet as storyteller’: It is supposed to be a story, a journal/ a confession, a tirade –/ but I will start/ with a poem instead.// There’s something about weaving/ through shadow and light.

Later in the poem she writes that the story or series of poems over more than 100 pages will be About a time that wasn’t supposed/ to mean anything, but did./ About big things remembered,/ about tiny details that remain/ in an empty frame/like disconnected parts.

What follows is an examination of disconnection, of a restless journey, both physical and psychological that has drawn me into it, allowed me to absorb the sense of the struggle, poem by poem. Unusually for me, but perhaps appropriately, I read it in order from first to last. It didn’t feel like a book that would give up its elusive secrets if I just dipped into it, reading a poem here and there. She tells us repeatedly that this is an ordinary story but of course it is anything but. It’s filled with the anxiety and doubt, energy and curiosity that we inherit or develop as our lives take their course. It is a courageous exploration, a mapping of where and how we travel as human beings, and in this case why we sometimes have an urge to return, to relive parts of our lives that a piece of us is saying ‘Don’t go there, don’t look back, it’s too dangerous’.

Bob Mee, NO WAY HOME – RAJANI RADHAKRISHNAN

If all goes well, Contubernales Press will soon bring forth my new book, Shield of Mnemosyne : a poem-sequence, a daybook reply to the Trumpist attack on the Constitutional order of our democracy. I began writing it in May 2024, and the first three chapters were published by Contubernales in my book Parmenides in Minneapolis. (Irish poet-critic Billy Mills reviewed Parmenides here.) The Shield volume assembles the concluding nine chapters; the whole poem was finished in February of 2026.

This work did not emerge from a vacuum. My focus on making large-scale poetic sequences began many years ago. And this 4th of July, the 250th anniversary of US nationhood, got me thinking back to an earlier long poem – a trilogy, finished on May 28, 2000 – called Forth of July.

The book’s title is a bit of a double pun. “Forth”, here, means not just “the 4th”, but the “coming-forth”. And “July”, here means (to me) not just the month, but alludes to my cousin Juliet, Julie – who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge at the age of 19, in the fall of 1971. On one weirdly playful level, the plot of this humongous poem enacts a kind of Orphic search for my vanished Julie (we were born a few days apart, in 1952). But is it also a kind of spiritual emblem : the “coming-forth of Julie” pushes back against the global spirit of Caesarism and militarism (“Julius” vs. Julie), as the sing-along poet sheds his skin, in the American interior, to commune with William Blackstone, “the man who went to live with Indians” (per the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin – protagonist of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano) – and with Black Elk, and with MLK (Martin Luther King).

Henry Gould, On the Forth of July

The next pamphlet from Headless Poet is in the works and indeed really quite imminent. I’m away next week, but I’ll be typesetting it the week after, at which point it gets a series of thorough proofs before going to the printers. The urgency is entirely self-imposed, and has felt a little perverse at times (life is busy), but it’s good to have a schedule if you’re going to get things done, just as it’s always slightly alarming, to someone of my temperament, just how effective a ‘to-do’ list is.

In Snow Bees, Jeremy Noel-Tod re-introduces the poetry of Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895-1949). Jeremy has been making the case for a re-evaluation of Bowes Lyon’s poetry for some time and it’s been both a pleasure and a privilege to help bring this selection into print: the first to draw on the full range of her work since the Collected Poems (1948).1 The more time I spend with these twenty poems, the more that fact amazes me.

To give you a sense of what I mean, and in lieu of something more considered to come, here is “Starlings: 1938”, from Bowes Lyon’s third collection Morning is a Revealing (1941). One of the striking things about Bowes Lyon’s work is the way in which she brings the same “concentrated skilfulness” to isolated, rural Northumberland and wartime London. In “Starlings”, these two worlds begin to come together. It is a remarkable, densely-packed poem, moving in an unsettling (and, I think, entirely convincing) fashion between the flock of birds and images of destruction without flattening the one into the other. And it does this precisely through a series of unlikely combinations: “glib roar”, “tinsel garrison”, “rose-crazed debate”.

Jeremy Wikeley, Dark news on the breeze

I’ve spent three days working on my LINKS page. When I began blogging (22 years ago) we all had extensive links to other blogs, and to various sites of interest. That seems less common now, but I’m still in the old mindset. This is a problem. 

There are a variety of components to this problem. The main one is that I can be interested in too many things. Being online can be like being on YouTube (Hank Green). So many topics! So many interesting topics! I think I want to see / watch / learn more about … all of them. I want more of this writer, this journalist, this presenter. Lately, this physicist (Carlo Rovelli). 

I want to read all the blogs, especially the poetry blogs. Especially the blogs I used to read. I want to find, again, the friends I discovered online years ago. Now I discover Substack, with all its controversies and all those excellent writers I want to follow. This seems to be close to what the blogging community used to be, with comment threads and interconnections. 

There are lots of blog-like “publications” on Substack. There, you subscribe, not follow. Reasonably enough, some writers request payment for their work. Even some poets! Mostly, though, I find more than enough to read without straining my budget. I can also read about philosophy and politics and artificial intelligence and physics and consciousness till I become . .. unconscious. 

Sharon Brogan, LINKS & reading

Pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I am now aware of three poets at work. I think it was Andrew Neilson that put us in touch (and I\m annoyed I couldn’t make it to Andrew’s do in town a couple of weeks ago. Blame the silly running thing).

Over the course of a few internal messages I’ve been speaking to Adrian Masters. Adrian’s day job is as Political Editor for ITV Cymru, but it was pleasing to discover that he’s also a fine poet. His latest poem in Bad Lillies *is well worth checking out (as are the previous other two). I’ve already told him how much I like the lines

at the sandpaper sound
of a cockerel crowing from an allotment,

at the synthesiser pulse
of fledgling jackdaws.

I especially like the “synthesiser pulse / of fledgling jackdaws”.

And it feels even more relevant as I type, having not long come back from our first go at taming our new allotment space. There is much to dig, much more to do, but I’m glad to have broken some ground on it, and to have not broken ourselves in the process. […]

We nearly didn’t go today. It’s been a long week for both R and me, and I had an attack of the insomnias last night between 12 and about 3am. Why, oh why couldn’t it have been tonight so I would be up when the England game starts?? Oh well. Anyhoo, the point of this is that we did go and we pushed on, but it also makes the poem that follows make more sense to me. I’d asked Adrian for permission to publish a poem form his pamphlet, Accretion, and he said to pick any, so I don’t feel bad about choosing one I don’t think I asked about originally. […]

The whole pamphlet is quite focused on time and gathering perspective. There is very much a long view at play in Adrian’s work that I like and admire. I know and recognise most of what is being described above, the disorinetation of darkness and the early hours, but the clinchers here are the last line of stanza 3 and the final stanza. The way they turn the very human experience into something that adds perspective, provides distance and if nothing else, it adds context

We can’t rail at the night when we’re amongst it in an unintended way. We just named time’s parts, but we didn’t invent it, we don’t own it. I like that. It reminds me that I need to go back to Samantha Harvey’s excellent work of non-fiction (with some fiction in it too), A Shapeless Unease: My Year In Search of Sleep

And on that note, I think I need a nap if I’m going to make it to the football later.

Mat Riches, Nightwithstanding

An attractive quality of these poems is the outsider’s constant searching for self and form. “Mirror” is not only the title of one of Zhang Zao’s most famous poems but also a recurring trope in his oeuvre. Thoroughly grounded in both Chinese and European literature, he seeks “a new tension and melting point,” as Bei Dao wrote in his personal recollection of the author, included in this book. How successful are his sonnet sequences, “Kafka to Felice” and “Dialogue with Tsvetaeva”? The Chinese originals strike as too full of words and ideas, and so lack the pressure cooker of the sonnet form. The free-verse experiments are more interesting, often ranging and strange. One has the great title “Song a Wall Driller and the Ultimate Ear,” but the poem, in fact, pages 179 to 186, are missing from my edition. 

The poem I like best is called “Fly.” It has something of John Donne’s playful eroticism, but also the concision I associate with Chinese verse.

Jee Leong Koh, Zhang Zao’s MIRROR

chaun webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work contends with the spatial, temporal, and interpretive limitations of writing and of the English language with its incapacity to represent blackness outside of regimes of death and dying. He is the author of the hybrid creative nonfiction collection Without Terminus: untraining an archive (2026), and the poetry collections Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (2023) and Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime (2018), both of which received the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Webster’s work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Obsidian, Brink Literary Journal,  LitHub, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Angel City Review, Tilted House, and Social Text. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t know that I would say that my first book changed my life.  It was a book of poetry that was thinking about black place and black placelessness, the organized dispossession of material and memory.  I think my perspective changed as and after writing it, specifically, I think I became more critical of the limits of the discursive as a response to material force.  My most recent work definitely has the mark of that first book and the strategies I was using, I’d just say that almost a decade later I am now more sure of myself and methods, especially my use of ambiguity, and abstraction.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry by way of the black pentecostal church.  The passionate oratory of the sermons, the repetition within the music, the hum and moan all moved me deeply and marked me in the way I consider sound and breath and return in my own writing.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The length of a project depends, oftentimes I am not always even sure of if what I am doing IS a project.  I am just trying to be present and attentive with the questions that vibrate for me, I’m trying to stay with them, I’m trying to see how they bloom.  Sometimes this becomes a project, sometimes that takes years as it did with Without Terminus.  I’d definitely say that writing is a slow process for me, but the gathering by way of note taking is very much a part of that writing process. […]

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
There are definitely theoretical concerns behind my writing.  How, as Frank B. Wilderson III asks, “does one narrate the loss of loss?” He asks this with regard to black people, the way our loss exceeds a linear teleology, does not have a resolution as might be conceived in narrative.  So how do I approach this problem as a writer? when many times the impulse is to make something known or visible through language, to bring it into coherence.  This also ties to questions I have about the archive, about how we make claims about the past, what we understand to be evidence.  I don’t have many answers, much of my process is just being attentive to the questions.  

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?
I’m not sure what the role of the writer is in larger culture.  I think the way we may have looked at the public intellectual a generation ago has shifted, and I’m less interested in what it might mean for my work to ascend and speak to truth to power, than to echo horizontally from below.  

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with chaun webster

Yvette Nicole Kolodji is a poet, artist, and former scientist from the greater Los Angeles area. She has published over 100 poems (including haiga) in various journals and anthologies since her debut in 2014 and exhibited artwork in many locations since 2019. Her poetry has won and been recognized by poetry competitions and organizations such as the Haiku Society of America, Haiku Poets of Northern California, and The Haiku Foundation. […]

Your mother, Deborah P Kolodji, was a brilliant poet and editor. Did your mother introduce you to poetry and haiku? How did your relationship with your mother inform and inspire your life and creative work as a child and as an adult?

Shel Silverstein was my introduction to poetry. To this day, I can remember how sad I was in kindergarten when I smeared my peanut butter sandwich on my favorite book, The Giving Tree. Most of my early experiences with poetry were through Silverstein’s books or school. My first experience with haiku was a lesson about syllable counting in second grade. I don’t recall them mentioning seasons or a cut (kireji). It was a lesson to learn syllable counting with a rigid 5-7-5 structure. Unfortunately, this view of haiku overshadowed my view of this form for years.

Of course, I learned to write and analyze poetry in school, but my creativity towards poetry started with an audition. In high school, I reimagined Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 as a marriage counselor discussing what love is to her patients. This was the first time I deeply analyzed and dissected a poem. In high school, I was focused on various theater productions, bands (I played clarinet), and a robotics team. I loved working with the metalworking machinery. Perhaps this was a precursor hint of my fondness towards sculpture. I also sketched often in my notebooks. After my high school art history teacher introduced me to scratchboard, I was hooked. I was mainly focused on theatre, sciences, and dabbling with my visual art in high school and college.

However, in high school, I was introduced to non-5-7-5 haiku by my mother, Deborah P Kolodji, whose interest in haiku began around that time. We would often play a back-and-forth haiku game. Although I enjoyed playing those haiku games and writing collaborative haiku forms with her and haiku friends, I didn’t take my haiku seriously back then. I would often mention how wonderful haiku was at perfecting long form poetry, since it showed me the weight of each word. One day, I came across this haiku by Kaisanjin, which had a profound impact on me:

one umbrella—
the person more in love
gets wet

Kaisanjin

Until this day, this poem is my favorite haiku. In college, I went to a Haiku Poets of Northern California (HPNC) Two Autumn’s reading and stopped by the Yuki Teikei Society’s Asilomar conference. It was not until after college when I started going to the Southern California Haiku Study Group meetings, readings, and assisted in the bookfair at the 2013 Haiku North America conference. I knew I was hooked on haiku when I started dreaming haiku. It began percolating into everyday life. I composed haiku as I drove. I composed haiku when I walked. It would keep me up at night. Haiku seeped into my essence. After I created a haibun for my sculptural floats, I began to create more haiga. Around this time, I started seriously focusing on my visual arts. I began working with more unconventional materials and created sculptures. I expanded my artistic practice to many different mediums and my writing practice to other haiku-related forms and styles of poetry.

Jacob D. Salzer, Yvette Nicole Kolodji

If the conclusion doesn’t seem to provide us with an epiphany — “I pass,” as a last line, feels at first glance obvious and unsurprising; was “the sentinel of space” really going to stop him? — still, the way the poem gets there is full of interest. Its form, abab quatrains of three pentameter lines that drop to dimeter (and to monometer in that final line), enacts a sonic drama, in which momentum juxtaposes itself with stillness. Everything about the poem’s atmosphere is like the image of those ships in the first stanza: riding at anchor, yet somehow, even in their stasis, “Home-bound.”

The progression of images throughout the poem, in fact, makes its own level of drama. Every particular manages to be simultaneously impressionistic, if not actually self-contradicting, and precise. It’s the reflection of the moon in the water, not the literal moon itself, that wavers and contains the slipping fish. Via metonymy, the thing and its image become imaginatively conjoined, providing a setup for the imagistic paradox that follows, in which the water “makes a quietness of sound.”

“Quietness” and “sound” are seeming opposites, yet we know the true thing the phrase implies. What we know as quiet is not the same as silence, which connotes emptiness and absence or, as in those spider webs on which the second stanza ends, entrapment. A quiet night may be full of small sounds and movements — “strange tunnelers in the dark and whirs / Of wings” — that don’t disrupt the quiet, but are part of its enormous, mysterious fabric. A silent night, by contrast, is the night of your padded cell, the night of the grave.

This imagistic progression, then, after all, earns the poem’s abrupt and initially unsatisfying ending.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Home-Bound

The error that Richard Dawkins made in The Selfish Gene and has continued to make over the 50 years since it was first published, is an error of poetry.  

It’s a poetic error in the sense that poetry is the art form of the metaphor and the mistake that Dawkins makes is one of metaphorical choice. 

The problem is with the book’s central metaphor of humans as survival machines. The idea that we are nothing but automaton shells, vessels for our genes, who are the real survivors. […]

As I said earlier, this error of metaphor has been made by a multitude of scientists and philosophers (from Hobbes and de la Mettrie to Skinner and Turing, and more recently Daniel Dennett and Dawkins himself). But to my knowledge it has not been made by any whose field of expertise the use of metaphor is: poets. 

They, by contrast, have tended over the years to emphasise the dissimilarities between humans and machines, and warned of the dehumanising effects of an over-mechanistic world.  

And in the famous case of John Keats, his argument – taken on in full throat by Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow, was against the rationalist, scientific explorations that came with the Enlightenment, and the way they deadened, as he saw it, the joy to be found in the mysteries of the universe. 

His conception of negative capability was a profoundly wise expression of why trying to pin everything down (to box it in) cuts off at the root a sense of wonder in the unknown and the mysterious. And in some cases, the truths hidden but inherent in the illusory. 

His most famous poetic expression of this comes towards the end of Lamia, when the cold, rational, surface-truth of Old Apollonius, reveals Lamia’s identity and thereby destroys both her and her lover Lycias: 

                                               Do not all charms fly 
At the mere touch of cold philosophy? 
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: 
We know her woof, her texture; she is given 
In the dull catalogue of common things. 
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, 
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— 
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made 
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade. 

Dawkins was able to argue against this view very successfully in Unweaving the Rainbow because he focused on the wonder that is engendered by scientific discoveries in the natural world. But in making this argument, he was missing a central point of negative capability: that there are truths which science is not capable of getting at. There is no reason not to feel a sense of wonder at the truths science can reveal (my view, Keats may have disagreed) and Dawkins’s description of what is happening in the realm of physics and biology when an individual sees a rainbow is a point well made. He considered Keats to be advocating for self-deception when bewailing the gaze of science on natural beauty, but he ignored the possibility that there are truths in the human experience of natural beauty that science can impede. Keats was receptive, and unusually sensitive perhaps, to such truths, and he found the strict rationality of a scientific worldview restricting in his search for them. Poetry, which allows language to dance around its own limitations, enables rather than restricts this search.

Chris Edgoose, Richard Dawkins’s Big Poetic Mistake

Rhetorical
question: why do I find the foods of my first
colonizer delicious? Ordinary fare: steamed
swamp spinach, fried scad, rice. Delicious,
especially eaten without silverware, but not
served to guests or at parties. Our tongues,
taught to swerve from the language of our
origins. Taught to soften the trills
that might remind us of birds.

Luisa A. Igloria, Tapas

Written in the late 11^th or early 12th century, Le Chanson de Roland (‘The Song of Roland’) is the story of an 8th-century Frankish knight, nephew of Charlemagne, who died in 778 C.E. while leading the army’s rear-guard through a narrow pass in the Pyrenees on the way home to France, following a military campaign on the Iberian peninsula.

Considered the oldest known surviving work of French literature, the poem is a chanson de geste (‘song of deeds’), a legendary account of the ‘heroic’ actions and martyrdom of Charlemagne’s knights. The form emerged around the time of the first Crusade, when Christians sought to retake control of the Holy Land, and it continued to flourish throughout the 16^th century.

In contrast with actual events, the poem describes an epic battle against paien (pagans) and ‘Saracens,’ a broad term used by medieval Christians to refer to Muslims. In reality, the Battle at Roncevaux Pass involved an ambush by the Basques, a people indigenous to the Pyrenees, who were retaliating after Charlemagne’s army ransacked their villages and destroyed their capital at Pamplona.

According to the poem, however, the ambush was part of a plot against Roland, orchestrated by his stepfather in league with the enemy. Roland is slain, but his pious devotion to god and king, and his willingness to martyr himself in battle, earns him a place among the angels.

Adam Miyashiro, Professor of Medieval Literature at Stockton University, has described Le Chanson de Roland as “a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations.” In his translation, Roland’s war-cry during the battle is full of religious zeal and alarming certitude:

“Paien unt tort, e chrestiens unt dreit!”
(‘Pagans are wrong, Christians are in the right!’)

Roland the crusading evangelist may have been proud to die a martyr for his faith and for his king, but was he merely a pawn in the game? A paladin, or a puppet?

In the 19^th century, Sicilian Opera de Pupi began reinventing these medieval epic poems to explore powerful themes of honor, justice, loyalty, oppression, and resistance, as shaped by Sicily’s own struggle against invasions by foreign armies and imperial powers. Their version of the stories reflected a blend of linguistic and cultural influences, including Byzantine, Norman-French, Spanish, Arabic, and Italian.

Opera de Pupi transformed and subverted the old epic poems into stories of everyday heroes and unexpected victories, in which women could be knights, noble bandits prevailed, and clever peasants became advisors to kings. ‘Pagans’ and ‘Saracens’ were no longer the enemy, and Christians and Muslims both faced obstacles to overcome. Just as the handcrafted puppets reflected a distinctive Sicilian identity, the puppeteers also became artisans of their craft of storytelling and performance.

Jenevieve Carlyn, In the House of Puppets

What makes Marston Moor the best of [Payne] Fisher’s poems […] is its unresolved ambiguity. Fisher fought himself at Marston Moor, on the losing royalist side, and was imprisoned afterwards. The earliest drafts of the poem are straightforwardly royalist laments for the horror of the siege and the disaster of the defeat, in which Oliver Cromwell, who was Manchester’s second-in-command, takes the role of the devil. The revised and massively expanded poem published in 1650, which won such success with Cromwell that it secured Fisher a paid job as his poet for the next eight years, shifted momentum to acknowledge the glory and power of the Parliamentarian success, but Fisher by no means forgot about the suffering of the other side. Long passages describe the miserable conditions of the besieged people in York, their joy at being relieved, and the terrible royalist losses on the battlefield.

It is interesting that Cromwell was so impressed by a poem that is essentially so even-handed.

Victoria Moul, Like a patient Angler e’re he strook

I recently wrote a review of the book Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War.

Here’s a short excerpt:

It’s significant that as I began writing this review about Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, a collection of poems reacting to the devastating ecological consequence of war, that our nation was again engaged in a new one. Rockets and drones were taking thousands of human lives, but also leaving lasting damage to land, water, and atmosphere. It will likely be decades until we understand the full extent of this war’s human, political, and environmental cost on our world.

You can read the whole review at Consequence Forum Substack here.

Grant Clauser, Review of Ecopoetics War Anthology: Convergence

Thinking of John Berger and his thoughts on the male gaze (I’m sure he thought we’d be well past bringing him up on this subject by now), I took And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, off the shelf. What a lovely thoughtful book that has been. Poems are nearer to prayers, he says. And, “Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.” He says, “The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.”

Shawna Lemay, Art’s Power to Change You

Stars curl
and spiral

this night

O the sight
of all that

blue
and red
and white

all that
bursting

all that
fire

all that
might

Maureen Doallas, The Flag on the Fourth of July

A couple of weeks ago I encountered this poem by “Alabama-born, Appalachian and Palestinian” poet Mandy Shunnarah thanks to a Facebook group called Read A Little Poetry. The poem has stayed with me, and I’ve been thinking about why that is and why it speaks to me. […]

“It’s not Palestine / like old buddy, old pal” is a great line. The choice to end two lines with “Palestine” and “Falastin” — almost the same word but not, which is the point. I’ve had Mo Husseini’s extraordinary essay A letter from the margins on my mind since I read it, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the name Palestine and the diaspora experience he describes.

The second stanza is where the poem really tugs at my heart. My grandparents were immigrants too, and I remember my grandfather’s struggle with certain English words that never emerged the way he wanted. (“Sheet” was a particular bugbear.) My grandfather spoke seven languages, which was amazing! but he knew his English was accented.

I think of how my mother, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Prague in 1936, chose short, simple, all-American names for her kids, especially for the three sons who were born to her first. I think about the tensions between assimilation and remembrance, about the old-fashioned or “foreign” Jewish names that I see now mostly in cemeteries.

The poem asserts that “only an American” would choose an aspirational name, one they themselves can’t easily say. I recognize that sense of leaning toward the future even at the cost of generational disconnect. My family’s immigrant story is different than this one, but they rhyme, as it were. There’s something tender for me about that. […]

Against all of these backdrops this week I encountered this beautiful essay by Jennifer Elise Foerester, a member of the Mvskoke people, shared on FB via the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

She begins:

What if we listened to each other in the language of poetry?
Poetry is a language of deep listening.
Listening to each other in this way would be a listening that does not demand an answer, a translation, or defense; it would be a listening that acknowledges not knowing, that does not preclude the possibility of new perspectives.

Jennifer Elise Foerester, Beyond The Obvious

I love the idea that when we listen to each other as to a poem, we cultivate a spirit of radical welcome. I love the idea of poetry as a language of deep listening — an increasingly lost art in these polarized and angry times. The FB conversation I saw about Shunnarah’s poem was pretty polarized and angry. I didn’t experience much readiness to listen there.

I get the anger. (I really do. I’ve shared a few very angry poems of my own, of late.) But I want us to be able to listen in a way that both upholds our own truths and keeps us open to the truths of others. I don’t want to respond to poems with defensiveness; I want to cultivate openness. In poetry, as in spiritual life, multiple things can be true at the same time.

Rachel Barenblat, Two poems and a dream of America

You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against probability, belongs to that region of the universe where the wildest bet may be the winning bet.

When she met Alice Methfessel, Elizabeth Bishop had served as Poet Laureate of the United States, had won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, had spent the better part of her youth in solitude and the better part of her middle age in South America with the woman she loved for seventeen years, who had taken her own life three years earlier.

Across their stations, across their age difference, across the abyss of possibility between their era’s parameters of permission, Elizabeth and Alice fell deeply and enduringly in love — a love that comes abloom on the pages of Megan Marshall’s delicious biography Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (public library).

Soon, they were beginning each day with a ritual refrain: “Good-morning I love you.” The “blue blue blue” of Alice’s eyes became the sky of a new world shimmering with new life. More poems poured out in a spring than had in a decade. They swam together in the Galápagos, admiring the flamboyance of flamingos, and in the Greek Isles, admiring the poppies and their thousand shades of red. Whenever they were separated by Elizabeth’s itinerant life as a public poet, she sent Alice “love — housefulls, churchfulls, airportsfull” and carried her photograph in her breast pocket. She revised her will to leave everything except her books to Alice.

After five years together — years of extraordinary creative vitality for the poet, but also years of savage struggle with alcohol — Alice, exhausted by Elizabeth’s increasingly out-of-control drinking to the point of collapse, met a young man who soon proposed.

“I want you to be happy and good and loved,” Elizabeth told her in a touching reminder that the deepest measure of love is wanting the best possible life for the other person. But she was heartbroken.

She coped the way all artists do.

What began as mostly prose became, seventeen drafts and several titles later — “How to Lose Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things,” “The Art of Losing Things” — one of the greatest poems ever written […]

When she learned that Alice had decided to accept the proposal, Elizabeth was devastated. With the helpless vulnerability of love laid bare, which neither pride nor prejudice can touch, she wrote to her:

I DO want you to be free, darling — that wouldn’t ever make me stop loving you… You can always have me back if ever you should want me… truly.

And then she sent her the poem.

Nobody knows what beckoned Alice back — the poem, the way a badly sprained ankle signaled Elizabeth’s fragility and made Alice shudder at the thought of losing her, or simply the inexplicable gravitational pull of love that eludes, always eludes, theory.

“I like being with you more than anyone else in the world,” Alice wrote to Elizabeth that summer.

They remained together until death did them part — one awful October evening, a cerebral aneurysm left Elizabeth’s body for Alice to find on their bedroom floor.

Maria Popova, The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written

Whatever else we might do in our lives, death is the thing we all will do. Most of us would rather not think about that. Here, then, is where the poets step in. Our readers may recall, for example, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which takes death’s inevitability as its subject. Tennyson, the laureate, speaking for a country and a culture, asks the very question nobody wants to ask: “How will we die?” For her own part, Emily Dickinson takes the question closer to the bone. She considers not how a culture, a generalized entity, might think about mortality, but instead, how she herself, an unrepeatable human I, will die. What, she repeatedly wonders, will that actually be like? […]

In sequence she describes the “Funeral in my Brain” as an entirely auditory experience, nightmarish perhaps particularly for the claustrophobic among us whose recurring bad dream of live burial the poem encapsulates. The speaker, confined in her viewless coffin but entirely awake, hears the tramping feet of mourners, the monotone drumroll of the church service, the creaking of boots as her coffin is lifted and carried to some solitary place, where she finds herself abandoned — “Wrecked, solitary, here” — for eternity. “Here” all sound stops; here ends the poem, presumably.

But at this point we should stop and remind ourselves that the public-domain version of the poem we’re reading is the one that appears in Poems: Third Series, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and published in 1896, ten years after Dickinson’s death. Todd and Higginson clearly agreed that dear Emily could not possibly have meant all those em-dashes, but also that she could not possibly have meant the poem as it appears in her manuscripts, with a final stanza beyond the one given here — a stanza that changes everything:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down —
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing — then —

In this original and necessary final stanza, the speaker, like a person being hanged, feels the “Plank in Reason” break beneath her. As the poem ends, on an inconclusive em-dash, its thoughts cut short, its speaker drops utterly out of “knowing” into the unimaginable, timeless, silent mystery beyond. It’s a terrifying prospect, that moment when “knowing” ends: the moment when the self stops being the self, or at least stops being sure of being the self, or of anything at all.

Yet as a restoration of the poem in its wholeness, this true ending offers a corrective to the nightmarish sense of being buried alive, on which the expurgated version of the poem ends. Death in Dickinson’s vision is not a desert island, a solitary shipwrecking, but something far stranger, outside the bounds of human knowing. If it’s a terror, it’s also a liberation and a darker, wilder hope, for which human language, in all its knowing, has no word.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: I Felt a Funeral in My Brain

if you whisper your truths,

they’ll disappear, he’d say, so he never whispers them –
and when he does speak, his voice is the wild thud
of trees falling oceans from here in cool shimmers

of rain, in the hot curl of asphalt, in all the time needed
though there’s so little now to do, and he’s prayed deep
into the hole of his aching, but that’s not how it ends –

Sam Rasnake, Some Last Things

This week, days bear their teeth, fantasy and reality rhyme, attention is a form of loss, and the poem has stopped showing and started naming. Enjoy.

The sudden early morning wind whipped up my loose hand-written pages of new poems and took them away, high over the gardens, scattered them who knows where. I apologise now for the litter they became. I sat at the patio table and watched them go. There are no copies. And so I began again the old process: wait, watch, hear, remember, get it down. It’s all memory, whether a second or two or a thousand years ago. I look again at notes from life in a lighthouse, on cliffs, among ruins, among ghosts, both up there and in a village where I’ll always be an outsider. Life on the outside, a life of faith – in what, is my business – emptiness.

Bob Mee, ON A DAY WHEN THE WIND WHIPPED UP MY LOOSE PAGES OF POEMS AND TOOK THEM AWAY, HIGH OVER THE GARDENS

Yesterday, towers stood like gleaming
sheaths beneath the broiling sun as though
they would withstand every form of violence.
Yesterday, a sinkhole yawned open at the exit
from the freeway. Days bare their teeth and
gums. The wind smears pastes of insect
bodies on glass. I am trying not to think
of these as plagues pouring out of the sky.

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

I have here A Chorus of Ears by Denise Riley, newly published. Four essays ‘On the Voice of the Poem’. A few pages in I know I’ll have to slow down and listen – as one might with a poem – as her elegant, rather wry hugely intelligent sentences unfold. I also suspect that ere long I’ll be standing on the table cheering. On page one already Riley is asking how writers may ‘preserve their freedom not to acquiesce in the zeitgeist’s tendency to aggrandise the poetic persona, with its platformed competitiveness’. Soon, she’s talking about how thought – and poems – surprise us in their making, or ought to. Many writers will know it’s not oneself, the poet, who makes the true utterance, it’s not our ‘voice’ or that of our people but ‘it’s the voice of language itself which is trying to speak’. For it to do so, ‘all the accidents of your authorship need to fall away’.

Kathleen Jamie, What We’re Reading This Summer

Here in Canonbury Square George Orwell completed Animal Farm and began work on 1984 and it is here where we encounter one of literature’s often forgotten poets. Enter Ampleforth. Ampleforth is the poet in 1984 who, like the main protagonist, falls foul of the system. Ampleforth is devoted to poetry and despite having to translate old works into Party approved texts he does so dutifully and carefully until he makes one fatal mistake. He fails to replace a banned word. He fails because he cannot find a suitable substitute for the word ‘God’. Ampleforth is arrested and punished not because he believes in God but because he believes in rhyme, in music, in the integrity of poetry.

I am sitting in Canonbury Square in the June heat, having completed a short walk from Louis MacNiece’s house just up the road and suddenly I feel utterly lost. Here I am in the summer sun and I can’t find another word for God. I feel suddenly abandoned by something that I cannot describe. Close by a small boy kicks a ball off the green. It rolls into the road. He doesn’t know whether to follow it or not. He looks for his mother. Across the way an angry man is shouting with a can of lager, barking insults at the neatly tended Canonbury borders and I am both of them, I am both a boy without his ball and a man angry with a can.

In the morning I’d visited my mother at the same care-home where I’d watched my father lose his capacity for speech, where his vitality for language abandoned him. My mother is smart and articulate but many of the other residents have been robbed of conversation, have forgotten how to ask for anything, can’t remember what it is they’re asking for and I am all of them too. And the boy who doesn’t know what to say to his mam and the man rattling with a can. And I am thinking of George, working diligently, articulately on his stories, preserving words in careful order, knowing the war will soon be over when I remember that it’s Father’s Day. It’s Father’s Day and I feel utterly lost but now I understand why.

Jan Noble, N°70 Bunting and rubbish

It’s been a quiet week here. Remember that tooth that kicked me out of the writing residency at the beginning of the month? Finally got it fixed, but it took almost a week to recover. On Tuesday, it was ninety degrees. Today it was gray and in the sixties. The Strawberry moon tonight looks more like spooky October than end of June. Meanwhile, I’ve been watching birds and listening to audiobooks and watching Film Noir on TCM. […]

Saturday is the 4th of July and the 250th anniversary of this fair country. This week the Supreme Court ruled, in line with Donald Trump’s well-known contempt for not just women and people of color but also disabled people (sound like any Hitlers you know?), that people with disabilities don’t have a right to live in their own homes. A lot of us are worried this means a return in being placed in institutions for being “inconvenient.” You can read more about it here. A load of laughs, right? It also took away some of the rights of people to claim asylum here. Whenever I get a bit of patriotism back, like while watching the World Cup, the USA reveals just how evil it can be. It’s hard to stay upbeat.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Recovery Week with Goldfinch, Almost Fourth of July and the 250th, and the Question of Patriotism

Last week the mayor of a city
most of us don’t live in
used the word “monsters” to describe
a political action committee.

Also last week a woman in Texas
was sentenced to fifty years
because she read “political zines”
about feminism. A gay man

who works as a public servant
was kept from his children.
At least one ceasefire
ceased its ceasing.

Rachel Barenblat, Ragebait

Jennifer Martelli’s “Dear_________,” begins with a paradox: “Today, to ease my anxiety, I thought of the scariest scene in The Shining—” The speaker then takes us into the opening sequence, in which a small Volkswagen travels through a mountain landscape while the camera follows from high above. What frightens the speaker is the scale of the view: “the vastness / of America,” the mountains, the road crossing into a place so immense that “only a helicopter or bald bird of prey” could follow it and comprehend “what kind of country this was.”

That gaze reappears at the end of The Shining, in the old photograph hanging in the haunted hotel. Jack Nicholson’s character stands in the foreground at a July Fourth celebration in 1921, though the film has taken place decades later. “He’d always been there,” Martelli writes, “celebrating America’s birthday.”

This move underscores the horror of realizing that the film’s violent man is part of the hotel’s past and, additionally troubling, how he may never have been separate from that past. Patriarchal violence is not an interruption of the national story. It is already inside the photograph, the celebration, and the country’s account of itself.

From there, the poem turns toward its unnamed recipient: “I see you in many men.” The blank in the title permits the addressee to remain particular while also becoming representative. One man proliferates into “angry men, bloated, omnipresent, powerful,” men frightened by “their own impossible hungers.”

That word, hungers, carries the poem into its final intimate turn, when the speaker remembers the Fatted Calf restaurant down the street. After six weeks of being unable to eat, she orders a rare burger and thick fries. “Finally,” the poem ends, “I could keep something down.”

The difference between the men’s hunger and the speaker’s hunger is crucial. Their “impossible hungers” appear boundless: appetites for power, control, possession, and permanence. The speaker’s hunger is physical and finite. Her body needs food. The ability to receive it, to eat and keep it down, is ordinary, but the poem makes that ordinariness profound.

José Angel Araguz, What Kind of Country This Was: On Jennifer Martelli’s “Dear_________,”

As part of the campaign to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal, [Emma] Lazarus wrote a poem to be read at a fundraising auction in December 1883. A poet well-versed in New York literary circles, Lazarus was herself the descendant of earlier Jewish immigrants to New York. Passionate about helping recent immigrants overcome the hardships they faced, she devoted her time to the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, after the Russian pogroms of the 1880s resulted in another influx of Jewish immigrants to the city. She also worked to establish the Hebrew Technical Institute, which further helped Jewish immigrants acclimate to life in New York.

Her poem, ‘The New Colossus,’ was styled after an Italian sonnet, during an era when large numbers of European immigrants were arriving in the U.S. in waves. In contrast with the Greek ‘Colossus of Rhodes,’ a male figure that presided over the harbor in Rhodes in the 3rd century B.C.E., Lazarus saw this new American colossus as a welcoming maternal figure, unarmed, and bearing a torch to light the way.

Read aloud at the fundraising gala in 1883, Lazarus’s poem included these now-famous lines:

Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

It may have been the only poem read at the auction that night. While it did garner interest in raising funds for the pedestal of the statue, Lazarus’s poem was not widely remembered in her lifetime. Pulitzer’s fledgling newspaper, The World, did print it following the auction, but The New York Times chose not to publish it, a decision it rectified decades later.

As it turned out, Lazarus was away in Europe in 1886 when the statue was finally unveiled in New York Harbor, three years after the fundraising campaign began. Her poem was not mentioned at the dedication ceremony, and she died the following year.

It was only after her death that her poem was reunited with the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles, through the efforts of one of her friends. In 1903, the words Lazarus penned twenty years earlier were officially inscribed on a plaque placed inside the base of the statue.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Blood from Stone

I’ve always found the summer to be the only season in which I struggle to write poetry. Of course, an extraordinary heatwave like the current all-but-unbearable one inhibits doing very much except lounging about in whatever shade there is. Jackie Wills’s brilliant new collection aside, I’m also struggling to concentrate on reading; or doing anything else of consequence for that matter, though I enjoyed watching Ecuador win last night. If only all the World Cup games were on in the afternoon and evening . . .

That said, I finished a rare political-ish poem last week and sent it off to the Morning Star, who have since said they’ll publish it in August. As a lifelong leftie, it does my heart good to help to support a publication with values broadly similar to my own. I never quite understand why poets might, instead, want to place poems in right-wing rags, like The Spectator, which gives platforms to some truly odious far-right ‘thinkers’, such as very far-right Douglas Murray (its associate editor) and Max Klinger, and is edited by Michael Gove for pity’s sake. It also happens to be owned by Paul Marshall, the hedge-funder who set up GB News. I like its poetry editor Hugo Williams and most of his corpus of poetry as much as anybody does, but, to me, The Spectator’s values aren’t in the slightest bit compatible with the inclusivity of poetry.

I don’t buy the argument that getting poems published in journals and papers which don’t specialise in poetry must be a good thing per se; or that putting poetry in front of the sort of people who like to read very right-wing tripe might broaden, perhaps even change, their minds. I suspect that is very unlikely. In the same way that publications are necessarily picky about the poems they publish, poets surely have a moral responsibility to be picky about where they attempt to place their poems.

A counter-argument is that placing left-leaning political poems in left-leaning publications like the Morning Star and the New Statesman will only preach to the converted, but how likely is it that a right-wing publication would publish a left-leaning poem or even one that, say, even tangentially alerted the reader to the horrendous adverse impacts of climate change?

Matthew Paul, Summer daze

To Phrase a Prayer for Peace, by Donna Spruijt-Metz:

from Day 63

I walk
through my unbombed neighborhood—
I sit in my white
studio to write to YOU—

More than any poem in this very moving book, which at its core is a diary Spruijt-Metz kept during the first 120 or so days of Israel’s war on Gaza, these four lines capture the essence of the struggle—spiritual, ethical, moral—that I think any American Jew of good conscience faced in coming to terms with the brutal reality of Hamas’ attack on the one hand and, on the other, the far more brutal reality of Israel’s response. While the poems gesture at times towards the contested historical context(s) through which all sides to that conflict give it meaning, Spruijt-Metz is more concerned with trying to reconcile the “unbombed” comfort in which she lives with the inevitable concerns Hamas’ attack raised about Jewish safety and the concerns about Jewish identity and community raised by Israel’s response. Spruijt-Metz holds herself accountable for the privilege of her position by weaving the mundane details of her life through the book like a recurring motif in a piece of music, constantly reminding herself and her reader that part of the reason she has the luxury of wrestling with these questions in this form is that she is not in any immediate, mortal danger. In the end, To Phrase a Prayer for Peace is a book-length wrestling with the transcendent presence she addresses as YOU, an attempt to find a Jewish answer to a question that is not the obvious one of how this YOU could allow things like the Hamas attach and Israel’s response to happen, but rather of how it is possible through whatever it is that YOU represents to find a path into a different way of being in the world. Given how much more brutal and complex the war in the Middle East has become—and it is in so many ways just one war, isn’t it?—it may seem odd to return to a book written in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, but precisely because of that increased brutality and complexity, the questions Spruijt-Metz wrestles with are more relevant than ever.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #56

Vulnerability Index, Elizabeth Robinson, Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025, ISBN: 9780810149205, $20.00 […]

In her Introduction to Vulnerability Index, Elizabeth Robinson talks about her work with the homeless, or better still, unhoused of Boulder, Colorado and her experience of ‘crushing depression’ and how the openness and generosity of the unhoused people she worked with helped her deal with it. She challenges the stereotypical views of the people she worked with that are often held by the comfortably housed, and, crucially for the poems that follow, speaks of the vital, difficult need to pay attention to others. The poems are acts of attention, while recognising the difficulties involved:

My attentions are crude, raw.

I begin to think that all attention is a form of loss.

because it cannot create perfect reciprocity
with its focus.

And yet Robinson continues, through these poems, to attend to the world of her unhoused clients, to understand them not as a problem, but as individuals each with their own attributes and their own reasons for the lives they lead. Which is to say she attends to the world she moves through not only looking but seeing. And these are the kinds of things she sees:

On Why He Doesn’t Want Housing

“A body that is in motion stays in motion.
A body that comes to rest stays at rest.”

He’s afraid he’ll die if he stays inside.

and

He is asking and he is he is asking and
he is asking and asking for

something. Not for resolution
in which this story has zero
confidence, but for relief.

Relief as a hinge between
death and survival.
An imbalance

that no story can right into equilibrium.
(from ‘Do Not Resuscitate’)

Formally, Robinson deploys a range of strategies, from lists through pieces based on responses to official forms to snatches of overheard conversation. The list and form-based poems provide glimpses into the relationships between the unhoused protagonists and a system designed, it would seem, to humiliate them:

Says they discharged me at eleven and I walked around in the dark all night, snow blowing everywhere, wearing only this T-shirt, jeans, and my flip-flops, nowhere

warm to go.
(from ‘Inmate’)

The understated tone of the writing, here and throughout the book, is carefully contrived and lends a dignity to the people Robinson writes about that society generally denies them.

Billy Mills, Elizabeth Robinson and Bruce Parkinson Spang: A Review

How this little poem swarms with wretched lives that seem to start up almost one to a line! Baudelaire’s genius for metaphor takes a striking turn here, seeming to pile presence on presence, pressure on pressure, in a way that reflects the crowded claustrophobia of nineteenth century metropolitan life. “Pluviôse” – name of the rainy fifth month in the French Republican Calendar, straddling January and February – becomes an irritable god pouring water in floods from an urn. Personified like this, he’s not only seen as causing the conditions the city struggles under, but himself seems oppressed by a discontent that makes him lash out at everything and everyone around him. The poem in fact develops as a series of brilliantly self-contained images like tiny video clips, each inviting the reader to dwell on it and expand it in his own collaborative imagination. Most brilliant, to my mind, is the final one with its ripples of teasing suggestion. There’s an animating friction between squalid and glamorous connotations – squalor in the “sales parfums”, a flicker of discordant glamour in “le beau valet de coeur”. There’s an arresting element of surprise at the way these court cards suddenly start into speaking, three-dimensional life. Readers will imagine different scenarios. For myself, though I don’t know if this is a result of letting the English meaning of “sinister” weigh too heavily, I picture the knave of hearts (the valet de coeur) and the queen of spades (the dame de pique) putting their heads together, whispering like a pair of conspirators from Goya’s black paintings. As they look back on their dead loves, “sinistrement” makes us feel they’re doing so sadly, gloomily and (to the unsympathetic spectator) boringly, but also that their doing so is disquietening, sinister in the English sense, and perhaps somehow ill-intentioned. All the tiny vignettes quiver with varying suggestions, though. In “Aux pâles habitants du voisin Cimetière”, for example, “habitants” seems to treat the cemetery as just another district of Paris, blurring the line between the living and the dead. And why are they pale? Because they’re ghosts, yes, but they also seem to be shivering with cold, hunger, disease, dread, like the living poor.

Edmund Prestwich, Imagery in two of Baudelaire’s Spleen poems

Larkin’s extraordinary formal command becomes in the mature poet so absolutely assured that it is almost invisible. But in these poems you can still catch him experimenting, as in these sapphics from 1949, which are not systematically quantitative but certainly partially so. If you have any Latin lyric in your head, I think it’s impossible to read this poem and not feel sure that Larkin, too, had at some point read some lyric verse in Latin:

Sinking like sediment through the day
To leave it clearer, onto the floor of the flask
(Vast summer vessel) settles a bitter carpet —
Horror of life.

Huge awareness, elbowing vacancy,
Empty inside and out, replaces day.
(Like a fuse an impulse busily disintegrates
Right back to its root.)

Out of the afternoon leans the indescribable woman:
’Embrace me, and I shall be beautiful’ –
’Be beautiful, and I will embrace you’ –
We argue for hours.

This is not a successful poem, and Larkin would probably have been horrified to see it published at all. It’s obviously an experiment: an experiment in metre, but also in metaphor, simile and the unexpected transition. That muddled simile of an impulse like a fuse disintegrating to its root must be remembering, and reversing, Dylan Thomas’ ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. (Thomas’s particular kind of romanticism was hugely fashionable in the 40s.) The poem is trying to do too much, and its dense abstraction doesn’t convince. Still: ‘out of the afternoon leans the indescribable woman’ is a very good line, even if it would be better without that unnecessary ‘indescribable’. Her role and position in the poem should itself tell us that, like Lycidas or Chloe in Horace, she cannot and need not be described.

You can hear in these lines the recurrent choriamb (— uu —) which is the ‘signature tune’ of sapphics and various related metres in Latin and Greek. Larkin no doubt read some Horace at school or university, as well as some of the English attempts at sapphics that crop up quite regularly in English poetry between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was perhaps influenced also by the choriambic music that recurs occasionally in both Hardy and Pound (as well as, for example, Bunting and Sisson, though both too late to be in play here). But the poem is obliquely Horatian in other ways too: many of Horace’s odes begin with a philosophical or political theme only to introduce an erotic object (whether boy or girl) at the very end. Sex in Horace is always both a distraction from, and a reminder of, the brevity of life. And Larkin here imitates too, actually quite unusually in English lyric, the signature shape of an Horatian ode, which typically ends somewhere quite different from where it began.

Victoria Moul, Larkin’s odes

The poetry of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was once so well known, filling page after page of school anthologies, that editors would often seek out his lesser-known poems, just to present something a little different — the B-sides of his greatest hits, on the assumption that everyone already knew the A-sides.

That assumption is just not true anymore. “The Rape of the Lock” is assigned, when assigned at all, with a trigger warning. “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” — Pope’s surprisingly un-Pope-like poem — has mostly disappeared. And then there’s An Essay on Man, the four-part work published from 1733 to 1734, that was once considered Pope’s major work and a necessary adjunct to any general education. We’re left, these days, to remember the A-sides before we get to the B-sides — beginning with today’s extract, the most glittering passage from his most glittering work, in the full power of his rhymed pentameter couplets.

But it’s also worth pointing out that this passage, the opening lines of Epistle II, appears at war with its form. The easy flow of heroic couplets — the deft arrangement of parallel constructions, for that matter — demonstrates an intellectual confidence that the actual content ostensibly declares does not exist. To be a human being is to be “In doubt his mind and body to prefer; / Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err” — and yet, notice the mastery of the chiasmus: mind/body, inverted to mortal body/erroneous mind. The poet is in charge, holding firm to his explanation of our infirmity.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: An Essay on Man

The speaker phonetically translates “moon” into “mun” which creates the right sort of sound but is the wrong word. As her thoughts digress, the word for moon surfaces. She’s not really forgotten, the word is there in her hindbrain, it just took a distraction for it to surface.

“The Symmetry of Fish” is an exploration of language, not just as words or letters on a page, but how words are spoken, the effort it takes to speak and the anxiety of getting it wrong. Cho’s poems feature the act of speaking, facial expressions and the way a mouth is manipulated to get the right sound in order to be understood. Her poems are a lyrical probing, teasing out what it means to be understood and to understand how someone caught between two countries, two cultures, two histories can honour both.

Emma Lee, “The Symmetry of Fish” Su Cho (Penguin Poets) – book review

Jacobea Vulgaris or Senecio Jacobea, a two-faced weed:
poisoner of horses and cattle when it’s dry

but a flourishing source of nectar for so many
species of invertebrates I cannot begin to name,

except for the day-time flying scarlet and black
Cinnabar moths that flutter around me as I tug

the yellow flower-topped stems from the ground,
or plant a fork into the clawlike purple roots and lift.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ragwort

I’m admittedly a bit behind on the work of Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, the author of Barcode Poetry (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2021), Supergiants (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) and TzAR: Pixel Art Anthology (The Blasted Tree, 2025) (as well as a mound of chapbooks), with the latest full-length title being The Wiki of Babel (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2026). […]

I’ve always considered the best kind of writing one that allows a collision between unexpected words, sounds, ideas or structures; one that allows, through that collision, the pure elements of the poem to form in the reader’s own comprehension of those collisions, and Flemmer’s The Wiki of Babel is an ambitious assemblage of the multiple languages of the Biblical Tower of Babel (in which a scrabbling group were struck by G-d to speak in multiple different languages, thus no longer being understood by each other, therefore seeming to all speak in a “babble”) and the wealth of information shaped and collected and hyperlinked across Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (and this title reminds me that Vancouver poet Rob Manery had been working on a hyperlinked poem/poem project back in the mid-1990s, which makes me wonder whatever happened to that, if it ever saw completion). Organized into cluster-sections, Flemmer’s engaging, delightful and playful collection of collage-lyrics is structured via sections “Suggested languages,” “Alternate histories,” “Current events,” “Community portal” and “Canadian hypertext,” the final of which includes some fun explorations through language via Canadian classic novels, including Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Marian Engel’s Bear (1976) and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974). 

rob mclennan, Kyle Flemmer, The Wiki of Babel

I’ve spent the month of June reading The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith – an amazing poet who I was lucky enough to meet and hang out with at the Cork International Poetry Festival recently. This new and selected from Bloodaxe does a brilliant job of giving a sense of the range and development of Patricia’s work over the course of ten collections of poetry – enough to give you a real sense of the development of her poetics over the years, whilst leaving me wanting to buy each individual collection (not good for my bank balance!). The Intentions of Thunder also won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2025, which as far as I know is a rarity for a New and Selected. She has more accolades to her name than I can write here – you can read more about her and her work here…

I do think you need to read Patricia’s collections to get a real sense of the kind of poet she is, and preferably one after the other. I wish I’d found her work whilst I was researching for my PhD. There I was, trying to work out how to write about female desire and sexism and masculinity and whether poetry can create social change – and Patricia has been doing all that work (and more!) for decades, getting (as Danez Smith says on the back cover of The Intentions of Thunder) better and better with every book.

The Intentions of Thunder draws from many of her collections, starting with Life According to Motown, published in 1991 and finishing with Unshuttered, published in 2023. One of my favourite poems in the collection is the first poem “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t). It begins

first of all, it’s being 9 years old
and feeling like you’re not finished, like
your edges are wild, like there’s something –
everything – wrong.

Each book feels more like an album than a poetry collection – each one has its own identity, its own stage of development. Patricia has prefaced each book here with a short prose introduction which kind of tracks her development as a poet, her sense of her own poetics.

Kim Moore, June Reading Diary

In the hard moments of hard days, my three-year-old curls herself away and sings to herself, to the walls, to me, to the shadows listening: “It’s so hard…to [be a] big girl…” It’s a song in the lineage of the Kangaroo song, one I made up for moments like these, a recent iteration of “Why is the baby so very mad?” and “She’s so fierce, with her two teeth.” I have been giving her these nonsense spells since her birth. I have chanted them to her, changing the lyrics at whim, and to suit her moods and requests. She doesn’t mind my voice, doesn’t question or pull from it: It’s so hard to big girl—sing it Mommy.  And by all that’s holy, I do. How has this little child so easily broken open the heart of my poetic wound?

As a young poet, I composed countless lines of sonorous words in delightful and tragic patterns with little semantic sense. As antiquated language faded from the codex of my writing, new voices made their way in, and with them an understanding of what happens when phonemes become morphemes, when morphemes become words—signifier and signified, and now we have meaning. Where before there was sound as somatic truth, now it was a doorway from my body to the larger world. Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and its proto-Siri voice reciting poetry to the house’s absent inhabitants, formed the first tether between my psyche and living writers. A few years later, as if in echo of Bradbury, out from the mystic, I heard Robert Hayden ask, “What did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?”—and suddenly, poetry gave voice (and blessedly, contrast) to the “chronic angers” that surrounded me.

O questionable confessional poetry in halting lines and the call of an open mic —I was fearless on the slam stage—the one poetic venue that wants to hear you. But this was not my place either. My scratchings were steeped in outdated verse, a locked doxology (for ever and ever, amen), and the primal vocal patterns fueling my writing were in direct conflict with my desire to be understood. Up to this point, I hadn’t considered what it meant to be a poet in a world where only the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen might write like this—“too street” for the page and “too heady” for spoken word—and I didn’t have a guitar to tender that connection.

So I did what any cloistered poet would do: I looked to contemporary masters for a new vernacular (Adrianne Rich, Philip Levine, Lee Young-Li among them), begged them to discipline my writing out from song and into narrative. I prostrated myself at the feet of Anne Lamott, Stephen King and Richard Hugo. For every fast, I would swear off Kalevala and Sir Gawain. Let me be narrative, O lord. Renew a right spirit within me. But I found instead Matthew Francis, Brenda Hillman and Michael Ondaatje. The fractured storytelling in House of Leaves and Cloud Atlas, and all the sundry works of Catherynne Valente.  I played Counting Crows on repeat.

From This Body—Music, guest post by Sherre Vernon (Trish Hopkinson)

I’m wrestling these days with having my silence stolen. Silence in the sense that Umberto Eco talks about in his essay on censorship which I mentioned in this post. Remember his call to: Redi in interiorem hominem? The digital noise as a drug is something I know I need to address for myself, for my mental health. As a first step I had this idea to cull my instagram — to unfollow those accounts that have been inactive for over a year. I’m shocked/notshocked by how many accounts that I followed that were inactive for two years plus. It appears the smart kids did a mass exodus (went dormant) about January of 2024. My other step has been to adopt the idea of a half-sab or half sabbatical from social media. Instead of having just one day off per week, I am going to try to take several days away. I mean, duh. Lastly, I’m trying to make my home email a sacred space. So I’ve unsubscribed to almost everything, bookmarking sites instead, old school. Who knows, maybe that’s not the answer either, but I’m wondering if emailing friends isn’t the way to go? […]

So I was re-reading (and need to go deeper) The Wasteland by T.S.E. And this is a good guide for it. I have been attending to the idea of the fragment, and so: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” is worth thinking about. And then the ending is the Aum Shanti chant which I once found useful and might again, particularly the Aum in all the things.

Shawna Lemay, Whose Silence Are You?

Two notes I’m taking from this autopsy, both about openings.

First: where an opening reaches for abstraction, the thing it should have entered through is often waiting one or two lines below. In Prayers it is line three: the cancer. I’ve gone back through a handful of my own drafts since seeing this, and the same shape keeps recurring — the first lines perform the mood, then a later line, often unforced, names what the mood was about. The repair is almost always the same. Cut the performance. Begin where the seeing begins.

Second: a single feeling-noun — tears, fear, grief, longing, loss — can carry an opening if the surrounding image earns it. Three in the first stanza is the diagnostic threshold. The poem has stopped showing and started naming. In Prayers, tears recurs three times across the first seven lines, and prayers arrives twice more after that. The recurrence isn’t motif. It is the same reach repeating, in lieu of the thing the poem is trying not to look at.

Adam Cairns, Two lines reached for tears. The cancer was one line below.

Has this ever happened to you? You’re writing, you’re into the flow, hearing all these words/voices/words/phrases/words/words/words, and then it just won’t stop?

I wrote this poem a few years ago after a terrifying episode that happened one afternoon. I had been writing poems and I couldn’t turn off the flow. The flood of voices, words, and phrases overwhelmed me. I was afraid I was psychotic.

I don’t know if it lasted 5 mins or an hour. I don’t know if anything has ever terrified me more. It only happened this one time, but I have been vigilant ever since. I didn’t write poems or lyric prose for a few years. Then I took a chance and started a Substack. It has helped bring me back. Thank you for reading here. […]

“Sam is standing over Jessie they
threw buckets of spinners absurdly
small a staircase in his mouth in all that
never a one their umbrellas rain
falling rain falling everywhere upwards of twenty
back forty the pink birds
shifted the church doors are locked
now nebulous”

I cannot make it stop.

“star candies five and ten
ways to cross the waste listen
Johnny the boss is soft ice too the back room they will
Judy, did you hear a sound?
the tree branches caught every child under
five is in an excellent
we were all at riverbanks and”

I cannot make it stop.

Surely I am damned.
I tell you,
this is hell.
Do not leave me in it.

Rebecca Cook, What Happens When You Can’t Turn Off The Flow?

In May I taught a week-long class: Taking Flight: Travel Poetry of Humans and Birds in a French castle complete with swimming pool and winery. The estate overlooking a working vineyard also held a small chapel, some fountains, and wooded paths. For one luscious week, we lived like royals with our own award-winning chef and a concierge who attended to our every need. Within days, this was our new normal.

There were so many things I loved about the castle—writing from new prompts every morning, a different room for each time of day and even a turret.

But most of all I loved the kindness present everywhere. The 9 women who came with me showed a willingness to leap into whatever crazy idea I came up with (“here’s a castle treasure map—go!”) and to look after each other with love and gentle attention. There’s so few experiences in my life that live up to the fantasy in my mind—but this week with no other tasks but to write poetry, swim, and eat freshly prepared French food—was a fantasy come true. At the end of the week, each poet wrote to me that they felt thankful for the experience which far exceeded their expectations. That’s all I needed!

Susan Rich, Sometimes Fantasy and Reality Actually Rhyme

The last time that I wrote, I was anticipating my talk at Bawtry Library as part of the Bawtry Festival. I promised to tell you how I got on. What I hadn’t anticipated was doing the writing from a chair at the side of my hospital bed. Ohh cruel fate. One minute you are a successful poet, dropping pearls of wisdom, regaling audiences with tales of your brilliance and experiences in the literary world, the next you are staring death in the face. Well, not exactly. I don’t think that kidney stones come with a high mortality rate, and with a bit of luck I shall be discharged in a day or two. But they bloody well hurt when they are doing their thing in the dark domain of your kidneys. And when the agony is upon you, thoughts of the sweet release offered by the grim reaper are of some comfort. Then again, the release offered by hospital strength pain relief is even sweeter.

Anyway, if I do perish through this current affiliation, at least I will have gone out on a high. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet too loudly, but my Bawtry appearance was a resounding success. Actually, I don’t think that the trumpet sounds outrageously loudly when the resounding success happens to be speaking to an audience of just over twenty in a small branch library in the outskirts of Doncaster. Particularly when a proportion of them were from my own family. But what the hell? I can be anything that I want to be and the majority of the audience were not family, and I had not even met many of them previously. Nobody walked out in disgust, nobody fell asleep, and the response was very favourable. I am a literary giant of the local library scene… In Bawtry. [..]

When I told Judy, my wife, that I had chosen twenty [poems], her first reaction was not encouraging. Twenty??? I stuck to my guns, figuring that I could always drop some if it wasn’t going well. In fact in the hours between selecting the twenty and the start of the gig, I flitted between panicking that twenty was far too many and panicking that I would run out of material inside the first half hour.

In the end, I delivered two 40 minute sets almost to the second. And all was well. I was a little bit technical, explaining the joys of writing in iambic pentameter, but that seemed well enough received. I even read a few stanzas of The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, so that my version The Budgie could be delivered in context. Again, well received. I ranted about Meadowhall, Ikea and Tescos in a section on shopping, I talked about what my dad has been up to since he died in a section on my dad, which I intersected with a section on death. People listened, laughed where appropriate, and applauded. I even managed to sell a few books at the end. There is honestly no other way to describe the evening than as a resounding success.

Mike O’Brien, Pride Comes Before a Fall

My best beloved is very, very fond of all things tech, and especially the equipment of live and recorded sound. We own lots of it, and for many years he, or we, schlepped it to various venues to run live sound boards for church services or poetry readings, or to record the concerts of musician friends. These days we don’t have the stamina for such jobs, and the tech is used for recording poems, as seen above. But here’s a poem in praise of the stuff and the marvelous sounds it preserves.

Microphone Litany

for John, sound guy

Wacky and various though they are, I praise them:
The sort shaped like metallic ice-cream cones
(sturdy, utilitarian, everywhere)
along with the wand-like, pricey as small cars.
The impossibly tiny, glued unseen against cheeks,
tucked into wigs or hair
(their wires always succumbing, always demanding repair).

Dangled from ceilings on squint-invisible strings
or on booms, swaying in acrobatic danger,
hung at distressing heights from spindly stands,
swaddled in foam against windy buffetings
or strung up in weird cat’s cradles of rubber bands—

I praise them all and their magic, which lets me loll in bed
and summon a peal of bells in Normandy
or an ache of countertenor, ages dead. […]

Maryann Corbett, On being married to Sound Guy

I didn’t plan to do a poetry reading on the same day as a concert, the two being 100 miles apart. But I’m so glad it all worked out, because both events were terrific. Ver Poets are a really welcoming group, and hats off to the twenty-five or so people who came out on a very hot day to sit in a very hot room and listen to me and Mark Fiddes. Speaking of Mark, he’s a poet I’ve admired for a long time, despite the fact that he’s just a bit too successful at competitions. I wish he’d take a break and give the rest of us a chance – ha ha. I interviewed him a while back on Planet Poetry – listen to it here. Anyway, we got a preview of his new book Hotel Petroleum (Broken Sleep) hot off the press – actually the launch reading this this coming Thursday. He gave a great reading, and there was a nice Q & A/ chat in which we both chewed the cud a bit with the audience about the podcast, competitions, getting published and the like. Followed by a short (and I have to say high quality) open mic. A really receptive group, and I was delighted with my book sales. Huzzah.

Robin Houghton, Various news & musings, from Mozart to Billy Ocean

Ah, summer. Historically, not the best season for writing as far as I am concerned. The garden, yard, and outdoor activities tend to take precedence over sitting with a notebook or in front of a screen. Sending out or revising work gets shunted to rainy days, or to days so blisteringly hot and humid that I’m forced to stay indoors with the dreaded air conditioner going. So it is a bit out of the ordinary that I have participated in not one but two online poetry workshops this June. And they were worthwhile.

First was a workshop sponsored by One Art online magazine (Mark Danowsky and Louisa Schnaithmann, editors) in which Erin Murphy read, defined, and gave examples of demi-sonnets, a form of her own invention. She discussed using the form and offered suggestions for revising poems using the demi-sonnet; she had us writing to a prompt and revising one of our longer drafts to “fit” into a 7-line stanza–an excellent practice for learning to be more concise. The practice is fun and was useful to me. I had already tried my hand at demi-sonnets and at 7-line poems, but using the process and form for revision was enlightening. Readers, you must check out her work! She has published lots of poetry collections.

Later in the month, Lesley Wheeler‘s “Poetry from the Underworld” was a 3-hour online workshop sponsored by Sara Ann Winn of Poet Camp. I’ve been a fan of Lesley’s work (and of Lesley herself) for some time now, and thus jumped at the opportunity to attend a workshop with her. Wheeler had us explore the variety of ways we can consider the Underworld and write about it, or use the concept as a starting or ending point (or metaphor) for our work. Think about it: Hell, Persephone, Inanna, spelunking, oceans, tunnels, subways, archaeology, burrows, mycorrhiza, drilling, depressive episodes, digging, death, Sigmund Freud, the unconscious. Yes, the possibilities are nearly endless for poets.

She then covered quite a few revision process options and let us hear how her poem “Sex Talk” developed; a moving, personal, and craft-based discussion that all of us learned from, I think. Kudos and gratitude.

Ann E. Michael, Workshops

People you meet yearly or every 2 or 3 years, as with a haiku group, feel connected. It’s a slow-motion relationship but founded on commonality. Of all the people that exist, these are you people, also interested in books, reading, writing, nature, and of those, in poetry. Of that subset, interested in short forms, within that, in haiku, within that, a particular subset of English Canadian haiku that is playful and flexible. And of those, not too shy to talk with people and share their poems.

What is community? It’s a choice to come together. It’s a group gathered for photos with people chanting my name to join them– that happened at the Haiku Canada Weekend in Kingston last week. It touched something in me. Unambiguous welcome as being a part of an us. Something one step more than people lighting up and running over with hugs. A reunion with the haiku family. It does the heart good.

her rare tight hug—
orb weaver’s egg sac
carried high

Pearl Pirie, Community of Choice

All afternoon I wandered the croft looking at wildflowers and wallowing in the joy summer brings. An orchid extravaganza has been playing out across the fields. There are so many this year – much greater numbers of familiar blooms, and some new species. I don’t understand why. It could be any combination of strange weather patterns, croft management, luck or other phenomena. My notebook is full of questions to ask people who know about these things.

In one patch I counted 23 Lesser Butterfly orchids (Platanthera bifolia). From two individuals recorded a few years ago, LBs have spread right out across the croft, down onto the flood meadows and over the river. They are delicately, beautifully pretty, with creamy white flowers, each one winged like an angel. At dusk a rich perfume is released attracting specific long-tongued pollinators such as Elephant Hawk Moths. The orchids also have a special relationship with another group of organisms. Fungi families, with interesting names such as Ceratobasidiaceae and Sebacinaceae, invade an orchid by creating microscopic coils in root cells. They help seed germination and then provide newly growing orchids with carbon, phosphorus, and nitrogen.

These symbiotic relationships between orchids, fungi and insects are vital, and evidence of the complex webs of life which underpin all aspects of the natural world. The abundance of orchids on Red River Croft tells me our soils, fungal networks and insect communities are in good health. Such remarkable inter-species partnerships are one of many in nature but there are other factors at work here. The croft is managed – lightly grazed then cut for hay in late summer, well after orchids and other flowers have been pollinated and their seeds dispersed. Nature’s bonds have developed alongside people, grazing animals, management and machinery. Here, they’re flourishing.

In the Highlands, scientists view orchids as ecological linchpins and important bio-indicators of long-established biodiverse habitats. In rare or fragmented ecosystems such as peatbogs, machair, heath and Caledonian pine forests, orchids promote as well as signify the complex webs which sustain much wider floral and insect diversity. If orchids are present, so too are fungi and insects. They in turn provide support for birds and other species. This is also the case in crofted landscapes but only when they are free from herbicides, fungicides, insecticides.

I knew little about orchids until they began to pop up on the croft. For a few intense weeks in June they feature in my dreams and thoughts. Orchid fever dreams, excited, hopeful, full of flamboyant colour. Perhaps they come because I saw none as a child. The industrialised old town of my youth was not conducive to plants which need clean air, water and uncontaminated soil with healthy micro-communities of fungi, insects and other organisms. So I go out every day, an excited child looking for treats, to see if any more orchids have emerged.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, Orchid dreams

This week […] marked the 24th anniversary of my first date with Kath. It was a blind date and one I am delighted I went on. I have a couple of poems about that very evening and it felt good to take one of them to the bandstand stage at Oswestry Pride at the weekend as part of my set. It was my third time reading at the event and it felt good at the end of a very hot week to be taking the cool breeze of poetry to the park. Because I wear reading glasses, I can’t always see the people in the audience clearly, and because it’s a park it wouldn’t be possible for me to see the people standing further away anyway, but what I can feel is which poems land particularly well and I’d say this one did. […]

Your hair
your skirt
your make-up
your eyes straight ahead
told me
you were out of my league.

Then that fumble of fingers
had the coin falling from your grip.
Your one flaw was all I needed to say my name.

Sue Finch, FINDING THE BREEZE

I write the words down on a sheet
of paper and they terrify me. And I think
of how the lady next door has let her
jasmine grow on a bamboo arch that
I pass under before I reach her door
and the scent or the possibility of scent,
softens my footsteps and uncreases
my forehead and I get to her, somehow
open to earth and sky and welcome.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Stalled

Thus week: Tranströmer’s ten thousand insect wings, the high shriek of a nightjar, moving at summer’s pace, an animal made of departure, and much more. Enjoy.

I can’t let the longest day of the year pass by unmarked. In the winter, I like to bake something citrusy and light a candle, trying to summon back the sun, but I spent the last solstice in the emergency room, tethered to a heparin drip while souls in assorted types of agony cried out—literally—all around me. Talk about the longest night of the year. This morning I walked under the midsummer trees, listening to chickadees and catbirds and great crested flycatchers and Tranströmer’s ten thousand insect wings, so maybe I’m ready to call it even with the universe. It’s good, you know, to be here.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Every Riven Thing” by Christian Wiman

Salmonberry bubbles
of sweet red light
break on our tongues.
Shooting stars
in the flowerbeds,
pollen in our sheets.

Sharon Brogan, Summer Solstice

We’ll stay up
late, light lingering
the first day
of summer,
til fireflies flash the seconds
before bedtime’s hour.

*
Notes

A shadorma is a poetic form of one or more 6-line stanzas, each of which comprises 3 / 5 / 3 / 3 / 7 / 5 syllables per line, respectively.

Maureen Doallas, Solstice

longest day
a fly through the front door
exits the back door

Jim Young [no title]

Watching the 1971 movie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my children recently – a VHS favourite of my own childhood and far better than the clangorous Depp/Burton remake – I was struck by something in the dialogue I somehow hadn’t properly noticed before. Interesting to note that although Roald Dahl is credited with writing the screenplay for the film based on his own story, apparently he didn’t come up with the goods promptly enough and the American screenwriter David Seltzer was called in to complete the script, including much of the dialogue. […]

It’s in Gene Wilder’s ludic, ambivalent portrayal of Willy Wonka that Selzer’s dialogue really shines through. The element which surprised me in my recent viewing was the sheer number of literary references the film contains: Wonka’s exchanges with the children and their families are studded with lines of English poetry which invariably operate as puzzling non sequiturs, flummoxing the nosey vulgarity of the parents. I won’t list all the allusions here but, for example, there are half a dozen allusions to Shakespeare, including “Springtime, the only pretty ring time” from As You Like It, “Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?” from The Merchant of Venice and, in the remarkable final scene, “So shines a good deed in a weary world” (slightly twisted from “naughty world”, again from Merchant of Venice).

There’s also Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (the opening line of Endymion); a line from the anthology piece Sea Fever by John Masefield, “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to sail her by” and even an Oscar Wilde bon mot from The Importance of Being Earnest, “The suspense is terrible. I hope it lasts.” Also in keeping with the film’s comic bravura is a line from Ogden Nash, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker” (in fact this is a whole four-line poem entitled ‘Reflections on Ice-Breaking’).

In the strange levity the film left me with, I began to see Willy Wonka in a different light. Rather than just the playful, eccentric ringmaster of the Chocolate Factory, the fanciful inventor of his own enclosed world and its fantastical confectionery, (even the trickster and conjuror emphasised in the recent Timothee Chalamet off-shoot Wonka), could he be read as a poet-figure in himself, a Wildean dandy as his velvet purple suit and frilly cravat might suggest? Suddenly the song which Wonka croons when the children and their parents first enter the Chocolate Room – “Come with me, and you’ll be/In a world of Pure Imagination” – took on a new resonance. It seemed to link back to the Romantics and their worship of the Imagination and its transformative power, set against the mercantile, avaricious cynicism of the outside world. Wonka’s song is ushering his guests into a sphere of imaginative liberty and sensory blurring such as we discover in poetry, a polymorphic zone in which the harmful impacts of contemporary life on the children might be tested and challenged.

Could Wonka even be seen as a Virgilian guide escorting Charlie and the others through an underworld whose circles embody four (if not Seven) of the Deadly Sins, with each child receiving the “poetic justice” appropriate to their vice – Gluttony (Augustus Gloop), Pride (Violet Beauregarde), Greed (Veruca Salt), Sloth/Wrath (Mike Teavee). The nightmarish ‘Boat Ride’ sequence sees the hallucinogenic magic of the Chocolate Room suddenly veer into a bad trip, perhaps prefigured by the earlier song ‘Candy Man’ with its familiar 70’s drug hint. The speeded-up boat ride seems like a spiralling catabasis, that descent into the underworld which was a recurrent trope in ancient mythology, notably in the myth of the archetypal poet Orpheus when he ventures into Hades. The lyrics of the song creepily intoned by Wilder hint at this interpretation – “Are the fires of Hell a-glowing?/ Is the grisly reaper mowing?”

Some further lines of poetry recited by Willy a little later not only seemed remarkably familiar to me, they also reinforced this sense of the narrative momentum of the film revolving around counterbalancing forces of, on the one hand, poetry and imagination, and on the other, moral transgression and penitence. “We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams”. Where did I know this from, was it Wilde again – surely something from the 19th century?

Oliver Dixon, The Music Makers

Almost every night, I walk. The darkness and I are familiar with each other; I meet it on my own terms. With my headtorch on, the world is reduced to a circle of light. Sometimes I fall and no-one sees, no-one cares, though green eyes shine in the forest. Gate posts greet me like friends; sheep scatter as I walk. In the darkness, yarrow and ox-eye daisies shine. The wild ponies feed through the night; they barely glance in my direction. A curlew is sleepless; over the sound of my podcast, an owl. There are foxgloves lining my path to home.

Exercise:

What taste is Monday? Which tree has the kindest personality? What shape is your anxiety? What texture is thunder?

Clare Shaw, Neurodivergent in Nature

It was the flapping
of loose shingles and the high shriek of a nightjar
from dusk to dawn. A tangle of sweet potato vines
crept toward your feet as if to say You think
your grief is original but what do you really know
of how things learn to sweeten in the dark?

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

In the last few days, I MC’d a reading at J. Bookwalter in Woodinville for their Wine and Poetry series, with poets Catherine Broadwall and Deirdre Lockwood, a local oceanographer. It was warm and sunny (you can tell I’m wearing sunglasses because there was so much glare inside!), but it was a good night AND Glenn did his first ever open mic performance, which I wish I had recorded, where he recited John Berryman’s Dream Song 14. I realized he is a better public speaker than I am, lol.

We also tried a real birdwatching trek because someone had posted about seeing a Lazuli Bunting at a local park. So, forgetting I don’t do well in heat, or sun, or, let’s face it, outdoors with hills and a lot of brush and non-paved pathways, we went on an adventure to a well-known birding trail at Marymoor Park. Despite wearing long sleeves, long pants, shoes and socks, plus sunscreen and two kinds of insect repellent, I still got attacked by a tick on my wrist while I was taking a shot (brushed it off within ten seconds, but still managed to leave a bite behind that required a doctor visit) and a black fly (which I am allergic to), so after an hour, I had to call it quits. It felt like nature had personally attacked me and told me I was an indoor cat, and keep to my own space, lol. On the birdwatching side, we saw about forty Great Blue Herons fly right over our heads, I saw Purple Martins and Tree Swallows and Yellowthroats, and multiple pairs of Lazuli Buntings (which is my first time ever seeing this dream bird). Oh, and did I mention my three-year-old Sony camera’s motherboard went out WHILE we were taking pictures? I didn’t get as many good ones, but it was still fun to see those birds.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Solstice! A New Poem in Crab Creek Review, Reading at J. Bookwalter’s, Birdwatching as Contact Sport, Cyclical Economic Misery

Turkey became the second team to be eliminated from the World Cup this week after registering a record sixty two shots on goal without scoring any of them. This, I regard, as a spectacular achievement, for it represents the endeavour of the poet. The very best of us do not concern ourselves with hitting targets or clocking up points or reeling away to an adoring crowd after sending a sonnet sweetly into the top corner. Some of us try overhead kicks and fall flat on our arses, others fail even with a simple tap-in, can’t manage, in endless attempts, to slot that last line home. We miss the wide open goal, don’t know where or sometimes even what the goal is. So bravo Turkey, bravo for shooting and missing and shooting again. Bravo for those sixty two attempts without finding the net. Bravo for not being the first but the second team to exit. We poets are not in the results business, we are in the business of scuffing the turf, of hoofing long balls up the park, we are in the business of vague and hopeful shots in the dark because there is more to poetry, much, much more to poetry than just winning cups.

Jan Noble, N°69 Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie

Worlds collide all the time.  This past weekend, it was Jewish poets at the Yetzirah Poetry Conference in the Blue Ridge Mountains doing their poetry hootenanny alongside hundreds of ROTC kids shouting theirs. It was Jesus Freak! JC rocks!, a Christian camp retreat with snaking lines of African-American kids in identical T-shirts.  

It was bears with their hulking, early-morning shadows at the garbage. It was yes, ma’am and no ma’am.  It was the delicate mourning of one poet’s lines about her single plate and single egg while one single syllable (Rah! Go! Sir! Shun!) uttered by hundreds of thundering voices.  It was the war machine alongside the poet machine.  It was a twilight shriek that brought me to the ill-fitting screen window to witness the violence of a hyena and a dog, a raven and a mouse, what turned out to be the other animal in their rituals of lethal bloodletting.  It was Jewish poets wrestling with unholy bloodletting. 

It was poets on a mission to speak through and in the context of ancient values, in the poetry of Song of Songs, of humanism, of universal values. A tradition that bases itself on multiple points of view, on those voices arguing, dialoging, constantly confronting and refining each other is a tradition we must put forward.  It was our own scratching itches. It was a world where a sweet Asian intern at the YMCA’s coffee bar asked, “You one of the Jewish people? What do you say? – oh yes, Shalom!” It was an easy Shabbat Shalom, y’all.  

Jill Pearlman, Yetzirah, ROTC & Jesus Camp

It’s done. I have completed running. Yesterday saw me tick off the last stage (I think) of my midlife crisis (sort of wish I’d got into affairs and motorbikes) by running 53K across some hills as part of the Race To The King Ultramarathon. I am in awe of anyone that started and/or finished any of the races happening yesterday. Some absolute loons were doing 100K. […]

[L]ast night after we’d got home (and thanks to my beloved wife for coming to pick me up from Chichester), I was continuing my read of Tobias Hill’s Collected Poems while sitting in bed waiting for my legs to stop throbbing and for the painkillers to kick in.

I must confess to struggling with the book so far..I’m not sure if it’s the onslaught of a collected works that’s a bit much, some of if I’m just not connecting to, or if I’ve been distracted this week while reading it. I do intend to go back to some of it, but when I have connected I’ve really liked it.

Mat Riches, Running Up the (Tobias) Hills

Leave it to a sunny day to turn a boring chord progression into a bright war against imperialism.

A day that shimmers you pearl-promised, tranced in rays of purple unhazed, unfazed by the boom of doomsday’s drums.

Leave it to a sunny day to steam your third eye clean, to make you feel so far out you can hear the stars sneeze.

Rich Ferguson, An Eraser Big Enough for Misspelled Skywriting

I’ve just finally gotten around to reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, in which he writes:

…[A]rt challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify that art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art…clichés are received ideas and so are ideologies…without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence. [Salman Rushdie]

There are others who’ve said this. I think immediately of Audre Lorde:

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

What makes a person really a writer, really an artist, is–in my mind–this quality of necessity. And of the right to exist, regardless of whether the nation, state, government, religion, or other ideology suggests that one ought to shut up. For many years, I questioned whether I was, or would ever be, “really a writer.” Now, I feel that I am. Regardless of what the academy, the current aesthetic, the powers that be might say. There’s a deep contentment that accompanies this feeling: somehow or other, I got here; it has little to do with publication or public acknowledgment, and even less to do with remuneration.

Maybe it’s age. (Crone wisdom, anyone?) So, for any of my readers who are younger people, by which I mean under 55, who feel like impostors or dilettantes or who question whether they deserve the title of “a serious writer,” I’m going to suggest that you keep writing and endure. And maybe stop asking yourself so many questions about your worth. You don’t have to be famous or acknowledged to be a writer, you just have to be dedicated to writing and to learning about writing. There’s value even in that, in looking hard at the “rock experiences” of your daily life and endeavoring to make something of those experiences. Stay curious, stay unorthodox.

Ann E. Michael, Not a luxury

Realistically I’m still very, very far away from the idealised life with its little house in the countryside and several books of published poetry and an income from writing that means I can choose when and how much I undertake socially demanding work (and yes there’s a whole other conversation here about how the journey is the destination, but I’m not going to get into that now). But where did me of a few years ago want to be?

She wanted a job, any job that meant she could pay the bills; she wanted to work in a climbing wall because she thought it would be fun and didn’t know then that she’s AuDHD and a socially demanding role would take it’s toll; she wanted to get into route-setting; she wanted to publish more poems; to get a first in her undergrad and get on to an MFA; to move out of a terrible, terrible house-share that made her miserable; she wanted a car; she was lonely socially and romantically; she wanted to be able to climb 7b; she wanted to get out into the poetry scene and start building a career…

I work at a wall, I route set, I climb 7b, I’ve had a few more poems published, I got a first in my undergrad, I’m doing an MFA, I live in a friendly house-share in a better part of town, I have some great friends who I see here and there, I have a wonderful and supportive partner who’s caring and kind and aware of my capacities and boundaries and meets me where I’m at, I go walking and birdwatching when I can and those things fill me with joy, I run this Stack and over 100 people find enough value in what I do here to subscribe to it, I host The Space Poetic and The Poetry Book Club and a series of workshops and clubs and there’s joy and community in all of them…

I am living exactly the life a previous me wanted so badly.

Rachael Hill, Opening up the timeline

Hard to build anything 
these days but golden calves and temples 
to avarice. Like Lot’s wife, I’m tempted 
to look back, but ahead is a small rabbit,
crouched, ears low, still as stone.

Sarah Russell, February 2026

All in all the week was gentle and quiet. Joys included delivering copies of the group poem to the residents at the housing association, feeling physically better after a recent hysteroscopy, drafting poems about said procedure so that it is set down out of my head, finding out during a conversation with a friend that there might be an audience for said poems even though I thought they were possibly a bit niche, getting back out into the garden. […]

There has also been time for reflection and I have taken time to reflect on the same experience through two different lenses … the lens of poetry and the coaching lens. When I write confessional poetry I love the cathartic nature of the setting down and the rawness. I hear the words reflected back and see the human experience of the moment. When I think about the coaching lens I think about the helpfulness of the forward-thinking nature of coaching. How saying things out loud to a thinking partner can be far more productive than listening to the repeated thoughts of an internal voice. Saying things out loud in a coaching space helps with a more efficient and proactive untangling of thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It was the coaching lens that enabled me to swap months of dithering for minutes of action. And it’s the poetic lens that lets me set down the experience for others to read.

Sue Finch, A SLIGHTLY BLURRED MIDSUMMER RONNIE

I’m teaching a three-hour virtual workshop on underworld poetry next week, preparing in bits and pieces as I carve out time for new writing, news-reading, and visiting loved ones who are struggling through their own purgatories (and in some cases exiting triumphant–my sister has successfully divorced the toxic narcissist, and there are celebrations throughout the land). My hope is for real connection with other poets across the abysses that strand us. I love a seminar-style conversation about poetry: no small talk, just digging into what matters, which can range from the subjects themselves that engage us to poetic strategies that might carry a reader along. Whether what comes to mind is death and decay or transformation and emergence, underground spaces have weird power and potential.

Below (hah!) are a few of the poems I’ll share in the workshop–the ones that are readily available online, because living writers ought to be able to drive you to their books for satisfaction. Poets go to dark places, deliver treasures, and don’t get much love or money for that labor. I strongly recommend Deborah A. Miranda‘s books–her poems, such as “Mnemonic,” can be fiercely geological–and there are compelling caves and cenotes in Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s new Night Owl. Here’s another good one in Amethyst Review: “Cloacina” by J. C. Scharl, whose work I don’t know at all otherwise, but it’s an appealingly filthy poem. I’d love to hear about the ditches and basements, bomb shelters and swimming pools that haunt you, if you’re able to join us on June 28th.

Even if not, enjoy the following subways, scuba dives, and bog archaeology of influential 20th century lyric spelunking.

Lesley Wheeler, Sneak preview of Poetry from the Underworld

I was fortunate to get my hands on an advance copy of Catherine Balaq’s new pamphlet, Some Dark God, which will be published by V Press on 3rd July.

As the title suggests, these poems are dark and chthonic – they get their hands mucky in the soil, pulling out all the blind, wriggling things to show us. Darkness here is a thing that attracts, intrigues and repels in one breath. It is the “very dark God who is watching you”, the “soul-thin drapes” of a widow’s kimono, the “kitchen sulk at parties”.

“A darkness lifting itself above, / leaving a darkness in its wake” (Ceridwen)

Catherine draws on Ceridwen and other mythological figures such as Persephone and Lilith to subvert notions of power, shame and propriety. You do not need to know the full stories of these myths to understand that the speakers of these poems are speaking back, reclaiming narratives that have through history been denied to them.

I was interested in the pervasive feeling of unsettled-ness running through the work. Catherine knows how to work the darkness into us, like a splinter we worry at, while we read. There is an ambivalence to poems such as Witch Fingers that resists a neat interpretation;

broodish with thumb buckles, tucks of knuckles.
Touch me, neat-scratch me in ticking stripes,
pull me and push me down on my knees.

The sonic patterning is fidgety, jumpy, and the reference to “ticking stripes” has that kind of (dark) cottagecore feeling. Pretty things but with an undercurrent. Elsewhere, a “ditsy Liberty’s hanky” is used to pocket a rather frightening toad.

Victoria Spires, Seeing in the dark

Bennett’s book […] opens with a page of “acknowledgements & process notes” and a three-page list of “influences, references, & sources,” material usually held for the back of any collection. As Bennett’s “acknowledgments & process notes” includes:

Many of these are ‘found’ poems using text from various sources. We had originally set out to write about the divine shadow feminine but She will not be intellectualized, only embodied. As various illnesses took away my ability to use electronic devices & think & speak & write with coherency, She invited me to turn inward, dance deeper into Madness, & to use unconscious analog art-making methods such as cut-up, collage, & chance operations. &—although I don’t love this term, it smacks of the hospital, preferring instead to be divinely guided rather than operated upon—as adaptation.

The result is this rough beast before you.

Thank you for reading.

Assembled across three sections, each of which are constructed as extended lyric sequences that interconnect—“The Oxford Dodo vs. The Anatomical Venus,” “The New Bodily Ethos” and “Excavation of the Colossal Mother”—there is something interesting in how one might see Bennett’s prior engagement with the sonnet as attempting to find order within a particular kind of chaos. Through the use of found material set in collage, a different kind of order, Bennett works a lyric structure more overtly chaotic, or, more likely, one that allows for a coherence through the chaos itself. Working with, and not against, what Bennett’s own possibilities provide. And in which Bennett’s compositional approach evolves from composing a poem with one’s own material, to being able to discern where the poem might already exist, within that same material. The pastiche provides Bennett a way to think through their improvisations to achieve something entirely fresh. Or, as Bennett themlseves write, towards the end of the second section:

      I rise & become one
in new shapes

rob mclennan, Roxanna Bennett, We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us

It’s hard to think of a less fashionable English text than More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (except, I suppose, possibly Jonson’s Ars Poetica). More’s Dialogue endorses the most dreadful form of execution for unremitting heresy, and it’s written in a conversational form of English as it was spoken in the 1520s — there is no punctuation in the original apart from the virgule (/), which is more like a breath mark than modern punctuation. More than anything else, the dialogue is about speech — the power and danger and beauty of talking to one another — and about language as it is spoken, in the mouth and on the tongue, as it is chammed (‘chewed’, one of his favourite words) and corrupted and turned to wit or wisdom. It is one of the great love poems to the English language.

As he turns to consider the risks of translation into the vernacular, More makes a remarkable comparison between translation and the divine venture of the incarnation:

Whereof I would not, for my mind, withhold the profit that one good, devout unlearned layman might take by the reading [of scripture] — not for the harm that a hundred heretics would fall in by their own willful abusion; no more than our Saviour letted [refused] for the weal [benefit] of such as would be, with his grace, of his little chosen flock, to come into this world and be lapis offensionis, et petra scandali (1 Peter 2), ‘the stone of stumbling, and the stone of falling’ – and ruin to all the wilful wretches in the world beside.

Translating is risky and difficult; it never works perfectly and something is always lost. How far off it is! that state of grace. But on those rare occasions when a translation really works, how close to us it seems.

Victoria Moul, What is translation for?

Bill Lavender’s city of god is a kind of serial epic of our times that takes the form of a dialogue with St Augustine’s book of the same name in the translation of the Rev. Marcus Dods, M.A. In a Foreword, Lavender tells us that he started the work as a ‘spiritual exercise’, expecting City of God to be similar in nature to the saint’s Confessions. He was, however, to discover that it’s an entirely different kind of beast, ‘a viscous polemic delivered in a tone of cynical derision and condescending parody, reminiscent of the radical right-wing polemics we see in popular media today, like the (ostensibly) new movement of Christian Nationalism’.

To add to the effect, Lavender began the work on the 6th of January, 2021, with images of riot and pillage on the streets of Washington overlapping with similar scenes on the streets of 5th century Rome and the fact that Augustine was writing in Hippo, a city on the cusp of destruction. Unsurprisingly, the work that emerged folds a good deal of politics, current and historical, into its weave.

Billy Mills, city of god by Bill Lavender: A Review

In the six years I have been writing reviews, I have rarely encountered a collection of such epic ambition as Hadley-Jones Hoyles’ A Ministry of Light (The Candyman’s Trumpet, 2025). The collection focuses on three periods in the history of the ancient British territories we would now recognise as Northern England and Southern Scotland: 350 AD, 525 AD and 700 AD. These are eras of turmoil, upheaval and instability, in which competing tribes contest ownership and control of the land. Hoyles renders this world through anonymous period voices, in poems whose cadence, alliteration and use of kennings recall early medieval verse and lend those voices a persuasive sense of authenticity. Although the collection is rooted in the distant past, it offers a resonant meditation on colonisation and its effects on communities, making it a work with considerable relevance for contemporary readers.

The subjugation of any community is a violent act, and this is vividly realised in Hoyles’ visceral verse. This is not a world shaped by diplomacy or mediation: relationships between competing tribes are determined by unchecked violence. In Eel at the deli counter, the poet presents a landscape strewn with the bodies of the fallen: ‘Breastplates scattered/ like shards of crab/ some tasty meats are clinging/ though them crows it seems/ have had first dibs/ I still have the option/ of Roman cheek/ or sun-dried Thracian liver.’ The image of the eel relishing the prospect of feeding on human flesh is arrestingly horrific, recalling the traditional ballad The Twa Corbies, with its bleak meditation on death, abandonment and the indifference of nature. The eel becomes a recurring presence in the collection: an immortal, detached consciousness that comments on centuries of change while moving between river, sea and land, and between different historical moments. In this poem, Hoyles uses the eel to symbolise nature’s indifference to human conflict. Violence becomes little more than a local disturbance within a larger, enduring natural order; the eel’s appetite gives that indifference a memorably brutal form.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘A Ministry of Light’ by Hadley-James Hoyles

Decades of film noir explain
how he dreamed himself—

pure Forties Bogart,
dinner-jacket suave, a cool
hand gesturing smoke,

a smolder censing
rooms thick with urbanity.
Struck from the film script:

his wife, his daughters
cleaning bathrooms, tasting ash.

Maryann Corbett, For Father’s Day . . .

“Eating Air” is a celebration of food and loving family connections. Du Bois has deliberately chosen a conversational, colloquial vocabulary that mixes Malay words and customs with English as a reflection of the poems’ messages. The use of food is not to separate but to combine and explore the possibility of new flavours and new traditions. A successful blend of mixed heritages.

Emma Lee, “Eating Air” Suyin du Bois (Emma Press) – book review

Zoë Walkington’s Missing Person (smith | doorstop, available here) was my reading matter of choice on trains to and from Leeds on Saturday. It’s ground-breaking: a mash-up of poetry pamphlet and police procedural detective fiction, in which we encounter suspects, and police investigators in a case of child abduction from an underpass in York. The reader is invited to read the poems and solve the case. I’m glad to report that yours truly did indeed crack the case. (No wonder I bought a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes in the book sale at the Leeds Library.) The richness of Missing Person lies, though, in the details – I have to say ‘gritty’ details. ‘Black Gloves’ opens thus:

How much for these? I ask the bloke
behind the trestle, who looks like
he has just eaten his own young.
And he looks me up and down
and says Seven quid to you, and I say
I’ll give you three and he shakes his head
as though I’m asking him which of his
Alsatians he wants to have put down.

The (black) humour here will be recognisable to anyone who read Zoë’s marvellous I Hate to Be the One to Tell You This (smith | doorstop, 2023). I won’t spoil the surprise and cleverness of Missing Person any further.

Matthew Paul, Recent reading and an imminent reading

I have been saddened to learn of the death, early in May, of philosopher, writer, and professor at Penn State University — and a frequent contributor to this blog —  Emily Rolfe Grosholz.  (Here is a link to her informative obituary.)

In remembrance of Emily, here is the opening stanza of her poem “In Praise of Fractals” — posted in this blog at this link back in November, 2014.

Euclid’s geometry cannot describe,
nor Apollonius’, the shape of mountains,
puddles, clouds, peninsulas or trees.
Clouds are never spheres, 
nor mountains cones, nor Ponderosa pines;
bark is not smooth; and where the land and sea
so variously lie about each other
and lightly kiss, is no hyperbola.

from “In Praise of Fractals” by Emily Grosholz

This link leads to a list of citations of Emily Grosholz and her work in this blog.

JoAnne Growney, Sadness — Math Poet Emily Grosholz has passed . . .

In hindsight, Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) appears as literary runner-up in the Great American Poetry Pageant of the 19th century. The crown, of course, belongs to Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), with whom Hunt, exactly the same age, had played as a child and became reacquainted late in both their lives. But although Hunt’s reputation has waned, as it might have done even absent the overshadowing fact of Dickinson’s genius, her poems, with their quiet innovations on received forms and their complicated interest in perception, continue to reward a reader’s attention.

Like the late sonnet “February,” from her posthumously published Calendar of Sonnets, Today’s Poem concerns itself with the natural world, but also with the human impulse to impose meaning on that world and then to read the world through that meaning. “Poppies on the Wheat,” which appears in Jackson’s first collection, the 1870 Verses, gives us an Italian landscape, in which poppies grow among the summer-burnished wheat, but its real subject is human perception.

The farmer, with his prosaically “heavy feet,” looks at the growing wheat and sees his harvest. The present holds no particular beauty for him, except as it foretells the prosperous future. The poet-speaker, by contrast, envisions a future in which, stripped of all other nourishment, she may sustain herself on the remembered beauty of the poppies, which promise no outcome except the memory of their beauty.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Poppies on the Wheat

Like all good poems, […] ‘The Trees’ [by Philip Larkin] grows richer when it’s read in relation to other poems. Those relationships, in turn, makes the ‘horror’ both easier to recognise and to digest. In the original piece, I talked about Tennyson, because I was reading Tennyson. Henry spots T. S. Eliot, and as Victoria Moul points out, that grief / leaf rhyme is everywhere in English poetry. There are, as so often in High Windows, ‘“furtive memories of once having enjoyed some French symbolist poetry” (for which see Jeremy Noel-Tod here).

Then again, we don’t even need to look outside of the book. Perhaps the most obvious companion poem to ‘The Trees’, is ‘Cut Grass’, which is placed towards the end of High Windows. Both poems are made up of three four line stanzas. Both are about the seasons: ‘Cut Grass’ picks up in ‘young-leafed’ June where ‘The Trees’ left off in May).

In other respects, as David Rees notes, they couldn’t be more different. ‘The Trees’ is argumentative, where ‘Cut Grass’ is pure image:

Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Ann’s lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer’s pace.

This is so straightforwardly beautiful that I don’t think it needs much comment. But on we go all the same. There is an extended metaphor in the first few lines — grass as life and death — before the poem turn into a series of images, whiteness piled on whiteness. Larkin described the poem as ‘like music’ and said he heard a melody kicking in around line six. The chestnuts that were ‘unresting castles’ in May are simply flowers here. Nature isn’t threatening, perhaps because it’s dying.

‘Cut Grass’ is one of Larkin’s little Edens. The poem is steeped in an Englishness which is both nostalgic (those lovely ‘lost lanes’) and hierarchical: the lilac is bowing, the cow parsley has its folkish, regal name. In that sense, it is a deeply conservative poem, but the politics is itself in service of the poem’s deeper myth-making, which is more about coming to terms with ‘the changing of the seasons’ than submission to any kind of human order.

Jeremy Wikeley, The Trees, again

Poets have a very specific occupational hazard: the warped representation of ourselves that results from our shortfall in self-knowledge. The poem is, neutrally, the most self-conscious form of speech humans can make, and those shortfalls tend to manifest in the way our poems project our own neuroses. All poems are generally ‘revealing’ of their authors, and can be psychoanalysed. I love Sharon Olds, but I suspect her habit of relentless TMI disclosure and confession is partly there to shock her parents. In the late Cantos, I’d say Pound’s absurd who-is–the-smartest-poet–of-them-all shtick is manifesting a lifelong embarrassment over the extent of his own bluffed scholarship. I’m not sure the lad could really concentrate. There are drugs for that now. (Talking of drugs: Plath had no choice in her own terrible lie, that voice in her head which told her death was the only solution. She was unlucky to get landed with imipramine, an old tricyclic; it has the notorious side-effect of rapidly flipping the bipolar cycle from elation to psychotic plunge. It’s unbearably sad to think that today’s meds might have turned that voice off.)

To return to the subject of making it harder than it has to be – sue me, but I think late Geoffrey Hill suffers from an explicit projection of the class insecurity (British grammar school county scholarship variant) and terror of God that, despite all the alleged ‘jokes’, saw his compensating authoritarian fantasies run out of control. I think the idea was that we were supposed to be very afraid of him. (Late Hill gave full reign to his worst stylistic vice, namely melodrama: this had previously been reined in by the wise habit of slow composition, something his SSRIs had destroyed. One was pleased he was happier, as I was pleased to hear that X was now sober; but don’t force me to pretend it improved their poetry. Hill had always apparently pursued the dubious logic that to risk being easily understood was to risk simplicity, and to risk simplicity was to risk cliché, but his late work displayed a pretentiousness that could approach the inadvertently ‘Pythonesque’, in performances that forcefully implied that to fail to share his precise store of cultural signs – and therefore fail to follow the metonymic contraction this shared knowledge permitted – was to be a rube or a philistine. He was a quite extraordinary poet, but I saw few signs that he ever caught himself on. When I watch him read, I still see terrible, existential fear, and I want to hug the guy and tell him he’s not going to hell. Heaney was no less erudite, but he never bullied his readers to make himself feel better. Sorry; I’m only banging on about Hill as his best poetry means more to me with every passing year.)

OK: I think we can probably agree that this is more of an unethical parlour game. But ‘what is X getting wrong about herself?’ is as good a question to ask of a poet as of anyone else. It’s an especially good one for a poet to turn inwardly. We may all be liars, but we can’t tell an honest lie until we eliminate those we tell ourselves.

Don Paterson, POETS ARE LIARS

It’s officially publication day for White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology! Many thanks to my friend and co-editor, Megan Volpert, for going on this two-year adventure, Madville Publishing for agreeing to publish it, Donna Kile for incredible cover photography, and our stellar lineup of contributors. And, of course, to the original sister of the moon, Stevie Nicks, for inspiring us all.

If you couldn’t attend the virtual launch reading on May 26 – Stevie’s birthday! – hosted by the Georgia Center for the Book, you can watch it on YouTube by clicking the link below. [link]

Collin Kelley, Publication day and virtual launch video!

Excited to share that my new book – No Way Home – is now available on Amazon in the US and UK, in Paperback and Hardcover editions. Am sharing the links below for those who might want to check it out.

Can’t wait for you to read it! And to hear what you think of it!

US: https://www.amazon.com/No-Way-Home-Rajani-Radhakrishnan/dp/B0H3PKVBCC/

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H3PKVBCC/

It has been three long, anxious months from completed manuscript to this point. I think I am ready now to spend more time on the blogs – catch up on all that I’ve missed and start writing some new poems.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Now Available!

Some poets find it hard to accept a poor review. Luckily, I don’t suffer from this kind of thinness of skin. I’ve had plenty of negative reviews in the past for books, whether poetry or not, and have been called all kind of disparaging names for what I’ve written in newspapers, so I have long accepted that this stuff comes with the territory.

Of course I want people to appreciate and like what I write. If I didn’t think the poems were any good, I’d not have wanted them to be formed into a collection. A collection should reflect what you think is your best work at the time it was sent off for publication. But as I said, once I’ve committed them to print, while it does feel really good when someone likes them and says so, they’re subject to the free-for-all of opinion. Or, if it turns out to be the case, subject to an utter and brutal silence.

It’s no secret that I am part of no poetry ‘school’ or clique, nor do I want to be. I won’t be entering any competitions or hawking the book around ‘collections of the year’ awards because they don’t interest me. I suggest those who compile long-or short-lists of books look first for names they have heard of, then fill out the list, mostly from the more acceptable, longer-lasting, grant-aided publishers, and finally add in a few small press books as evidence of their open mind. While any publicity is good publicity, and if a book’s title is on a long-list, that does help with marketing, it seems a fairly tired model to me and the prize largely valueless. The poetry books I buy in a year have nothing to do with a poet’s reputation. I might open them in a shop, physical or online, be intrigued by a poem, and so buy it. Or in the past, have heard someone at a reading and have bought the book on the back of it. I won’t buy it, simply because it won this or that prize.

Bob Mee, IF YOU WOULD LIKE A REVIEW COPY OF POEMS IN THE KEY OF AARDVARK, PLEASE LET ME KNOW

From 1995 and my first book, to 2025, my seventh. Thirty years of putting poems together and hoping they make sense, make more of each other, at the very least offer a view of moments in time. 

This one has taken about seven years. Some have been quicker, but this book’s poems accumulated slowly and even at the last minute I was throwing some out. 

It starts with a quote about sewing, specifically mending. My life in sewing began at school when one of the first things we were taught was how to mend a sheet. That was the 1960s. Early days for consumerism. 

Fear and loss are also linked in this book. It’s impossible to write today without acknowledging the enormous environmental changes I’ve witnessed – the loss of stag beetles paired with news footage of the Vietnam war. The loss of flies paired with love. The loss of beetles paired with lifelong friendship. 

I write about money, trade, the price of meteorites. And then there are attitudes towards older women, so ageing is another topic that feeds into poems about fear and loss. In one poem I demolish a desk, in another I am cursed, in another I place an older woman at the centre of the language of money. 

None of my books have been tightly themed but tend towards the surreal. I want to understand, celebrate, dive deep into human interaction and attempt to expand specific moments with a different language to that of everyday conversation. But I hope a reader will recognise the language of everyday in my poems, as well as the assonance, rhymes, rhythms that may not be attached to specific forms, but which give it a different tone. 

In the last section of the book, Estuary, the poems come from the fluctuating self who is travelling between two places, the place where you might encounter a saint, a preacher, a memory of childhood, where you might, like a cat, be led by a sense of home, navigate by lullaby. Where you might find yourself in hiding for a night and a day and make the most of it. The book starts with mending, ‘the sea rebuilding reefs’ and ends ‘at the mouth of a river/ with water birds’. Always the sea, and that’s the influence of my city caught between a pebble beach and rolling chalk downland. 

Making the Wedding Dress is available from Salt Publishing for £10.99

Jackie Wills, A life of mending

The work has changed over the years, but every time I think something new feels vastly different, on re-read, it is still very much the same. I don’t hate this–if anything I’ve gotten cleaner, leaner, and meaner in poems. the language is more rhythmic and concise than what I was writing a decade ago. Two decades ago. Three decades ago, I was just finishing up my undergrad degree and writing terrible rhyming poems, so getting toward something good takes time.  

While I would say many of the same obsessions that fueled book number one have similarly fueled this latest book which I am putting the very final touches on as we speak,  I think I am doing them better justice. More sure-footed and intentional than the girl who used to throw things at the wall and see what would stick. But then there are also how the obsessions wax and wane. They feel more fictionalized now, with the series in MKK almost feeling like small stories and worlds placed alongside each other in the whole of the book. The NOLA vampire poems, the Bluebeard sequence, the governess poems. There were definitely books that felt like there was more of me, personally, in them–MAJOR CHARACTERS…felt very much like this. As did FEED and RUINPORN, though there may be the rather obvious reasons for this–both were bread out of a time when I was losing my parents, restructuring my life, and undergoing a lot of strangeness in the world. But I suppose just because the poems are about other people, that doesn’t mean I am not in there, rattling around like a rock in the shoe. 

And maybe, my thoughts on mid-careerness are not about the writing at all.  Things have changed greatly in the past decade on how I look at my work and strive to connect to readers. To find the best way to situate myself and my work in a way that seems right, even if it is not the usual, well-trodden path. What I’ve found there is immensely helpful when it comes to charting paths in new mediums. To look at the scope of the playing field and be able to decide what works for me, what doesn’t. What I want and what is not all that important. It’s a better state to feeling out the world in, and ill probably be far more satisfying than the years I spent tortuously pondering what kind of poet I wanted to be, what were the rules and punishments for disobeying them. It’s actually very freeing. 

Kristy Bowen, dispatches from midcareer poeting

My Plan A was to be a university professor with tenure. In California, when you teach at a university, you don’t wear elbow patches; you wear jeans and blazers. My father, whom I only met briefly, wore those patches, smoked a pipe. For real? I thought. I wanted to become one of those West Coast-type jeans-and-blazer professors. That was Plan A. But it didn’t happen. Maybe in the future. But I have never taught at USC or any of the UCs, outside of extension classes.

We recently published an author who teaches at a public university in California and makes $310,000 a year. I thought, That could be me. My family would be living well. I would have a nice house/kayak/dog/car, take vacations like la-di-da. I always feel like when you have more money, it’s easy to lean into saying smart things because you don’t have panic in your throat, and that’s a good thing. I can picture myself with a well-compensated teaching job, waxing eloquent.

Instead, I’m on Plan B.

Plan B is publishing. Making a choice to jump headfirst into instability, risk, and recklessness. People keep asking me what I’ll do if saving Red Hen doesn’t work, as if there is a Plan C. I think, Come on, these plans don’t run to Z. There’s just Plan A and Plan B.

I’ve thought about it, sure. I could live in Sri Lanka or Vietnam on five hundred a month, but that is not the plan and wouldn’t fulfill me. Failure is not in our future.

I have come to the conclusion that it’s also healthy to say, I can’t make it without help. Every single person who has stepped up to say I am here to help you, we are finding a way to honor their names. We want to remember who got us through this crisis. We want to remember that we have friends. That we are not alone.

Kate Gale, Walking Through the Moon Door

I’m lucky enough to have my own rowing machine, which we keep on our balcony during the summer months. The balcony looks out over two tall oak trees, leaning towards each other like old friends. As I row I watch squirrels chasing each other through the trees, leaping insouciantly from branch to branch to the accompaniment of a symphony of birdsong.

Meanwhile the display screen in front of me indicates the distance I’ve rowed, the time I’ve taken, my pace, stroke rate and even my heartbeat. At any instant I have a measure of my performance. 

Often I count along with the strokes, particularly when I am pushing myself towards the end of a workout. When I go to the gym I count too, lifting weights in sets of six or eight, and noting the number of breaths for which I can hold plank position.

This has led me to muse upon how numbers underlie our activities: whether we are counting rowing strokes, football goals, or tricks in a game of bridge; recording the distance we’ve cycled or driven; monitoring blood pressure; or marking birthdays on a calendar. We count the syllables in a haiku, the metrical feet in a pentameter, the notes in a musical scale. 

We (mostly) think in words or images, but numbers – in all their glorious variations, as sequences or patterns or absolute values – provide the unobtrusive ostinato of our lives.

I row. I watch squirrels and numbers, listen to birdsong, count strokes, and muse.  Sometimes my musings evolve into a poem.

Marian Christie, Musings

There were swifts over the rooftops last night — a low, screaming party of them, six or seven, scything the air above the lane in that way they have, as if the evening were a thing to be cut into ribbons. I stood at the gate and watched until the light went. They had come up from the south of the town, over the orchard, and they turned at the church and came back, and turned again, screaming the whole time, that high thin sound that is less a song than a kind of friction. I have been waiting for them since the first week of May, when one arrived and then was gone, and I half-thought I had imagined it. Now there is a colony of them, and the evenings have their proper noise. […]

A swift does not land. Not on the ground, not in a tree, not on a wire like the swallows. Once a young swift leaves the nest it may stay airborne for two or three years before it ever touches anything — feeding on the wing, drinking on the wing, gathering nest material on the wing, sleeping, it is thought, on the wing, climbing to a great height at dusk and dozing in slow circles through the dark. It mates in the air. By the time it first comes to rest, in the eaves of some building it has chosen, it has flown a distance that would have carried it several times round the world. We share our houses with an animal that is, in almost every sense that matters, made of departure.

And it is leaving us. The swift is on the red list now — the most serious category of conservation concern in Britain. The numbers have fallen by better than half in a generation, partly because the insects have thinned, partly because we have tidied and sealed and renovated away the small dark gaps under the roofline that they need. A bird that asks of us only a hole the size of a fist, and gives back the whole high theatre of a summer evening, is being quietly evicted by our improvements. I think about this when I watch them. The impermanence is not only in their season. It is in their tenure. […]

I have spent a fair part of these last years learning, slowly and against my inclination, not to grasp at things that are leaving. It does not come naturally to me. My instinct, when something good is plainly temporary, is to start grieving it while it is still here — to spoil the present arrival with the rehearsed loss. The swifts will not let me do that. They are too fast, too loud, too entirely in their six weeks of August-bound summer for any of that elegiac nonsense. They insist on the evening they are actually in.

That, I think, is what the solstice has to teach as well, if we will let the longest day be what it is rather than what we wish it were. The light is already turning. It has been turning, in fact, since before the swifts arrived; it will go on turning while they fly south. None of that is a reason to stand at the gate in mourning. It is a reason to stand at the gate. To watch the birds cut the evening into ribbons for as long as the evening lasts, and then to go in, and to let them go when their night comes, knowing they will lift off without ceremony and that the eaves will be silent by September.

Adam Cairns, The longest day

short pilgrimage…
some sun
in the side yard

Tom Clausen, illumination

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

This week: the prow of the house, swampy winged women, a parking space for dreams, rubbish dumps and petrol pumps, and much more. Enjoy.

One morning last week I woke abruptly from a dream about Horace’s ode to a wine-jar, Odes 3.21, which begins o nata mecum consule Manlio (“o female-thing born with me when Manlius was consul, i.e. in 65 BC”). In the dream, the first line was the actual first line but the following three were some kind of made-up dream-Latin, though in alcaics of course, like the original.

Horace’s odes are almost all addressed to people. There are very few to non-human entities: just this one, 1.32 (the poet addressing his own lyre) and 3.13 (to the Bandusian spring). Odes 3.21 is accordingly quite often treated as a kind of comedy-ode or even a send-up of one, and this isn’t wrong, exactly: it obviously is meant to be humourous and perhaps quite affectionate. But thinking of it as a joke is not a very good guide to the experience of the poem either, because as so often in Horatian lyric, the poem ends up somewhere very different from where it started. If it begins as a kind of send-up of a hymn and a joke about Horace’s tendency to write poems about boozy parties, it ends as an actual hymn, with one of the most mysteriously beautiful closing lines in all of Horace.

Victoria Moul, O gentle tile

It was bliss. The first time this year lying on a hammock in my backyard, under tall trees, the green-filtered flickering light and Medieval music in delicious fifths on decidedly 21^st century earbuds. Then I stopped the music and listened to the birds. Our yard is surrounded by trees and is near a ravine so we have many birds and many varieties. As I was listening, I was thinking about Bernie Krause’s concepts related to soundscapes and biophony and especially the acoustic adaptation hypothesis and the niche hypothesis, that is where creatures carve out their own acoustic space in a soundscape, usually through occupying a particular frequency niche. So, not only what are the sounds of birds, but how do different birds occupy a soundscape together.

I’ve always loved seemingly uncoordinated sounds from crowds. So, rather than the coordinated homophony of church choirs, the heterophonic and more anarchic traditional chanting (including muttering) of the synagogue congregation. The aggregate sound of a party or really any large human group just doing their thing. The many intertwined voices overlapping, cancelling each other out, winding around each other, changing depending on position and depending on the pitch and timbre of the voices, occupying different acoustic niches.

All of this inspired me to rise from the hammock and create a setting of a poem, and specifically something that I’ve wanted to experiment more with: multiple versions of the same voice but presented in various overlapping ways so the words wash over you. Do you absorb the words and their meaning by osmosis? What if one voice was slightly louder? Does time pass differently as the various word repeat, echo or anticipate each other? What does it do to the language part of the brain as opposed to the music or environmental listening part of the brain?

Gary Barwin, Everyone talking and singing at the same time

This week I’ve been flying solo, a poetry reading in Rome at Keats-Shelley House, an award ceremony and a launch for an underground poetry pamphlet series. I booked an apartment and spent most of my fee on a view across the Eternal City, the dome of St Peter’s a stone’s throw from the terrace. This is not a step up. I’ll still have nothing in my pockets when I come home. But this, this I tell myself, is poetry. You don’t get to take views home with you. They remain in the places where poetry goes.

My exuberance was perhaps due to my Instagram feed that is, like everyone else’s, notoriously populated with ‘my-life-is-better-than-yours’ views. In the last weeks it has been hijacked by writers from the Hay Festival, novelists mainly, not discussing ideas, not getting into it, not getting deeply down into it but bragging, mostly bragging about the idyllic locations where they’ve written their latest best sellers.

“I spent a delightful month in Tuscany,” says Sheila De Vinity, author of the A Millpond at Marlborough (Chatsworth & Grimstone) a W.H.Smith recommendation or David Henchman-Trout addressing a sold out crowd in a tent, “I find the pace of Dorset just suits my writing,” and Daphne Soames who you’ll probably know from All Our Mothers’ Sons saying with a contrived world weariness, “Each year my publisher banishes me to a villa in Umbria and tells me not to come home until I’m done.”

Fuck you, I think, fuck you, I shout at my phone. And then I book a fancy apartment in Rome. Because I want to be like them, the writers, the serious writers who don’t seem to have a view on anything, who only seem to have a nice view over something.

Jan Noble, What do you do with a view?

One of Richard Wilbur’s best known poems, “The Writer,” begins in his daughter’s room “at the prow of the house / where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden. . . ” For years I thought I knew what that meant, “the prow of the house.” Wilbur’s biographers, who have located the very house and the very room, tell me I am not quite correct, but I hold to my mental image. I live in a house with a prow, and a neighborhood full of such houses. The years I’ve spent writing poetry have made clear to me the hold that these streets and these houses have on my imagination. In the normal order of things, supposing my work is remembered, it might be years before some critic noticed its rootedness in a place. I have the chutzpah to talk about it myself because the place is already beginning to disappear.

In architectural terms, my “prow” is a dormer, projecting from the roof-plane at the front of the house. A gable end with a prominent window can have the same visual effect. On the streets I inhabit, a hundred such dormers and gables jut into the sea of society. In each the containment of the family puts its public face toward the street, propriety and stature on view. These are Edwardian and even Victorian houses, creaky with age but spacious, with dormers that often extend from third stories, looking into the crowns of mature trees. In times past, high windows on these streets would have been tossed with elm; the dying elms gave place to ash trees, now dying in their turn and being more thoughtfully replaced with varied species. Our own tossing is done by maples.

In spiritual terms—that is, from its interior—a dormer of this kind is a place of solitude and protection. As its etymology declares, it’s often a place to sleep. The sloping walls created by the main roof, or by the dormer itself, lean in as if to embrace the inhabitant: sleeping child, daydreaming teenager, adult engrossed in some attic-exiled craft.

Maryann Corbett, Houses, Neighborhoods, Poems

When I arrived, a woman was sitting in the quiet at a side table in front of a laptop, looking pensive over the keyboard. Two people were setting up a table of books for sale. One by one people drifted in, slightly disheveled, many, some looking halt and infirm, then others arriving in twos and threes, more nimble, clutching bags and notebooks, chattering, some, others sitting quietly, men, more women, mostly middle aged and above, some scattered younger folks, one group looked like a parent and an adult child or two. Sneakers, light jackets against the rain shower, some cool glasses here and there. A writers festival, the mountains of northern New York State. I spoke to someone from Vermont, a woman from Texas visiting a daughter. That family I saw turned out to be locals. An old friend was there with his son, having traveled in from two other parts of the north to meet there. Fiction, mystery, romance, memoir, poetry, fantasy, plays, screenplays — all the minds roiling with ideas and the desire to write. In Ukraine, according to the article, the same, but younger, many wearing army fatigues, chatter, hugs, periodic evacuations because of the possibility of incoming missiles, all clutching bags of books, minds full of stories. Physicists are positing that all reality is relational, not material. We are many things, we problematic human species, but we are word lovers, tellers of tales, avid listeners, against odds of geography, war, life’s inherent limitations, large and small, grievous and petty. I am moved by this.

Marilyn McCabe, & time works it out

There’s something powerful about gathering in a room with other people to work on our writing together. There were four of us in the library yesterday, and another six online, and for an hour, all of us were working in silence, except for the scribbling of my pen and the tapping of their keyboards. It’s a pleasantly organic, embodied experience, writing like this; it reminds me of the old days in the newsroom when six or twelve of us were huddled around a large table in one room, working, together. Except in the writing circle, none of us are on deadline, and we’re all there just to support one another in our various writing projects. I noticed, at the end of that hour, that my heart rate had slowed and my anxiety levels were lower.

Dylan Tweney, Five things for June 4

Yeah, I know, Wile E. Coyote isn’t saintly, but all those years ago, watching Saturday morning Looney Tunes, young me empathized with him way more than with the smug, always-victorious Roadrunner. I hereby salute everyone giving creative chase this summer, painting tunnels on rocks, building devious literary contraptions to trap a fleeting spirit, even knowing we’ll take a lot of canyon falls.

I recently revised a brief lyric essay starring Wile E. and Krazy Kat and placed it under submission, along with a lot of poems, as I hunt out which magazines are open during these dog days (Virginia’s humidity blanket has settled on my valley). Oh, Ploughshares, how I’ve tried and tried to snag your attention almost every June for decades now: will I ever catch you? Some of my poetry submissions from earlier this spring landed well, thanks to editors at The Common, Ecotone, and SWWIM Every Day. Thanks, as well, to a few editors for sending me encouraging notes with their rejections. The longer I trudge through the desert, the more I appreciate that kindness.

Lesley Wheeler, Wile E. Coyote, patron saint

Saturday was reading through poems and checking I’m happy they’re ready, then making two lists: one of poems and one of places to send them. I also nominally suggested which poems I might send where but of course I changed this when it actually came to sending the subs (not sure if these were actually good changes, but it’s too late now!). Then the actual subs were split over Sunday and Monday, plus one on Friday night after work. I split them up cos it takes me a long time, I struggle to decide what to send where, and to stay on task, and I have to do a lot of checking to make sure I’ve included/omitted all the things on the instructions; trying to send too many in one day is overwhelming and ends up not happening. […]

It’s time consuming, right, and a bit of a headache. Even with doing all my writing in a 12 point standard font and basic formatting (excluding concrete poems obvs) I still have to read back through and double check all the formatting specs cos they’re slightly different across a lot of places.

Then if it’s a comp you have to make sure your name isn’t on it… some want page numbers in a particular place… some are specific about what they want in the file name… some want you to include a line count in the top right or the top left… some specify spacing…

Some want a separate entry form attached along with your submission, while my favourite (joking, obviously) want you to fill out their online form, make payment through a separate portal, and then email your poems along with transaction/receipt numbers and other specified information in the body of the email. Trying to get all these separate points correct as a neurodivergent is – to put it mildly – absolutely fucking brain-melty.

Rachael Hill, SUBMISSIONS – insert facepalm icon here –

I’m a bit like a hermit crab right now, quietly working on my new books. Trying to make time to stare at big skies, take deep breaths, dream big dreams and patiently birth new worlds. 

Salena Godden, Books & Festivals: Summer 2026

My father is passing
through these last days
like a ghost
he lies in
the nursing home bed
while finite iterations
of him skulk their way
toward the grave.

I am stuck in time
mulling over the past
as though I am
polishing rocks in
my mouth.

Rebecca Cook, Edit A Poem With Me

How can we tell, the ones who will be here only briefly. Is it the eyes, the smile through the unannounced pain. Is it the wandering. Where did you sleep most nights? In a poem for you I apologised, ‘I never knew your address’.

Is it the ones who pass us by like a flash, like a light, brightly. Cast deep into the back of our minds. At one point we all needed a break. Some of us were settling down, as they say. I last saw you from the 38 bus.

All of this in the one single poem I have ever written for you.

Luciana Francis, Map of Our Lives

We went to a different part of the North Carolina mountains, near Boone.  We were there for the wedding of my spouse’s sister’s oldest child.  The wedding was beautiful, of course, but there were other beautiful moments:

–On Monday night, we went to Parallel Brewing in Boone for a rehearsal dinner/party.  Do they brew beer?  I don’t know.  Did I taste it?  No.  I wanted wine to go with the pizza.  Was any of the wine memorable enough to make note of what it was?  No.

–I was much more interested in Huzzah Books, which shares the building with Parallel Brewing.  We could go back and forth, which made the party better–more space.

–I also loved lingering among the books, which seemed to be used books from decades when publishers were more serious about publishing.  I found a book of “best new poetry” published in 1960 or so.  The names were fairly familiar and all male, except for Adrienne Rich.

–One of our younger family members (21 or so) was thrilled to find a book by Jane Kenyon.  I was thrilled that she was thrilled.

–We didn’t do more in Boone.  We spent most of our time visiting with family members on the front porches of our cabins.  If it had been clearer weather, we’d have had a glorious view.

–I did love seeing the fog/mist move across the land, only to vanish.  Once again, I thought about how humans might come to believe in ghosts.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Memory Whisps from Last Week’s Travel to the High Country of NC

The author event is good, as it is every year. It’s one of those jobs that I look forward to. I take 1-2-1s with PhD and MA students, helping them in their publication journeys, boosting confidences. In between events I take some time to wander into York looking for a building I’ve heard about but never seen. I walk up and down the street several times until I finally find it – the oldest house in York, tucked down an alley way called Trembling Madness Apartments.

The passageway leads to a courtyard. Within the courtyard are the ruins. An ancient window looks out into the brickwork of the wall behind it, floor joists jut from the wall, holding up air. This is the sort of ruin I like – the juxtaposition of it; the bins against the masonry, the fag ends next to the romance of a 12^th century window trailing ivy like a fairytale. I stand for a while undoing the modern to reach the past, reducing the surrounding buildings to nothing, the minster back to its original wooden structure, the window back to a view of the river, the fields. The woman in my novel would have known this place as a ruin too. It’s possible she walked here. I feel her feet in my feet, as if the building is a pin that sticks us together, holding us in one space.

As I leave, an American couple is talking a photo of the alleyway with its comical name. I apologise for spoiling the picture, and the lady tells me I suit the name perfectly and I laugh and embrace it: I am trembling madness, I am swirling between jobs, I am writer, I am carer, I am menopause, I am slipping between worlds and finding a way back to myself, and I’ve been doing that forever.

Wendy Pratt, Trembling Madness

Recently, I found myself in the middle seat on a turbulent flight, barely able to move without bumping into my seatmates.

You may know that feeling of foreboding that arrives out of nowhere. I can go months without it, and then, somehow, an accumulation of stresses tips into dread.

Anxiety has endless inventive momentum. No wonder so many writers seem to know it intimately.

So, what did I do to calm my body and mind? I used the in-flight Wi-Fi to look up poems about anxiety.

I’d love to hear which poems resonated most with your experience. And if there’s one I missed, please share it in the comments.

Maya C. Popa, The Poetry of Anxiety

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?

Writers are deep observers; I think that quality of being a witness and then writing it is a vital check in society. I’m a yoga teacher and practitioner, and the yoga practice also requires contemplative awareness. I do my best to honor what practicing yoga actually means; according to The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: yogash chitta vritti nirodhah, essentially translates as “yoga is the quieting of all the changing states of the mind.” The primary purpose of this practice is to clear the lens to be in a state of heightened clarity at the present moment. What better conditions exist for poems to emerge than from the place of sheer presence?

8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

ESSENTIAL. The right set of objective eyes, (or a few of them), is essential to crafting and refining poems when the poems are ready for that stage of work. This is part of the journey is a wonderful opportunity for self-inquiry, because it allows me to explore my relationship with ego, want, and attachment. Why am I clinging to this couplet? What makes this image so damn precious to me? What happens if I let go and allow the space for possibility beyond what I originally imagined?

9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Last year, I had the opportunity to study with Ellen Bass on her Truth & Beauty retreat in Santa Cruz with Marie Howe. When I was concerned about about what the poem was uncovering about the person and situation it was based on and feeling guilty about putting all of the mess into the poem, she told me, “Give the poem what it needs.” It was such a declarative moment of wisdom. You can go back after and do all the things to care for the humans who’ve inspired the pieces or think about how the audience will meet the piece, but as the poem is coming to life, don’t hold back. When I head into tough territory around family of origin work, I hear this reminder and charge forward, emboldened and reminded to meet the poem where it is and tend to its needs.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Emily Hyland (rob mclennan)

I don’t write poetry to get reviews or validation but all the same it’s nice when you find out someone likes what you do.

The first written response to my collection Poems In The Key Of Aardvark has appeared on amazon (from a verified sale, it says). So I will, quite shamelessly, quote in full:

“Poetry that reads like a mind passed through a shredder, then carefully reassembled by touch: fragmented, intimate, and full of strange little truths that only reveal themselves when you stop trying to read them normally. Difficult to put this one down.”

I like the idea of my mind passing through a shredder. Seems fair.

And sales are trundling along. Mostly, as far as I can tell, to people who aren’t poets. So far, so good.

Bob Mee, FIRST REVIEW OF POEMS IN THE KEY OF AARDVARK

Sitting down with a copy of Bob Mee’s magnificent Poems In the Key of Aardvark is like tackling a giant trifle with a tiny teaspoon. There’s a lot if it. Gobbled at once, you’ll be sick from here to Christmas. But take your time and you’ll be amply rewarded.

It’s a full fifteen years since Bob’s last outing: The Maker of Glass Eyes, and there’s a sense of making up for lost time – both in the urgency and sheer volume of this new collection.

Some of this work is familiar from the blogosphere, where early versions were first aired. But for me, the poems are more impressive on the page, where print rewards the courage of their convictions.  

When you have a writer as prolific and effortlessly inventive as Bob, it’s easy to miss lines – and sometimes whole poems – that truly resonate and sing.

The trouble is, he can do everything. His trick is accessibility; he’ll draw you in with a casual invitation; sometimes a throwaway line, then lead you somewhere totally unexpected.  

Christopher James, Stop making sense – a review of Poems In the Key of Aardvark by Bob Mee

Or many villages. Whole cities. And today, I want to thank them all.

My brother, Harsha, Vani, and Namratha Varadharajan – for reading the manuscript and giving me the courage to take the next step. And, with Madhuri Katti and Prithvi – for being massive sounding boards as the publishing process almost broke my resolve at every step.

My fellow-poets on WordPress and Blogger – for reading the poems when I posted them in 2022-23. You kept me going for a whole year as the series evolved. I went back several times to read your comments and reviews, when I was drowning in imposter syndrome and self-doubt. And especially Rosemary Nissen-Wade – for the idea, the inspiration and the friend that she is.

Folks at Atta Galatta, one of Bangalore’s premier indie bookstores – for letting me write and edit and sulk at one of their tables, whenever I needed a place away from home. And the good people I meet there – for all the positive energy and support.

Fellow Substackers – for your kind words of support. It encouraged me to bring new poems from here into the book.

And those who have lived through the things in the book with me, all these long years – for quietly providing a shoulder or a willing ear or an anchor, whenever I needed it. You know who you are. This one is for you.

For too long, this book has been unwilling to step out into the world. But here it is now. NWH is out on Amazon India . It will take a few more days for the international listings.

‘No Way Home’ is the dark scab on an old wound. I hope you will welcome it gently into your homes.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Because it takes a village

I was editing the final version of the upcoming collection of poems and thinking about what holds the book together as a whole. Some of it a twisted version of matrimony and domesticity, but also in some ways, the idea of transformation and monstrosity, which is a place I have visited before obviously with previous books and series, but seems important to take into account with this manuscript in particular. Early American vampires. Murdering governesses. Swampy winged women, and, of course, Bluebeard and his wife (and hidden room full of corpses of brides.) Not that I haven’t written about monstrous women before, though they are usually less malicious. The Renaissance dog-girl of PELT, the sideshow women of GIRL SHOW and EXOTICA. The strangeness of the SWALLOW poems and the female body. These women have a bit more bite behind them. A bit more violence.

Kristy Bowen, women and monstrosity

Having had some time alone at home over the past several days, I watched a lot of bad costume television (Bridgerton Season 4), made progress on a new imaginary landscape painting, pulled a lot of weeds, and spent time combing through my computer files to see how many poems I consider ready to submit or have been published yet uncollected in a book. I figured I’d have twenty or thirty.

Reader, I have one hundred and seven.

How did this happen? When the hell over the past several years have I written over a hundred poems that were not in my last two books?

Donna Vorreyer, Aliens, MRIs, Ouija Boards, Outer Space, and Wild Carrots

We’ve all likely been to a show where no one came. In fact, some of my most wonderfully memorable shows as an attendee have been exactly that—such as seeing one of my favorite bands, Jucifer, perform at the Double Door (RIP) in Chicago to a crowd of less than 10, their wall of amps still reverberating so loud that they knocked over my husband’s beer. And for those of us who are poets and writers, we’ve all likely been on that awkward side of the microphone, staring into a room of just a few good friends or fellow readers, but playing and playing (or reading and reading) just the same.

It can sometimes be so hard to explain this to the authors I work with as a publicist. Just because a bookstore is hosting an event for you doesn’t mean people—particularly people who don’t know you—will come. And just because people come to an event, it does not mean they will buy books. Events are rarely, if ever, about sales. You will not sell enough books to pay for your time and travel (says she who is saving all her tour receipts as a tax deduction for her unprofitable writerly “business”)—even celebrity author tours aren’t known to break even (particularly those that require stylists and handlers and make-up artists).

So, why do we it? Why do we, even at Black Ocean, strongly encourage our authors to team up and get out there?

There is no substitute for the author-in-person—hearing their voice, seeing and feeling why the work matters to them, and having the opportunity to engage with the ideas in the moment, in the flesh. This is not just true of poetry (which one could argue should always be read aloud and has its origins in performance) but of serious nonfiction as well. A scholar’s true enthusiasm for their subject and their research can be infectious.

Events are about visibility and profile raising. Even those who live in a different city or can’t attend the event may see something about it on social or in a newsletter. It puts the book and author into the ether. Those mentions build and compound. A good reading may lead to a review or an interview. It may lead to word-of-mouth recommendations. Or an invite to speak to a class. It may even lead to book sales you don’t see online or a library request.

They are also worth doing just because they are fun. For me, they’ve provided the wonderful opportunity to hang with friends (thank you, Nate Hoks, for the road trip conversation to/from Iowa City), read with writers whose work I love but had never heard aloud before (thank you, Tessa Bolsover, Sadie Dupuis, Sara Wainscott, Jordan Windholz, and Anna Zumbahlen), and to make new friends and support writers and publishers I admire (thank you, Teresa Dzieglewicz and Naoko Fujimoto​).

Carrie Olivia Adams, Readings & Book Events: Do They Matter?

As I move ever deeper into the third print run of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, I find myself reflecting more and more on the complete irrelevance and absolute significance of sales figures.

Sales are completely irrelevant to me as an objective or target, but on the other hand their growth brings with it an accumulation of readers, who are by far the most important part of my whole creative process. Without a reader’s enjoyment, my poems would seem self-indulgent.

Then there’s the fact that no favour trading or box ticking are involved in someone’s decision to sit down with a collection, and engage with it. The gaining of a reader is by far the greatest award that a poet can win.

I’ve come to believe that slow-burning word of mouth is the most solid, long-lasting way to build a reputation as a poet. Do you agree…?

Matthew Stewart, An accumulation of readers

San Francisco poet Beau Beausoleil has collaborated with Sebastopol artist Tamsin Spencer Smith in this striking volume published on 24th March this year by FMSBW Press. Smith’s bold and expressive abstract paintings face Beausoleil’s poems of love and rage, observation and empathy, across each two-page spread.

Many of the poems are tall and slender, like the trees that hold the sky in place and entwine their roots … nourish each other setting an example of care and co-operation to our divided human society. Beausoleil’s California is a place where night-ships carry darkness under starlight, and urban landscapes interact with a crumbling coastline – a parking space for dreams. The poet’s eye is drawn to wandering streets and … fog-filled trees, highway signs and the scent of the ocean. The poems are sustained by love and fuelled by a fierce grief at human cruelty and destruction.

Ama Bolton, A new book from Beau Beausoleil

I’ve finally got round to cutting the grass today as we’d been doing No Mow May (How deliberate that was is up for debate), but between that and the state of our new allotment (It’s official now…we have the key and have joined the WhatsApp Group for it…) it’s been a week for wrestling with nature, so it was great timing to finish my reading of Graeme Richardson’s debut collection, Dirt Rich, this week.

Dirt Rich followed his New Walk Editions pamphlet, Last of the Coalmine Cowboys, pretty quickly, that being published in 2024. And there’s often a fear with that sort of turnaround that it has been rushed, but a) I’m not going to review a reviewer (who reviews the reviews of a reviewer, etc?) and b) while the collection contains all but 3 of the poems from LotCC, I think this is more a case of accretion of material over time.

Anyhoo, more importantly, I enjoyed it.

Mat Riches, Hardstanding for the bier

In Thistle Kate Maxwell turns a compassionate focus on daily interactions and familiar scenarios. Her poems don’t judge. She illustrates how vital acts of empathy and humanity are in healing connections with others and how to stop short of overdoing it and becoming overwhelmed. Readers are invited to see a thistle not as a prickly weed, but a sign of endurance and resilience. Something that grew where it wasn’t invited but made the best of a hostile environment nonetheless.

Emma Lee, “Thistle” Kate Maxwell (Recent Work Press) – book review

The full-length poetry debut by Edmonton-based poet, artist, educator, translator and researcher Adriana Oniță is Descântec for my Split Tongue: poems (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2026), a collection of poems that sits amid and between two languages and cultures, even as the author feels her Romanian slip slowly away. “I should have begun by saying / that I lost my mother tongue.” begins the poem “LIMBA MATERNĂ,” early on in the collection, “I know what you are thinking. / How can you lose something / that lives inside of you, unless / you chose to live languageless? // Forgive me, loss never occurs / on purpose. Think of the way / you lose a loved one, or faith.” Her poems speak of a loss still in-progress, with almost a call-and-response element to a number of these poems: offering a line in Romanian that follows in English translation, almost as a kind of reclamation of her mother tongue, but one that sits aside this more recent English comprehension. The poems work to reclaim and, perhaps, to recontextualize, offering alongside this life built fresh in Canada’s prairies. As the poem “PENTRU A FACE ŞI DESFACE / FOR DOING AND UNDOING” writes:

Fă rai din ce ai.
Make heaven from what you’ve got. 

Grăbeşte-te încet.
Hurry slowly. 

Am carat apă la fântână.
I carried water to the well.

The way her two languages, her translations, are set against each other, it suggests not simply to replicate or repeat in English, but composed and translated in a way attempting to shape and articulate that space where both Romanian and English might comfortably meet, within the comfort of her own divided imagination, perhaps. Accompanied by full-colour collages, including those built with photographs from the family archive, Oniță writes to articulate, to claim, to re-claim, setting up a new foundation from which to finally build. I am curious to see what might follow.

rob mclennan, Adriana Oniță, Descântec for my Split Tongue: poems

In Australia his literary reputation, like the man himself, was big enough to block the sun. But to the poets who grew up in Les Murray’s shadow, it was a reputation also composed of conservatism, royalism and patriarchalism. And so, as a young woman coming of age at the University of Technology in Sydney – the epicentre of a metropolitan, sloganeering conformity in the late 80s and early 90s – I deliberately turned away from Murray and his undeniable talent and originality.

Some of my reticence was understandable. Australia still had a frontier, masculine culture, and at first glance Murray’s poems appeared to inhabit that tradition too comfortably. There wasn’t much there for a young feminist to easily identify with. My mentor, Dorothy Porter, was chippy and dismissive of him, and I found it easy to fall in with her point of view.

Here’s another reason for my initial disdain: Murray was the same age as my father, and from a similar background. Working class and a Catholic convert. I was keen to code myself differently at university: sophisticated, worldly, adventurously atheist. I cringe when I think about that younger self.

But as I got older, I realised that Murray was the real thing, and far and away the most talented and original poet Australia has ever produced. When I moved to a rural property three hundred miles north of Murray’s native Nabiac to raise my young son I gained a different perspective on the rhythm of life in a farming community, and a new respect for Murray’s exploration of masculinity, of the Oz cultural cringe, of the harsh realities of Australia’s violent pioneering past – and how its brutality has affected both incomers and indigenous people. His reportage of what it meant to be a motherless working-class boy bullied at school with only a distant and haunted father to watch over him is deeply moving. […]

I remain captivated by his “Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” – an early attempt to create dialogue between Aboriginal and western ballad traditions, at a time when most white writers were either too frightened or politically paralysed to genuinely engage beyond the usual second-hand slogans and bromides. The political and critical response to the ‘Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ over time is salutary. Cultural commentators as diverse as Lisa Gorton (whose review in the Australian Book Review is wonderful), Nam Le, Noel Pearson, Peter Garrett and Clive James all praise the poem. In his excellent essay on Murray in the New York Review of Books J. M. Coetzee calls it an ‘expansive, joyous holiday-season poem’ whose use of the Moon-Bone cycle is ‘a stroke of genius on Murray’s part that is also an act of homage’.

That’s the way I see it: an act of careful, respectful homage written by a man who grew up in a community that was on the very frontier of rural race relations. Where the rubber, along with human skin, hits the road – brutally, and irreversibly: a deeply uncomfortable and heartbreaking place to be, both for indigenous people and the white rural working class; a place of daily experience of the other, while sharing the same environment of poverty and marginalisation; and a very long way from the ‘ought over is’ utopias of the metropolitan universities.

Lisa Brockwell, In the Shade of Les Murray

Just arrived on my doormat is the latest, and second, issue of Free Bloody Birds, a new little magazine ‘printing new poems and essays about poetry’, edited by Alan Jenkins and Declan Ryan. Louis MacNeice turns up several times, which is always a good sign: there he is in Ange Mlinko’s essay on Derek Mahon, in Michael Hofmann’s poem for Michael Longley, and surely he’s somewhere in that fire in Paul Muldoon’s contribution.

And, of course, he’s there in John Clegg’s lovely essay on MacNeice’s London, of which more below. There’s also a superb series of poems by Leontia Flynn (who I wrote about here), an elegy for youth, called ‘Summer’:

Summer is fading
on literary ambition –
on my literary ambition
on the blood-congested drive

to conquer all readers
as not a but the poet,
marmoreal and timeless
to be referenced in every debate;

That first line, which is the first line of each poem, working its way down the page, comes from Larkin’s ‘Afternoons’. Perhaps Larkin was listening to MacNeice too. MacNeice creeps up on you, as I wrote the other day. Here is the beginning of Autumn Journal, the long poem he wrote in 1938:

Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire,
Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew
Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals…

As FBB’s editors point out, though poets from Belfast and ‘the North’ are keen to claim MacNeice as ‘one of their own’, MacNeice ‘went to school and university’ in England and lived and worked in London ‘almost his entire adult life’. At the same time, John argues in his essay, MacNeice rarely wrote about living in London with the same roving magpie eye for he brought to places like Belfast and Birmingham.

Rather (John writes) ‘MacNeice writes at his best about London — writes, in fact, unforgettably about London — when he is leaving or entering it.’ John’s full explanation is ingenious: I won’t spoil it here. But, as he says, leaving or entering London also means being ‘on the train or on the road’, and MacNeice is the ‘first poet of things seen from that speed’: factories, the backs of houses, rubbish dumps and petrol pumps.

Jeremy Wikeley, Goodbye to London

The extreme musicality of Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au voyage”, emphasised by its very short lines, immediately make me think of Verlaine, but it combines musicality with a robust sensuousness quite unlike Verlaine’s delicate, ethereally elusive effects. In fact it’s above all the sound of the words and the way they make the mouth feel as you say them that makes their images glow so voluptuously in the imagination […]

There’s no point in commenting on the images in detail. Anyone reading the poem aloud or sounding it in his inner ear will both see them and feel how caressingly the poet evokes them in his imagination. The poem unfolds like a song, an incantation that weaves a self-hypnotising spell so that the speaker seems almost to sink into the world he’s imagining. Only almost, though. The refrain both yearns towards this world and accepts its distance. Depending on the emphasis one gives “Là” in reading the poem, this acceptance can seem like something quietly in the background or a sharp reminder of how far the speaker’s actual world is from the order, beauty and pleasure of the imagined one.

Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage

Searching our postings, I was surprised to see that Eliot is among the poets we have mentioned most often in Poems Ancient and Modern — although the newsletter has featured only three of his poems: “Gerontion,” “La Figlia che Piange,” and “Preludes” (partly because not all his work is out of copyright). Somehow, for us, Eliot remains a touchstone, and if his thought dwelt on a poet — John Webster, for example, or George Herbert — we tend to engage that thought.

A sign of age, perhaps? When Sally Thomas and I were young, Eliot’s poetry was the very horizon of ambitious verse, and high modernism the chief claim of high seriousness, both intellectual and poetic. And that was particularly true among literary and intellectual readers with a religious sense, for whom such work as Eliot’s Four Quartets gave an obvious riposte to the oft-heard sneer that believers are undereducated idiots.

As it happens, when I was starting out as a writer, I took a long lance and charged at this use of Eliot, arguing that God in his poetry is more often a device for addressing the crisis of modernity than an object of faith. The essay was overwrought, as young critics’ work often is, although I think I do still hold that Eliot was doing something intellectually and theologically risky when he took the language of mysticism, which expresses the believer’s rising to the vision of God, and shifted it down the scale to describe the non-believer’s rising to belief.

Perhaps similarly, as the years have gone by, I’ve grown less certain of the idea that Eliot’s poems are puzzles to be solved. Here’s a link to a useful hypertext version of The Waste Land, and in the presentation of Today’s Poem, I’ve placed hors-texte links to Eliot’s own notes. But I have gradually come to think that we might be best served by taking The Waste Land as a toboggan ride rather than, say, a step-by-step guide to forensic accounting. You just climb aboard and try to hang on as it shoots down a bumpy mountain run.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Waste Land

Come February, maybe, we’ll embark on a study of the “Terrible Sonnets,” the hard-won late-life achievement of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). But right now, in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway, sumer is icumen in, with all its bursting life, and it seems fitting to turn, yet again, to Hopkins’s own summertime of poetic flourishing. In the spring and summer of 1877, as Hopkins awaited the autumn and his priestly ordination, the sonnets we most readily associate with his name, voice, and vision flowed from him in a great surge: “The Windhover,” “God’s Grandeur,” “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” — and Today’s Poem, “Pied Beauty.”

This poem is one of three examples, in Hopkins, of the “curtal sonnet,” a form devised and named by the poet (the other two are “Peace” and “Ash Boughs”), and distinguished chiefly by its abbreviated length, ten and a half lines instead of the sonnet’s standard fourteen. More precisely, it is like a Petrarchan sonnet whose separate pieces have shrunk in the wash, or like a recipe with two ingredients, reduced proportionately. The Petrarchan octave becomes a sestet; the resolving sestet then consists of a quatrain and a fifth partial line. The rhyme scheme is compressed accordingly. The standard abba quatrain doesn’t repeat itself, but gives way instead to a cdecde sestet, with its first two lines forming the end of the initial stanza, broken after the d-rhyme, which is repeated an extra time in the short closing line.

The form’s compression raises the stakes subtly, requiring the poem to accomplish its Petrarchan wind-up/wind-down thought process in fewer lines, with less room at the end to tie that process off. If Hopkins’s primary fascination was with the mathematics involved in this reduction of the Petrarchan sonnet — he went so far as to work out the formula for paring it down with precision — the consequence, in “Pied Beauty,” is something that eludes quantification.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Pied Beauty

Comprising tightly written found poems as well as persona poems in the form of police “confessions” to the deaths of the African Americans who appeared again and again on our screens, Ligatures [by Denise Miller] draws on the news articles, autopsy reports, and video recordings of and testimonies, verdicts, and sentences in the court cases to establish the undeniable, unsettling, ugly truth of the alternative narratives that Miller offers for Scott and Garner, Rice and McDonald and Steen: systemic racism in the United States, where “black and brown / people’s stories have been spun so quickly and so / thoroughly so that suddenly our lives seem to justify / the ending of them,” exists still. [..]

Just 35 pages long and containing the reported narrative of each death, Ligatures delivers a deserved punch in the gut, restoring what a headline and a hashtag cannot: name, identity, story written by “those people” denied all three.

It is not at all “the child friendly bed time story” Miller acknowledges that some in America wanted then, want even now:

[. . .]

See a picture of a black boy or black girl, a black man
or a black woman, a black person or a black person

and you wonder is she or isn’t she, is he or isn’t he, are they or
aren’t they and each isn’t but each is, you wonder is it another
story of or isn’t it? [. . .]

~ from “Dear Spectators 2: A Bed Time Story” (pp. 33-34)

History — his story, her story, their stories — in Miller’s series of strong and strongly defiant poems is the present we cannot just scroll by. Our shame, Miller makes clear, is so many more names have been, could be, are still being added.

Maureen Doallas, Ligatures by Denise Miller

A poem […] does not make the kind of sense an essay does. The experience a poem invites a reader into—even the experience it leads me through as I write it—is an emotional one; its logic is associative, not discursive. It creates what Susanne Langer calls in Feeling and Form, a “virtual experience,” by which she means that a poem, despite being made from discursive language—syntax, after all, is linear—presents the experience it contains as a whole to be encountered as irreducible to the sum of its parts. “Coitus Interruptus,” in other words, is not a report about my experience with domestic violence. Rather, it offers the reader an opportunity to feel what it was like for domestic violence to have been such an intimate part of my life.

Creating this experience necessarily meant leaving out some details of what actually happened, not because they were unimportant, but because they existed outside the emotional web of that intimacy. For example, not too long after “Mr. Peters” asked me to tape that note to my neighbor’s door, I was telling a friend about everything that had preceded my doing so as we sat talking in my living room after dinner. Suddenly, a male voice came up through the grate covering the space in the wall where my radiator was located. “So you’re the motherfucker who called the cops! You better not let me run into you. You won’t like what happens then.”

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Domestic Violence Has Been A Thread Running Through My Life

I oones fro Westminstir cam,
Vexid ful grevously with thoughtful hete,
Thus thoughte I: ‘A greet fool I am
This pavyment a-daies thus to bete
And in and oute laboure faste and swete,
Wondringe and hevinesse to purchace,
Sithen I stonde out of al favour and grace. –

Thomas Hoccleve (c1420)

The above quote is taken from Hoccleve’s (1368-1420) poem ‘The Complaint’, and it relates a situation that will feel vividly familiar to any member of our contemporary precariat, but especially to those of us grappling for purchase at the ragged edge of End Days Academia. This passage situates the speaker within the unfolding vocational crisis of the late Middle Ages, whereby expanding universities graduated ever more elitely educated clergy, whom the church could not afford to hire into beneficed positions.

There were multiple reasons for this, not least the unscrupulous practice of “pluralism”, where wealthy clerics or papal favourites were allowed to hoard multiple lucrative benefices; hiring out the pastoral overspill to poorly paid and often uneducated surrogates, such as vicars, chaplains, or lesser church officials, while continuing to pocket the juicy tithes. Increased secular interference was also a huge factor. The Catholic church had been greatly weakened (financially and in terms of authority) by the Great Schism; secular monarchs and local lords sought to take advantage of this situation by seizing control over church appointments, selling benefices off to the highest bidder, or simply giving them away to unqualified relatives in order to siphon parish revenue – the bastards.

Reasons aside, the results were clear: a crisis of vocation amongst the clergy, and the creation of what Kathryn Kerby-Fulton in her banging monograph The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) calls a ‘clerical proletariat’, forced into ever more various, casual, insecure and undignified forms of labour in order to make a living. This new and highly literate proletariat took lowly positions as civil servants, became secretaries in great houses, office-clerks, jobbing liturgical labourers, itinerant scribes and – according to Kerby-Fulton’s thesis – poets.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought about it in these terms before: but this new social class simply saw more opportunities for writing in English because they were working for – and uncovering an audience amongst – the laity. The implications of this, in terms of determining a kind of proletarian poetics are huge: the opportunity to address proletarian themes directly; to carve out for this clerical proletariat a distinct subjectivity and realm of concern, as Chaucer does through his characters – especially the Clerk of Oxenford and the Parson – in the Canterbury Tales; as Hoccleve does through his striking first-person confessional in ‘The Complaint’, and as a roused and radical Langland does through scorching critique in Piers Plowman, with its defence of the poor and its attack on corrupt labour laws and church hierarchy. Fun fact here: the rebels of 1381 are known to have used pseudonyms, including that of Langland’s titular character “Piers Plowman”, so you have a really solid example of the way the poetry of the clerical proletariat is not merely reflecting but influencing/ imagining into being a political and literary proletarian community. Woo-hoo!

Why am I telling you this? Because Hoccelev’s despair has often, over the last couple of years, been my own, and because the situation in which he found himself resonates so profoundly with the crisis engulfing academia in Space Year 2026: there are fewer and fewer permanent positions; the universities themselves seek to outsource more pedagogic labour to adjuncts, associates, and sessional tutors. We’re highly skilled and highly qualified, but we will face chronic underemployment/ unemployment as a result of both over-qualification (ahem) and – it has to be said – a raft of unethical practices inherent to a profit driven university system that has chugged the ghastly orange Kool-Aid of business ontology down in one.

I dearly want to find these parallels comforting; to take them as proof that this too shall pass, but how I actually feel about it can be summed up in the rather more sobering assessment that history repeats, corruption endures, and that we learn – that we continue to learn – absolutely nothing. What I do take courage from is precisely the resurgence that Kerby-Fulton’s book identifies. Before resurgence must come recognition: that is, the abandoning of internalised aspirational bullshit; learning to know ourselves (myself) again as a member of the sweaty, striving, vitally alive proletariat. What do we/ I sound and think like when not staging our subjectivity for an elite – downward and outward-looking – audience, but when we are, in fact, talking to and imagining among ourselves? What kinds of speech and formal tactics might be ours? What is the new vernacular? The new idiom? The language of our intellectual laity?

Fran Lock, Hoccleve/ Hedge Schools/ Rude Bootlegs

the bee’s buzz—
another path
into thoughts

embrace by tom clausen

Last fall, one of my poems, “Confessions of a Former Scarecrow,” was featured as part of Prairie Schooner’s Intern Picks series. I’m grateful to have the poem receive that attention and wanted to share it again here as I continue thinking about looking, attention, and transformation in relation to my upcoming workshop.

You can read the feature here:
Prairie Schooner Intern Picks Fall Feature

And the poem here:
“Confessions of a Former Scarecrow”

Here is a stanza from the poem:

I’m not a man but a wariness,
a warning to keep clear of the field.
I stand, friendless—what friends, tell me,
are apple trees, a trail of leaves,
the wasted weather, these apples worn
to a sun-brown, and then just brown,
a rot and musk—everyone reeks
to me, no man, half-made of air.

Returning to this stanza now, I’m struck by the way the speaker looks out from a transformed state. The poem does not simply describe a scarecrow; it lets the speaker become a field of wariness, warning, weather, rot, and air. The act of looking here is shaped by estrangement. The speaker sees from the edge of personhood, or from a place where personhood itself feels unstable.

That feels connected to some of the questions behind my upcoming workshop, “Look / Mira: Latinx/e Ways of Looking in Poetry & Prose.” What happens when looking is not neutral? What happens when the gaze is shaped by memory, body, place, fear, language, or transformation? How might a poem or essay allow us to see from a position we could not otherwise name?

I’m interested in writing that lets looking become more than description. Looking can become pressure. Refusal. Witness. Inheritance. A way to survive. A way to change shape.

José Angel Araguz, three invitations to look

The day after my online book launch, I got up at 4.30am to get a taxi to the airport to go to Cork International Poetry Festival. I was there for four glorious days – and met so many fantastic poets and writers. If I was cast out from Yorkshire, I would probably run away to Cork. It’s one of my favourite places in the world. If any of you are thinking of a poetry holiday next year – and by poetry holiday, I mean those ones where you gather your poetry friends and descend on a poetry festival, then do think about going to Cork. The programme is always amazing, and is truly international – plenty of Irish poets but also poets from around the world. The readings go on all day and most of the night and you could quite safely go on your own and end up with friends for life by the end of the first reading.

I was very excited to be reading with Annemarie Ní Churreáin on Saturday night – she is a fantastic poet, and author of one of my favourite contemporary poems A Hymn to All Restless Girls – now the title poem of her latest collection, published by Gallery Press.

I’d bought thirty copies of the House with me, and sold twenty six books at the reading, and then one for cash in the bar afterwards, so I only had two take home with me!

Kim Moore, More Adventures with the House

I always think I need more time to write and when I have it, it suddenly seems hard to focus. But this week I sketched a poem about students finding my poetry on the internet. They’ve googled me which seems a waste, but  there’s definitely worse things out there. The fact that they chanted lines of my poetry back at me on the last day of school as some kind of taunt just tickled me. I had to write about it. They read poetry willingly, even memorised it. That has to be something to be proud of. […]

My desire to try and get published may be almost gone, but not my love of writing. So in between lesson planning, coursework, piles of laundry, mowing, feeding and negotiating with my kids, I try to write poetry. I play with words and images, I attempt to capture my moments in this world on the page. 

And I don’t press publish on this blog to reach the masses or even a trickle of readers, but for myself. To see the entries sketch my thoughts across the years, to document my highs and lows, my random thoughts, my cycling through the seasons. 

I write to find my way through.

Gerry Stewart, Writing for No Reward

[A] couple of days ago, we visited Luna Parc, which is quite an experience. It is a handmade house, sculpture garden, and studio that Ricky Boscarino has been working on for decades. A Rhode Island School of Design student fascinated by silver-smithing, Boscarino decided early on that he wanted to make a living doing art. He began by making unusual (and sometimes slightly alarming) jewelry and creating art from found objects. He’s also a painter, ceramicist, welder, woodworker…and trying to make his housing needs, studio, and life as sustainable as possible in the wooded region near Stokes State Park in New Jersey. Now, the place is a non-profit that trains students, sponsors art interns, and continues to grow and morph into, well, who knows? He’s devoted his life to art-making. And the place is really fun to explore.

Talk about inventive!

It’s something people need to do, have an urge to do–invent stuff for some purpose, to solve a problem, for enjoyment, or out of a need to play around; we are, as Huizinga says, Homo Ludens (see this post!). Play leads to all kinds of things, piqued by curiosity and that urge to fiddle with things. The patent models at Hagley were behind glass, but I was itching to play with them, like a five-year-old.

That is what I like about writing poetry, too, the play and invention of it–using words, images, sounds, patterns. Earlier today I was messing around with quatrains that used rhyme/slant rhyme line endings, switching off between ABBA and ABAB by stanza. The poem’s content isn’t cheerful, yet puttering with possible patterns was fun and kept me thinking about the topic. Then I went inside and put Bach’s Inventions & Sinfonias on the stereo.

Ann E. Michael, Invention

Working in the arts is tough going, and classes are clear in America. I think it’s hard to understand how much physical and mental labor and hours go into making books. It’s long hours. There are people who look down on those of us who work. Some people refuse to get their hands dirty, and I wouldn’t know how to step into their mindset. I have respect for all kinds of labor, whether it’s medicine, law, building houses, or kelp farming.

I could not walk into a room and pretend to be a lawyer or a stockbroker or an arbitrageur. But neither could a suit walk into our lives and paint or plant a garden or build something. I have painted and gardened and trained horses. My husband and son can do most of the trades—plumbing, carpentry, tile; my son redid my whole bathroom when the floor collapsed. We are in the substance of the world, building culture.

Which is why I want to keep the press going. I like books. I like arguing about them. When friends disagree with my thoughts on a book, I love those conversations, because I’m still in the swim of a story.

It’s late, and I need to sleep. In stress and exhaustion, I am not operating at my best, but when I wake up, the dinosaur will still be in the room—the ridiculous Kate—and what do I do with her? And the press hanging on by its fingernails, and the people who are upset with me, and all the problems I can’t fix.

Kate Gale, Waking Up to the Dinosaur: Finding Our Story of Survival

When we pick and gather, wash, chop,
stir then eat and drink, there’s almost
always a sense of ceremony. From
the holy trinity of onions, garlic, and
tomatoes to the background strains
of gingery broth, bitter greens and
tamarind pucker, any improvisation
is inspired by those who taught us:
before you reach for your portion,
shake some droplets on the ground,
ladle an offering into a bowl.

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

This week the thing that I read which kept me Alive (as opposed to just living) was the transcript of an interview between James Shaheen and Li-Young Lee on Tricycle. Like, dig this:

“For me, there’s only three postures of the soul when you’re writing a lyric poem. They can be summed up as “Oh my God,” “Oh my love,” and “Holy, holy, holy.” You know, when I experience something and I feel, “Oh my God,” I mean, I know I have to write about it. When I experience something like, “Oh, my love,” I have to write about it. Or when I see and feel something that inspires in me, “Holy, holy, holy.” Those three are the postures of awe. Adoration, I don’t know who said it, but adoration is the proper attitude of a soul in awe. And it seems to me that the lyric poem is the greatest expression of awe and adoration, turning about one thing, and that thing is unknown. I feel like I live in those three postures all day long.”

So this is what’s getting me through. Thinking about the three postures of awe. Thinking about adoration. And repeating in my head the words, holy holy holy. Also, he talks about the line of a poem being a form of trembling. When you speak a poem, when you speak, “the vocal cords are trembling.”

Poetry is not going away, awe is not going away, trembling is not going away. The holy holy holy is not going away.

I think, I imagine, what will happen next is that the realms will just get further apart. They were always apart, and I don’t know why. Because why do you want to be a human living in this world, and separate yourself from art, and joy, and beauty, and philosophical thought, and the depths of the creative experience. I think back to taking what now seems like a truly wondrous undergrad degree in the humanities, and how the arts were always pitted against the business and science faculties. That was so weird to me. I always craved more cross pollination, people-wise. Which I guess is why I worked in the science library when I was at university doing my English Honours degree. (Which I received with honours, might I add, because what the hell). My co-workers were largely science and engineering students and we had the most interesting conversations.

We get to pick our posture every day. And the thing to do is to remember. You put on your coat, your shoes. Put on your posture of awe, too. Holy holy holy, oml omg.

Shawna Lemay, Holy holy holy

And here’s a poem from Magnifying Glass which captures a moment from childhood when I was stung for the first time…

STUNG

If it was a wasp
it stung once and fled,

if it was a bee
I didn’t see it die.

I stood naked
gazing at a splinter;
a black spine centred in a pink circle.

I pushed my stomach out to watch what next,

alone and naked in a field I saw
it redden concentrically as I stared.

I held out my arms to the summer air

let my lungs expel their cry.

Sue Finch, A PERSON FLYING THEIR HORSE ON THE BEACH

We had some family stuff that happened that reminded me that life is not steady, that change is the only constant, and sometimes, those changes are not the changes we’d choose. Parents getting older, our worrying about them, and my own body, struggling with what can be several debilitating problems at once, realizing we don’t have forever, and neither do those we love. It can push us into depression or push us to try to make the best of every day we have. It’s also realizing that although right now is hard, we’re not having as bad a time as we had in the past—reading from Flare, Corona always reminds me that I had some of the worst news and the worst health of my life when I wrote that book, and I survived a terminal cancer diagnosis and an MS diagnosis and severe flare almost a decade ago now. We lose things in life—our memories, our ability to run or walk, our balance, money, security, loved ones—and we have a choice, to continue on or to stay in mourning or lament our inability to trust and secure our lives exactly the way we want them to be. Sure, the world can feel like it’s in constant apocalypse right now. But we have a choice in what we do every day with that. What do you do with your last day on earth? Why, write another poem, of course.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Reading with Kelli in Shoreline, Goldfinches, Hummingbirds, Woodpeckers, and Losing Things

this is my huge giant flower face. this is my
handful of hair. this is my rocket collection.
when i reach the moon i am going to put
my ear to the surface & listen.

Robin Gow, 6/4