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

This week: a sequestered egg, phrenology’s adhesiveness, the rustle of blood, dancing chickens, and much more. Enjoy.

This morning the air brings the rustle of rain soon and the vague scent of vanilla biscuits.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookshelf. Indeed it is, and that person is me and the book that I have temporarily removed from its space on the shelf in Waterstones is Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. And the fact it is written by me, and it is there makes my heart dance a little happy dance.

In my ponderings this week I thought about blue moons, and I found out that maybe the blue moon at the end of May meant there have been forty-two blue moons since I was born. And whether there have or there haven’t this ‘fact’ along with the realisation that I hadn’t got a blue moon poem in amongst my moon poems inspired me to get writing. I donned my ‘Poetry in Business’ t-shirt and started to draft.

Sue Finch, FORTY-TWO BLUE MOONS

this heat, dear god. this room. a tranquillised diplomacy. refrain is bottlenecked inside the throat. i float, infused, transfigured; so pink and smooth: sequestered egg. i dream, such dreams! my cloudy raptures overrun. i must wake up. to wane of nations, whine of wealth, wax of sun; the clean and reachy flight of birds, white birds. those deadly vestal things are women in accomplished dresses, sweeping up and down. not i. an egg does not aspire to flight.

Fran Lock, LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE

All week I’ve had a book with a broken spine cracked open in my study. (Which could be how it came apart in the first place). It’s a well-loved book, as so many of mine are, and becoming more beloved all the time. This is Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski.

I’ve been doodling in the mornings, with and without words. What can I say, it’s the therapy I can afford and there are worse methods to get one’s s-h-i-t together. One of the phrases that comes up is one of my favourite lines from AZ:

“It’s not time we lack, but concentration.”

Shawna Lemay, …that summer was just about over

As a full-time writer, I sometimes work a 16-hour day, and still there are tasks not completed, and still there is no time to write poetry. I hardly ever have weekends off; I do most of my creative writing and editing on holiday, or late at night when I should be asleep. How do you let your words run wild if you’re earning less than the minimum wage, or if you have to get a first in your creative writing MA to justify the course fees and the time away from other priorities? How do you let go when you don’t understand the poem that everyone loves, or you have to write a poem-a-day, or what you most urgently want to say might lead to sweeping judgements in the poetry world, might even get you cancelled? When everyone is arguing, and you’ve been rejected again, and no-one will publish the book you’ve been working on for years, when you take your precious poem to a workshop and everyone finds something they want you to change, how then do you write freely and truly from your own heart?

And perhaps just as crucially, what can we do as a community, as readers, as friends and writers and peers, and teachers and mentors, competition judges, event organisers, publishers and editors, to support the wildness in each other? How can we shape the environment in which we create poetry, to encourage and sustain its wild heart?

Clare Shaw, Return to the Wild

Are you a poet with a chapbook or full-length collection that came out in 2025 or 2026, or is coming out in 2027? I created a spreadsheet to help poets with new books find each other for readings, events, collaborations, regional connections, and general book-launch camaraderie in this circus of book promo. Email me at kelli (at) agodon (dot) com and I’ll send you the link so you can add your book and info, to find other poets with books coming into the world around the same time. […]

Poetry Book Recommendation: The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvorocessi. I know, I won’t stop talking about this book. This is the first poem of the book—you can decide if you’d like more of this voice. I honestly can’t get enough of Gaby’s poems and rereading it again.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Terry Gross Wants to Interview Me! and Other Things AI Made Up

Two things. Firstly, the ‘Guide to Getting your Poetry Published’ is out in the world (literally: orders from Canada, Singapore, Sweden, France, India …) so that’s one big project finished. And thank you to Thomas Ovans for his review of the book on London Grip.

Secondly, I’m now setting myself a ‘poem a day’ challenge to get some work in the bag. OK, it hasn’t been every day exactly, but I’ve made a good start, and I’m back on it once I’ve written this post. Writing went out the window for a few days while our little choir the Lewes Singers were in Winchester singing the weekend services. Turned out the cathedral was the only cool place in town, in fact I got really cold a couple of times while it was over 30 degrees outside! I also met up with a friend for a visit to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. Although I’ve been there before, it’s still a lovely place to revisit, very atmospheric and quite moving to be reminded of Jane’s short and somewhat unlucky life. […]

A couple of weeks ago Peter Kenny and I launched a new episode of Planet Poetry, this time featuring poet and children’s author Mara Bergman. It’s already proving to be a popular episode. Our next interviewee will be Will Harris, in the last new episode of this season. But there will be at least one, maybe two archive interviews released over the summer. Scaling back the number of new shows this season while keeping the poddy going has suited both Peter and myself, in that we’ve both had the time and energy to work on other projects.

Robin Houghton, Quick round-up of poetry & other happenings

Last month, I revived our monthly poetry thread for subscribers, and I could not be more glad that I did.

What I witnessed this month was a reminder of the care, decency, and thoughtfulness at the heart of poetic practice. I watched strangers comment generously on one another’s poems, sharing how and why they were moved. I saw vulnerability and candor that wasn’t performed, just human.

I also read some really, really good poems I would not have encountered otherwise.

One of the pleasures of putting together this selection was the range of subjects, registers, and approaches. I found poems in strict forms, poems inventing their own forms, and poems unfolding in lively streams of consciousness. There were poems about grief and loss, of course, but also many rooted in appreciation and pleasure.

I’ve tried to reflect some of that range in my curation—and, as usual, I’ve tried to link the poems up by echoes in their motifs. My selection is idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive, but please know how much I enjoyed reading your work even if I didn’t include your poem. And please know there’s always next month.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

I wasn’t actually going to post this week, but

1. I have to say a huge thanks to Tim at Crooked Spire for a great evening last Sunday and the last event for the Fig Tree 2025 Anthology.

2. And I have to say a hugerer thank you to the wonderful Katie Griffiths for inviting me to read at the Riverhouse Barn (Michelle Penn and Tom Sastry coming up soon – go, go!!) on Thursday just gone. It was a wonderful evening of readings from Alwyn Marriage and the 4 open mic folks..And Katie’s own poem at the start (I think it was called Arrival) was glorious and very moving.

A huge thanks to Katie’s partner, Cris, for the lift to and from the station…and to everyone that came. Part of the evening was an interview ons stage. I’ll not lie, I was more nervous about this than any other part of the night, but I was out at ease and it was lovely to hear Katie say she enjoyed these blogs and my work. She’s certainly given me lots to think about in terms of using some of the gubbins I post here in poems. I gave myself something to think about by saying I should stop writing these and use the time on poems instead…We’ll see.

I look forward to Katie’s new collection, Mindset Mindrise due out this year, and commend The Attitudes (her previous collection to you now).

Finally, more gigs where you’re gifted a mug afterwards please.

Mat Riches, It meant allotment to me

Well, I was supposed to spend the last week on the San Juan Island at a writing residency. The first day was glorious – beautiful warm sunshine, seal heads bobbing in the water, and my first ever real-life encounter with baby foxes! The second day was cold and rainy, but I got a lot of reading and some writing done. The third day, sadly, I woke up with my jaw swollen from a tooth infection (root canal next week!) with fever and it was determined that I should probably get home so I could rest, get antibiotics and move up my root canal. […]

Here is the rising of the Blue Micromoon of May, which is slightly smaller AND a rare second full moon of the month. Apparently, all weird moons are signs of health doom for me, so I should really pay more attention to them (see many blog posts where weird supermoons coincide with unexpected trips to the hospital.) Should have paid attention to that horoscope!

Anyway, one thing I did get to do during the residency besides writing a new fox poem was look over my manuscript, and you know what? I had the strong feeling that, at this point, I could make it different, but I could not make it better. I definitely had the feeling it was time to send that manuscript out and start on a new project at last.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rough Week with Blue Minimoon, Baby Foxes, Tooth and Rib Drama, and Summer Approaches

It’s beginning to flood, my foot
on the brakes falling straight to the floorboard
as water rises, the car floating slowly
amidst a cache of litter, planks,
a garbage can, and a blue tricycle.
Out of control, I let the waffling
steering wheel go, lean back with a Hail Mary
on my lips and think about wading
to the nearest bar for a screw-it-all beverage.

Charlotte Hamrick, May Listopia 2026

Of course time has dimmed my memories, and no doubt shifted them as well. What I remember is a blogging community, people whom I met only online, who helped and encouraged me. 

Some of you are still here. I wasn’t, for a few years. I see the vacancies in the resurrected blog, the months of silence. No doubt I was silent elsewhere, too; silent on the blogs of my WWW friends. 

Now, I miss it. All of it. The community, the fresh excitement of meeting someone new, someone interesting, a new way of making language, new thinking, new art. New eyes. 

We built something. Now I discover that I was not the only one to fade. I learn that blogrolls are obsolete, that writers no longer exchange links and comments and follows that lead, eventually, to more of the same. 

I learn that nostalgia is a kind of grief. 

the buddha in the window well
wet with spring rain
remembers snow, its white shawl

Sharon Brogan, W.W.W. Nostalgia

I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary and thinking myself worthless; but I didn’t recognize that about myself. So why Homer’s story of a fatherless boy setting out to discover whether he actually has a heritage (and whether it is ever coming home to save him) would move me, was mysterious to me. But move me it did.

I did know some things. I was reading the classics for the first time, and they were legible! So there was a heritage, it was a real thing, and I was up to receiving it! That, at least, I understood at the time.

But another thing that happened to me, I did not realize. It happened sotto voce. I was reading poetry for the first time. It was my great good fortune that I was given the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: I was reading a master of English iambic pentameter. My ear was wholly untrained then. I was only vaguely aware that it was poetry, at first. I knew that that ragged right margin was supposed to signal something special, some elevation or sonority or affectation, but I didn’t really know what it was. So I just read it as though it were prose, galloping along, puzzling out the meaning. It was exceptionally clear language, very easy to grasp at first sight, but I was very young and very uneducated, and reading it at all was an athletic achievement. I was proud of it, and rightly so. So many foreign names, alien customs, weird locutions, puzzling repetitions! I marched through it, like Sherman’s troops through Georgia.

And something was happening besides the story. I was absorbing the fundamental rhythm of English poetry. I was learning it in probably the best, if not the most efficient way: just by reading it, line after line. When I read Shakespeare for the first time, later that year, I had a leg up: I already understood implicitly how this thing worked, how it steered, how you breathed when you read it. Poetry will eventually teach you how to read itself, if you give it time, and grant it authority.

Dale Favier, On First Looking into Fitzgerald’s Homer

In the ninth month of his forty-first year, readying the third edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sat down to compose what we, ahistorical in our lexicon, might consider his coming out. Titled “Calamus” after Acorus calamus — a tall wetland flowering plant native to his birthplace, Long Island, the sand-duned end of America, also known as sweet flag for its strong erect leaves and solid cylindrical spadix — this would always remain his most overtly erotic lyric sequence, the one in which he included his elegy for his New Orleans heartbreak. The sequence is often referred to as Whitman’s “homoerotic” epic — a definition narrowed not only to sexuality alone but to a sexuality that exists solely as an antipode of the heteronormative paradigm. Such a reading flattens the substance to the surface, for the “Calamus” poems are Whitman’s love poems—his only overt love poems. Among them is a short meta-poem vibrating with the vulnerability of writing these verses at all:

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

But while Whitman boldly celebrated his intimate sympathies in verse, he remained restive about them and sought to fathom himself through what he, along with his generation, thought to be science. Again and again, Whitman returned to phrenology’s amativeness and adhesiveness, charging his poetry of contrasts with this battery of words, locating his own coordinates in relation to them, making sense of the world, making sense of himself in relation to the world and of the world’s totality in relation to its multitudes. Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth. In the “Calamus” poems, he dares imagine in the public plane what felt so intolerable on the personal — not only the total acceptance of his nature, but its consecration of an entire species of love:

For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other! There shall from me be a new friendship —
It shall be called after my name.

How much more poetic it would be to call ourselves Whitmanic or Waltean rather than homosexual or bisexual or queer or any other term etymologically rooted not in the lush wetlands of nature but in the strangeness, the otherness of the counternatural, describing us not by what we are but by what we are not.

Maria Popova, How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love

Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). […]

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’  Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.

It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann). […]

Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.

Martyn Crucefix, Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker

Longing in Dream Logic is not confined to romantic or interpersonal scenarios; it also takes the form of grief, where desire is directed toward the impossible recovery of the dead. In several poems centred on the speaker’s grandparents, memory becomes both a consoling and destabilising force. Echo Wood is especially effective in this regard. The poem revisits shared habits and private rituals—guessing the wood of a banister, smoking roll-ups—not as anecdotal detail alone but as traces through which intimacy is preserved after loss. Since her grandfather’s death, the speaker explains that ‘she likes to haunt’ the places associated with him because ‘it feels as if a part of you is still there, a bit of your soul left behind.’ The language of haunting is crucial here. It registers grief as a condition in which the boundaries between presence and absence become porous, and in which the mourner herself assumes a spectral relation to the world. Bosman intensifies this instability through the refrain ‘Perhaps- perhaps’, a phrase that suspends the poem between disbelief and yearning. Logic gives way to wish, but the wish is structured by grief’s need to imagine continuation. In this sense, the collection’s dream logic is nowhere more affecting than in its treatment of bereavement, where emotional truth depends not on factual certainty but on the persistence of attachment.

These recurring concerns—unrealised possibility, anxiety, failed agency, and grief—give Dream Logic a notable conceptual coherence. Bosman’s references to Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, and Sylvia Plath help to situate that coherence within a wider poetic lineage, though the collection does not merely imitate its forebears. One might locate Bosman between Dickinson’s inward metaphysical attentiveness, Plath’s psychological intensity, and Brontë’s emotional extremity, yet her work remains distinct in tone and method. Where those predecessors often move toward crisis, revelation, or visionary confrontation, Bosman is more interested in quieter forms of disturbance: hesitation rather than rupture, lingering attachment rather than rebellion, emotional afterlife rather than dramatic catharsis. Her landscapes, accordingly, are less sites of sublime struggle than repositories of memory and projection. What emerges from the collection is an understated but persuasive poetics of frustration, in which the mind returns compulsively to what it has lost, feared, or failed to realise. As a debut, Dream Logic demonstrates not only technical control but a sustained interest in the forms through which interior life becomes thinkable and speakable.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Dream Logic’ by Satya Bosman

As with other Italian imports, such as olives and spaghetti, I sometimes feel have an endless appetite for sonnets. So another anthology is always welcome, and this week I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon’s Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets (Faber, 2025). It’s an enjoyable buffet of small plates; one discovery I was glad to make was “The Shepherd Boy” by John Clare, which, like many sonnets, seems to tell a story about its own playful ability to imagine riches in a confined space (the book’s title comes from Wordsworth: “‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”) […]

As with most poetic miscellanies, closer inspection reveals some scantiness in the table of contents. For a writer whose own inventively pararhymed sonnets have been so influential on contemporary poetry, Muldoon is surprisingly uninterested in the range of modern experiment with the possibilities of the fourteen-liner out there, and surprisingly keen on nineteenth-century poets with only a minor claim to significance in sonnet history. Robert Browning, for example, was not a notable sonnet writer — unlike his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — yet not only does he get in with a sort-of-sonnet comprising two seven-line stanzas, but also features in two other tributes: Swinburne’s “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” and Landor’s “To Robert Browning”. For this week’s post, then, I thought I’d pick seven sonnets passed over by Muldoon, which would be in my own imaginary anthology.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #43: A Swirling Chain

If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision, that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes.

Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you might say, and well you might — though some of you might recall the poet and critic Daniel Galef’s piece on Lee-Hamilton’s chilling “Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford,” which ran here a year ago last March. But largely, except to scholars of the Victorian era and those who remember him as the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity.

Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” His interest as a poet inclined to the historical dramatic monologue, as in the imagined address of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the mistress of her husband, Henry II, whom Eleanor loves, as Daniel Galef has written, “the way the viper loves the dove.” In these dramatic monologues, Lee-Hamilton manages to channel not only the Victorian monologue-master, Robert Browning, but also the sonnet mastery of that poet’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

A master of the sonnet in his own right, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the illusory sound of the sea in a shell.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sea-Shell Murmurs

The latest full-length poetry collection since her remarkable Griffin Prize-winning poetry title, Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s, Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), a book-length suite of deft, single-stanza prose poems. Her fourth published poetry collection, Dismantling is set in two untitled sections, the second of which is a suite of twenty-six numbered poems, each titled “cento.” “The shades above the city have already been drawn,” begins the first numbered “cento,” “the pockets of wind emptied. The room is quiet now, everything falling at the same rate of speed.” There’s a part of me still frustrated at how her work so quietly floats just under the radar, having only been introduced to her work at all through her third collection, and missing completely her first two—The Startled Heart (Oolichan Books, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (London ON: Brick Books, 2010)—although one might say what keeps her just under the radar is exactly the strength of her quietly powerful lyric. “All history is revisionist.” begins the poem “revisions,” “Dig down and there’s so and so with his version of events. A little further and you can hear the song of the last speckled cormorant and before that the ancestors of Przewalski’s horses no bigger than foxes. What’s the point of one more poem?” As part of her contribution to “short takes on the prose poem” over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in 2022, she wrote: “I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely.”

Composed across firm and precise lines, set with such a delicate touch, Joseph’s poems are masterfully written, perfectly held together, even through an ongoing conversation around how easily things fall apart. This is a collection of form and attention, carefully layered and precise. As the poem “the hour before dawn” begins: “How many silences penetrate other silences? The monk with his vows. A violin at rest in its black case. Two of Adelaide Crapsey’s three: the falling snow, the mouth of one just dead. Not the dying or the death itself but the wide-open O of the moment. The breath gone from the lungs yet still in the room.”

rob mclennan, Eve Joseph, Dismantling

Entire years of your life will blur together, or be forgotten. Eventually, some effort to rescue what is left becomes necessary, and some reckoning with its meaning becomes possible. The poems in The Discarded Life [by Adam Kirsch] are such an effort.

One of the poems’ pleasures is how well they evoke a time and place. We are in Southern California, in the early 1980’s. (I grew up there in the same decade.) The Muppets, Atari games, and Sesame Street all make appearances, against the almost-imperceptible gradations of climate that that place calls “seasons”:

The most of winter that we ever knew
Was a gray, cloudy tincture of the air[.]

For those who did not live through it, the technology of the time will seem insanely primitive, as far from us as the turn of the 20th century was to them. The absence of the internet is only the tip of the iceberg. Kirsch remembers the limited graphics of one video game, which were

All that the bulky monochrome display
Could generate from five-inch floppy disks
You had to keep inserting and withdrawing,
Like turning hand cranks on an early Ford.

While Americans worried about nuclear war, Southern Californians prepared for other disasters. I myself remember the regular drills, but not whether they were for earthquakes, wildfires, or a meltdown at the local nuclear power plant. Kirsch describes a fire coming to his summer camp:

…red smoke drifted close enough to make
Our eyes burn like the chaparral around us,

and I don’t think I’ve heard the word “chaparral” since I moved away.

Brad Skow, Book Review: The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
First, the positive – I loved the second half of this book, where Clark tied in Plath’s life to what she was writing at the time. It gave some insight into her writing process and what inspired specific poems, and analyzed the artistry of her work. I also was impressed with Plath’s ambition and work ethic – I feel like a champion when I wake up at 4:45 to get a bit of writing done in my morning routine, but Plath wrote from 4 – 8am, as a single mother with very young children. She puts me to shame!

The negative…I did the audiobook for this – it was 45 hours long. I like Sylvia Plath as much as the next person – perhaps more – but I did not care about what she ate at girl scout camp or what grades she made in elementary school. I would have preferred a 300 page condensed version of this, focusing more on her career, development as a poet, and her poetics. I thought too Clark could have gone a bit more into the mental health aspect – I think she is kind of trying to make the reader think that Plath’s depression was hereditary and inevitable – but more could have been explored there.

But my main complaint is Clark’s kid-glove handling of the monstrous Ted Hughes. I think Hughes, whether indirectly or not, murdered Plath. Actual quotes from Ted Hughes:
“I murdered her.”
”It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius”
(at her funeral) “It was either her or me.”
(also at her funeral) “You all hated her too, right?”

Not to mention that he wrote Plath to tell her it would be better for him if she committed suicide. And don’t get me started on how he mishandled her work after her death – destroying her novel-in-progress and current journals, rearranging and editing her manuscript to take out the parts that made him look bad, letting his sister who hated Sylvia write her biography, letting his mistress handle her work…

Yet, Clark tries to subtly manipulate the reader of this biography to think of him as a Byronic hero – comparing him to Heathcliff and Rochester, commenting on his stormy good looks and country ways, his powerful poetic “talent” and how much he suffered after Plath’s death. Oh please! I like a biography that sticks a bit more closely to the facts of what this guy actually did, rather than trying to paint it in a gothic romance light.

Plath was no Innocent – the first half of the book slogged along as she dated so and so and cheated with blah blah blah and got drunk here and etc etc etc – she was not much of a prim 1950s lady. But choosing Hughes as a husband set her on an unstoppable slide to self-destruction. I don’t think he remotely deserves the wrist-slap of being called a “Rochester.”

I think there is room for another Plath biography to be written – one that is a little less soft on Hughes, a bit more focused on Sylvia’s career as a poet, and 1/3rd the length of this one.

Renee Emerson, A Mushroom of Doom, a Marriage of Doom, and a Face of Doom

“Impossible Paradise” is a selected poems taking from Chen Yuhong’s collections “Half-Light” (2022), “Trance” (2016), “In Between” (2011), “Bewitched” (2007), “A River Flows Deep in Your Veins” (2002), “In Truth the Ocean” (1999) in English translation. She has been influenced by poets such as Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy whom she has translated in Chinese. However, this is the first time Chen’s own poems have been translated into English. The selections are gathered by collection in reverse order, with the most recent poems first. She relishes in the everyday and natural experiences. […]

In “Inkstone” written, ‘on seeing a Duan inkstone from the Qian Long period, Qing dynasty’, the stone is “ineloquent”,

“yet from it soundlessly
flow mountain waters, birds,
insects, flowers, fish, people”

[…]

Chen’s poetry is quietly compelling and concerned with connections between people and between people and the natural world. It’s an empathetic, measured plea for compassion and understanding. The poem’s rhythms feel prayer-like, pointing to a space for mindfulness and focus. This collection and English translations are long overdue.

Emma Lee, “Impossible Paradise” Chen Yuhong translated by George O’Connell and Diana Shi (Carcanet) – book review

Normally at the top of these posts, you’ll see details of the publications under review: title, author/editor, etc. However, for If/Then, I list Chris Turnbull as ‘instigator’ and I do so for good reason. The genesis behind this most unusual publication was a visual poem by Turnbull which she sent to Linda Russo asking her to write something in response to it and then send her poem on to another writer to repeat the process. The result is a kind of chain art text, or 21st-century renga for longer poems. The final list of contributors is: Chris Turnbull, Linda Russo, Sandra Guerreiro, Anna Reckin, Camilla Nelson, Matti Spence, Sarah Cave, Luke Thompson, Suzanna V. Evans, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Andre Bagoo, and Richard Georges.

Of course, the chain art experience is not that unusual, but what makes this one stand out is the physical structure of the object, which Turnbull describes as an ox-plough or boustrephedon, sheets of print bound in a complex folder card binding, not unlike accordion pleats, but reversible in multiple directions. Printed pages are bound into the folds using a loop of strong thread, one or two folded sheets per fold, and the first ‘return fold has a bonus of two square postcards with short extracts from a couple of the poems inset into slots in their backing card cover. The images at the link above are a perfect instance of a picture being worth a thousand words.

The poems set up conversations between them in a variety of ways. Some are straightforward links, as in the closing lines of Linda Russo’s ‘With Our Many Small Faces Turned To The Sun’:

burying the words, finally

o how long it takes

under onto

reconfigured to provide the opening for Sandra Guerreiro’s untitled response:

“o how long it takes

       under onto” entering the field

The next fold begins with Camilla Nelson’s ‘from Run’, a celebration of birds, her:

black bird                         black bird
ch-                      ch-                             ch-
meutgghhhh

looking back to Anna Reckin’s preceding ‘Now that’:

blackbirds shyer this year, but still there, darting
in and out of the ivy on the wall

Later in Nelson’s poem we read:

ch-                         ch-
click                     of cows                     moving
up                         chalk                         downs
and me in the dip
gathering sun

Then Matti Spence’s ‘Walk And’ opens:

Hear the chalk-
downs drone not white
but a proposal of something
near to that deflection

This is followed by Sarah Cave’s ‘Walk & Pray, Pilgrim’:

hear      the       chalk       rabbits
beneath       the          mountain
&    thru    the mountain    &    pray
&     ray     to     the     mountain

(Rabbits also appear in Spence’s poem.) The fold ends with Luke Thompson’s ‘Chalk Rabbit’.

The fifth fold then opens with Suzanna V. Evans’ ‘and sings’:

Sea-sieved melodies, whale melodies, fall like particles of chalk, marine
snow, down to the black spines of sea urchins, to the ear-shaped shells of
abalones.

There are other threads in these ecologically aware poems that I could have picked up on, but the chalk Downs of South East England have personal resonances for me, so I went with that one.

Billy Mills, Three Pamphlets and a Boustrephedon

Last week I was in London for a couple of days to do various things, but mostly to spend some time in the British Library. One of the items on my to-do list for the BL was to photograph in their entirety the two manuscript notebooks containing most of Payne Fisher’s earliest recorded poetry. I’ve known about these manuscripts for a decade or so, and I already had fairly detailed notes on them, but no full images and therefore no complete transcriptions.

Fisher, a fascinating figure about whom I hope to write a book in due course, went on to be Cromwell’s poet. I’ve written about him several times, both in scholarly articles and chapters and also here on substack:

Fisher came to the attention of Cromwell as a Latin poet, and it is as a Latin poet that he had great success in the 1650s (and diminishing success thereafter). His breakthrough hit was a remarkable Latin poem in the Claudianic style about the siege of York and the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. It is an excellent and unforgettable poem in large part because it is both genuinely a celebration of Cromwell’s unstoppable military might and a lament for the suffering of the defeated royalists and the besieged inhabitants of the city. (In this sense, though not really in many others, it is a bit like Lucan’s Civil War.)

Fisher had in fact fought at the battle of Marston Moor himself, on the losing royalist side, and the earliest versions of the poem — which exist in both Latin and English — are straightforwardly royalist. Here is a fragment of the early English version of the poem that would eventually become Marston Moor, describing the city of York:

That Matron-Citty prostituted now
To the leud embracement of hir Ravishers
Hung downe hir aged Head disfigur’d round
With Batteries both of Foes, and hir owne Feares.

When we think of ‘war poetry’ today we tend not to think of poetry celebrating the victors, but rather the verse that laments the suffering of the participants — as in the trench warfare of the First World War — or, as here, of innocent civilians. Conversely, if we think of the poetry associated with the English civil war, we think probably of the ‘cavalier’ poets, celebrating honour and chivalry mostly in a rather abstract if beautiful kind of way, as in Lovelace’s poem, ‘To Lucasta, on going to the wars’:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.

Fisher and Lovelace were almost exact contemporaries, and in fact Fisher met and became friends with Lovelace during the 1640s, when they were both serving in the army. But Fisher’s version of war poetry is entirely unlike Lovelace’s — and indeed it’s not much like anything else I can think of from this decade. The style is perhaps best described as ‘documentary’, and indeed several of the poems do seem to have their origins, at least, in material written during a campaign.

Victoria Moul, Realistic war poetry from the 1640s

[Margaret] Tait was Orcadian; though once she qualified as a doctor she travelled widely. In her mid-thirties, after serving through WWII in the Royal Army Medical Corps, she turned to filmmaking. “I think I gradually came over to feeling that it was necessary to do something more than just simply bringing people back to bodily health”. Between 1951 and 1998 she made over 30 films of various lengths, all of which have this sustained focus and attention to detail which I imagine she gave to her patients. Tait also published her own poems in three slight, beautiful hardbacks, the shape and size of a Ladybird book, in 1959 and 1960. Her logo is a cardiograph line, the double beat of the heart.

In her films and her poetry Tait was, says Ali Smith, instinctively Modernist (Smith links her to the Beats and Whitman, and to Hugh MacDiarmid, a friend and the subject of one of her films – check it out on YouTube). Interviewed on Channel 4, Tait quoted Lorca: “an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest … [The artist] enters what may well be called the universe of each thing … [he/she] takes all materials in the same scale”. The camera was an impartial witness, she believed: it showed all things in great and equal detail, it could present context and perspective as well as great intimacy. Using collage and disjunction, following associations of ideas and sounds and her own train of thought to move from one shot to the next, without hierarchy. This allowed her to create what she felt was “a pure form of poetry”. “In poetry something else happens … Presence, let’s say, soul or spirit, an empathy with whatever it is that’s dwelt upon, feeling for it – to the point of identification”. In The Big Sheep, for example, this dwelling is in accumulated, over-familiar layers. Images ‘rhyme’, and are nested together through repetition and cross-linking; she revisits and revises places, shapes, textures and faces constantly, in subtly interconnected moments. But these are not private exercises. She is constantly aware of us, the audience, peering over her shoulder. Look at this, she says. And this. Now look here.

“Poems, like all human fabrications from straw huts to theology, are made to our measure and by our measure, and are not above or beyond us,” said Charles Simic in ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’. “Language and paint are not metaphysical and forms are not spectral. Patterning is a universal human act”. It is in this that I understand her move from “simply bringing people back to bodily health” to looking more deeply at how we live, at how we knit our experience together. In her film poetry, she looks to present simply this, “in a way that only the motion picture camera has a language for”. Documentary filmmaking was, in her view, ultimately unsuccessful because of the way it isolates its subject from its surroundings in order to study it. “I think that film is essentially a poetic medium,” Tait said, “and although it can be put to all sorts of other – creditable and discreditable – uses, these are secondary”. Her film-poems have been described as anti-narrative. They end by simply ending.

Lesley Harrison, Sometimes it’s the Wordiness of Words That Gets in the Way

“Fardistantly past due, we throughganged the outpumpers, the alden gatherers saved from longforetimes.“

A couple of years ago, I made a video that used a very early version of MidJourney AI to create some background elements that I did not have my own material for. At the time, MidJourney seemed like an exciting new way to create original material. However, it is now clear that these AI engines illegally use original work and consume massive amounts of power. Therefore, I have completely remade the video using all my own footage. Even so, the images look somewhat unworldly, which is part of my intention. The text is in a kind of future-archaic dialect that I invented.

Ian Gibbins, The Bilgestruck reimagined

i find myself craving primordial. to chart
a path across species. wake up in the twilight dawn
of a thick-shelled egg. the sun, like a father’s eye
burning through the walls of any house.
we wake with hollow bones.

Robin Gow, 5/31

Whenever I watch sensei doing an arrangement, I am struck by her care, not only toward the flowers but her attention to the active empty space that is part of the floral field. When I took lessons in Dutch Still Life flower arrangement, I was surprised by the way the floral field is completely filled, in much the same way that an oil canvas is primed and fully painted. You never glimpse the canvas underneath an oil painting in the same way you see and appreciate the white spaces in a Chinese landscape painting.

Because, of course, the empty space is doing crucial work. In Japanese this is called 余白の美 the “beauty of the white space.” As an expression of “ma,” it is an emptiness that is active and generative. […]

I also often find myself now thinking about plants as sentient beings— each, as some Buddhist philosophers might say, on their own path toward salvation and enlightenment. Michael Pollan, in his new book on consciousness, begins his journey with a long meditation on exactly this possibility when he describes the poppies in his Berkeley garden appearing to return his gaze one afternoon, and rather than dismissing the experience, he followed his feeling into the emerging science of plant intelligence.

Researchers have shown that plants are able to read their environment and solve problems. They appear able to learn, form memories, send signals to other plants, change their behavior in response, and even cooperate with plants they recognize as kin. Pollan stops short of claiming they have reflective selfhood, but he takes their inner life seriously. And so do I.

Leanne Ogasawara, Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚

you gave me your hand lens
by a mossy tree
and I looked up close
my eyelashes crushed by its metal rim
my nose touching tree bark
smelling its tiny life
made large.

On bark cliff faces,
dripping dark where the sun can’t enter,
unfathomable life hides
itself from view

Anna Chilvers, Confessions of a Moss Widow

It delights me that Scientific American includes science-related poetry — and when my monthly issue arrives I turn first to the monthly poem.  Here are the opening stanzas of  ‘The Algorithm’ by California poet Barbara Quick from the May, 2022  issue.

Optimization under uncertainty
is a field of study in which my grown son
will earn his Ph.D. The math, in his case,
concerns the production of wind energy.

He reads his papers aloud on the phone to me
as a way to optimize their clarity,
so that even a layperson, such as myself,
can understand what he’s saying,
in between each beautifully made
equation and graph.

Quick’s complete poem is available at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Science in Meter and Verse (from Sci. Amer.)

I’ve been thinking about the wind, its partnership with seeds, with pollen, its agency with water, how it casts it beyond its own reach, and sand, rising as clouds from the desert to whirl and settle to crevices in odd places, and weather, wind its worldwide vehicle. And wind’s havoc, flattened forests, but from which new growth births, and us, our dust bowls, how wind carries even our own species with it, tangling itself in our hair, lining our faces with its force. But it occurs to me also that we are as wind ourselves, the same force of movement, destruction, new plantings. We also drive ourselves mad with our constant blowing. What can we learn from being like the wind? Could we be more humble? But the very trees themselves bow down. But though we can “harness the wind” for our energy generators, we have not yet learned to stop it. There’s that. This week the wind blew light rain pattering against the window. And here’s a charming poem by German poet Jan Wagner that translator David Kaplinger has rendered “portrait of the rain.” I guess I’ll have to start studying German, so taken have I become with some of the German poetry I’ve been dipping into.

Marilyn McCabe, particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world

I’ve been thinking about throwaway remarks in poetry recently. Those little bits of speech which don’t really seem necessary but nevertheless lodge themselves into the felt memory of reading the poem with great force.

One such moment is the detail that Jaan Kaplinski supplies the reader in these lines, from his poem ‘This morning was cold’:

I came from a meeting – a discussion of
the teaching of classical languages –
and I was sitting by the river with a friend
who wanted to tell me his troubles.

The lines could make perfect sense without the reader learning about the ‘discussion of/ the teaching of classical languages’. There are many Jaan Kaplinski poems which include similar declarative statements without any self-interruption. ‘I came from a meeting/ and I was sitting by the river with a friend/ who wanted to tell me his troubles’ is fine. But it’s the bit in the middle I love, the bit you could argue that we don’t need. When I first encountered the poem some twenty years ago, I thought its inclusion was slightly knowing, a little on the nose, self-regarding, even. All this time later, I return to the poem to check that the poem’s speaker has remembered to include this unnecessary yet vital detail that so perfectly captures the urgent liminality of needing to switch between two very different worlds, from theoretical pedagogy to listening to the ‘troubles’ of a friend on a ‘freezing’ riverbank. The poem makes another, similar turn into the world of domesticity, towards its end: ‘I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.’ This is also worth meditating on. But he had me at ‘meeting’.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: A discussion of the teaching of classical languages, by Jaan Kaplinski

I was editing some poems today and thought about one of the strategies that I use a lot when revising any writing. Cutting out the parts that are less interesting. Trimming filler. Pruning around important or more arresting images so that they stand out and aren’t cluttered up by other material. What would the musical equivalent of that be? I wondered.

I modifed the backing tracks from my piece Nothing Makes Poetry Happen (which I posted yesterday) and improvised an alto saxophone solo on top. I was trying to sound like Julius Hemphill on Dogon A.D. an album that I adore.

I took the poetry editing approach and cut out lots of filler. I noted that played too much, trying to capture the feeling of excitement and energy in the tracks. I didn’t leave much space. (Oh you ADHD!) So I edited out unnecessary parts. I found places where the “images” (musical ideas) would be better without the clutter around them. I didn’t reorder the solo, though sometimes I have done that. Except for adding on a single note at the end which came from the beginning in order to end with something more summative and cadential and a formal callback to the beginning.

With writing as with music, it’s easy to think that the flow of a draft is integral and inseparable to the essence of the work. But it isn’t. Or, in fact, one can craft a flow that better expresses or highlights the core material. And the modified flow often is a better manifestation or expression of the flow one was aiming for in the first place.

Gary Barwin, Editing music as if it were writing

Frances Brawne (later Frances Brawne Lindon) is cast as the girl next door in the Keats story. She literally became the girl next door when her family moved into rooms on one side of Wentworth Place (now Keats House) in Hampstead, London in April 1819. Fanny and Johnny had met the previous November in 1818 and Keats appears to have been initially quite critical and dismissive of her. She, however, showed him enormous kindness, gave him emotional support when his brother died of tuberculosis that December and it’s easy to reduce her simply to being the poet’s muse as the two became close during Keats’ most productive period in 1819. Fanny was “a voluminous reader” and “books were her favourite topic of conversation.” She was also, “an eager politician” and is described as being “fiery in discussion.” She was vey much Keats’ equal. On 18 October 1819, Keats proposed to Fanny Brawne and she accepted. Keats had given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry and a marriage would not be consented to by Fanny’s family. They kept their engagement a secret.

When Keats began coughing blood in February 1820 Fanny was still living next door. His infectious illness meant that meeting in person became problematic and instead they exchanged frequent notes and letters despite being only a few yards apart. Fanny would pass his window returning from her walks. All of this provided condition for an intense yet frustrating affair. We will never know if their relationship was consummated physically. The romance intensified when Keats left for Italy, on health grounds, in September. He never returned. He died in Rome in February 1821 with Fanny still believing he would be back by spring. She was thrown into a profound period of mourning that lasted six years when she learned of his death, cutting her hair short, wearing black and the ring Keats had given her before he left.

When she eventually married, twelve years after his death, she retained all of the poet’s letters and keepsakes and her archive provides much colour to the Keats story. It offers little further insight into her own. The letters she wrote to Keats are lost. The last ones she sent to Rome were never even opened and buried with the poet in accordance to his wishes. When the Keats letters were sold into a collection and published after Fanny’s death there was controversy. Fanny didn’t quite fit the Victorian narrative that had been established, she was too ordinary, even considered by critics as unworthy to be cast alongside such a distinguished figure as the poet. […]

Frances Brawne Lindon is number ninety two on the top one hundred list at Brompton Cemetery and I go in search of her. I find her in the brambles and the ivy behind a metal, workman’s fence. She retains a degree of separation, cut off, removed as she was with her poet. Perhaps they have some works in mind here. Perhaps they’ll clear a path to Fanny, give her a little more status, restore her to a greater and more deserving glory. She doesn’t need her lines cut back anymore. They’ve been lost already. I stand respectfully, eagerly behind the metal barrier as if I’m waiting for a rockstar or a member of the royal family, which, of course, I am.

Jan Noble, Nº66 Finding Fanny

In Prayer (I), George Herbert creates a sonnet out of a series of metaphors for prayer. No explanation is given. The images emerge, disorientingly.

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

I especially like the line The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, as I think it expresses a common feeling of reading poetry—a half-way feeling between experience and understanding. The soul can only be paraphrased. There are no words that fully express the human soul. The heart in prayer is on a journey to God, it cannot be said to have arrived. Poetry is the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage. It is a common cliché that life is a journey—but it is a cliché because it is true, it has been said for as long as there has been commentary on human life.

As Thoreau said, being a traveller is the history of every one of us.

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us.

Poetry is about that traveling. Whether in literal journeys in which we learn to see strangely, as in Bishop, or about spiritual journeys, as in Herbert, travels in our heads and souls, poetry captures the sense of being unsure about the world, but knowing that something is understood. Before we can begin to talk about the specific understanding, we have to be able to enter the dream, and to begin to see the poem as it wishes to be seen. We must read like travelers, coming into a new place, looking for what they can see.

Henry Oliver, Something understood. How to read poetry.

This time, wedding travel took us to the high mountain country near Boone, NC–spectacular scenery, very rainy weather, fog rolling in, winding dirt/mud roads.

I am sitting in a tiny cabin in near dark, and I’m always surprised at how hard it is for me to work on the computer lit only by the light of the computer.  I’m fine reading online stuff with no other light, but writing a blog post feels hard.  Or maybe it’s the tiredness that makes it hard, the existing outside of my normal routines. 

Let me record a line that came to me this morning, which may find its way into a poem at some point:  “I am the bartender without a corkscrew.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Second Spring Wedding

When I began writing this, I saw the bats flitting about in the air but now it’s so dark that I can’t see them. When I look up from my word document (white words on dark “paper”), I see pale, parallel symbols across the sky.

It looks like a trace fossil.

Sarah Lada, Trace

This past weekend I was most fortunate to have been interviewed, via Zoom, by four Chilean university students of English and creative writing. They are taking Hernán Pereira’s course at Arturo Prat University, Iquique, Chile. In 2014, Hernán collaborated with Dr. Karen Jogan of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania on a poetry and place project that resulted in the book So Far..So Close/Portada y Contraportada: Contemporary Writers of Tarapacá & Pennsylvania. Pamela Daza took the photos for the book; I posted a bit about it here. Thanks to social media, which I don’t often thank, I’ve kept in touch with Hernán, who is full of interesting ideas for teaching young people to enjoy poetry and to learn English.

Now, I’m retired, and I was pleased to hear from Hernán that he’s assigned his students books by English-speaking poets to read and research, and then interview, said writers (with whom he is acquainted). Would I be willing to be interviewed? Why, of course!

The result of most interviews is that I learn a great deal about my work by having other people ask me questions about it. I usually learn a bit about the interviewer(s) in the process. In this case, I was happy that the students had come up with some good and unexpected questions that really made me pause and ponder. I was also impressed with what excellent English skills they have, and how polite and earnest they are. One of the questions was what makes me motivated to write a poem. Not inspired (the usual question), but motivated–a slightly different verb and a telling one.

I answered along the lines of how seeing an image, experiencing an event, learning new information (ie observation), or reading a text with which I might disagree or wonder about leads me to a line of questioning/reflection, and that whole process motivates me to write. I have to say my answer was, in real time, rather vague, and that I was speaking with people for whom English is a second language. But a student named Maximillio said, “So, would you say then your motivation is responsive?” Wow, yes! Which clarifies a lot for me. I’m not a forward-momentum sort of writer who bulls into powerful expression, much as I admire such writers and sometimes wish I were more like them. I’m the ponderer, the one who imagines being an other and tries to figure out that perspective, the somewhat distant observer who nevertheless wants to bring the feelings and experiences home to whoever my reader may be.

That was a splendid experience for me. So nice to speak with people under 25 years old again. I miss that. Meanwhile, reading a 1998 edition of Lorca’s Poet in New York (in translation of course, though I am getting slightly better at reading the Spanish). And drafting new work in my head while watering the garden.

Ann E. Michael, Interviews

How to explain to someone else
when your basic condition is knowing you barely
have words for things in this universe? I try to strip
the shelves of my excesses. Why did I need more
than one pen, one bottle of ink?

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

People who believe in community lean into community. We are doing everything we can to lean in. I have been working seven days a week since becoming Publisher and CEO in January 2024. I haven’t been paid for three months. I’m going to keep working, but if it were up to me, I admit, I can’t carry this press into the future alone.

Sugar is poured unevenly in the publishing business. Presses without endowments and large operating reserves often go overlooked. I wonder where the sugar was poured for the Literary Arts Fund. I wonder if there was ever actually a chance for Red Hen Press, or if we only imagined there was.

Meanwhile, Tobi has powers and is hatching a plan, one that includes rebuilding our board. Our staff continues to march ahead. Our work goes on, but we need more support to be sustainable, to survive into the next year. Tobi is our community whisperer, the one who speaks in the clearing in the woods, and they help us believe that if the community wants Red Hen, it will happen.

The night we found out about the Literary Arts Fund, we had tickets to a play called Exotica, where performers dressed up like animals and performed aerial stunts. There were two dancing chickens (you really can’t make this up) who got all of us on our feet to conga through the adjoining restaurant. Maybe it was our new board member and Tobi, getting everyone up and dancing, to remind us that we are all in it together.

At some point, they had a “slut contest” to see who would dance on the bar and strip. The twenty-somethings lined up, but nobody took off more than a jacket. I just couldn’t let this pass. I got up and danced the slut walk, off came the jacket and the top. My bracelets and rings flew in all directions. Sometimes, you have to do it yourself.

Tobi is creating our future, and the future is a conga line with a chicken in the lead. I like that future. I believe in it.

We Kates don’t give up easily. I won the slut contest and walked off with the champagne. Red Hen Press will not go quietly into this good night. Tomorrow is another day.

Kate Gale, Not With a Bang: Finding Our Future in Community

My anguish can be washed in warm water, with a mild soap, when it’s soaked then rolled in an old towel lay it out in the dappled sun, beside lilies of the valley where it can hear the tinkling of its bells and exchange its sour breath for their small beads of sweet aroma smelling of fields and fields of the smallest hope.

Jill Pearlman, Anguish is like Laundry

Now here they come again, the immaculate men.
Here they come, smelling of incense and failure.
They walk past the pot-holes, weeds, broken glass,
into my dreams, while I sit in moonlight with my
book. What’s this pressed between the pages?

Bob Mee, THE JOY OF STREAM-WRITING IS NOT KNOWING WHAT’S HAPPENING, WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN

It’s summer, for sure this time. Gave my author site a cleanup for broken links and to be better organized. Read a bit. Sent a couple more submissions. Took a walk. Transcribed some.

Birdsong of various chirps, and another, somewhere among cat’s meow, falsetto donkey and door hinge. Took a horsefly, a wasp, a few deerfly out to see the sky. Snacked, drank, read some more. Received a few more submissions for my one-line chapbook call. Wrote some more.

Pearl Pirie, Getting Resettled

This week: a lion-faced serpent god, the preserved body of a billionaire, memories of tap dancing, a brown-paper-bag existence, and much more. Enjoy.

The first bird I hear as I wake this morning is a wood pigeon; the promise of spring in its echoing tones. In the damp morning the cheerful chorusing of many birds is welcoming the day, and the air brings the scent of rosemary and twigs.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a beaver in a muddy puddle. I say it is a capybara sitting in the mud at Chester Zoo. I photographed it during a visit back in 2015 and the photo came to mind this week after a conversation with a wonderful friend.

Part of our conversation centred around the importance of being able to sit with someone when they are in the emotional equivalent of a muddy puddle. I loved the analogy… being alongside the person, acknowledging that it is indeed a swampy place, sitting with their thoughts and feelings for a while without rushing them to get out, without offering to try to solve it… bringing presence not solutions… simply being there with them in that muddy puddle.

I love a metaphor and after our chat I spent some time thinking about the times I have sat in muddy puddles of my own as well as the times I have meandered off my path to sit with others in their puddles. Those puddles have held a lot. Times of pondering, times of deep thinking, time to respect the need to be still for a while, times of silence, time to figure out the feelings and what is needed right now.

Sue Finch, SITTING IN THE MUD

At one point yesterday morning, a sea turtle patrol truck drove down the beach away from the sunrise, with one young worker guy hanging out the window taking pictures.  I assume that the workers get to see a beach sunrise every morning.  The fact that one of them went to such an effort to get a picture made me happy.

I’ve said before, and I’ll continue to remind myself that the human capacity for wonder makes me think that humans may survive after all.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Beach Sunrises

Recently, I enjoyed/endured a string of late nights (I’ll only do it for poetry), first in New York, where I heard extraordinary poets including Richard Siken, Ilya Kaminsky, and Ocean Vuong, and then in Chicago, where I heard debut writers including I.S. Jones and Noa Micaela Fields. I love the mix of improvisation and preparation that goes into introducing a poem—I learn as much about the poet from those candid moments as I do from the work itself.

This week, I attended a wonderful dinner for the National Poetry Series, which does invaluable work in support of poets, and had the pleasure of sitting alongside three former teachers: Deborah Landau, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Meghan O’Rourke. Fifteen years after my MFA, it feels especially meaningful to find myself working alongside them and still learning from them.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

Recently, I posted about some poems of mine published in Creative Writing Department’s Print Journal. They were a set of seven pieces, all of similar style, called “Rat Heart Nebula.” Below, I’m sharing three more sections of it, rounding out the set to ten. I am eventually going to collect all these in a chapbook, but I’m not sure how many of them there will end up being. They are extremely fun to write. […]

Monstrous child of Sophia in the Gnostic cosmology, Yaldabaoth is the lion-faced serpent god who created our insane world. It does not matter if you think about this or not when reading.

R.M. Haines, BLUETOOTH SPEAKER YALDABAOTH

This is “Cupid and Psyche” (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) by Jacopo del Sellaio, from about 1473. Fifteen scenes from the same story are merged together, Psyche appearing 11 times. A tree in the foreground of one scene may form the background of another.

Time goes left-to-right along the lower part of the painting. Higher up, more liberties are taken. This style is called ‘continuous narrative’ – because, I suppose, there are no dividing lines between the different scenes/times.

I think it’s an idea that’s sometimes replicated in poetry, the same phrase representing a cause in one moment of time, and an effect in another. Recall and foreboding are intermixed with the present.

Tim Love, Continuous narrative

After the art gallery I had
skin tags removed
at my dermatologist’s office.
where I bought the most expensive
cosmetic I have ever bought.
I decided not to feel guilty about it–
my birthday was in two weeks.

This was the day after
the day I’d had
two poetry groups
back to back
where I wrote
poems
as vigorously
as a Baptist pastor
can preach
hell fire.

Rebecca Cook, The Sound of The Ocean

A gorgeous day as I rode the waves of a county road up from the river and into the glacial-carved bays and fjords of this county, rising into the air to crest a blind hill, easing past the slower vessels, a horse and buggy, a man in a flat brimmed hat pushing a bike, all sparkling in spring sun and new leaves pattering in the wind. Arrived lakeside, a park spread like its own picnic. A windsurfer coursed the chop of the dark blue lake. And I entered the community of food-bringers, of neighbors and friends, mostly strangers to me, chatting, no real laughter yet, as people assembled in slow spurts, some signing the guest book, some leafing through the photo albums, some pausing to hug hard the bereaved. I’ve done this a few too many times in the past six months. A spate of funerals and memorials. This one for a man I’d only known as a towheaded boy flinging himself around the yard, pausing briefly to pee in the bushes, too busy to bother with the niceties of a bathroom, or settling beside his tiny little sister to smooch or tickle. His mother, my friend. After we wailed together briefly, struck senseless by the simple devastation of her loss, broke apart to hold each other at arm’s length, enjoying seeing ourselves much unchanged after all this time. “He grew up to be a nice person,” she assured me, knowing I’d been a stranger to him, as we do not live near each other and had drifted apart. I will never know. Sudden death or slow, predicted or out of the blue, the shock of it remains much the same. Wait a minute, we wake to realize, day after day. Wait a minute.

Here is a poem by the ancient Japanese writer Isumi Shikibu, as translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani.

“Why did you vanish…”

Isumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani)

Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world.

Marilyn McCabe, into empty sky

What I am referring to here is my long, missed diagnosis of OCD.

I have found myself fully tethered to Larry, so I resist forming bonds with anyone. It’s too painful. I don’t want to lose someone else. Yet I want a witness. We all do.

There is a feeling of duty and obligation to ensuring his work stays out there, so his presence stays…present. I want people to see my love for him. I want people to keep loving him and appreciating his work. Yet I am in a loop. Often, I cannot leave my apartment. It takes me awhile to detach myself from him as I am convinced he is with me (his ashes are in my apartment).

Via repetitive tasks, and mind-numbing repetition and panic, I do things that provide a false sense of comfort that life is moving on without him. Since he died, I’ve been legacy building. Because he was a poet and so prolific, such a talented writer, a beautiful soul. Because I love him and my connection to him is through poetry.

And if I repeat myself through these posts it is because I am re-processing, meta-processing, or processing things for the first time now, with some—albeit very little—distance. It’s only been 15 months.

The book I am working on of his, for example, had to be pulled apart and re-laid out. All 800 pages of it (long story which I will detail another time). So after I painstakingly worked through thousands of pages of his hard copy poems to get them organized, labeled, edited, and collection into an 800-page volume of never-seen-before poems, I had to read them all again, reliving each love poem, each drawing, each haiku.

And my algorithm feeds me more grief, I feel more grief, feel guilty for not feeling more grief. On repeat. Constantly in grief mode.

And then there is the very accurate notion in grief that we don’t experience just the one loss, it is loss over and over. Every time you hear, see, or feel something that triggers you, you miss your person and your brain has to adjust and say to you: “Remember? They are not here anymore.”

It is looping loss upon loss.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, To play with catastrophe.

The grammar of archives, of our accounting—
     more than just the language of the incident report

Dalamhati— grief of the deepest kind, 
from the Malay root for interior, something seated
      in the liver or the heart

Sorrow as more than affliction, because lodged
      in the body

Luisa A. Igloria, Souls on Board

i asked myself what i thought grief was. i used to know. or else, i used to think i knew, when i was young and young-in-grief, when grief felt as immediate and instinctive as arousal. when i thought i could name it; could call it by any single name. i thought that grief was an absence and an urgency. which it is, but not only this. it is also an accretion, a thickening in time and texture. grief has a taste, a colour and a shape, is shaping – reshaping – my attachments to others, to the world, to the body, to the “self”. yes, it is reshaping still. against the implied trajectory contained within much of western thought, that says beyond its immediate moment, your grief will diminish or fade. i used to dread this as betrayal and failure; found ways to – as i saw it – keep my grief alive and livid, insisted upon it as an ethics: that which we owe to the dead. silly girl, grief does not diminish. grief, if we allow it, is intimate, metabolic, and slow. grief is transformative. that is, as it transforms us, grief also transforms: from the emptying distress of acute personal hurt, to a rich and weighty way of being with. i think we are looking at healing through the wrong end of the telescope. perhaps we are using the wrong word altogether. supposing the aim was to acclimatise? suppose we sought not to reduce, but to deepen? to lean into this deepening.

Fran Lock, ON MEMORY #2

(Art unburnt in the pyre—a Cornell box carousel.
The chorus of little birds in the yard, psychopomp
for our cat’s last breath rising like smoke. Tears
I’ve kept close, waiting to share them with you.)

Lori Witzel, Smoke

Tom Sastry has published one pamphlet and three collections. Carol Ann Duffy said he “makes friendships and love affairs new and strange” and Hera Lindsay Bird call him “a magician of deadpan”. His poems have appeared in The Guardian and Poetry Review. His latest book is Life Expectancy Begins to Fall is described by Jonathan Edwards as “the most important – and certainly the most entertaining – book about the end of the world I’ve yet found”. Tom himself describes it as the perfect birthday present for someone with a sense of humour about their mortality.

The title poem – a sequence of six titled poems, each consisting of six couplets – is at the core of the book. It is linked to the Covid-19 pandemic and government decisions.

The collection is also a short master class on making titles work:

• How to tell the apocalypse is happening when you get all your news from Instagram
• Navigating the Peri-Apocalypse with Radical Self-Care
• The preserved body of a billionaire slowly defrosts in a devastated world

[…]

As I was preparing this post, Tom wrote to me: ‘You can be pessimistic about the drift of world-historical events and still hopeful about human nature and human connection. You can be hopeful about what might happen next week or about the reception of your friend’s new book.  There’s no link between optimism and virtue or between pessimism and cynicism. So that’s really the moral centre of the book – the belief that an age of pessimism doesn’t condemn us to live mean lives. We can live well as pessimists.’

Fokkina McDonnell, Life expectancy begins to fall – poems

Big workday today for me. And an exercise in joy. One of the greatest happiness an author can experience in the process of creating a book is receiving the first “proof” from the book designer, assuming you have a brilliant and conscientious designer, which I do in Mark Melnick who I recommend. Today I’ll be proofing my 2027 book COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES which, to my relief, pulls off one of my most ambitious literary structures to date. That is, I first wrote a novel. Then I had one of the novel’s characters create a poetry collection. Both are featured in CDB.

It was an arduous process over the past 3-4 years to create CDB. I first wrote another novel that wasn’t good enough (yet) to leave my files where it’s shelved as a “trunk novel.” I wrote a second novel, and from that novel birthed CDB. Literally a poet-novelist I am. From my Author’s Note, you’ll see that CDB has something for every type of literary reader.

The featured doll by my manuscript is the avatar for my novel’s primary protagonist, Kris–an orphan, a spy, a lethal killer, former head of the C I A, a community organizer, and a lover. He’s stared at me in my writing studio for the years it took me to create this book. He’s been ensconced over my computer to encourage–and pressure–me to finish this project. I look forward to the day I can present the actual book before his nose and hear him say, “I told you so!”

And someday I hope you will read CDB, which critiques Empire by going right to its root source: Sargon of Akkad, known for his conquests of Sumerian city-states in the 24th to 23rd centuries BC (last image). He’s been identified as the first person in recorded history to rule over an empire.

And yet this is also a rom-com. So: something for everyone.

Eileen Tabios, PRE-RELEASE NOTES: COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES

As I’ve been getting ready to get a final version of my next collection, MARRY | KISS |KILL together and issue it this summer, I’ve been thinking about my own experiences with self-publishing my work (at least the full-length projects, but this applies to chapbooks as well)  and how that might be of interest to other poets if they are considering doing the same in this age of dwindling publishers, slashed funding, and general upheaval in the arts. 

While I spent many years waffling over the logistics and benefits of self-publishing, there were many benefits once I took the plunge. One was more control over timelines and design (including books, like GRANATA above, with an art element, not always welcomed by other presses)  Another benefit is a greater share of the list price. This happens in a time when poets, even publishing with traditional presses, often share the brunt of promotion anyway for any collection, so that was nothing new under the sun. I also was producing work at a steady clip, impossible to publish all of them with the press that had issued my last three books. I also did not want to go through the work and expense of entering manuscripts in open reading periods and spendy contests, having already played that game earlier in my career. I was also in a great place to make it happen, having my own imprint and book design experience, as well as an existing audience for my work this many books and years in.

When I was initially contemplating self-publication in the early aughts, it was still very much a no-no if you wanted to be taken seriously and be seen with legitimacy (though I wonder how much of this was just the poets I was in community with.) Other communities had different ideas about it. There were spoken word poets who regularly issued their own work to sell at readings. The zine makers I knew regularly published their own editions of new work. When I started DGP, the first trial chapbook was my own, and when that went well, I moved on to publishing other authors. As time went on, there were more chapbooks and zines, but I still entrusted other presses with my full-length manuscripts. While I loved the presses and editors I worked with, it became steadily apparent over the years that traditional publishing, while nice, was not always ideal. My first publisher issued one book and accepted a second, but shuttered before it bore fruit. Ditto with another I later published with–same situation, one book released and another in-progress and abandoned when the publisher closed (I later issued this one myself, first as an e-book and now in print.) Other books closed out the print run after a decade (I have a handful of copies of these, but they are only available direct from me now.) 

Since 2021 or so, I’ve been happily typing and designing away since, issuing 1-2 projects each year on my own, usually available to all, though there are also some Patreon-only offerings.  But there are a few misconceptions I have often come across that bear mentioning when discussing self-publishing your poetry. that seemed fruitful to discuss.

Kristy Bowen, Self Publishing Myths Dispelled

To found the publishing company New Directions, James Laughlin invested $100,000 of his family’s wealth (about $2 million today) into the company. While he ran New Directions, James Laughlin lived on family property in a large country house in Connecticut. He lived off his investments in the stock market, as well as his generational wealth. Over time, he kept investing his family’s money.

I like New Directions; it’s a revered press. But Red Hen Press has no family money. Last night I was at a dinner, and someone said, I would never want to work at a nonprofit. Too unstable.

I know what you mean. It is too unstable.

There are many things I don’t understand. Can I make it from Point A to Point B? Why is Point B always so far away?

For me, Point B is the amount of money I need to raise for Red Hen to make it to the end of the fiscal year, June 30^th.

In this struggle, people might care, but no one is coming to save me. Despite some incredible ongoing donors, no one can guarantee the survival of Red Hen; few people have been able to connect me with new foundations, donors, or sources of income.

When I was in my fifties, considering the path of James Laughlin, I looked into the stock market. I didn’t put any money into it then or since, but I did look into it. It was another thing I didn’t quite know enough about. What exactly was the stock market doing over there? What was it up to?

We recently decided to sell some of our personal books that we didn’t need. I said to Mark, if you had a tiny amount of money, what would you do with it? Savings account? Stock market? Get a car that won’t break down?

I started without generational wealth. I did not have any investment income. Out of the cult, I had nothing. Later, I was earning wages teaching, writing, and speaking. Then, I started a publishing company. That’s when everything shifted.

I thought that publishing was an enterprise worth saving; that the building of literary culture was an enterprise worth keeping. I still hold this belief, still say this to myself, but maintaining the physical reality is harder. Nonprofit publishing in the U.S. comes from a small batch of people who decide to build literary culture. Most of them are writers. Those without pre-existing wealth often give up their own literary lives and are written out of the story.

My goal this fiscal year is to get Red Hen fiscally healthy. My other goal is to get myself an additional job so that I can be fiscally healthy. To be fiscally literate and stable, I need to make a living, and I am going to figure it out. I am going to carry Red Hen forward.

Kate Gale, What We Know, What We Weather, What We Climb

Starting a poetry press was always going to be an education, but I didn’t expect to be learning quite so fast. Headless Poet is dedicated to the art of the introduction: you can read about the idea here, and an interview with Victoria Moul, editor of our first pamphlet, here. The response so far has been really encouraging, and there’s a lot more to look forward to.

One question, rather obvious in retrospect, which has been preoccupying me recently: how exactly does one go about promoting poetry that has been (in the words of my mission statement) buried by time? Time isn’t the easiest material to shift. Come to think about it, how do you market poetry at all? Perhaps you just keep writing blogs. That was always the original plan.

Today, Headless Poet publishes Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected and introduced by Alex Wong. Alex is the author of two collections of poetry, Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021), both from Carcanet Press. He has also previously selected from the work of Victorian writers A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and Alice Meynell. When I first approached Alex last year, I didn’t have a particular writer in mind: he brings such a deep reading of and appreciation for the poetry of the era that we might have gone in any number of directions. But soon as he mentioned Hood, I knew it would have to be him.

Thomas Hood (1799-1845) hasn’t so much been buried by time as dismembered and deposited in various places — known for the odd anthology piece, but rarely read as a whole. I Remember, I Remember might be familiar to some (and it is a far stranger poem than it seems) but it doesn’t necessarily prepare you for the sheer exuberance of Hood’s comic verse or the astonishing, sing-song social criticism of poems like The Song of the Shirt. And yet: Hood was also a contemporary of Keats and Shelley, and could write a sonnet with the lyric intensity of either of them.

Jeremy Wikeley, New to Headless Poet: Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected & introduced by Alex Wong

What I loved […]

was the man, out of place like the rest,
telling a bawdy story of standing

at the urinal many weddings ago,
when something drifted from his inner coat pocket

as he stood pissing beside an editor —
his poem, having escaped confinement,
landed in the froth.

The gentle man, already zipped up,
delicately picked the page up by its corner

and published it.

Jill Pearlman, Wedding Miracles

There is an actual Lake Isle of Innisfree. The note that accompanies the photograph says, “It is difficult to imagine scraping a living on the unpromising terrain of this island.” (Wikimedia Commons)

For most of the poem’s twelve lines, that place does exist, shining and almost reachable, in the evocative liquid sounds of its hexameter lines, dropping to tetrameter at the end of the first two abab quatrains, and resolving in pentameter in the poem’s last line. There’s a quality in these longer lines of, simultaneously, languor and urgency: the timelessness of the place, the exiled speaker’s haste to get there.

But can such a place exist? This poem, despite its maker’s dyspeptic later opinion of it, saves itself from the poisoning of nostalgia in its last lines. This Innisfree is real, more real even than the physical islet in the actual Irish lake — but only in one man’s “deep heart’s core,” where he carries the memory, which has become his own creation. It exists, but nowhere in external reality. You might want to arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, but you can’t get there from here.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I’m delighted to feature today a poem by Ricky Monahan Brown, taken from his recent pamphlet, Drawer of Letters (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).

The piece I’ve chosen is titled ‘Drawer’, so its significance within the manuscript as a whole is pretty clear. I don’t tend to be a fan of poems that use the passive voice a lot, nor of poems that don’t contain any main verbs. However, those two devices are actually used to terrific effect here, holding back narrative details that the reader is allowed to fill in, such as the identity of the protagonists. Meanwhile, progressively tweaked repetition is clearly a driving force, used deftly, moving us forward without any punctuation towards the poem’s emotional core. 

Matthew Stewart, A poem by Ricky Monahan Brown

Anthony Barnett is a kind of one-man cultural institution, poet, editor, publisher, translator, musician and scholar. He has published, amongst others, the original Collected Poems by Jeremy Prynne, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Collected Poems and Translations. He has also co-edited and published the journal Snow lit rev since 2013.

The first two volumes here display something of his range as a translator. ‘Whoever Has Found a Horseshoe’ is significant for being a rare unrhymed poem by Osip Mandelstam; it’s also his longest poem. Subtitled ‘A Pindaric fragment’, it reads to me, in Barnett’s version at least, as a meditation on the difficulty of art, of making things that are not, to echo David Jones, valued for being utile.

Barnett presents the poem’s ten parts one per verso page, each with a facing recto page illustrative drawing by Lucy Rose Cunningham, drawings which strike me as being integral, not decorative. The opening section, facing a drawing of a tree, presents a view of woodland as raw material:

We may face the forest and say:
Here is a forest with ship masts and timbers:
The pink-tinged pines
Freed from the weight of their clumps to their crowns
Should groan in a gale

Straight away, the utilitarian is undercut by the aesthetic; nobody will build a ship from a drawing of a tree, and for the shipwright, that ‘pink-tinged’ is entirely superfluous.

The fourth section addresses the difficulty of art, specifically the art of poetry:

Where shall we start?
Everything sways and splits,
Similes quiver in the air

While the next section addresses its value:

Thrice blessed whoever enshrines a name in a song,—
A song graced with a name
Outshines those that are not—

The penultimate section revolves around the title line:

So
Whoever has found a horseshoe blows away the dust,
Buffs it up with wool
Until it shines.
Then
Hangs it over the door,
To rest,
No striking sparks on flint again.

The polished horseshoe hung over the door has transcended its utilitarian origins to become, in its own small way, a work of art, of the impulse to make things over for no end beyond the pleasure it gives. The final section emphasises the poet’s identification with the finder, the trouvère, whose words are like objects dug from the earth.

In an afterword, Barnett describes the process of translation, this being his fifth version of the Horseshoe poem. He describes it as still potentially not finished, but it’s hard to imagine how he would come up with a more enjoyable version.

Billy Mills, A Basket of Barnetts

Mekyle Ali Qadir is a Pakistani poet currently pursuing his Master’s degree at Carleton University in Ottawa. His writing explores the negotiation of culture and ethnicity he enacts in his life as an immigrant from Pakistan. Writing in both English and Urdu, his emerging work explores South Asian cultural traditions, migrant identity, mysticism, and intertextual art. […]

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?

My writing is probably too theoretical. I’m very occupied with intercultural knowledges, negotiating my home traditions with Western modernity. My writing interrogates the assumptions that come with intercultural dialogues, especially in a place like Canada with all its performative multiculturalism rhetoric. I draw much of my inspiration from postcolonial thinkers who challenge hegemonic and Imperialist epistemologies, especially Edward Said, Fanon, Cesaire, Iqbal, and Shariati. I’m just regurgitating their words and adding personal anecdotes along the way. Aside from that, though I don’t count it as a “theoretical concern,” my writing is steeped in mystical thought and teachings. As I repeat throughout my answers, the Sufi traditions give me inspiration beyond these great thinkers. Mystical inspiration doesn’t work in the question-answer structure because it’s beyond language so it’s hard to say what questions I answer when I write through this inspiration. But a tangible result of it is a keen sense of empathy that pushes beyond personal and cultural barriers and lets me capture intense personal and social experiences.

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 there’s more creative writers operating at multiple levels of culture than we tend to acknowledge because they don’t call their work ‘creative’ even though it is. I think writers always find themselves in strange ‘moments’ in history, but now especially their work has been threatened by AI and slowly, their value is starting to be remembered in the wake of AI’s disappointing capabilities. I also think writers should see their work beyond its political impact. It’s a result of Eurocentric reductionism that writers are encouraged to think only in terms of political, material ends. I don’t think all writing is or should be political, though you can stretch definitions to fit your argument as much as you want. There are truths that transcend that, which all writing, but especially poetry, can uncover. I guess that’s what writers should be chasing after, to unveil Maya and reach the Gha’ib. […]

13 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I see what he means I guess, but I don’t like to think of it that way. Writing for me is one form of art that has to coexist with others. The creatives I admire most are creative in multiple ways, it’s only now that we’re siloing ourselves into discrete ‘disciplines’. I like to draw and play music, both of which make their way into my writing. Poetry is a mathematical activity, sometimes a scientific one. Poetry for me is tied to my religious expression concurrently with all of these other forms. Defining poetry through delimitations leads to dead ends, I think.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mekyle Ali Qadir

The famine in Damascus fell so hard that year
that friends forgot what affection felt like.
The sky above them grew so tight-fisted
that neither crops nor date palms drank a drop.
The ancient springs ran dry, and orphans’ tears
was the only water anyone could find.
If plumes of smoke rose from a household’s vent,
it was nothing but a widow’s sigh of grief.
I saw the once well-muscled trees unleaved,
each one poor and weak as the poorest darvish.
The orchard and the mountain, both were bare:
locusts had eaten the gardens; people the locusts!

Richard Jeffrey Newman, From Saadi’s Bustan: A Noble Man Suffers With The Victims of a Famine

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reviewing a couple of different books about Homer and his “afterlife” — the myriad ways in which the Iliad and the Odyssey stand behind and within so much of our literature but also off at an angle to it. Texts can be both foundational and also irreducibly strange and distant. (The Bible is another good example of this.) Very few people can read Homeric Greek, let alone with real ease and pleasure. But at the same time more people, I would guess, know something of the Homeric myths than any other classical work. Stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey are a popular basis for children’s picture books and early readers as well as the fashionable mythological kind of fantasy aimed at older children and teenagers. This just isn’t true in the same way of the story of the Aeneid or the Metamorphoses (though those poems incorporate Homeric material, of course), and even less so of, say, Herodotus, Livy or Lucan. Homer occupies a peculiar cultural space: both almost entirely unread (in Greek) and at the same time familiar, friendly, even cosy perhaps, in a way that is unlike most other “classics”.

Victoria Moul, Bifold authority: Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”

In the years since his death, no age of English poetry has been without its tributes to Shakespeare. Ben Jonson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us,” written in 1616, the year Shakespeare died, graced the prefactory material in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and John Milton’s “On Shakespeare. 1630” appeared in the 1632 Second Folio — which is praise from a pair of poets hard to match. And on the tradition goes to the 21st century with, for example, Wendy Cope’s lighthearted 2016 “Shakespeare at School.”

The centuries between saw plenty of work in this line, but, curiously, only Today’s Poem, “Shakespeare,” seems much anthologized — a sonnet written in his twenties, which appeared in his first collection, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, in 1849.

I haven’t managed to decide what I think of [Matthew] Arnold’s poetry. His reputation declined in the 20th century, partly with the rise of awareness of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but the 1939 study of Arnold by Lionel Trilling, a critic I admire, took the poetry seriously, as I have grown to suspect we must. Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we have looked previously at only two of his poems, “Dover Beach” and the strangely constructed “Growing Old.” And I find, in my teaching and lecturing, that “Dover Beach” comes easily to mind, easily to hand as a way to convey the sense of something lost in the rise of modernity — something that large swathes of 19th- and 20th-century artists felt.

The argument of the poem is that Shakespeare stands alone, and the tremendous opening line, expressing that thought — “Others abide our question. Thou art free.” — is probably why the poem joined the standards of English verse.

(A test I use for literary reference is whether P.G. Wodehouse would use it for comedy, with an expectation that his readers wouldn’t scratch their heads. And sure enough, it appears in such stories as “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald”: “At imitating a hen laying an egg he was admittedly a master. His fame in that one respect had spread all over the West-end of London. ‘Others abide our question. Thou art free,’ was the verdict of London’s gilded youth on Archibald Mulliner when considered purely in the light of a man who could imitate a hen laying an egg. ‘Mulliner,’ they said to one another, ‘may be a pretty total loss in many ways, but he can imitate a hen laying an egg.’”)

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Shakespeare

In “Material Witness” Edward Ragg turns his forensic eye towards material details often overlooked or taken for granted, e.g. rock formations, coral reefs, bower birds, an old photo, and what these artefacts might show or reveal. The specific details of a small starting point widens out to a relationship, family history or connection to the natural world, giving an universal appeal to a personal starting point.

In “The Tap Dancer”, a photo of a dancer “with a Nazi stamp on the back” is revealed to be the poem’s speaker’s mother.

“My father recalled bright-faced GIs breakfasting.
So enthusiastically polite. How they’d throw kids
sweets from their jeeps (candy they called them)
before most girls and boys knew to brush their teeth.
My father wept for those pearl toothed men until
his death. My mother remembered tap dancing
and often said: I was always so lucky, so lucky.”

The poem shows the different attitudes towards the war. The father remembering candy thrown at children from soldiers facing going to war. For him, the war is a tragedy of these men who never returned. The mother, the girl in the photo, focuses on memories of tap dancing. She is not being flippant, however, as she considers herself fortunate to survive. Her attitude is one of fortitude and survival. The war is something she’s put behind her.

Emma Lee, “Material Witness” Edward Ragg (Cinnamon Press) – book review

Taken as a whole, Mountains that See in the Dark is a striking collection in which the austerity of the desert becomes a means of exploring emotional depth, endurance, and renewal. [Regine] Ebner’s imagist precision allows her to distil large truths into brief, resonant poems, revealing a world in which beauty and hardship are inseparable, and in which hope persists even in the harshest conditions. The collection confirms her as a poet of remarkable economy and insight, one whose work transforms the physical landscape into a profound meditation on what it means to survive, to love, and to begin again.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Mountains that See in the Dark’

I was having one of those dumb human hissy fits wherein one believes she will never again encounter another example of a beloved thing, i.e. a poem that seems to have been written specifically for her, when, lo and behold, Bob Hicok’s latest, Breathe, appeared unbidden in my mailbox last Saturday, courtesy of one of those remarkable human treasures, i.e. a friend who doesn’t actually know what is wrong with you yet seems to know the cure. These are the third and fourth Bob Hicok poems to appear in this publication, so I guess it qualifies now as a Bob Hicok appreciation vehicle, and that’s fine with me, especially since Breathe contains its own Gerald Stern appreciation vehicle in “A little wave of my hand goodbye,” my own love of that poet being decidedly well–established. Ideally those warblings have also made Gerald Stern one of your favourite poets, but just in case: “Logic” felt to me like a perfect Hicok poem, one you need not possess any particular poetic affection/affliction to appreciate.

Vanessa Stauffer, Two poems by Bob Hicok

I love the specificity of the blue tits, Lookout Hill (the one in Greenwich?), wild thyme, the Sphinx moth, the evening primroses, the turtledoves – it’s exemplary in how these are deployed without seeming in any way fake or outlandish.

I love, too, how ‘a rich lentil stew’ will replace ‘the gnarled leavings of a slaughterhouse’ (and not just because I haven’t eaten meat since 1982). My 1978 edition of the Collins Concise English Dictionary gives ‘leavings’ as an alternative for ‘leftovers’, but I suspect it’s an anachronism now – I wonder if it’s still used in Wombwell/Barnsley where Sue is from, though despite the places’ close proximity, my Sheffield-native wife Lyn says she’s never heard it. Either way, it looks and sounds just right, doesn’t it? When I attended ‘Poetry from Art sessions at Tate Modern from 2008 to c.2014, Pascale Petit exhorted participants to ‘use all the senses’, and that’s certainly what Sue did in this poem.

Above all, I adore how Sue ends the poem so beautifully, with ‘the crooning turtledoves’ – one of our most extinction-threatened bird species – and invites us readers to hear their song instead of the tomcats on their night-time prowl.

Matthew Paul, On Sue Riley’s ‘Cats’ Meat Man’

14 May is #dylanday, a day to remember Dylan Thomas. I am posting this as part of a Facebook celebration initiated by Lidia Chiarelli of Immagine e Poesia. 

Under Milk Wood was first read on stage at The Poetry Centre in New York on 14 May 1953.

Please find below some lines from my poem in memory of the poet. My poem was first published in Places within Reach (2006), an anthology from Indigo Dreams Press, edited by Ronnie Goodyer.

Tycoch

Tall rows of rainbow tulips line these ways
where poets, lovers, dreamers stoop to gaze
upon the mirror of the pool. A sudden spark
shakes up the surface like a burning coal.
We jump, and vow to leave before the night
sweeps down from Kilvey Hill: a rook in flight
spreads shadows on the bay and bares its soul.
We climb the hill where ponies used to roam
and reach at last the red, red walls of home.

Caroline Gill, 14 May is #dylanday

I promised a review of Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poetica, which, as the title promises, is a lot of poems about poetry—kind of a slim volume, not that many poems, and an unexpected large chunk of prose in the middle, talking about attending antifascist rallies where violence breaks out, being threatened by the ex of a friend with gun violence at her workplace and consequently going to the shooting range and thinking about a bulletproof vest—probably the most interesting part of the book. Juliana is seven years older than me but still in my age group (Gen X), started blogging and such around the same time I did, lived a large part of her life in Ohio (which I also did), and she’s a feminist who struggles with what that means. She also has some privileges—a lot of famous writer friends and a steady paying fancy academic job—that I don’t have, which she makes pretty clear in her acknowledgements, all ten pages of them (!). Is it worth reading? Probably. Is the best book of poetry I read in the last year? Absolutely not. (I would give it to Martha Silano’s Terminal Surreal, such a searing book about dying of ALS, or Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic, such an intensely intelligent meditation on mushrooms and death. I think the people that choose the Pulitzer Prize are probably picking friends from their own cohort of academics, not reading too far outside their comfort zones, and boy, do they love poems about poetry. (Remember Diane Seuss’ frank: sonnets also had a lot of poetry talk, though her style is pretty different than Spahr’s.) I absolutely adored Marie Howe’s Pulitzer winning New and Selected Poems, which had a totally different flavor, which won the year before, so I guess it just varies by year. If I was a judge, I would have probably fought for a different book, but no one has asked me yet, LOL.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Personality and Poetry, Hummingbirds and Goldfinches and Butterflies, Surviving Root Canals, and Melancholy Seasons

This sort of critique has been around forever: https://themagialipoetryshow.substack.com/p/peeing-in-the-pool-of-poetic-mediocrity. I recall such chat when I was 20 years old and all poetry was print; there was much to-do about whether being a poet associated with a university was the only way to be taken seriously or at any rate recognized at all. There were complaints that celebrities got books published while excellent un-famous writers struggled, waiting for rejections by SASE*. Poets often complained of cliques, of infighting and pettiness. There was a certain railing against mediocre free verse and “overly-confessional” poetry; writers threw barbs at those deemed too political or not political enough, or too feminist or not feminist enough, or writing that was deemed too formal for contemporary times. Recognition was a term I heard often in the 1980s. It was what mattered, apparently. Needless to say, I did not attain it. I think, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.

Author Ali Whitelock’s points are not all off the mark, in fact; who has not suffered through listening to some embarrassingly bad (well, we have to learn somehow) or, worse yet, egotistical/narcissistic readers at open mikes? All I can say for myself is that when I was starting out I recognized my work was not brilliant–but I needed the practice and tried not to overstay my welcome on stage. Even as a featured reader, I tended not to fill the time allotted. Granted, it helps that I don’t write epics! But I’ve heard these criticisms of open mike readings and about gate-keeping literary magazine editors for decades, and also the charge that poets are aiming more for recognition (today read: “likes”) than for highly-crafted work. And also the claim that there’s a sudden proliferation of “half-arsed poetry” in the world. Nope. Not sudden or new.

Whitelock’s essay is likely meant to be a bit provocative. Otherwise why use such freighted language, or make sarcastic remarks like “Poetry, as we all know, is competitive…”? And her bullet points about how to know when you’ve achieved a poem worth publishing–Eh. Not objective or even particularly actionable, and what if the writer really feels that her mediocre poem meets those points, even if few others agree? Taste, after all, is personal. However, I do like what she says about writing poems: “The poem itself – and the process whereby it is achieved – is the reward. Not the likes, not the prizes, not the comments – true, false or otherwise.” I’m definitely into the process. “Likes” on social media are nice, I suppose, but they tend not to mean much.

Ann E. Michael, Complaints, critiques

A poem that disappears. A poem you can hold. In this self-interview, writer and artist Josh Medsker opens up about his evolving practice and the intimate, tactile world of his Container Poems—art objects built around a single emotional or thematic thread. As he puts it, each one is “an art object built around a theme — every element of the piece supports that theme,” a definition that becomes richer the deeper you go into his process.

What makes this conversation especially compelling is how it mirrors the work itself: personal, reflective, and rooted in relationship. Medsker traces the surprising connections between his Disappearing Poems and these new physical pieces, exploring how ephemerality and permanence can answer the same artistic question from opposite directions.

This guest post dives into the origins of the project, the emotional labor behind each object, and the way making physical containers has reshaped his understanding of what a poem is—not just text, but an experience.

Trish Hopkinson, Inside the Box: A Self-Interview with Josh Medsker on Container Poems

Prose, a punch in the face, a feather in the armpit, a snake that sticks its tail in one of its ears so it doesn’t hear too much music. I want my prose to be as tricksterish, as surprising, as osmotic as is my experience of the world, not just from A to B, but all points between and also those points that are not on that line. I want my prose to be as quicksilver as a mind and as tawdry or broke, as rich and as broken, as plain spoken or baroque. A passage of prose could be a various as what might happen from morning until night. I wish my prose to be as vivid and changeable as weather, as a drive through a city, sometimes with your eyes closed, sometimes with everyone else’s eyes closed.

Gary Barwin, Prose like a feather in face, a snake in the armpit

Two fairly different haiku of mine, both published by Tinywords over the last few days. I consider myself blessed with good fortune! That sort of thing doesn’t happen often with my poems and there are often long periods when I get nothing but rejections. That’s good too though – all part of the process. And polishing them up to send them out is also a necessary part of it too. I’m always learning new things, about the craft and myself, which is what keeps me interested.

Julie Mellor, Tinywords

Some of my early poems (in books now out of print, in online magazines that have disappeared into the ether) contended with my feelings about the general rebelliousness of our then-college-age children. Those feelings are now part of the deep past, but I can easily recall the self-questioning of that time, which lies behind this poem and others like it. […]

What business did I have
aiming the star-eyed young at physics departments,
at nights in mountain observatories
listening for beings who might not even have breath,
when all I want from the night
is whatever the psalmist heard, that shout of glory?

I know this much: the cosmos
is flying apart. The old drift off the signal.
The children have reached lightspeed.
The galaxies move away
in search of work in a more exciting city.

Maryann Corbett, Failing Astronomy

I’m sitting in a Bentley on Brick Lane eating a bagel from a brown paper bag. I’ve always been more of a brown paper bag kind of a guy than a Bentley man. You’d probably say I live a brown paper bag life. I would reply that you’re more likely to find poetry in a brown paper bag than in a Bentley. I may be wrong. I’m generally wrong. Sometimes I actually like being wrong. I think that’s my problem. I try to convince myself that wrong is where the art is. Isn’t that where you’ll find it? At the wrong side of town. In the wrong bar. At the wrong time. With the wrong people.

We’ve just been sitting in the right kind of place with the right kind of people. All of the beautiful, young and buzzing, hip and hopeful East London creatives. This place even has a sober open mic night. I’m sober but the idea of a sober open mic night brings me out in hives. Is that wrong? “Ya know what?” I say to Rob, “If there’s anything that’d make me want to pick up a drink, it’d probably be going to a sober open mic night.” And I know that’s wrong.

What I’m doing right know feels wrong. Rob has ‘got me in a room’ with a guy who might be able to help me navigate away from a brown paper bag existence and I’m pitching (I think I’m pitching) a poetry project. I’m pitching a poetry project to a guy who’s also done everything wrong but ended up with a Bentley. I need to qualify this: There’s a difference here between wrong and bad. He’s not done bad things (I try hard not to do bad things too). What I mean is wrong, as in being told “there’s no way that’ll work” and trying it or hearing “Oh, you can’t do it like that” and doing it.

Wrong is e.e. cummings dropping his caps, is Joyce abandoning commas and fullstops in a novel, is Kit Marlowe busting free from tight rhymes into blank verse then passing the mic over to Shakespeare. OK so Marlowe did a bunch of bad things too but all that other shit is wrong. It’s wrong and it’s good. It’s wrong and it keeps poetry alive and vital. It’s wrong to break the rules. But it isn’t bad.

Jan Noble, Nº64 What the hell is wrong with you?

I’m not a natural runner, but I have become a habitual one. I like the almost weekly feeling of surprise I experience when I turn up at 9am to the start of a run (not a race) with 100s of other participants. Finishing, however, is never a surprise because I’ve made that my only goal. Were I more of a risk-taker, more hare and less tortoise (to borrow from Aesop), I might run faster earlier, but then I might have to give up (so my thinking goes) and nap en route. As soon as I reach the home stretch, especially when I can see the finish flag, I feel confident and pick up speed. 

I’ve had several other finish lines to cross this week. These finishes have included the usual ones for teaching sessions at work; a printing deadline for the 2nd edition of a poetry collection I’ve edited for a friend (more on this soon); my own poetry submission for a collaborative exhibition in Girona in the autumn (more on this soon); a mid-May aim to get sweet corn planted in the new badger-proof section of my allotment (more on this now): [photo]

This flurry of finishes has been satisfying but also perturbing- maybe my motivation levels are shallow, and it’s only a deadline which results in completion?

But reflecting further on what I’ve learned from all those Parkruns leads me to think a little differently. I had, after all, to do the first 199 in order to complete the 200th. Slow and steady. The sight of the finish each time has been the measurement I need to judge the equation between the resources at my disposal and the task in hand. 

Liz Lefroy, I Sprint to the Finish

 I don’t think my desk or study has been messier. I keep meaning to tidy it up, make a plan, figure out what to do with the accumulation of books. And I will but I wonder if subconsciously the books that are piling up are an encouragement, a comfort. There are all these amazing books still being written that I am excited to read. I feel like I need to read them! So the books are shoring me up a little against despair.

Shawna Lemay, Let’s Just Title This Random Notes and See What Happens

this desire to just be
alone
with all these poems
swept away again and again 
by the bigger poem of my life

Tom Clausen, matrix

Little Woolden stole my heart. Follow the sat nav, and it might take you through a network of uneven roads, their surfaces alarmingly cambered by the old bog which sinks below them, or up a small, rough track, to an unmarked space for around 6 cars, and a burnt-out portaloo. Or walk there from Caddishead Library, down the dusty Old Moss Road, through wide open landscapes of wheat, low hills on the far horizon.

This is Greater Manchester, and the city centre is just ten miles away, but it feels like a different country. Directions to some of the smaller flashes, or areas of restored bog might read like follow the road through the estate, down the cul-de-sac, park up by the old folk’s home and take the path on your left. I’d walk down paths only trodden by dog walkers and find myself transported from the sort of depressed Northern towns I grew up in, to a sea of cotton grass, or a stretch of shimmering water where you might hear a nightingale sing.

I think magic comes in many forms. Waking to a snowy day, falling in love, stars. When I started my residency in 2021, I realized that Lancashire was full of secret doors, tucked down cul-de-sacs, next to schools, nursing homes, takeaways, off the main road, round the back of the estate. Gateways and tracks too often go unnoticed, but if you pass through them, you enter a different world and you leave transformed.

These words are taken from an audio trail I wrote as part of my efforts to open those secret doors so that more people can enter. Because if you’ve heard of Wigan in the last week, it’s probably because 24 of the 25 council seats up for election were taken by Reform. If you’ve heard of Leigh in recent years, it might be the murder of Brianna Ghey. And in coming weeks, the old cotton-and-coal town of Ashton-in-Makerfield will be the site of frantic campaigning and speculation as Andy Burnham seeks election in a local struggle that might decide the next PM.

But my concern is not party politics: it’s the bog. The bogs held my grief and my fear, and the surface of the flashes shone with hope. Call me obsessed, call me naïve (I’ve been called a whole lot worse) but if everyone felt a connection with the live green singing world around them, many of our divisions would melt away. As part of my residency, I took groups of young carers, asylum seekers, schools groups, onto those bogs. For a short time, what mattered most was how the ground shook when we jumped on it together, how the sky told the story of our loss, whether we had biscuits. How a stick could be a wand, how stones were precious.

When we connect with the land around us, we belong. When we listen to a bird, we are still, we are together, the environment is present to us in a living, singing form. It matters, and we matter within it. When you are digging, or cooking, or carrying a heavy load, difference melts away. When you are picking litter, or planting cottongrass, you start to see the land, and it sees you. When we are outside, or in the warm shared spaces after walking or work, there is air and light enough for all our stories.

The work of connecting everyone to our land is slow, sometimes so slow it looks like nothing. It looks like a cup of tea outside, or shared food. It looks like walking slowly so someone can catch up. It looks like teenagers swimming in Pennington Flash on a hot day. It looks like what we need to do, regardless of whatever we see it as success. It looks like light on the water. It looks like hope.

Clare Shaw, BOGS AGAINST FASCISM

after the rain
sunshine dripping
from the fig tree

Jim Young [no title]

This week: speech bubbles, egoistic namby-pambyness, the staid denizens of heaven, a rainbow in a storm, and much more. Enjoy.

/ hope’s ache, pinkly.
/ in the mind’s ill-mannered museum.
/ something is stirring.
/ claustrophobic and soft.
/ the bad idea. with its octopus of arms and gossip.

Fran Lock, OPAQUE OR “DURATIONAL #11”

Some flowers hold their petals for only a few days and in those few days they are likely witnessed time and again by what is most important, the pollinators, be it winged, footed, or the wind. The more-than-human world is always announcing itself, a lot of it silently, invisibly. The swarm of insects indicate the announcement of flowers. The perching of birds announces the quiet leafing-out of trees, the whispering growth of berries, the stock-still readiness of seeds. You smell of lilac announces the high-up cones of flowers waving at the sky.

Sarah Lada, Quiet Announcement

On the nearby peat bog and in patches on the croft, bog myrtle flowers opened. They turned from bright orange to peach and cinnamon. Each day the heavenly perfume rises and threads through everything, caught and transferred by wind. For me, the essence of spring, the herald to a year of light, colour and smell, of growth and possibilities, the fragrance of life itself, is found in this combination of myrtle-incense and peat. When cold easterlies blew, I sat in a sheltered nook near the cliff-top, facing west to the sea, and almost felt the scent of bog myrtle as a tangible thing, a stream of life, overpowering even the aroma of salt, seaweed and rock. This, this, marks the real beginning of a new year – when I am submerged in, cleansed and blessed by attar of myrtle.  

On April 22^nd I take a break from writing to catch up with the latest news. I see a picture of a small boy in a woollen jumper and long pants holding on to a chair and am completely undone. He is very young, with the stance toddlers adopt when they are first learning to walk independently – widely space legs, arms spread. His hesitant smile is that of all children at that age, wide-eyed, hopeful, ready to explore. He looks so like my youngest grandchild I need to study the image carefully to be certain it isn’t her. She is at the same stage, tottering around with her arms held out for balance, a smile of delight on her face as she investigates her world. Tears flow. I can’t stop them. Hot tears and a rage-sweat. I let it all burn out of me.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, April-May… the force be with you

This week saw my friend Catherine Broadwall launch her book Aftermath at the downtown gallery/bar Vermillion, the announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes, a new poem in the lit mag Assaracus, and the return of some favorite birds, like the Black-Headed Grosbeak and the Rufous Hummingbird.

Also, the Iran war continues and a hantavirus scare from a cruise ship. Plus, the Supreme Court continues to abuse the “shadow docket” in order to support an evil, racist regime. Is this all discouraging and apocalyptic? It is.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Book Launch at Vermillion, a Desert Rat Poem in Assaracus, Spring Bird Appearances, The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Are you getting much sleep? Are you awake with me at 4am? Can you see this beautiful May dawn light? I’m not supposed to be here, but here I am, watching and noticing the soft peach and pinks in the May skies, listening to the dawn chorus and sipping some mint tea. Are you ok? Are you looking after your bold hearts and big dreams? Not easy is it.

What a mess.

In every direction there is chaos, calamity, catastrophe. It feels like all the sections are wrong, like the forks are muddled up in the spoons section, like all the pieces of us are scattered. It feels like the script of this episode of you and me is being writen by a maniac sniffing glue. The news keeps reminding me of boys in the playground at school kicking the bins to make wasps fly out and getting angry when they get stung. Fuck about and find out over and over again. The consequences of all of this, the divisions, the bubbling hatred, the violence, this vibration, this unease, all the energy of humanity is cornered and angry and confused and frustrated and frightened and sick and tired as this ooze of misinformation and wildly unchecked macho egomania spreads like a stinky toxic treacle sticking to every leaf and idea, every wing and cloud of thought. It feels like our world needs to be drenched with sea salt and sage and rose petals and rosemary, take a deep breath, but maybe that’s just me.

I’m going away on a Writers Retreat and just packing.

Salena Godden, Death is another country

The other day I went out for walk. I went out for a walk in the same way I would go about making a poem – and I do believe you make a poem, you do not simply write it. I went out to seek connection. I went with an idea of where I was going but, as with a poem, without knowing exactly what I might find. I went with purpose. I went, as one goes to poetry, with the cautious endeavour of bringing elements together. […]

The walk began in Moorgate, London, beside the bronze cast of a life mask of the poet John Keats. The sculpture itself marks the poet’s birthplace, a London pub now called The Globe. It was originally called The Swan and Hoop. Ten years ago I took my poem, My Name is Swan, to every pub in London that, like The Swan and Hoop, had the word Swan in its name. I read my poem in around twenty Swan pubs. The performances were documented in film. The poem is now due to appear in a book. My publisher will be making an announcement about My Name is Swan and other fine titles on their list at 4:30pm UK time. […]

The walk took me north to Bunhill fields and to the grave of William Blake. Here I began to conceive of a series of walks, with each walk connecting two points of literary or poetic history within a roughly one mile radius of each other. The walks form single scenes, short acts, that move toward a much larger play slowly unfolding across the city. The course is plotted weekly and broadcast live, here on Substack on Sundays at 5pm.

Jan Noble, Nº63 Poetry is mobility contrary to the viral thesis

So here’s something I’ve wondering—do you ever wake up and feel you should be happy, but melancholy feels like a heavy blanket someone keeps putting on your shoulders? That’s how I’ve been feeling lately, besides all the beauty around me—I’m thinking springtime birds, cherry blossoms in bloom, sunshine, so much we decided to skip going into the Two Sylvias Press office this week and instead are working from home. But to look at one’s life and feel SO grateful and thankful for all you have, but then also kind of sad.

I’ve carried this feeling a lot throughout my life (it’s come and gone and returned) and I know with the state of our country, things are feeling a bit harder everywhere. So there’s that. . .unfortunately. (Also, promoting a book at that time feels beyond ridiculous.) I’ve found planting stargazer lilies feels hopeful. I’m learning how much of my hope is tied to plants, maybe because they are a quiet insistence that something is growing despite our human world. Maybe it’s the agreement a seed makes with the future—possibility, it whispers.

Last week I met with two good friends and one said she believes things will get better, but first they have to break open before they can be repaired. And I’m like, Great, love that for us—but is there an express lane to the healing part? I’m so impatient these days and just like with movies, I want to fast forward past the bad/scary parts. But time, right? We have to day-by-day it with our fingers crossed and hope in our back pocket.

I think that’s why I’ve been writing more—writing has always helped me, even writing these little letters to you. I found myself writing a lot of prose poems too, I think because they feel as if I can get all the stuffs in there. I’ve been waking up, putting on “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp (wait, maybe this is why I’m sad, that song has lots of minor notes!). Also, please don’t think these poems are good—there are many many many really bad ones, but it feels good to be writing.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Do You Ever Wake Up and Feel You Should Be Happy?

The cartoonist’s shape of speech,
its pinch-pot gnomon pointing out
whose breath it is, and isn’t. As if
the boundary was real, as if every
exhalation wasn’t both a way to
wipe clean the mirrored self and
a fog of unknowing. Those soap
bubbles in a vanitas still life. Your
warm breath in the shell of my ear.

Lori Witzel, Bubbles

I’m writing a bit but not with vim. Whatever vim is. A wonderful word. I’m painting. I’m plunking on my piano. I love that this is my life. But I’m wasting an awful lot of time wasting time. I’ve been pretty creative in my life, but I feel the potential in me to be more so, bigger in thought, farther in reach, giddier in play, bolder, broader, braver, more wonder-full, more experimental. But I don’t seem to know how to get from this chair to whatever that is, that place where I’m being bold and giddy. What is the environment that will best draw this effort out of me? It does not seem to be this chair. It’s not the chair’s fault. (Is it?) Are there people who can help shift me to this mythical place? Is it inspiration? As I’ve said previously, I don’t believe in “muses,” alas, or I could blame THEM, their mulish absence. No, it’s the brain. My brain. That wrinkly thing that’s currently a bit soggy with allergy snot. It’s a nay-sayer often, a builder of obstacles, a doubting thomas. How do I call it to order? How do I poke it into action? I feel a little lost, in fact. Do you ever feel this way?

Marilyn McCabe, text of earth, ocean, and breath. Let me, too, inhabit

I am easing back into my Substack reading, so if you haven’t seen me around, trust me, I will return. When life is this uncertain, it’s hard to concentrate—I keep running into these walls where I just, very calmly, stop doing. I just sit down on my suitcase and refuse to move. It’s called burnout. I’m working on taking care of myself, on having fun, on doing the things I need to do. Substack is one of them.

This morning I grabbed a few moments and ended up working on this poem. It’s been a while in the making. I dug it out and started to play with it. I have three versions here. Mostly, its the pronoun usage that I’m interested in. I would love your feedback.

VERSION #1

How can we not love this world,
the elegance of it,
the way it lifts itself
up from sleeping,
the way it spreads
a blanket on the ground
and carefully sets out
the potato salad
the chicken
the cold slices of pie.

How can we not love this world,
the mothering of it,
how she catches the newborns
and lifts them to the sun,
how she lays the backs of her cool hands
across forehands to gauge fevers
how she rubs salve on the congested chests,
ladles up cool water
whispers sleep sleep
sleep. […]

Rebecca Cook, 3 Versions. Which Do You Prefer?

Wow. There’s nothing like typing a poem out to realize it really is pitch perfect. Between 15 – 21 syllables in every line. Nothing misplaced. I think again of Elizabeth Bishop’s line that what she wants most in poetry is to see the mind in action. The leaps here from Dr. Martins to wild flowers to black widows to smoking to eating shrimp and making honey—to the speaker’s need to be seen as good. It all makes sense in the context of the piece. Beautiful, stunning sense. I adore this poem. I adore Jen.

The one time I was lucky enough to read with Jen was in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It must have been shortly after COVID. Jen offered to host me at her home which meant we had a good long time together. That night 5 minutes before our reading, I asked Jen if she would be willing to try a braided reading where one poet reads two poems and then the next poet reads work that somehow echoes what’s been read before. For example if Jen read her “Dr. Martins 1460 Wild Botanica” poem, I might read my poem with the line, “The season’s don’t fuck with me boots.”

In true Jen Martelli style she said “let’s do it,” and with no time to prepare we improvised back and forth choosing poems from our own book that chimed with the other. It was the most fun I’ve ever had doing a reading.

Susan Rich, Jennifer Martelli, Way Too Early

why not?
she stands in the sunshine
blowing bubbles

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: May ’26

I don’t know who reads this. I don’t know who reads anything I write anymore, or whether that matters. I’m not sure it should… but writing, to me, has always involved this effort to transcend loneliness, however brief.

A poem and a painting then, since poems and paintings are less canny than human beings. Poems and paintings cannot — and therefore do not— condescend to you. Nor are they careerists. However much the poet or painter who created the poem or painting may be a late capitalist careerist, the poem and the painting are free to repudiate their creators. In this sense, the poem and the painting are better than us.

Alina Stefanescu, Frank Stewart’s “Marriage Among Friends”

I can only read in tiny snatches at the moment. Gérard de Nerval’s sonnets have been a great recourse in such a situation: brief, crystalline and endlessly evocative, they’re things I can dip into in spare moments, particularly the ones I know by heart and can think about as I walk to the shops or do the dishes. I have no academic grounding in them and my French is limited so my responses are personal and subjective, but I think in the case of these poems that’s as it should be. […]

Loss and recovery are fundamental, recurrent notes in the Nerval poems I’ve read. We see them here in “l’ardeur d’autrefois brilla dans ses yeux verts”, in “J’ai revêtu pour lui la robe de Cybèle” and in “la mer nous renvoyait son image adore” – the first two full of energy and forward-looking purpose, the third ethereally reflective. In fact the more I think about it the more the whole poem seems a magical orchestration of the tenses in three movements – a first, eight line movement revolving round the bitter stasis of a present that seems inescapable, a second, forward-looking three line movement which draws life from an eagerly anticipated future, and a third three-line movement of rapt retrospection.

Edmund Prestwich, Gerard de Nerval – Horus, a personal reading

Beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh, I think, is all ye need to know. Like the key of a map, the phrase collects the poem’s principal features in one clarifying legend. Perhaps microcosm makes a better metaphor in the context of “The Dancing,” which is more interested in connectedness, in complexity and wildness, than a map’s simplified order can represent. At any rate, I think of it as a kind of signifier, distilling both the poem’s linguistic strategy and worldview.

[Gerald] Stern’s music is built of accretion, a stacking up of sounds into a sonic lushness that foregoes the simultaneously anticipatory and analeptic distance of traditional forms in favour of something I want to call more organic, arising from a corporeal present instead of a telegraphed future or reverberated past: one sound gives rise to its twin with a wild spontaneity. The assonance of “rotten shops,” the liquid consonance of “beautiful, filthy,” the pairs of present participles: there is patternless patterning here, the sense of both randomness and design.

Beyond the musical pleasure, there’s a familiar delight in the yoking of praise and denigration: how we love to hate our hometowns, or secretly cherish certain exasperating persons, the places and people who teach us the protean nature of our attachments. How quickly we shift, out of a need—real or imagined—for self-preservation, fall in and out of devotion. How tenuous the divide between what is precious and what profane. “The Dancing” holds this egoistic namby-pambyness in check, tames our proclivity for simplifying our inherent ambivalence into for or against, love or fear, praise or denigration. Pittsburgh is beautiful. It is also filthy. You can love something broken, imperfect. Even—in 1945—the world.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Dancing” by Gerald Stern

The British poet J. H. Prynne died a couple of weeks ago, prompting several touching responses from his relatively small but loyal group of readers. Coincidentally, this past week I’ve been reading some of David Melnick’s weird and extraordinary version of the Iliad, Men in Aïda. That poem is an example of an unusual (but not unique) approach to translation that prioritises the sound, the music of the original — I mean not just that the translator has attempted to use the same or a roughly equivalent metre, or even that they’ve taken the opportunity (as surely all good translators do) to echo the sound of the original where possible, but that this version of Homer chooses English words based primarily on their sonic similarity to the Greek. So ‘Men in Aïda’, the title and the first words of the poem, translates menin aeide, the first two words in Greek (‘Sing [of] the anger’).

Melnick is not the only poet to have tried something like this. Louis and Celia Zukofsky produced a similar ‘homophonic’ translation of the poems of Catullus, which is quite often quoted in passing by classicists. (And can be useful for teaching.) The reason I mention this mode of translation is because, reading Melnick, I was surprisingly often reminded of the particular pleasures (and frustrations) of reading Prynne. Quite often Prynne’s poetry sounds rather as if it might be this sort of sonic translation of something else, of a ravishing poem in a language I do not know; which is not to say that the English words he chooses have no meaning. (Melnick’s words, too, convey meaning and even a loose sort of plot, albeit more often impressionistically than by conventional syntax.) Here’s a representative sample, from Down Where Changed (1979):

The creamy recruit pines
for his stone, down under
the second-best hiding

white at the foot of green

still white, ever green, love
offers the perfect match
ignites the perfect loan.

I think this is a pretty fair example. It’s far from the best or most beautiful bit of Prynne but it’s far from the most obscure or difficult either. And it ends on loan, one of his signature words. Prynne’s poetry pushes you up hard against the sheer strangeness of language and languages. But it also delights in language in the simplest and most musical kind of way.

Rather surprisingly, Prynne has himself been translated a lot — most noticeably into French (many separate pamphlets), but also (according to Wikipedia) into Chinese and German, and he even composed some poetry in Chinese himself. This week, I was rather charmed to discover that his first published poem, as a schoolboy, was a translation of Thomas Hood into German verse. Not long after we moved here I picked up the bilingual French edition of the 1999 pamphlet Pearls That Were (Perles qui furent, French edition by Éric Pesty, 2013), with astonishing translations by Pierre Alferi. I found reading Prynne alongside a translation in this way extremely stimulating: I suppose this is partly because the translator is rarely able to reproduce identical ambiguities; he or she must, instead, adjudicate between meanings held in suspension in the original, while attempting to introduce alternative ambiguities. […]

When I asked on social media whether people thought [Geoffrey] Hill or Prynne would have the more enduring reputation, almost everyone who replied made it obvious — more or less politely — that they thought this was a no-brainer in Hill’s favour. But I find so much of Prynne’s poetry, for all its obscurity, exceptionally beautiful and unmistakably profound. The fact remains that I am more often moved to tears reading Prynne than almost any other recent poet in English. This just isn’t true in the same way of most of Hill, even though I am in variously ways unusually well equipped to enjoy him and do indeed sincerely admire and enjoy much of Hill’s later verse. How is it that two poets who have embraced difficulty and the limits of language in such apparently similar ways can produce such different results?

Victoria Moul, Bank on the grammar flowing: on Prynne’s music

Catching the Light (Fairfield Books, 2026), the anthology of cricket poetry edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard, contains, as it should, several poems by the doyen of cricket poets, Alan Ross, including ‘Watching Benaud Bowl’: ‘Leg-spinners pose problems much like love, / Requiring commitment, the taking of a chance.’ But among the great and the good (Agard, Arlott, Dabydeen, Hughes, Brian Jones, Kunial, McMillan, O’Brien, Rollinson, Selby, etc.), there are many individual poems which leap out, especially those by S.J. Litherland – one of only nine female contributors – and Matt Merritt; the latter’s poignant pair of portraits ‘Two Orthodox Left-armers’ celebrates two Yorkshire and England greats, Wilfred Rhodes (‘Every ball an interrogation, / every over a conspiracy of art and science’), and Hedley Verity, who died in an Italian hospital of wounds sustained from fighting the Germans in Sicily (‘Shell-bursts, a net of tracers closing fast, / but as upright among blazing Sicilian corn / as on any Scarborough dog day.)

Another of the fine contributors to Catching the Light, Rishi Distidar, has just had his fourth collection published: Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak (Nine Arches Press, 2026). In it, his trademark quirky wordplay and use of form gets full rein – just a scan of the titles gives you the idea. At times, his wish to entertain occasionally spills into silliness, but that’s no bad thing in my book, and there are precious few other UK poets around – Selima Hill and Mark Waldron come to mind – who seem to remember that poetry can be something to enjoy as well as be moved by. Those familiar with Rishi’s oeuvre will know that he also writes poems on the most important subjects, like ‘On board the ‘Tynesider’’, concerning Martin Luther King’s visit to Newcastle in 1967, which ends with these beautiful lines:

But actually he was at his best
when he was harried, harassed –
by time as well as the times –
at 1am on a slow train to somewhere
he would never go again, minting
coin as easily as he breathed, currency
we still spend in the realm of hope.

It feels apposite that Rishi’s books should sit on my shelves between the Dickman brothers and Michael Donaghy.

Matthew Paul, Recent and future readings and recent reading

I reread Heaney’s worst book, Electric Light, in prep for an upcoming webinar on his style – something more clearly observed when he’s in cruise control. It’s fine; it lacks only a real sense of necessity, and is mostly superfluous to his oeuvre. Disconcertingly, though, it’s still better than almost everything else. So many poems of Heaney’s seem written at the golden hour, with the shadows stretching to infinity. The sense of history carried in his language – indeed in his use of almost every single word – never fails to humble me.

Don Paterson, Our Spring Reading: Part I

“And that sweet man, John Clare.” So, famously, ends the 20th-century poet Theodore Roethke’s brief poem, “Heard in a Violent Ward,” grouping Clare (1793–1864) with two other poetic visionaries, William Blake (1757–1827) and Christopher Smart (1722–1771). Roethke’s speaker prophesies to some unknown companion in an insane asylum that “in heaven you’d be institutionalized,” classing this mentally ill person, given to violence, with the three poets, and consigning them to the same ward in the afterlife. If this classification is jarring in its equation of violent madness with mysticism, it’s also a little odd, or else a little too conventional, in its view of heaven.

This speaker suggests that aside from the whiff of actual violence, to be a mystic in the vein of these three poets would imperil the presumed tidiness of the celestial order — as though the nine choirs of angels themselves would not know what to do with such a person, except to lock him up. Possibly Roethke’s speaker underestimates the nine choirs of angels and their capacity for dealing with people who think in visions. Also possibly, Roethke’s speaker underestimates heaven itself, casting it implicitly as a place where nobody colors outside strictly drawn lines and gets away with it.

Not that Smart and Clare, at any rate, really meant to color outside the lines. Like Smart, in conscious belief and practice Clare remained, all his life, a straightforwardly devout Anglican, orthodox in all his outlooks. Unlike Blake, he was not in any deliberate way a radical. But again unlike Blake, and again like Smart, he was given to what was delicately called “infirmity” of mind, and less delicately labeled “lunacy.” Sensitive and susceptible to disturbances as natural and predictable as the change of seasons, he was given to terrors as well as glimpses of sublime things beyond the defined and rational boundaries of ordinary piety. Or perhaps, as Wordsworth before him had suggested, the terror and the sublime were all one.

In Clare’s poems we might find the reminder that while the God in whom he believed might have established and endorsed those rational boundaries of ordinary piety, this God himself, with all the reality that flows from him, is not limited by them. It’s the visionary who glimpses something of that unlimited, and therefore unsettling, reality. Sometimes this looks like madness; perhaps sometimes it is madness. Suffice it to say that often enough, Clare’s poems arise from those moments when in one way or another, his own mental clarity dissolves and re-resolves on new terms.

His “I Am,” for example, written during a stay in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, gives voice to a mind striving to assert itself in darkness, while “Autumn” renders in verse the sensory warping that turns the vividness of a hot harvest-time day apocalyptically strange and terrifying. This turn of mind, in which mere sight becomes vision, transfiguring reality into something alien, simultaneously more threatening and more glorious than it ordinarily appears, may be what prompts Roethke’s speaker to assume that for the staid denizens of heaven, a poet such as Clare would be too hot to handle without a straitjacket.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: A Look at the Heavens

Winner of the Hudson Book Prize from Black Lawrence Press, Bettina Judd’s debut collection of poetry, patient. poems, takes as its subject the history of medical experimentation on Black women. Her poems evolved, Judd explains on her website, from a series of watercolors she had been painting while healing from surgery. The paintings themselves, she says, “were influenced by the work of artists in the service of science and medicine who painted portraits of indigenous and African peoples for the purpose of study.”* For Judd, an African American, that source material raised innumerable ethical questions about the use of Black women’s bodies (e.g., as exploited medical subjects, as slaves denied their humanity). Given her academic research interests and the fact her own surgery had been performed at a teaching hospital, and thus was subject to possible study, it was perhaps inevitable that Judd would undertake a more involved project. What ultimately came into being was a multi-voiced series of poems, each able to stand on its own, that provide a narrative about some aspect of Black women’s violation and suffering at the hands of doctors and scientific researchers.

The history that Judd resurrects in her poems is, all at once, eye-opening, traumatic, disturbing. It is also sourced in facts. […]

In “Pathology.”, Judd introduces us to “the researcher”, who is both unnamed and embodied in the character of the antagonist J. Marion Sims, a 19th Century physician, called by some the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” who developed groundbreaking surgical techniques but whose medical ethics and experiments on Black female slaves were highly controversial and damnable.

How to Measure Pain I

In the woman it is a checklist:

Can you imagine anything
worse than this?

If the answer is no, ask again.

It is in this first section that we first hear from “the researcher” about the Black women Anarcha Wescott, Lucy Zimmerman, and Betsey Harris — dubbed “The Mothers of Modern Gynecology” — who “are taken into the care of a reluctant country surgeon in Montgomery, Alabama” and are experimented on: “In these three, Sims shapes his speculum, invents his silver sutures, perfects protocol for proper handling of the female pelvis” — without anesthesia or consent. (“The Researcher Discovers Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy”)

Lucy didn’t scream like most. Though sometimes she would moan—deep, long and overdue. I’d wake thinking death. It’s her, knees curled under, head face down, her body trying to move out of itself. [. . .]

~ from “The Inauguration of Experiments”

As the collection unfolds, Judd tells by turn the stories of these three “patients,” as well as those of Joice Heth, Saartjie Baartman, and Henrietta Lacks, also African-Americans who suffered their own “ordeal[s] with medicine.”

Maureen Doallas, Bettina Judd’s ‘patient. poems’

Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Agni, American Poetry Review, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. His short stories are also widely published. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain recently taught Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. As of Fall 2026, Sylvain is Associate Professor in the  Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at UMass Boston. His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works in 2026 include: Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan) and poetry collections from Arrowsmith Press (Fire on the Tongue), Finishing Line press (Habits of Light), and Central Square Press (Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout).

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

P.S.: My first full collection, Zansèt (Ancestors), written in Haitian Creole in 1994, marked a turning point in my life. At the time, I was a member of the Dark Room Collective, a public school teacher in Cambridge, and deeply engaged in activism around democracy and human rights. I set out to write a book that would embrace the full essence of poetry without retreating from the political. I wanted to experiment with language and offer an aesthetic that departed from what many Haitian readers expected.

The book became, in many ways, a hybrid form—merging American poetics, which tend toward the imagistic, exploratory, and personal, with Franco-Haitian traditions that are philosophical, surrealist-leaning, and socially engaged. Its reception, including the generous preface by Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, the former Haitian Minister of Information and Culture, affirmed for me that I could dwell seriously in the craft. It gave me permission to see myself as a poet.

Fire on the Tongue, by contrast, reflects a more elastic and mature poetic consciousness. If my early work emerged from instinct and urgency, this later work arises from a deeper sense of intentionality and self-possession. But that evolution has not been linear. What I once understood as personal growth has revealed itself to be inseparable from history, displacement, and the political conditions that shaped my earliest awareness. This collection engages themes of identity, memory, exile, and cultural buoyancy. It navigates immigration, adaptation, loss, and self-understanding—what it means to live with two feet on different soils. While grounded in a Haitian-American experience, the work seeks resonance with the broader condition of migration and belonging.

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

P.S.: I came to poetry at fifteen, through love and through history. I fell deeply for a girl who had just moved into my neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Like many adolescents, I discovered language through longing—the way words could carry desire, absence, and imagination.

At the same time, I was coming of age under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. I began writing with what I think of now as a split tongue: privately composing poems of resistance against the regime, and love poems for the girl who stirred me profoundly. From the beginning, poetry became a space where intimacy and politics converged.

Over time, poetry ceased to be merely an artistic practice and became a mode of consciousness—a way of testing truth against lived experience. […]

9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

P.S.: “Trust the poem, but do not trust your first impulse.” That advice has stayed with me because it honors intuition while insisting on discipline—it reminds me that the initial spark matters, but it must be tested and refined through craft and revision.

Yusef Komunyakaa often echoed a similar balance when he said, “write with your heart, and edit with your mind.” I remember him once, sitting outside the Carpenter Center on Quincy Street at Harvard, saying, “allow yourself to be surprised by what the poem is revealing, and don’t force it to reveal something that the voice in the poem did not ask of it.” That idea—of discovery rather than control—continues to shape how I approach writing.

When I sit down to write, I often feel the presence of both Robert Pinsky and Komunyakaa not too far off in my cognitive and poetic distance, as reminders to balance instinct with intention, and openness with precision.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrick Sylvain

Last night (7th May) I had my Manchester book launch at Manchester Poetry Library. It was a really lovely event, hosted by my friend and colleague Malika Booker. This event was a little different to Sunday – I did a fifteen minute reading, followed by a fifteen minute Q & A with Malika and the audience, and then a poem to finish. This time Blackwells was the bookseller – they bought thirty copies and sold out!

Actually, the real story is that the bookseller bought 30 copies but only sold 29 – someone either loved my poetry so much they stole a copy, or someone absent mindedly wandered off without paying…I prefer the desperate-for-my-poetry-so-they-stole-a-copy version of the story.

This week I also ordered a box of one hundred books, ready to take round to smaller events that don’t have their own bookseller. This also means I’ve got some to sell through my own website as signed copies – another way of getting the book into the world.

When I first published my pamphlet back in 2011, I bought some postcards and some tissue paper and wrapped it up before posting it to my first buyer. I found this process both time-consuming and strangely satisfying, and have done it ever since. My friend John Foggin (sadly missed) on receiving a tissue-wrapped pamphlet said that I always do everything with my whole heart, and I think he was right – what other way is there of doing anything?

Kim Moore, Adventures of the House

Kim wasn’t exaggerating – the launch of The House of Broken Things was magic. Up at Wainsgate Chapel, off the road where the ponies gallop to the fence to see me when I walk over the moors by night, up the stoney lane which leads past the chapel to my home. […]

And in the second half, after a break filled with cake and booksales, Jodie (Kim’s identical twin sister) played her french horn with Dave Nelson’s expert piano, and the chapel filled with a perfect sound, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry before Kim took to the stage again and settled the matter.

I would love to leave it there. I’d love to say that I had a wonderful time, and that I left smiling and feeling lucky and fulfilled but – that’s not how it goes for me. Time with people is costly, and there was so much chat; there were crowds and emotions and sitting still; too much sugar. I’d forgotten to wear my “I’m faceblind: please introduce yourself” badge so there was the strain of half-known faces, unfamiliar shifting etiquette, noise. I’d a migraine by the time I left, and come evening, I walked a long time in the darkness considering the strange animal I am, how I have no name for myself, how I don’t seem to fit in anywhere.

Then out of the blue, Kim texted to tell me how’d she felt calm when I arrived at the Wainsgate, and I realised that this place here, however rocky, however changeable the weather, is where I fit. And I carried on walking into the night taking photographs of lichen and bluebells with the UV torch Amy brought to my house because she thought I might like it, because I am a strange animal, and my strange little flock is right here. Here’s to The House of Broken Things. Here’s to poetry and friendship. Here’s to finding your kin.

Clare Shaw, Different Forms of Magic

Then one of the women who organized the gathering wondered aloud how it would change things if every reading series in New York included somewhere in its web presence, or at its venue if that were possible, a written commitment to what we now call diversity, equity, and inclusion, incorporating specifically a zero tolerance statement about sexual victimization of any kind. I thought this was a brilliant idea. Such a statement would allow me at the very least to establish publicly both a set of expectations and a standard of accountability for my series’ content, management, and audience. It would serve as a resource I or anyone else involved with First Tuesdays could refer people to when telling them about the series, as well as a publicly accessible code of conduct should it ever become necessary to call someone to account for their behavior, including me.

I wrote a statement, circulated it on the series mailing list to get buy-in from as many regulars as possible, and posted it to the First Tuesdays website, where it has lived now for more than ten years. I did not feel the need to incorporate it into our regular meetings, though, until we began once again to meet in person after the pandemic shutdown and I actually had to ban a fellow poet from our open mic. He’d read an egregiously sexist and implicitly racist poem for which he refused to take any responsibility despite the ample room I gave him to do so, first during the break between the open mic and our featured reader and then in an email exchange over the course of the next week or so. In that exchange, he criticized me for calling him out publicly, immediately after he read the poem. He felt blind-sided, he said, which struck me as a point worth considering, not because I thought I shouldn’t have called him out like that, but because if he’d never read what I’d begun to call the First Tuesdays vision statement, there was no reason for him not to assume our open mic was, like so many open mics are, more of a public square where anything goes than a curated literary space.

That’s when I decided to start reading the statement out loud at the beginning of every meeting:

First Tuesdays is an open mic/featured reader literary gathering where writers who wrestle with the issues of our day—from racism and sexual violence to climate change and economic inequality—can find an audience willing to embrace the risk and discomfort that come with sharing politically engaged, satirical, or otherwise edgy material; where those writers can coexist, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and camaraderie, with writers whose work is more traditional and conservative; where anyone who comes only to listen, even if they just happen to walk in off the street, can sit down with a cup of tea or glass of wine and feel not just welcomed, but challenged, engaged, comforted, seen, maybe even inspired.

At the heart of First Tuesdays, in other words, is an ongoing, proactive commitment to diversity and inclusivity, in both the kinds of literary work we welcome into our community and the people who come to share it. Nothing will erode that sense of community more surely, however, than the mistrust and hatred borne of sexism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, or any of the other far-too-many ways that human beings have learned to target each other for who they or what they believe. So I will state this plainly. Neither work nor behavior that bespeaks any of those “isms” or “phobias” is welcome at First Tuesdays, and I will, as host, confront and hold accountable anyone who brings either into our midst.

When I first started this practice, I explained it by talking about my exchange with that banned poet. Over the last four years, though, and especially since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, it has become something more important: an affirmation that gathering as we do every month, as we have been doing for the thirteen years that I’ve been running the series—and by “we” I mean everyone: the regulars, the newcomers, the featured readers, the people who just happen to be in the café when the reading starts—that gathering as we do to share the literature we make is in and of itself a form of resistance that we should not take for granted.

When I think about the impact that reading this statement aloud has had on the First Tuesdays community, I think about the people who nod along as I read, even those who’ve heard it month after month since I started, and about the applause the statement sometimes gets, and the softly spoken—and sometimes not so softly spoken—expressions of support I hear when I’m done reading. Listening as I read the statement out loud, in other words, matters to them, just as reading it matters to me. Because even if it feels like all we’ve done on the first Tuesday of the month is walk a block or two to the café to hang out with friends and listen to and talk about literature, we should not forget that there are an awful lot of powerful people in this country who would very much like to undo not just the community that we have formed, but also the capacity inherent in literature to build that kind of community in the first place.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Sometimes Resisting Means Recommitting Yourself to What You’re Already Doing

Is it fair to say, as Micah Mattix does, that “The Nigerian poet and critic Ernest Jesuyemi was selected as a National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow…until they discovered he was a Christian”?

Or is this too simplistic a description for what happened?

Was the NBCC board right to withdraw the full fellowship? Or is this religious discrimination? Does it matter that this is a fellowship, which requires working among community? Is this another artist cancellation, or is this categorically different?

Becky Tuch, I Can Buy Myself Lit Mags!

On a long oak table in a formal room
in Rare Books, on the library’s seventh floor,
is the fifteenth-century manuscript—Middle English—
from which I mean to wring a dissertation.
The work is verse, a church-year’s worth of sermons
probably copied by an earnest monk.
The librarian, anxious for this precious object
left to my handling, offers me a bookweight.
I settle into the captain’s chair and the task.

These first steps are detective work, forensics.
Hand: Anglicana; Secretary features.
Materials: paper. Visible watermarks.
A lot of Northern spellings. I warm to this,
matter and form, but I’m especially held
by matter, tangibles: the ink, the paper.
Though faded, the pen strokes have the ebb and flow
of a bending quill tip in a moving hand.
The heavy paper still shows peaks and troughs
that speak to the moving pen. My own right hand,
knows pens and writing, and it feels these moves,
knows in its bones another hand was here.

Maryann Corbett, Academic dreams . . .

I was surprised and a little unsettled by Kariega, the last poem in the book, in which the narrator and a companion paddle upstream through the game reserve of this name in the Eastern Cape. The journey is to escape the ‘concrete, tar or plastic’ of so-called civilisation, to explore the river – ‘And there’s an island far ahead where we’ll rest and eat/ with the waterbuck, the crabs and blacksmith plovers/ where the world is as it has always been, quiet and slow’. He ponders the passing of time and the inevitable end to life that I suppose most of us who have long kissed goodbye to seventy will think on here and there and considers if the end were to come it would not seem tragic if it happened in such a place. It’s a fine poem. My surprise was because, having only a very limited knowledge of South Africa, I looked up Kariega before reading the poem. It is home to a vast Volkswagen factory, supposedly the largest car factory in Africa. I expected this to come into the poem somewhere in contrast to the reserve and wonderful natural wilderness that stretches away from the town. I thought about why [Harry] Owen avoided this rather obvious contrast – and concluded that sometimes, perhaps, the power is in what is left unsaid. That view, however, relies on a knowledge of place that perhaps only a few outside South Africa would connect with.

Following on, I think when a poet is from another country – Owen was born in Liverpool but has lived in South Africa a long time now – the reader needs to attempt to understand at least the sense of the place in which a book is written. Mindforest is not exclusively bound to South Africa but it supplies much of the backdrop. My glimpses of the world in which he immerses himself, and hopefully via the poems us, were long ago. I had a couple of work trips to South Africa in 1994 and 2001 and they were confined largely to the surreal creation that is Sun City and to Johannesburg, where I found, at that time, the city centre was more dangerous, darker and considerably less welcoming than Soweto, where I needed to go to visit a boxing gym and so obviously took time to look around. Necessity and time confined me. The wider landscape of the country I experienced only in passing, in travelling through. Still, it’s something I could work with in reading the book.

I think it’s fair to say that Owen has developed as a poet later in life and perhaps this is to his advantage. Those who find a ‘voice’ or success early on sometimes burn out and the opportunity to use the supposed wisdom that comes with age is lost. Not so here, as the poet acknowledges in the poem Epiphany, which perhaps describes what it feels like for so many of us not born into financial privilege and academic expectation.

Bob Mee, REFLECTIONS ON MINDFOREST by HARRY OWEN

Back in January, I attended a conference in Cambridge on “Creative Medievalisms”. Among recurring threads of conversations throughout the event was a ripple of ideas about voice — the human voice, the creative voice, our personal voice. Margery Kempe cropped up repeatedly in these discussions, as did the ventriloquized voice of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”, Chaucer lets the garrulous, “gat-toothed”, bawdy Wife speak at length, giving her free rein in the longest prologue of any pilgrim-teller in The Canterbury Tales. Veering between learned argument in which she takes on Church teaching on marriage and virginity and earthy vignettes of her life with her five husbands (“in his owene grece I made hym frye” she says acerbically of husband number four), the Wife is a lively, funny, engaging interlocutor. As she courts controversy she is interrupted within the Prologue by (male clerical) pilgrims who don’t like what she is saying or object to her going on for so long.

In fact, the Wife is such a distinctive character that, as Marion Turner observes, she is referred to by other speakers in The Canterbury Tales and emerges after Chaucer’s lifetime as a literary figure in her own right. She is even described by Thomas Hoccleve (1368-1426), a poet who knew Chaucer and promoted his reputation after his death, as a specifically female authority (auctrice) on the subject of women’s displeasure at men’s depiction of the female sex: “The wyf of Bathe, take I for auctrice” (“Dialogue”, 694). The Wife is the Chaucerian voice that escapes the bounds of the text and the control of its author to take on a life of her own.

Yet despite her unique voice, Chaucer’s Wife is also in some ways utterly unoriginal, a creation based on the anti-feminist discourse of the time, sometimes viewed as nothing more than a collection of misogynist ideas brought to life. Chaucer was entering into a contemporary debate that was crowded with authorial opinions. Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) a catalogue of illustrious women is designed to respond to the anti-feminists. Although the style and form is very different, there is a common purpose with Chaucer’s Wife. Where Chaucer offers us the voice of an ordinary middle-aged woman with a wealth of experience of marriage, in The Book of the City of Ladies we encounter a dreamscape in which the Lady Reason, the Lady Rectitude and the Lady Justice explain to Christine that they will debunk all the misconceptions about women. Abounding in examples from history and myth, with a core of philosophy and a sharp critical eye for inconsistency, we can detect in Christine’s detailed rebuttal to the misogynists, something akin to the Wife’s vivacious and rather one-sided argument with the clerks. The subject matter overlaps, but the individual voices of the authors take the material in different directions.

The creative voice then is the thin thread, the wisp of experience and meaning that the individual brings to the discourse, orchestrating the interplay between the living and the dead. In the words of John Keating, the teacher played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, it is the verse that we contribute to the play. Now, whenever we talk about voice, there is the unavoidable subtext of what it means to write in the age of AI when a pattern-recognition machine can spew out sense-making words. As someone who loves the struggle of writing and wrestling with words on the page, I cannot imagine why I would want my creative hand guided by a robot and I find it difficult to care about text that is not written by a human. It’s ersatz writing to me, no more than a poor substitute for the real thing. It removes the thin thread that makes the writing worthwhile for the author and meaningful for the reader.

Ruth Lexton, The Creative Voice

The voice that is great outside us. Between us. That is all of us.

So often we’re taught to find our “voice”—both as people and as writers. But I’ve always thought that this notion of “voice” is reductive and essentialist. I’d rather imagine our “voice” to be more about the range of ways that we interact with the world and the range of relationships we have. As a writer, also. What are the ways we relate to language, culture, writing, to process. To our processing of the world and how we (and our words and our notion of words) are processed by the world.

Imagine a sculptor bringing a set of objects with which to build a sculpture. I feel that their “voice” is not so much about the objects as it is their way of considering and engaging with these objects. Perhaps the process of accumulating the objects, the way they put those objects together. The way they are open to what the object are saying.

We are always already part of the work, the world. We don’t have a singular “voice,” any more than we exist as independent organisms apart from the world. Our bodies/selves require the infrastructure of the world: air, warmth, food, bacteria, shelter, other humans. Each individual is the result of their engagement with this infrastructure. So, all writing relies on the infrastructure, the betweenness, the interrelationships, of language and humanity, readers and the society and culture that by definition surrounds the writer, their work, and the process of their work.

A writer doesn’t need to find their “voice,” but instead to develop awareness and tools for considering and realizing process, for considering their entanglement, inter- and intrarelations, their I’m-soaking-in-it-Madgedness.

Is there a self without interaction? Is there a writer?

Gary Barwin, The voice that is great outside us: writer as part of the necessary polycule

I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to use. And then I met Emily Levine. Across the aisle on a transatlantic flight, across our half century of age difference, we became instant and abiding friends.

Intellectually dazzling, creatively mischievous, and ecstatically funny, Emily took it upon herself to open my world to poetry, reading me a poem a day, peppering with poems our rapturously roaming conversations about semiotics and the singularity, the physics of flight and the evolution of flowers, Hannah Arendt and The Beatles, until I came to love poetry and, eventually, to write it. Emily is the reason The Universe in Verse exists.

When she was dying — which she did with such vivifying reverence for reality — we began taking long weekends by the ocean, reading poetry and talking about the meaning of life. The poems she brought were always a revelation, down to the very last one, which became a lifelong favorite I revisit whenever I lose perspective.

Maria Popova, Poetry: I Too, Dislike It

— I recently read the short book, brief notes on the art and manner of arranging one’s books by George Perec. I’m immersed in reading about the history of classification as it regards books right now for the novel I’m writing. Perec also says interesting things about the daily, the habitual. “The daily papers talk of everything except the daily,” he says. And, “How should we take account of, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the back-ground noise, the habitual?” He goes on: “To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as it if weren’t the bearer of any information.” […]

— I recently picked up Imagining What We Don’t Know by Lisa Samuels, admittedly because the title refers to something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: Imagining, the imagination, our power of imagination, the importance of our imaginations.

— From the Lisa Samuels book: “Beauty is a problem for poetry because we no longer imagine beauty as a serious way of knowing. But it is. Beauty wedges into the artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not know.” She notes that taking beauty seriously and working on theories of beauty “is out of fashion.” But she says, “Forms of beauty are resistant structures, imaginative structures that present an impenetrable model of the unknown. Beauty is therefore endlessly talk-inspiring, predictive rather than descriptive, dynamic rather than settled, infinitely serious and useful.”

— To reiterate: beauty is a serious way of knowing! Yes.

Shawna Lemay, Notes on Beauty, Books, Imagining, the Soul’s Skeleton, and a Smoking Angel

Since nothing is ever complete, the poetry book I wrote about my mother, Diaspora of Things, seems like a light-sensitive print of where I was a few years ago.  The relationship keeps evolving.  The deeper I get into motherhood – all these years now! – the more I slide alongside her, intuiting her unsaid about joy, loss, “annoying aspects of inevitable change,” freedoms gained and realities of our limits.  In strange morning dreams, so kitchen-sink and unsentimental, I’m waking up to the twists that adult children exert on mothers, and how much I got away with!  Doris had a taste for the radical, and more patience than I give her credit for.  To the complexity and mystery of motherhood, and the sister-soul that walks along with us on our journey!

Jill Pearlman, Diaspora of Affections

It has been a time of moments recently. Stillness. Patience. A buzzard on a fence post. Applauding a flyover from a heron. A rainbow in a storm. A 5p found on the ground at a motorway service station. That tyre pressure light. Seizing the moment to drink tea on the settees of family and friends. Asking for a drink in a coffee shop by using its advertising tagline to see if the person taking the order laughs.

And a new writing desk. Sometimes I spend too long flicking through my phone, but recently it led to a serendipitous moment when I saw that a friend had a writing desk for sale. Mine was old and faithful, and it always surprised me just how much I could get done in such a small space – so many poems and videos and meetings and essays and coaching sessions. It was originally gifted to me many, many moons ago by a neighbour of my grandparents and has easily fitted into every place I have ever lived. It has been well and truly loved and as it retires I tip my hat to just how well it has served me. And now into service comes a new beauty, with space aplenty. This then reminds me of that time we were asked to bring something to show which was important to us when I first started my coaching training. Being a little nervous at starting something new I had everything ready, but felt the urge to double check before the meeting started. I felt a little bit clumsy and fumbly (and everything was crowded into a small space) and as I reached for the glass paperweight to check that it wasn’t dusty before I shared it with a group of new people, I knocked my hand on my laptop screen and promptly dropped my show and tell object into my glass of water. I do like to be ready for things before they happen, so my heart beat a little bit faster as I dipped my hand in to retrieve it and hurriedly wiped it on my jeans to dry it off. At least that solved the dust problem, I told myself as I took a deep breath and clicked to join the meeting. 

I am pretty confident that my readiness will be easier where I now sit so here’s to finding the space we need for the things that bring us joy, and for appreciating the old and the new!

This past week I was keen to find out what kind of poem would be the first to be written at my new desk (and when it would take shape). Pleasingly it was a love poem that flowed. They are quite rare for me and come with a little fanfare and sparkles when they arrive.

Sue Finch, THAT’S NOT MINE, MINE’S CRISPY…

Now is the time of spring’s coolness. The breeze and shade detain the heat. The trees look fresh and new. But the flowers are falling. The blossom is over and the rhododendrons and azaleas are nearly over. Far away in north D.C., the tulips at Hillwood House are peaking and about to wilt. Here the tiny blue flowers by the path will soon go to seed. As we walk back to the car, we hear an oven bird, whose loud clear song fills the forest from some hidden spot. So much of what we have seen are tropes from American films, and tropes of real American life. The oven bird is familiar from Robert Frost. “He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.”

The sun has begun its decline. One of the fishing boats is gone now. The young man in headphones is sloping back. Bikers are strapping their bikes onto car racks. As we leave the forest, we come back to aggressive American driving, the need to get things done before bed. The late sun sinks behind the trees and lights the undersides of the high-raised roads. Dogwood flowers gleam in the evening glow. We pass the filling stations and see the price of gas is rising, rising. A fire truck goes past. The 24-hour diner sign still shines. There were two dozen cars at the shore when we left—owners and boats were still launched on the Occoquan.

In Washington, there are secrets, heard and unheard, in Congress, the White House, and the Court—at Langley, Rosslyn, the Pentagon— and in all the agencies and institutions and non-profits that fill the grid. Somewhere back in the woods, the oven bird is still singing. “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.”

Henry Oliver, He says the early petal-fall is past

I’ve read that the turn in a poem is a key to the closing, and ending lines will be stronger depending on how near they are to (or distant from, and evocative of) the turn. This seemed helpful revision advice. Yet does every poem require a turn? The idea of the volta is ancient indeed, but it need not be a prescription for all the poems in the world. Poetry from other than Western cultures often proceeds quite beautifully without a turn, and does that mean that such a poem is static? That’s often seen as a negative in art: when nothing moves, or moves the viewer. I’d like to refer my readers to L.A. Johnson on Jericho Brown’s duplex form, “Radical Stasis” in Poetry. What could be more static than repetition? And yet in Brown’s work, the lack of a turn implies circularity, not necessarily ambivalence and certainly not a lack of movement. Johnson calls it a transformation.

I want to experiment with how altering a poem’s closing might lead to changing the poem’s form or structure for a stronger impact. Another option I’ve used is moving the last lines to the start or near the start of the poem. Maybe those lines weren’t really the image or idea that particular poem was aiming for. And then there is docking the tail of a poem. It may be a cruel practice for dogs and horses, but a poem can benefit from a careful removal of the unnecessary closing line(s). Closing lines that summarize a point can wreck my delight in a poem, and alas, I tend that way sometimes…I spent my childhood Sundays in church, listening to my dad declaim from the pulpit. The oral and rhetorical structure of sermons is routed into my brain, and that can be a real problem when I draft. Poetry can be many things, but I don’t care for poetry that sermonizes.

At any rate, I have a LOT of unfinished drafts that might benefit from change-ups. Instead of writing a blog post, I ought to be working on those!

Ann E. Michael, Closure

And what about that final quote? It’s italicised and in speech marks. Did the horn blow the tune to which that ballad was originally set? Is that Childe Roland speaking about himself in third person, suddenly seeing himself from a distance (the distance of death)? Is that the storyteller Browning’s voice suddenly breaking into the dramatic monologue?

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ is the title of the poem too, so to end with the same words almost suggests something circular. We have returned to the start, in a kind of Groundhog Day. Childe Roland will never get to the tower but be stuck in this perpetual circle of hell forevermore… And it’s worth mentioning that time is supposed to work differently in Elfland or Faerie Land. Perhaps it loops.

It’s a sinister, unsettling ending, deliberately ambiguous. But perhaps that is why it continues to fascinate and inspire. It creates a desire that it refuses to satisfy. Browning’s neverending story continue to haunt our literary culture.

Clare Pollard, Reading ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ by Robert Browning

       I could translate all this into words like hunger
or gift, witness or mercy. But I choose not to.  
   I consider the breath that unraveled so quickly, how 
       the future briefly arrived, without fanfare or song.

Luisa A. Igloria, Life Study

This week: fists of will-be-blooms, a delicate crepuscular pinky grey, parrots nesting in the rain tree, the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue, and much more. Enjoy.

A word drops off my fingers,
hits the floor, shatters. Words
shatter not into letters
and sounds, but into sharp shards
of reflection and color,
memory and movements, dance,
hollows where meaning was home.

PF Anderson, Wordless (#NaPoWriMo 29)

I have begun to teach myself to draw with my left hand.

I have started what I hope will be a book. I haven’t written much prose in a long long time. I learned a lot writing my novel, CLICK, and by learning a lot I mean a lot of what not to do.

I haven’t been hearing poems lately and when that happens I tend not to force myself to write them. I do write them when I’m in poetry circles where we get to write and share with each other but other than that I really haven’t felt like writing poetry. It will come back when it comes back. I think I need a lot of quiet space to let my brain run across the pastures and go wild. Then the poems will come.

Rebecca Cook, Life Update

We had a beautiful full moon right on my birthday, too, and we had lovely sunny weather, so we got out and gardened and Glenn power-washed the deck, so we were ready to entertain. The full moon always gives me insomnia, and this one was no different. I was thinking about an interview with Meryl Streep about the first Devil Wear Prada and how she was thinking of retiring from acting when she was offered the job at 56. I am 53, so it made me think about when we retire as artists. I’m not making the kind of money Meryl is, and I’m much less in demand. If I retired, there probably wouldn’t be as much of an outcry as there would be over Meryl (who was not only great in Devil Wears Prada 2, but if you’ve seen her, she’s terrific in Only Murderers in the Building). It’s surprising to me that she was thinking of retiring but then spoke openly that she did the movie that was so beloved because of the large paycheck it afforded.

I’m also thinking about retirement because Microsoft is offering early retirement packages next week. Glenn still loves his job and enjoys working, so it’s not very attractive to him yet. They’re doing it to invest more in AI and less in humanity, which seems depressing. I guess poets can work until they die or decide to do something else, and we definitely won’t be offered a nice paycheck to quit, and AI may try to take our jobs anyway.

This week EcoTheo re-ran a photo I took for them a while ago, and Rattle re-ran an older poem in their newsletter. So it was nice to be remembered in these ways on a week I was feeling discouraged and thinking about quitting.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Birthday Week, Full Flower Moon, Open Books, Seattle’s Japanese Garden, and More

I’ve been observing my mind lately. It’s been such a gadfly. In five minutes I’ll have searched five things on the internet, gotten up and splashed some paint on paper, written my little 100-word daily challenge (more on that in another post), sat back down and picked up a book, put it down to look something else up, started one thing only to interrupt myself with another. Is it spring that’s making me so flighty? Life in these times? Yes and yes? I’ve been busy in spurts and listless the rest of the time, aspiring to grand ideas but too scattered to think them up, or I think them up and immediately reject them. It’s spring and not-quite-spring, some trees are dangly with their bright catkins and some are well into their leaves. My lilacs are just showing their fists of will-be-blooms but someone’s three blocks away are in full purple. On my walk up on the ridge, no jacks in no pulpits, but flocks of marsh marigold in their fancy dress. A tiny speck of eagle high in the sky circling; in a field the very earthly dark mound of a turkey vulture, its terrible red head bent to its meal. I tried to write a poemish thing based on the crazyass mix of headlines in the Guardian, the whiplash of turning to witness democracy’s demise in one article, the ridiculousness gravity lent to some fashion “controversy” in another. But Rilke said poetry was no place for irony. I disagree. Except when I agree entirely. There’s my mind again, changing, changing. But here is the venerable Don McKay, with a poem from his book Another Gravity. I’m not sure I entirely follow the line of thought of the poem. But given the state of my mind, I think it’s okay.

Marilyn McCabe, there must be a door — a door

nothing grows here, the sanctioned and expatriated seed, scoured from yr latitudes, yr gravel hemispheres. flowers: pacified fixtures, bracketed to buildings. tree: hi-vis bros administer enjambment. i bring with me only this body, idealised and desperate. it is the weed and the worm, dankly questing prole, the writhing of its reach, opaque with strain. fungus. assemble myself inside the open sprawl of it: worklife, yr city. the empire is setting. like aspic.

Fran Lock, THE MUSHROOM IS NOT A PLANT

You may be lucky enough to not feel stress or anxiety before a reading or public performance. In general, I usually get excited nerves, rather than debilitating nerves. Yesterday however felt very different. I spent the whole day in a state of extreme anxiety, worrying about everything. I knew I was being illogical because I was worrying about nobody turning up (even though ninety tickets had been sold). I was also worrying about people turning up and being bored. I spent a full hour thinking about my book and regretting writing any of the poems and publishing it in the first place.

On Saturday night, we had a power cut at midnight which lasted till midday on Sunday morning. This meant we couldn’t make lunch so we all went down into town for lunch on Sunday, which now I write it, sounds like a relatively simple thing to do, even a pleasant one! However, by this point, my ADHD symptoms were in overdrive, making simple decisions and even eating something feel completely overwhelming.

Because I usually don’t get like this before a reading, it took me a while to identify what I needed which was some time on my own to relax and work out what I was reading. I went and had a very long bath, made a list of the poems I was going to read and then left for the venue with my sister.

As Jody and I pulled up to the venue, my friends E and S were also getting out of their cars. They’d come early because E knew I was anxious about nobody turning up! When I got to the green room, my colleague Reuben from work was there with Malika – he’d met her at the train station to make sure she got up the hill ok. Carola was already there, Amanda was in mid-flow organising everyone and then Clare strode through the doors with a box full of The Book of Bogs to sell and I felt instantly calmer.

I silently thanked past Kim for the genius idea of filling this event with my best friends and my sister, of surrounding myself with friendship and laughter.

Kim Moore, HOW TO HAVE A MAGICAL BOOK LAUNCH

My poem Interior with a Table has been awarded equal Fourth Prize in the Kent & Sussex 2026 Open Poetry Competition. I was delighted, especially as the competition was judged by Mimi Khalvati. She describes the poem as a ‘sensitive example of ekphrastic poetry’. You can read her Judge’s Report here.

The poem was inspired by the 2021 painting of the same title by Vanessa Bell. The date put me in mind of WWI which enters the frame.

You can read the poem here.

Fokkina McDonnell, Interior with a Table – poem

Earlier today, as I made adjustments in the galley for GRAVEYARDS OF CHICAGO, I was thinking about my acquaintance with this particular urban legend and source materials. In particular, Resurrection Mary has been an obsession that took root when I was 12 and checking out stacks of ghost story and paranormal books from the tiny Cherry Valley public storefront library with its rickety floors, precariously leaning stacks, and questionable green shag carpet in the children’s area. It’s probably natural that I would become obsessed with ghosts given my love of horror and gothic leanings. This one seems particularly interesting from a regional standpoint (not Rockford necessarily, but suburban Chicago, though another spooky urban legend from my hometown makes an appearance in the play).

When I was taking a class back in the MFA program way back in 2005 that was devoted to writing Chicago poems, it seemed like a no-brainer, to take my obsession with this urban legend and see what bloomed. There were also great ways to bring in history and class in the city in interesting ways. The result of course was Archer Avenue. Initially, it was a small print edition that I mostly gave away and traded in the year leading up to my first book’s release. Later, those poems would fit nicely in the context of IN THE BIRD MUSEUM, my second book. 

Certain things informed that project, and by extension, the play i just wrote two decades later. In addition to in-depth research on sightings and lore, I did things like go on ghost tours and wandered around the historic State St. Marshall Fields (which was on the verge of becoming a Macy’s soon after.) Class and the idea of pauper/unmarked graves was at the forefront of my mind, as was Depression-era economics. 

While the poems wander in their p-o-v and thematic directions, the play places Mary’s story as I imagine it alongside a cab driver decades later, using music to mark the shifts in time and weaving their stories together, including one scene I really hope works that changes decades mid-scene.

Kristy Bowen, roadside ghosts and writing your obsessions

Between Marshal Pétain’s capitulation to the Nazis in 1940, and the Liberation of Paris in 1944, the French wrote over three million letters of denunciation to the authorities. After the war, some denunciations were deemed, retroactively, criminal acts: the crime of “indignité nationale.” Fascinated by their surface and their substance, I set out to write a poem based on those letters. While I admit to an interest in the more standard heroic possibilities of iambic pentameter, here my aims were Frostian. The letters are a fascinating mixture of “tones.” Rarely were the writers trying simply to convey information. They were just as keen to signal things about themselves, to the agents of the Vichy state: patriotism; sophistication; alignment with its (sick) values. They wanted to denounce “traitors,” but they wanted to sound appropriately bureaucratic in doing so. Bureaucratic tones are underrepresented in metric poetry—I’m not aware even of Robert Frost trying—but poetic they can be, when they contain an undercurrent of terror. Also poetic, in this case, is the fact that these writers’ mixed goals did not mix well: because virtue and vice do not mix well. Nor, and this is no coincidence, could the writers quite carry it all off. Their sophistication is often sour and out of tune.

That’s how it struck me, anyway. This may be serendipity, but I have leaned into it. For I should say, the letters were written in French (of course), and discussions of them referred me to a compliation titled La Délation sous l’Occupation, of which no English translation has been published. Unable to pay a real live French person to produce one, I have relied on machines to do it, machines which are, despite recent advances you may have read about, not entirely reliable. But their unreliability was, in this case, poetic, in a way worth explaining. It’s familiar enough that modern English is a mixture of German and French. Because French was, in the centuries after the Norman Conquest, the language of England’s ruling elite, French words that came to English tend to have a “fancier” meaning in English, than their originals have in French. For example, “travail” in French means (simply) “work,” but in English it means “painful or laborious effort.” Computer translations from French tend to “transliterate” French words, rather than replace them with simpler non-French words that are closer in meaning: “travails” may remain “travails,” and not be translated as “labors.” The denunciations, therefore, in my eyes, appeared to try quite hard to use the fanciest—and so, Frenchest—English words they could, even when those words were not well-suited to their intended meaning. This was, sometimes, quite amusing, as was the contrast between these elevated stylistic aims, and the sometime pettiness of the “infractions” being reported. And then, here and there, through this curtain of administrative and euphemistic malaprops, some plain and brutal language would protrude. In a poem, this could be magnified into something grotesque.

One story about World War II, is that its great evils should not be wholly blamed on a few monstrous men; shares should also be distributed to the masses of collaborators, each of whom perpetrated his or her own microdose of evil. These letters are among them, and they smell of it.

Brad Skow, The Spirit of a Broken People: French Letters of Denunciation

I was absolutely delighted yesterday to receive my contributors copy of a new poetry anthology, The New Sentience: Reimagining Animal Poetry, which is just released from Trinity University Press with a Foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It’s a beautiful book! The editors, Ashley Capps and Allison Titus did a wonderful job putting it together, and I’m marveling at the Table of Contents, which is full of such greats as Mary Oliver, Linda Gregg, Mary Ruefle, Mary Oliver, Nikole Brown, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Camille Dungy, Ross Gay, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Ada Limon, as well as yours truly.

The poem of mine that they’ve selected to include is “Dr. Harry Harlow’s Primate Laboratory,” from my book Darwin’s Mother, which takes the perspective of a monkey forced to participate in Harlow’s famous (and chilling) wire mother and cloth mother experiments from the 1950s. Thinking about those experiments and what it must have been like for the baby rhesus monkeys who were deprived of maternal care and familial connection still makes my heart feel as heavy as stone.

But the anthology is also rich with hope—poems of connection and kinship, of observation, odes to interspecies friendships, to entanglement, wildness, and mystery.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Reimagining Animal Poetry

Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex. She writes about motherhood, shifts in identity, and love in many forms, frequently finding wonder in the seemingly everyday. Her work has appeared in publications including Magma, Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog, and Under the Radar and her debut pamphlet Tiny Bright Thorns was published in 2024. And in news very hot off the press, Jen has just been announced as the winner of the 2026 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition.

A Dress with Deep Pockets is a book that takes us in its confidence, and talks to us candidly over the kitchen table about friendship, motherhood and ageing. Jen writes with a quiet confidence – the poems are not fussy, preferring to leave a deep imprint through their frankness and vitality.

Here is a poet who is able to bring us the essence of a character and a stage of life in swift, bright sketches – like her teenage friend, in Hare Girl, “tawny and watchful in corners, / boys staring owl-eyed from across the room.” Or the speaker of the poems, caught mid-realisation in Boxing Day Swimmers, of her own ongoing process of transformation;

It’s the strangest thing, lately,
I open my mouth and my mother falls out –
a mournful clockwork woodpigeon on the kitchen table.

Boxing Day Swimmers

What I enjoy about these poems is how lightly they wear their ‘poem-ness’. They are full of craft – clever little turns, pin-sharp images, genius line breaks – yet they are carried along with an immense warmth and wit, a voice that feels so natural and completely itself.

Victoria Spires, Fictional bats, stolen vodka and bobble hats

There are periods when I’m reading for work, others when I’m reading for pleasure. Sometimes, they overlap. At the moment, I can firmly say that my reading life feels expansive and enriching in a way that lands firmly in the realm of pleasure.

Last week, I reread Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, which is one of my favorite collections. This week, I’m reading two extraordinary books, ’s forthcoming Middle Slope and Karen Solie’s T.S. Eliot-prize winning Wellwater. I wake up excited to read, which is a wonderful feeling.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

The private detective is closing the file, dusting the mirror to move on but the woman at the heart of the case is living rent free in his mind. It suggests how experience shapes us and some memories can never be left behind.

Polly Clark has a skill for taking apparently ordinary moments, working on a piece of art, attending a funeral, finishing a job, and invests them with layered depths, showing how these micro connections shape individuals. She asks readers to look again, challenge their knowledge of how they might think this scene pans out and asks what if you focus on the less obvious, what if you were less complacent? It’s a fine balance between a relaxed, colloquial tone and a thoughtful, darker undertone and invites a reader to re-read the poem. If you’re not familiar with Clark’s work, “Afterlife” is an excellent place to start.

Emma Lee, “Afterlife” Polly Clark (Bloodaxe) – book review

A couple of years after I met this poem, I met its author at the Dodge Poetry Festival. He gave a reading and I queued up to have On Love signed, and told him that “For the Sleepwalkers” was perhaps the first contemporary poem I had loved, and that I had read it in Fifty Years, and he looked at me very seriously and said yes, he remembered that anthology, and he was very glad to know it, and thanked me for telling him, and then he signed my book “We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.”

“For the Sleepwalkers” is a simple poem is another funny thing I almost wrote in the spirit of earnest classification. Is it simple? It leapt off the page and into a seventeen-year-old, so make of that what you will. I suppose I continue to feel guarded about my beloveds after such a long estrangement from Poetry at large: the sneaking suspicion that I do not like the right things remains hard to shake, especially when I make the mistake of picking up the latest issue of whatever. But, Dear Readers, I’ve so far only gained more of you here, so perhaps that’s a kind of empirical argument for not being all that wrong.

What’s to like? Tercets! The load-bearing stanza form: I like to imagine Hirsch, inevitably, thinking Dante, maybe even making a stab at terza rima early on—wonderful / invisible, faith / path—but that may be autobiography; I can’t count the number of times I’ve set out to write terza rima and abandoned it after line five. It’s handsomely constructed, repeated phrases and constructions weaving a subtle net of sound and sense: “so much faith . . . so much faith” in the first stanza, “stairs instead of the window . . . doorway instead of seamless mirror”in the second.

Alongside, and in conjunction with, these syntactic pairings, I love the strangeness of some of the figures, how the poet doesn’t quite ask us to rethink our assumptions as much as declare them rethought. Sleepwalking is most often employed pejoratively; one who sleepwalks through life misses things, but Hirsch’s sleepwalker is the one who truly sees. Stairs in the context of somnolence denote danger, yet here they are a preferable path to a window, a safe way down, and also out; the gaping door is not a symbol of vulnerability, but preferable to the mirror’s endless echo chamber. I love the night-soaked beauty of hearts flying off and returning, the clipped percussive music of “thick black fists,” the solid sound and sense of “glove of our chests.”

Most importantly, and I think most like Hirsch—the poet laureate of insomnia—is this notion of generative dark, of insight arriving not on a beam of light, but in the wild darkness: in shedding the self and actively seeking the unknown, even though we are so often told, and so often tell ourselves, it’s dangerous.

Vanessa Stauffer, “For the Sleepwalkers” by Edward Hirsch

James Matthew Wilson has noted Ransom’s prosody in these late poems:

the falling, slant-rhymed, rhythms . . . which Ransom borrows with so much else from Mother Goose, are coupled with the mundane and the parenthetical, rhetorical, Latinate grandeur, and these all conspire to create poems immediately amusing to the ear; grotesquely jerry-rigged so as to compel us to ponder their inner-workings; and finally insistent that life in this world is a long defeat, where what is most precious, beautiful, and humane merits our reverence and study even though it will, in God’s time, fail us.

In “Blue Girls,” a number of pentameter lines, specifically the internal b-rhymed lines of stanzas 1 and 3, do contain these falling rhythms, ending on such multi-unstressed-syllabic words as “seminary” and “contrary,” which casts the short concluding lines in those quatrains, with their final stressed syllables, in higher relief. The effect, then, is something like rolling down a hill and hitting a fatal wall.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Blue Girls

Fourteen lines long, like many of his pieces at all stages of his career, “Alternative Anatomy”, describing a hawk moth, is an ethereally thinned version of a reversed sonnet (one in which the sestet precedes the octave): it’s written in short, irregular lines, and has only a few highly attenuated rhymes. The irregularity and attenuation both suit the idea of the moth’s fragility and erratic flight (itself brilliantly captured by the line end pause in ‘cleverly / erratic’). I think they have another important effect. The whole poem is brought delicately to rest by the way the last two lines move to the iambic pulse of the dominant tradition in English metrics and of the traditional sonnet in English. However, the unpredictable rhythms before that point seem to contribute to its lightness of imaginative touch and the consequent extremely open way in which its suggestiveness works. This gives it a vast imaginative reach with many overlapping circles of suggestion. Short lines isolate images and phrases, letting each resonate in the pause or blank space at the line ending. Shimmering between overwhelming extremes of light and darkness, between poles of miniaturist empathy and geographical or even cosmic vastness, and between anthropomorphic and naturalistic imaginings of moth and bat, glancing in its imagery at archaic and modern industrial techniques, at marine, submarine and aerial navigation and at the mechanics of making music, vividly evoking both the cruelty and the marvellous intricacy of the natural order, it doesn’t push the reader towards a conclusion but opens multiple vistas of reflection that he’s free to follow or not as he wills. The whole poem gives a beautiful sense of completeness, but this is entirely a matter of artistic shaping, not of the expression of an idea, and it seems to me that the abstention from any kind of intellectual conclusion that would have limited the reader’s freedom of response is as much a beauty of the poem as its shaping is.

Edmund Prestwich, Jamie McKendrick and sonnet form. Comments on “Alternative Anatomy”.

[Edwin] Muir was a Scottish poet who died in 1959. According to my note on the flyleaf, I bought my Faber edition of his Collected Poems as a student in 2000. I’m not sure how much read Muir is these days but his poems seem to me to have stood the test of time particularly well. He assumes some scriptural and classical knowledge in a way that is less common now, but his poems are never ‘learned’. You always feel that he is putting his gifts at the service of the reader — that he writes to be understood.

In this poem, for instance, there’s an obvious allusion to the story in Genesis, and also to two Gospel parables — of the wheat and the tares (in Matthew 13) and of the workers in the vineyard (in Matthew 20). ‘Tares’ is a now largely obsolete word for vetch, a kind of weed that grows easily in wheatfields. Recent translations of the Bible tend to use ‘weeds’, but ‘tares’ is the word in the King James Bible, and I would guess that for most mid-20th century readers — for whom it was no longer in common currency — the word itself was strongly associated with this particular parable. But even if you have never read the New Testament, and don’t know what ‘tares’ are, I don’t think you would have any difficulty following this poem.

Muir uses scripture (and also some parts of classical mythology) in a natural way, to clarify his meaning rather than hedge it around. This is much harder to do than it looks, and the apparent straightforwardness of Muir’s style is perhaps his greatest achievement. It is very difficult indeed to write lyric poetry which is both beautiful and straightforward to understand, and which also has something to say — a clear and specific message or argument. These seem like they ought to be the basic virtues of verse but it is a rare poet who can put all three together as consistently as Muir.

The clarity and (for want of a better word) ‘accessibility’ of Muir’s style derives to a large extent, I think, from how deeply rooted his poetry is in what we might call roughly ‘popular’ verse, including songs and hymns — the kind of verse that is shaped by use for maximum clarity. 

Victoria Moul, When will all come home?

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
I’ve been reading this one for several months. Did you know Leaves of Grass is quite long? The first (self-published) book wasn’t so bad, but the one I have, one of the later editions after he had added and added to it, is a bulky 400 poems.

Some parts are great! But some not so much. For example, should anyone, poet or otherwise, use the word “promulges” this much?

“Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,
And the dark hush promulges as much as any.”
(from Song of Myself, 45)

Not to hate on Whitman – his work is obviously inspired by the cadences and repetitions of Biblical poetry, notably Ecclesiastes (which I was also reading at the time – interesting pairing) and the psalms. However, instead of centering around God, he centers around himself, in a universalistic way. What a tiresome subject.

Often a famous poet will be known for one or two of their very good poems, but there is a treasury of much better poetry that no one ever reads – but in Whitman’s case, I think the well-known poems are the poems you should read.

Renee Emerson, Does anyone ever finish Whitman?

Simone Weil was, to all who knew her, intense. Over the course of her shortened life, she gave herself up to an evolving sequence of political, ethical and mystical philosophies, and pushed herself and her body to great physical extremes in order to live them fully. This was her praxis, her public self.

Tom Pow’s new collection of poems has grown out of several years of immersion in Simone’s writing, augmented with visits to places which advanced her thinking in some way, or were the site of revelation, of a sudden clarity. By deepening his concept of her by encountering her in these places, he invests his poems with a directness and intimacy that comes from working with primary source material, including the places in which it was formed – the sounds of the building, the light on the walls. We encounter her in these places. It is this sense of presence, of being with, that charge these poems with such authenticity, that makes them ring true.

Lesley Harrison, The Vulnerability of Precious Things

There is no single reading of a poem. We cannot be done with it in a single pass as we might with a novel. (I don’t mean later re-reading, but the initial or single encounter.) Even a joke poem, a limerick, a short form, a couplet, requires more than a single read: it lingers and echoes in memory. Something about itself is always drawing our attention. Most verse is dross because it lacks this quality, not for any merely formal reason. When I first read ‘Filling Station’ I did not understand it in a literal sense. Some barrier existed because it is American and the lingo was obscure; some words needed looking up; some of it is simply difficult, not the sense that it is hard but in the sense that you must mull it before you “get” it. Not all difficulty makes itself known on the surface.

Late James is poetry in this sense. There is this sort of poetry in the heart of Austen, too, whose sentences roll in our minds. Not poetry in the way Dickens drops into pentameter, but in the lilt of her prose that becomes almost like the long lines of the Psalms. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in the country of Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property… We might hear Cowper behind this as well as Addison. We might have to read the novel several times before we think to ask why it matters that the residence is in the centre of their property.

Austen can be read as an easy novelist or as a difficult one, not difficult in the way Joyce is difficult, but not easy in the way Wodehouse is easy. Some novels have their difficulty submerged, like Brideshead, which I read three times through on first encounter. Just as the first time we read a great poem and it will require lots of attention, so we might need to read a novel that looks easy. But the “standard” way of reading a novel is straight through, maybe going back a little, but mostly linear. If we rate literature according to pleasure, the more linear the better. Zing! So when people discuss difficulty, a lot of their arguments might depend on how “poetic” they like their literature.

For some poets, like A.R. Ammons and Wallace Stevens, keeping you in the state of difficulty is almost the point. To reach a full explanation is almost to miss the point—these poets are trying to put something into words that cannot, fully, be expressed. The sense of difficulty should be where we understand that. We will only ever be able to get so close to reality through words.

Henry Oliver, Out of all the indifferences

Whenever people ask, “Which poets inspired your own work?” I end up saying that my poetry is largely influenced by prose writers—maybe even more so than the poets. Clarice Lispector is part of my holy trifecta (others include Anaïs Nin and Marguerite Duras, whose work I also practiced bibliomancy with).

Lispector, a Brazilian writer whose family origins trace back to war-torn Ukraine, lost her mother as a child (I am always interested in writers whose childhoods asked them to raise themselves, in a way—writers who operate through and within a kind of lack). I’m also married to a Brazilian person, so there’s one slightly familiar doorway through which I enter her work.

Despite genre classifications, her work is a poetics of nonlinearity and interiority. On the line level, it is positively delicious. Água Viva—a “meditation on the nature of life and time”—asks you to surrender to a sea of questions, desires, prayers, thoughts, to the very mysteries that make up our world, to the spaces in between. And I fucking love that. If there’s anything I hate in literature, it’s being hand-fed.

Água Viva is an exercise in constructing meaning, but it’s collaborative between author and writer; it feels as though the author is whispering directly to you. Or that you’re watching a prayer as it’s being transmitted to the heavens.

Lisa Marie Basile, Bibliomancy of the week: Clarice Lispector

A poetry prize that we are lucky to have in the UK is the Michael Marks Awards. Founded in 2009, it now has four categories recognising small-press excellence: Poetry Pamphlet; Publisher; Illustrator; Environmental Poetry Pamphlet. This year’s shortlists have just been published, with the winners to be announced in June.

The only shortlisted title that I currently have on my shelves is Hugh Foley’s Recent Poems (The Fair Organ), which is a pamphlet in the tradition of small, simple printed objects that I particularly enjoy as a way of reading poetry: a paper-wrapped, pocket-notebook of 28 pages, stapled and hand-stamped on the back with the publisher’s logo (I wrote about my own small-press experiment with this format here).

Of course, the downside of reading this way is that wafer-thin publications easily get lost at the bottom of the book-shelf food chain, pressed flat by the paperbacks and hardbacks they can sometimes end up tucked inside. […]

In a statement about “The Importance of Poetry Pamphlets”, the Michael Marks Awards observe:

Traditionally, pamphlets have provided a vehicle for new writers to emerge, as well as offering established poets a focused, short structure that is ideal for exploring themes […] Historically, and still, often small presses have been labours of love, individually crafting each pamphlet.

This got me thinking about which pamphlets on my shelves I value not only as short and portable early gatherings of poems that later have ended up in “full” books, but specifically those which are themselves my preferred (and sometimes only) way of reading a particular work.  [Click through for Jeremy’s selection of a half-dozen memorable pamphlets (AKA chapbooks).]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #42: An Outside to Language

8 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

It has been a natural state for me to move among poetry, translation, critical work, and fiction. I may spend months or years focused on one or two, toggling between them, and then find myself drained. Other genres rush in to fill the space left and reinvigorate me. Translation, especially, recharges the mind for my own poems. There, you are both creating and kneeling at the mercy of existing language, balancing between fidelity and estrangement, mimicry and imagination, domestication and foreignization, to mold a poem in English that does to an English speaker what the original did to readers of that language. Switching modes feels like stepping out of an airport in the tropics and taking off your parka. So I never have writers’ block per se. There’s always some other kind of writing I could be doing if one type is coming up dry. And the genres necessarily challenge one another. Is this really a narrative poem or a story that hasn’t been completed? What form best serves this idea? What can this form do that the others cannot?

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

With a “9-5” job, I write when I can: a snippet in the early morning, something after dinner, a few hours on the weekend. The trick for me has been to keep the mind engaged with the literary, with the way a poet attends to the world, at least for a few dedicated moments every day; that may not be actual writing, but it keeps the writer in my mind alive.

10 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn to international writers to pull me out of the milieu and habits of U.S. literature.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Daniel Moysaenko

like any poet, i am always
fighting the moon. i want to have her
over for dinner. i want to use
my phone flashlight to find her face.
in a dream, the house catches fire &
i turn into a diamond in the heat.

Robin Gow, battery life

According to #FemkuMag, “In September 2017 Rowan Beckett Minor coined the term “femku” in the subtitle of their first book Radical Women: A Book of Femku. Since then, the term has resonated throughout the Haiku community, thus pioneering a movement and this journal, the safe space Rowan created for women, trans, and gender-expansive Haijin to share their work.” I’d like to learn more about your first book, Radical Women: A Book of Femku. What are the main subjects and topics that you focus on in this book and what inspired you to write it?

I didn’t yet realize I was non-binary when I wrote Radical Women: A Book of Femku, so many of the poems are about navigating the expectations of gender roles in society, the sexual pressures women face, and my love-hate relationship with my body. These poems are raw, gritty, and very underdeveloped in traditional technique, so I’m not sure you can truly call them “haiku,” but they certainly have a senryu spirit and laid the groundwork for my entire poetic career.

I’m also interested in learning more about #FemkuMag. What do you enjoy the most about serving as the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of #FemkuMag?

Oh, that’s easy. I most enjoy the community I’ve built. There are many poets who tell me their submitted work was written specifically with #FemkuMag in mind, or that they would only trust me with certain topics. Unfortunately, women and transgender folks are often scrutinized for speaking their truth and most people just want someone, anyone, who will listen to their unique stories. I think it’s important, crucial even, for underrepresented voices to have a platform; all I do is secure the space and hand them a microphone.

When and how were you introduced to haiku and Japanese-related poetry?

My haiku journey began shortly after moving to Detroit, Michigan in 2017. I discovered the Evergreen Haiku Study Group at Michigan State University, run by Michele Root-Bernstein, and attended several meetings. Mike Rehling of Failed Haiku regularly attended the meetings and was kind enough to give me a few haiku history lessons over some delicious Japanese cuisine. Failed Haiku was my first haiku publication credit, the H. Gene Murtha contest was my first placement, and I had a haiga featured in the 2017 Michigan State University “Haiga Around the World Exhibition,” so I owe a lot to Mike and the Evergreen Haiku Study Group.

Jacob D. Salzer, Rowan Beckett Minor

Zoeglossia is a literary organization seeking to pioneer a new, inclusive space for poets with disabilities.  Launched in 2017, Zoeglossia is the first such organization in the poetry landscape. The idea is to provide an intersectional community open to a wide range of disability poetics, encouraging conversation and support.  This link leads to a wide variety of poems that explore the experiences and consequences of illnesses and disabilities . .. and I offer a the opening portion of a sample from that collection below.

Number Twenty by Jonathan Mack

This, the story that brings me to you, is one story in twenty. In the other nineteen I am dead. In five stories I’m dead of AIDS, having suffered every possible infection and died at home, in a variety of hospitals, and in the toilet of a theater. There are seven suicides between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. There are two terrible car accidents — one involving a drunk driver and one that is entirely my fault. In one story I live only three days and  . . .

Jonathan Mack’s poem is from This New Breed. Copyright © 2002 by Jonathan Mack.

JoAnne Growney, Resisting Disability with Poetry and Math

Over the past few years, I have interviewed over one hundred journal editors. Some lit mags want work related to specific themes such as war, social justice or the environment. Some focus on showcasing certain writers, such as women over sixty or Canadian poets. And, of course, many have specific genre parameters: creative nonfiction only, or prose poetry only, flash fiction, long fiction, hybrid works…

Yet if there is one commonality among what a majority of editors look for in submissions, it is related to voice.

Stephen Beeber of Conduit: His magazine is a “venue for voices that aren’t ready to be recognized by the mainstream.”

Cherry Lou Sy of Adroit: “A strong voice gives a story its soul.”

Michelle Lyn King of Joyland: Her magazine “is most interested in a distinctive voice.”

Jennifer Acker of The Common: The editors are “looking for really strong voice.”

Courtney Harler of CRAFT: “Does [the work] express and capture a truly authentic voice?”

Anthony Varallo of Swamp Pink (formerly Crazyhorse): He is interested in “the voice and energy of the piece.”

Sheila Squillante of Fourth River: Regardless of the genre, it is “incredibly important that the voice of the piece is strong and idiosyncratic and fresh.”

What exactly does all this mean?

In fact, the more I think about the concept of “voice,” the more fascinated I find it as a literary element. On YouTube, the question “What is voice in writing?” yields many results, ranging from the obvious to the nuanced and enlightening.

However, these videos and most other queries related to voice tend to clump together two strands of the concept. One strand is The Author’s Voice. This is your unique stamp as a writer, the singular thing that you and you alone do. This is the Hemingway story you can spot immediately; the Anne Sexton poem you recognize in an instant. This may just be another way of referring to an author’s style. Yet “voice” encompasses more. It’s bigger than style—it’s the author’s worldview, their vision, recurring themes, favored images, vantage point, social position, the very wellspring of ideas that could only come from them.

The second strand is The Voice of the Work. Many writers are admirably consistent in their works. They write about the same sorts of things in more or less the same way. I, perhaps like many of you, am not one of these writers. Some of my stories lean lyrical and are deeply serious. Others are bright and wacky. Some are violent; some are light-hearted. If there is a unifying quality that connects all these works to one another, a larger Author Voice umbrella under which my stories gather, someone else might recognize it, but I’m not sure I can.

So, in talking about voice as a literary element, it would seem important to tease out these two strands. Invariably, writers would want to know whether voice is something that can be learned. Can you strengthen your writing voice? Can you sharpen it? If so, how? What does it take to shape the voice of a particular work? What does it take to shape your own voice, as a writer?

Becky Tuch, Q: What are editors talking about when they talk about “voice”?

I’ve been moved by the sound of mourning doves, their plaintive call. Plangent, but somehow unsentimental. A kind of straightforward sound of mourning. How does the resonant coo evoke our human sorrow or mourning. Of course, for the bird, that’s just the sound they make. They are not more mournful, despite the delicate crepuscular pinky grey of their feathers and this hollow and hollowing song.

We often read the natural world assuming its signs signify our signified, as if these signifiers were human. A pathetic fallacy, but also a deeply felt cultural interconnection. Our human world has evolved in dialogue with these signs. Dark skies, brooding clouds, joyful birdsong, joyous brooks. Here we find voice for our feelings.

Gary Barwin, Bird=flute, egg=stone: Mourning and pathetic fallacy

He said, writer’s block is a myth, look around, the city will provide words for your poem

And the city spoke to me in red.
All instructions and warnings.
Private Property. No Entry.
Trespassers will be prosecuted.
Do not urinate here.
Right Arrow. Left Arrow. Straight and Right.
U-Turn. No Free Left.
Vote for __ . Or maybe for __.
Residents Only. Beware of Dog.
No Parking. Tow Zone.
Speedbump ahead.

And I imagined these signs instead:
Shhh. Parrots Nesting in the Rain Tree.
Take Left. Jacaranda tree in bloom.
Look up – full moon tonight. (And Venus!)
Free books: Take one. Take two.
Pin your poem to this board. (Poets, This Way!)
Hang your art here.
We are not busking. Sing with us.
Feel the grass. Take off your shoes.
No swimming from 2 to 4 PM. The fish are napping.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -5

There is a poem written by Frank O’Hara in April 1954 titled after Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” In Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, Marjorie Perloff refers to O’Hara’s poem as a “loose adaptation” of Rilke’s. David Lehman has called it a “deliberate mistranslation.”

Frankly, I’m not sure what ‘translation’ has to do with O’Hara’s poem at all.

If I had to find words for it, I’d say O’Hara borrowed the structure of Rilke’s poem and cast it into the shape of Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” The title acknowledges this Aus-Einem-April mode; there is no epigraph pointing to Rilke because the pleasure of an O’Hara poem (much like the pleasure of an Ashbery) comes from reaching the reader who recognizes the source. Even the way O’Hara closes this poem — “and out there everything is turbulent and green” — shares almost no bones with Rilke’s quiet glistenings and “still” details ordered by awe.

Alina Stefanescu, “Alfie, honest mistresses are lauded…”

I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me to translate classical Persian poetry if an Iranian friend hadn’t asked me in the early 2000s if I’d be interested in working with a now-defunct organization called the International Society for Iranian Culture (ISIC). ISIC, he said, was looking for someone to write the text for a website that would help counter the axis-of-evil caricature of Iranian culture and history that had been current here in the United States since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The focus of the website would be classical Persian literature. My job would be to make that literature and its place in Iranian and world culture accessible to an online American audience.

I was immediately interested. Since my wife is from Iran and my son is therefore Iranian-American, I had a real stake in the cultural awareness about Iran that ISIC wanted to engender; and, as a college professor and a writer, not only did I think the educational value of the project was self-evident; I also saw it as an opportunity to learn about a literature I knew next to nothing about. When I asked my friend if ISIC might see that ignorance as disqualifying, he told me not to worry. They actually wanted someone who would approach the literature from well outside the specialized and scholarly contexts in which those texts were usually read and studied.

My friend put me in touch with the man who was pre-screening those people who’d been identified as viable candidates for the project, and then he, after a long conversation of which I remember very little, told me I would hear within the next week or so from ISIC’s executive director, Mehdi Faridzadeh. When I met with Mr. Faridzadeh, however, the project he described to me was not only radically different from the one my friend had told me about; it was one I knew right away that I was not qualified to take on.

“We want you to produce,” he said, “book-length literary translations of selections from masterpieces of classical Persian literature. All told there are ten. We’re asking you to do five at a time.”

I did not hesitate. I immediately rejected his offer. While I spoke some Persian, I did not read it. How could I possibly presume to translate from it? Surely, I asked, there were bilingual poets and writers capable of doing this work. Why wasn’t he talking to them? He’d reached out to them first, he said, but, with very few exceptions, none were interested in working on classical texts, and the ones who did had either not responded to his query or had told him outright that they had other commitments. Since he wanted work to start on the project as soon as possible, he’d decided not to wait for them.

I pushed back. Given my lack of the obvious minimum qualifications, I said, I did not see how I could accept his commission or do the work with any integrity. Mr. Faridzadeh responded by pointing out to me something that I already knew, the long history of poets translating works from languages in which they were not literate by relying on informants and what are known in the field of translation as “trots” or “ponies.” These are literal or near-literal versions done by native speakers that the poets then use as a basis for the literary translations they produce. ISIC would provide me, he said, with English-language versions of the original texts that were widely recognized as valid, as well as access to scholars who could answer my questions and help me with any difficulties. Moreover, he went on, since he wanted the translations to stand on their own as contemporary American literature, as something a general readership might actually enjoy reading, he preferred the idea of working with someone like me, a native English-speaking poet, to working with someone who was bilingual but had neither a poet’s ear nor a poet’s way with words.

I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of earning myself a footnote in American literary history by producing these translations did not appeal to me. What ultimately persuaded me to accept ISIC’s commission, however, was a point Mr. Faridzadeh made about the generations of Iranian Americans who did not read Persian and for whom translations like the ones ISIC wanted to publish would be their only access to the classical literature that was part of their heritage. I thought about my son and others like him. They deserved, I thought, access to a version of that heritage that would “sing” in their dominant tongue the way the original “sang” in Persian. So, I agreed to produce a sample couple of pages from Saadi’s Gulistan, and when Mr. Faridzadeh called me a week or so later to tell me the project was mine if I wanted it, I accepted, though I was not at all prepared for the politics of the terrain I was entering.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On The Trail of a Tale – Part Four: How I Came to Play a Very Small Role in Saadi’s Travels Through the World

There were times I wished
I’d apprenticed to a sushi chef and learned
to wield a sharp, clean blade, and times I wanted
only to walk the marbled length of museum galleries,
opening window after window on the centuries.
What I know now came mostly from learning
to sit still, opening books and letting language
take me out of myself and back again until I
could find my way to some shore resembling
knowledge, and there at last make my own fire.

Luisa A. Igloria, Some Labor

Bezos, Musk and Branson strapping the rich to rockets and shooting them at the moon is, in theory, quite appealing. They won’t send poets up there even though poets and astronauts are the same – it’s just the pay-grade that differs. Both reach out into the vast nothingness, return from the overwhelming emptiness with similar sentiment: the world is fragile. And beautiful. And insignificant.

Most poets prefer to stay grounded, don’t stretch to such perilous missions, play it safe, take what earthly succor they can. It seems the further out you are prepared to go the harder it is to attach value to your assignment. I could put on a vest, jog a few laps around the local park, say that I was doing it to save the barn owl or a rare breed of newt and I’d easily raise a few quid. If I told you I was taking a journey, a voyage into the great unknown of a poem, that this odyssey was taking place inside my head, a venture into the unmeasured depths of the imagination but for a similar cause you’d be far less inclined to part with your hard earned.

The first few times I got paid for my writing taught me a lot about how we calculate the value of such work. It was a lesson that came in three stages. I understand it’s a common experience. On the first occasion I didn’t feel worthy of the fee, I felt a little shame and embarrassment. The second time the money felt about right, I was comfortable, confident, assured but by the third time I realised that no matter what you paid me it would never be enough. This is not to say that I thought that my work was astonishingly brilliant just that there was a spectacular randomness about putting a price on it. There was an absurdity to it. It couldn’t be done with any sensible measure. I mean what do you pay for a poem?

Footballers earn more in a week than nurses do in a year and there aren’t riots in the streets. A diamond is just a see-through stone and poets go to places astronauts wouldn’t think to visit. In a parallel universe, somewhere beyond the moon, kids are tossing jewels into mill ponds as wealthy wives string common rocks around their necks.

Jan Noble, Nº62 Diamonds are (not) forever

It’s been a week of bits and pieces in terms of poetry.  Let me record some of them here:

–In my end of the semester cleaning up of the paperwork piles, I discovered lots of rough drafts of poems.  A few of them had some potential.  A few I couldn’t remember where I thought the draft might be going.  A few I didn’t remember writing at all.

It was good to remember that I did more than my computer files might indicate.

–I was making some poetry submissions to literary journals before the bulk of submitting season winds down.  There are moments when I wonder why I bother.  But the occasional acceptance still makes me happy, so I persist.

–As I was looking through my file of finished poems, I realized that I had reviewed a rough draft twice, once back in January when I first finished the rough draft and then again in April, when I had no memory of revising it back in January.  I haven’t circled back to see which draft I like better.  It does bother me a bit that I had no memory of doing the original revision.

–On Monday, I was thinking about the trinity of nuclear war movies of the 80’s, and I listened to this podcast about them and other nuclear war movies, including House of Dynamite.  As I drove down to Spartanburg, a line floated through my head:  The apocalypse will not be televised.  Once my students started writing, I put poem ideas on paper and ended up with a fairly good draft, just two hours after the line flitted through my head.

It’s not the way I usually create poems, so I was happy to have that experience, especially in a very busy week.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poetry Creating Notes at the End of a Term

I know the unseen work behind my writing, my learning, my community building—but I also know that my “score” does not necessarily matter in a subjective field. I might have the same “stats” on paper as an award-winning, widely-published writer, yet feel invisible. And someone else might be looking the same way at me, though that’s harder for me to imagine, of course.

But I also know for a FACT that I do not do a fraction of what other writers do to seek those opportunities and awards. I spent 36 years of my life working as a public school educator, often putting the needs of others before my own. As a retiree, I get to decide how I spend my time. And though that freedom has indeed given me the gift of ample time to focus on my writing and literary endeavors, it has also given me other freedoms.

Most importantly, I have the freedom to spend more time with people I love—my family, my friends—for laughs and meals and concerts and movies and general ridiculousness. To move my body and spend time in nature. To explore new creative outlets with visual art. To travel outside the timeframe of a school year’s constraints. (TL/DR: The way I choose the spend my time is not always devoted to my writing life, but to my LIFE life.)

I may not get the accolades I see my peers receiving, and maybe I have a little pity party every now & then. It feels good to be acknowledged, after all, but that isn’t why I write. So I’m good. I will celebrate my writing wins. And I will celebrate yours.

But I will also celebrate the heron returning to the local lake. The little boy racing his mom down the hill at the forest preserve. I will sing with my husband at a concert or yell at the contestants who annoy us on Top Chef or Survivor. I will talk on the phone with my son to discuss movies, or his upcoming wedding and new home. I will celebrate a friend finishing chemo, a sunny March day after a week of gray and snow. I will celebrate the beauties of the wider world through traveling while I am still able. I will celebrate each small kindness shown to me and try to show the same in return.

This is kind of keeping score that matters.

Donna Vorreyer, Keeping Score

Frankly, it’s all too easy to find metaphors for life in the garden. Nurturing seeds with a sense of hope, even expectation, sure. Endeavoring to control outcomes though one cannot control the weather? Yep, that too. Culling, thinning, weeding in an effort to produce abundance, clarity, or beauty? Yes; and waiting and working under hot sun or in the pouring rain and being surprised by hail or hurricane or drought. (You can pop any of those words into the “search” bar on this blog page and find times I have written about said weather events.) In the thousands of poems I’ve drafted during the past 45 years, garden topics and metaphors abound. Lately, though, I’ve been dwelling on how change–inevitable in the garden–presents problems to solve but also lovely surprises. And yeah, there’s metaphor in that as well. Though people tend to avoid change, change brings a wealth of education in its wake.

It’s true that education is often humbling. We work our butts off only to discover we’ve been doing things wrong, or ineffectively, all along. That’s one of the things I learned when I began trying to grow things in earnest, and it is also true of my experience writing poems. You have to be willing to make mistakes and accept that you made them if you are going to improve; it doesn’t mean you have to solve each difficulty in a prescribed way. You can invent! As long as you know that invention sometimes fails, you can learn from it. Create a nonce form for a poem, for example. Or an improvised trellis for a squash vine that got a lot larger than you’d planned.

Every year in late winter, I devise a garden plan and order seeds. Every year in early spring, I revise the plan in some way. Every year in mid- to late-spring, the garden looks very different from those designs…it helps to have a flexible nature, since nature hates rigidity and thrives in its own way. Often unexpected. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes quite a charming surprise to which I’m more than happy to adapt–I welcome the variation! It’s a process that reminds me of writing. No wonder my gardening and my poems are so connected: the processes are so similar.

Ann E. Michael, Process & metaphor

Above the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue,
a chalk-white smudge of contrail arcs
across a sky by Watteau. Everything stills.
For now,

driver-attention holds, and brakes are firm and good.
Ducks cross in danger and care, those ancient, storied laws.
Early light spangles the cottonwood.
A flowering crab confettis its applause.

Maryann Corbett, Mayday

I just roughed out an early draft of my next poetry manuscript (and finally figured out how to automate the Table of Contents in Word—ha!). It’s a long way from done: a little short, so I have more writing underway; there’s a section that might be relatively weak, we’ll see what I think later; and I will just generally need to revise individual poems and think about the flow within sections. I’ll take my time with all of it. But the basic structure makes sense, hitting the beats and ideas I have in mind. Plus I’ve been drafting new poems toward the gaps and, at least for the moment, feel good about most of them. The working title is Spiral Hum.

It’s Friday here and I fly out on Tuesday, so I’m in the home stretch on the Storyknife residency. I’ve had a couple of down days for a variety of reasons, all of which seem inevitable. It rains a lot here in April and gray skies wear on me. Social anxiety in the company of people I’m just getting to know: for sure. The ms contains tough material and spending time with it can be hard emotionally as well as in craft terms. Sometimes drafting a poem is a total joy, an episode of absorption that leaves me exhilarated. Other days it’s a grind to haul the stanzas up the hill. It’s certainly demanding intellectual work to analyze a sheaf of poems and figure out how they could be better versions of themselves. A stretch of two or three hours can burn me out. On a larger scale, I periodically question poetry’s whole enterprise. A question from Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems” always haunts me: “What kind of beast would turn its life into words?” I’m still tracking world news as well as the struggles of my loved ones. What gave me the notion that writing is a good idea, in the face of all that?

Well, the fellowship itself suggests that I should be writing–that at least a few people in the universe want me to. This interval is a rare gift, so gratitude picks me up and set me on my poetic feet again.

I’ve also been reflecting on what about my residency has nourished my desire to write, because in general, it has. For the first time in ages, I have utter privacy to calm down and focus. I know for sure that no one will disturb me all day, though I can wander out and talk to whoever’s around, if I feel like it. Mostly I don’t, until five, when we gather for dinner. We do the dishes after and almost always go out for a walk. Then I’m back to my cabin to write and read. It’s a nice rhythm. And I would like an excellent lunch delivered to my doorstep every day for the rest of my life, please. (I have eaten very well generally, both here and in town—special shout-out to Maura’s salmon, chicken soup, and bison meatloaf; Katie’s baked goods; and the oyster restaurant on the spit.)

An equally important factor is Alaska itself. Awe is some of my most powerful poetry fuel. I crack my door and hear owls and eagles. Scary moose are marching around (don’t even talk to me about bears, who are waking up all over the state and feeling hungry). Yesterday I jumped on one of the staff’s twice-weekly errands to town so I could walk along Beluga Slough and Bishop Beach. I was hoping to find a hag stone, which I did. I filled my pockets with a variety of other pretty rocks and shells, too. I watched sandhill cranes, newly arrived. I found a mysterious feather, now on my windowsill, although I’ll leave it here, especially after learning it could be from a juvenile eagle (illegal to transport). The long stretch of sand and tide pools, distant rollers, and the Aleutian mountains beyond were gorgeous, even on a cold, cloudy day. Once, when my head was down, a raptor’s cry caught my attention. I looked up to see a bald eagle—they’re huge—perched on a carcass only several yards away. It was a dead otter and the eagle was plucking out his eye. Jesus, this is a stark, fierce, awe-inspiring place.

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemerals pt. 4 (awe and otters)

Grief has chiseled its name in me
like a bored kid with a penknife.

Then again so has love, and
I yield willingly to that inscription.

My heart is a lacework of runnels
etched by a million attempts

at gratitude, even when
I am a canyon flooded with tears.

[…]

I haven’t posted a Torah poem here in a while, so here’s one that I’m working on this week, arising out of the second part of this week’s double Torah portion, Behar-Behukkotai.

The Hebrew word חָקַק means engraved. Hukkim are the mitzvot that don’t make intellectual sense (as opposed to mishpatim, justice-commandments.) Sometimes these mitzvot are literally “inscribed” on or in us, as in brit milah.

I started thinking about inscriptions, carving, the ways in which we do or don’t yield to being changed. The grooves we carve on ourselves through habit, and the grooves life carves on and in us. That’s what sparked this poem.

Rachel Barenblat, Carved

Have you ever done something genuinely kind and beautiful and then chose to deliberately keep it to yourself?

Is there anything soft, gentle that is kept inside — not necessarily hidden, nor embarrassingly put aside, but rather something to be proud of, and yet untold?

And what about a day when we do not reach for the phone, for the camera, not even for the pen. A day when we see, feel, touch, taste and do not have the need to tell, when the experience and its briefness (however long it may last) shall be enough.

Luciana Francis, The Anonymous Life

On the first day, the woman making my reading pass had warned me, “the days will start blending into each other” and so they have, to the point that I am only half sure that I am writing this from my bed, with Rastafarian music and weed smoke from the pavement below wafting into my room through the window, and not the reading room of the British Library because how can I be really certain that, like Alice, I hadn’t fallen into a rabbit hole, in another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again the rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next, 

What happened next was that as I was reading the manuscript, the almost endless repetition of the cursive letters made me wonder if I was not hallucinating all of it, the letters, the writer of those letters, myself, my life, the people around me, the building, the garden house of 19th century Calcutta, or the screeching ambulances of 21st century London, and if I did not exist at all, then who was it that I sometimes saw in mirrors or windows, and who was the I seeing it? Was I really in London in 2026 because if I were, how could I simultaneously be in the suburbs of Calcutta in 1873, and if I were somehow here and there, could I walk out into the garden in Chitpore with cobras, mangoes, litchies, and cats named Baguette, how she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

At exactly 5 pm, the reading rooms of the library close. Outside the archives, the world seems strange, less and less itself. The bitter pint of Guinness in the Irish pub outside the archives taste like mangoes of a long gone Indian summer. 

Saudamini Deo, Mal d’archives

                      my heart is broken
it is worn out at the knees
                       ~ Suzanne Vega 

I have forgotten how 
     to do this. 

How to sit with myself
     on a Wednesday morning 
     and pay attention. 

How to resist
     the Breaking News. 

How to resist.

Sharon Brogan, Snapshot poem 29 April 2026

This week: the clay-dusted air of the workshop, the rambling treasure hunt for a poem, writing nothing but sonnets for a year, the poets on the farthest end of the table, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s a bright morning in Yorkshire. The trees are in full blossom and there’s a fierce little breeze which scatters their petals like confetti. Today is Earth Day. It’s also the twenty second day of National Poetry Writing Month; a writing phenomenon which began in the States and now extends around the globe. According to the NaPoWriMo model, a prompt is issued and poets are invited to write (and share) a poem in response .

Yes, that’s right – a poem a day, every day, for 31 days. I can’t remember when Kim and I began following this crazy instruction – seven years ago? Nine? Ten? My blurriness is partially the result of late-night-writing-sessions and sleep deprivation by the end of the month; partly the sense of almost-total immersion in the world of the poem.

For all of those years I’ve been doing NaPoWriMo, April has functioned as a sort of creative reservoir – a time when I know I will produce a stack of drafts which will go some way to sustaining me through the rest of the year. It’s not just about quantity either: the daily discipline; the heady exposure of knowing that I’ll publish my early drafts on social media no matter how imperfect or incomplete; the delicious combination of mutual support, appreciation and competition I always feel when I’m writing with Kim – there’s no doubt that I produce some of my best writing in April.

Clare Shaw, Running with the Pack: NaPoWriMo

Early in my social media times I began adding a link to a piece of music to each of my poems. I’ve been doing this for maybe … eight years?? My playlist of these songs exceeds 30 hours now. Why am I doing this? The thing is …

A poem takes us into a waiting room.

We open a magazine on a random page and read. The person next to us changes their position on a plastic chair. The wall clock ticks on. The air is stale, infused with the deodorant of the man who has left before we entered. These lines. We reread them, not having quite got it. A fly that has landed on the table is shuffling its legs.

Then we look up.

Outside, mute, the branches of a tree. Traffic. A person hurries down the street and a piece of paper falls from their trouser pocket, but they walk on, not noticing.

We look back at what we’ve just read and it has changed.

Kati Mohr, Linking and shifting between poetry and music

Like many people, I am intrigued by bird calls. Where we live in the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges, just out of Adelaide, South Australia, we are graced by many types of native birds. However in the forty years we have lived here, the number of species found in the area had dropped dramatically. This decline has been well documented and is due to a combination of habitat destruction, mostly for human housing, and climate change. Nevertheless, most of the time, the air is filled with the calls of birds, some regular residents, others infrequent passers-by. But what are they saying to each other? what are they trying to tell us?

Here are a couple of videos I have made, in which I give voices to the birds in different ways. Both these videos have had many screenings in Australia and around the world.

Ian Gibbins, The voices of birds…

With Birds and Duduk

In this piece, I’m playing a duduk, an Armenian double reed instrument made out of apricot wood. I’m also using live digital processing and recordings of birds.

Gary Barwin, This instrument is made of trees and birds

And there is this beautiful thing Ted Berrigan said, as quoted by Ron Padgett:

The gods demand of the system that a certain number of people sing, like the birds do, and it somehow was given to me to be one of those people—and I mean I did have a choice—I could have decided not to, to be a truck driver or a filmmaker. But I like doing that, and I feel that probably the major reason I write is because the gods might destroy… the whole thing could fall apart. I lift my voice in song. I lift my voice in song.

Valium numbs every part of the song that seeks to keep things whole in me.

The administrative precision of the hospital emphasizes the humiliation of being embodied. I will always dread it. But I won’t spend this week consumed by the worry of waiting for results.

I lift my voice in song instead, to quote Ted.

Alina Stefanescu, What started with wax.

I say to the tree growing inside me

It is one thing to taste your bitter
leaves but now I hear your barbets
all day, their song is crawling out
of my ear, do you know they are
planning to escape?

I think they saw a cloudless sky
dancing in my dreams.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -4

During bouts of outdoor work, when I’m mindlessly weeding, pruning, or doing soil prep, I’ve been mulling over whether–and if so, how–I’ve changed as to writing poetry (see closing paragraph of last week’s post). There are vague recollections of getting really on a roll and drafting new work into late hours of the night when I was 20 or 21 years old. But how I went about it, what approach I took to writing back then? I barely recall. It’d require research into my old journals to figure that out; there, I dare not go! And what happened to all the poems I typed up on my heavy, electric typewriter (an early 1970s Adler, if I recall aright)? They’ve mostly vanished, though a few reside in my attic in several boxes of old literary magazines which chose to publish my efforts. […]

I’ve just finished reading poems by the 16th c. Korean poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a brilliant person who started writing before age 8 and died at 27. A young person all her life, by our standards, and a prodigy. A frequent theme of hers is yearning for a husband or lover who is far away, a trope as common in Asian poetry as in European poetry. The lover has gone to war, or been exiled, or is in another region on work for the king/emperor/church, or is at sea. Nansŏrhŏn frequently wrote in the style of the Chinese poets who penned this sort of yearning poem; in fact, her husband was often distant, trying to work his way into a higher-status position, while she was left at his home with her in-laws. Her desire may not even have been so much sexual longing as just plain loneliness. Her work, even when it is not more romantic in subject, is suffused with an overall sorrowful yearning.

I recall having that feeling when I was in my teens and early twenties. Often, I wasn’t even sure what it was I yearned for or desired specifically. I just felt the sense that something was missing in my life, and I suspect that many of my earliest poems aimed to describe vague heartbreak about a kind of emptiness. (I assure you, my work was terrible–no comparison to Nansŏrhŏn can be made here.) However, when I read her poems, that’s what resonates with me. […]

[W]hile I recognize and appreciate the sentiment that accompanies yearning, my work has not been animated or inspired by that particular kind of longing for awhile now. It’s not that I lack desires, but the tenor of the feeling is different. Romantic love or an unrealized self? Not so much. The longing is for new places, further questions, better solutions, comfortable nearness, safe space, peace. I find much to learn every day, much to love, to admire. In spite of everything.

Ann E. Michael, Learning & yearning

Kelli Russell Agodon came out to be our featured reader at the J. Bookwalter Poetry Series (just rebooted!) on Thursday night and she did a great job, as did the open mic-ers, and a wonderful audience. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with poets here in Woodinville, and the weather obliged, not being too cold or too hot, and the evening ending in golden light as the last reader read.

We also got to introduce Catherine Broadwall’s upcoming book, Afterlife, which will debut on May 5, and she’ll be our featured reader on June 18. I feel very lucky to have so many talented friends and writers around for inspiration.

Kelli read from her upcoming book with Copper Canyon, Accidental Devotions, which if you haven’t thought about preordering, think about it! It’s got Alexa solving existential crises, mermaid dreams, Emily Dickinson’s phone messages, and a whimsical take on a world in chaos. Kelli and I have been friends since before our first books were taken, so we were reminiscing a bit, how we’ve changed as people and writers, how we haven’t changed. I think both of us have become better writers, and part of that is a function of having supportive writer friends, and part of it is not giving up, and another part is becoming more comfortable with who we are as people, which somehow translates into poetry.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Kelli’s Reading in Woodinville, Goldfinches Returns with Cherry and Crabapple, Birthdays Approaching and the State of Publishing (And Fear of Failure)

“In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago” is a poem that came together over many years. In 2005 I first jotted down notes about the canyon, the view from Airport Mesa, and the Milky Way while on my honeymoon in Sedona, Arizona. Over the next twenty years or so, I returned to that material now and then, but never had the poem in my grasp, just images. After my divorce, I went back to those old, failed drafts to see what I could find. That excavation led me to a poem that is, in its own way, about excavation, and about seeing things later through a different lens.

What helped me find and shape the poem was seeing an opportunity to play with repetition and variation. Like jazz musicians, we writers can improvise and riff! I’ve noted some of that riffing in the handwritten annotation below.

As I note here, I saw the opening—“Our honeymoon was a strand of scenic overlooks”—as an opportunity to play with variations on that sentence. Mid poem it becomes “Our honeymoon was a stranded scene I overlooked,” and in the end it becomes “Our honeymoon was a strand, a strangeness, a look ahead.” Riffing on the words in those sentences inspired me to play with other words and to find possible variations. Ultimately I built the form of the poem around those variations and revisions/distortions, with the end words in lines 1-3 (stand, wrote, scenic) corresponding to the end words in lines 4-6 (strange, penned, scene), and so on.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago”

In the summer of 2023, the poet and translator Aaron Poochigian posted on social media a link to an article about an unusual archaeological find: On a fragment of an amphora from Spain at some time in the first four centuries CE, some words were scratched into the wet clay that are quite different from the usual commercial information. The article’s authors identified the words as coming from Vergil’s Georgics. Theorizing about the sort of person who might have inscribed poetry on a pot, they note that children and youths were commonly employed in pottery manufacture of the time, and that the Georgics might well have been used in pedagogy in the agricultural area where the fragment was found. Whether or not their scenario is likely, it struck a chord with me, recalling my teenage encounters with Vergil’s hexameters, a rhythm I’ve tried to echo with the stresses of modern English, and used in several poems. The poem I based on this article has finally, finally, appeared in the little magazine Vergilius, so I can show it to you.

On some words of the Georgics,
inscribed on a fragment of Roman amphora unearthed in Spain

Journal of Roman Archaeology, June 5, 2023

Picture him, down on one knee in the clay-dusted air of the workshop,
bent to the wet terra cotta. He’s mouthing the sounds of a poem,
working the spelling out roughly; misplacing the start of the sentence—
wrong, but we see what he’s after. Underside up, the amphora,
waiting, still soft, is a near-irresistible draw to his stylus.

Everyone writes on amphorae—the contents, the names of the sellers—
what’s to deter him? His memory’s zephyred away to the schoolroom
now, and he’s singing it—quietly, quietly—wheat fields and grapevines,
oxen and beehives; he’s singing the gyre of the year in the heavens,
Bacchus and Ceres. He’s etching his love of it into the softness […]

Maryann Corbett, Vergil, dac-hex, and me

Much is written about how to be a good listener. Far less is written about how to be a poetic one, or rather, how to listen for the poetic.

When I write poems for strangers as I do on my podcast, There’s a Poem in That, I I don’t write affirming poems that reflect the client back to themselves, merely. Instead, I take a more assertive stance. It’s not about listening and repeating, it’s a poetic processing I’m still learning how to think about.

Nomenclature for this practice can still only be borrowed. The stranger asking me to write a poem for them—do I call them a client (medicine)? A subject (visual arts)? A querent (Tarot)? Do I talk about this work as clinical? Service-oriented? Socially engaged? A healing art? Isn’t it all those things?

Listening, too isn’t enough of a word for what constitutes the rambling treasure hunt for a poem in someone else’s story. The process is more journalistic than therapy-based, but art’s the goal. I get in there, and I tangle. It’s almost physical. I tangle with what people try to tell me.

My standard three hours of interview provide ample opportunity to learn whether, and how, to challenge my querents’ narratives, test assumptions, and clarify loose language. I begin to make demands. If someone is bold enough to require a poem from me; I’m emboldened to require they take the project seriously. I do them the favor of holding them to task.

Active listening is one thing; proactive listening is a more recently advocated set of advanced techniques in which the listener pushes back a little harder in a more deliberate effort to understand not just the words a person is saying but what, in fact, they mean by them. It’s a kind of parsing in which a subject’s words need not be taken at face value if their meaning is obscure. It’s worthwhile work for poets, who are trained to interrogate the language.

I listen for images, metaphors, motifs, patterns, and archetypal hero’s journey stuff. But I also listen for those narrative gaps in querents’ stories into which a poetic conversation can fit where nothing else seems likely to. I hasten to those clearings in a client’s imagination where only a poem might spark new fire.

Todd Boss, Call it “Anthrophrasis”

My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn’t do in the Gospels:  bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on.  But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.

This morning, the solution came to me, and it’s so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn’t come to me sooner.  I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis.  Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate. 

There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go–it’s so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that’s closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

I’ve noticed that more of us are questioning the platform. Like me, these other users — most of whom, in my case, are artists or writers — don’t want to leave a place where they’ve staked out a long-time presence and do have a sense of community, but they are also putting more energy into their own websites, blogs, and other online forms that are not corporate, not part of the big system, and remain under one’s own control. They are also hungry for other forms of activity and community that require — and acknowledge — genuine connection and greater attention. I’m not going to leave the site, but I’m now much more aware of what it is, how it affects me, and how I want to use it.

None of what I’ve based my life upon is disposable. When we take the time to create a work of art, to play or listen to music, grow a garden, learn a language, write a set of poems, or build a relationship, we do so because our effort feels worthwhile and we hope the result will last. Our lives themselves are short; time is precious. I want to make intentional choices and to spend most of my time in the real world, as positively as possible. So I think the right thing for me is to limit my intake of news to what’s necessary for knowing what is going on, and not get drawn into the maelstrom of debates and opinions; to limit my time on social media; to write as thoughtfully as possible, to keep learning, to devote myself to music and art and the people I care about — many of whom are online friends, some of whom I met through Instagram itself — but in a thoughtful way that honors the best aspects of who we are and what we respect in each other.

Beth Adams, Instagram, Revisited

So where are we now with the gift economy as artists/writers/creatives? I remember when I started blogging 2000 years ago and it was very much an exchange of ideas, freely given. I remember when I saw blogs like Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) monetize. It was the first blog I can remember doing that and it blew my mind. Like, jealous! A bit. But also, it seemed odd? And now I think, how my life would have been so much better if I’d figured all that out way back when. These days I still struggle with the whole Ko-fi thing :) And I’ve whined about how maybe I should move to Substack all the time and then never do.

And now the question, the problem of AI, stealing our gifts but also messing up the gift economy. And then the feeling that it’s foolish to be putting almost anything on the internet at all. I honestly don’t know what to do with all these thoughts currently. Because just the pure giving online has brought me a lot of goodness in this world. So anyway, I’m sitting with the Wittgenstein quotation, the gift as a problem to solve.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Thinking about The Gift

This week, on a tiny writing retreat, I’ve been thinking about the idea of running without fuel in the tank. And sometimes, not just fuel: no oil, no coolant, and the car needs some work as well. I’ve been thinking about what makes it possible to move forward when your resources are depleted. To be your best self, whatever that self is.

I used to find that whenever I traveled, I ran on empty. I was eating badly, not exercising, I lost connection with my game, and when I got back, I grasped at reconnecting with my life. But I like to think that being able to be my best—my most creative self, my most wild and fun self, my most dedicated self to Red Hen self, my most focused self—all requires some care, attention.

Some people need a lot of time with other people to feel good. I need a certain amount of alone time, and I need to spend that alone time reading, writing, or exercising, not doomscrolling. The apps raise my anxiety, and they convince me that everyone else’s life is much better than my life. They give me a fidgety unhappy edgy mash of dark to mess.

Alternatively, reading centers me, exercise brings my brain into focus, and writing reminds me of who I am. During my alone time, I rein in my urge to deep-dive, and I return to my focus. […]

On this, my birthday week, I think of Molly Fisk’s poem “Cedar Waxwings.” It is a good example of finding yourself through silence. It’s a poem that makes me think about healing and finding grace and getting back to equilibrium, and all of those things that I hope are possible while I am breathing, writing, finding my pulse.

So much depends on my finding my breath again. On refilling my tank. On resisting mournful isolation and embracing good solitude. I look to Molly, now, who is such a centered, soulful person. When I talk with her, when I hear her, her voice is large and surrounds me, and I feel like she is someone who climbed a mountain and saw the surrounding fields and all the trees, who saw devastation, too, and managed to stay sane and lived to tell the tale. She’s at the center of her own stillness, writing and seeing. Let us all aspire to such grace.

Kate Gale, Solitude, Stillness & Sanity: On Remembering Yourself Through the Empty

I’m back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I taught a surrealist poetry class with poet and librettist Melissa Studdard. We were the last class, which made me a little worried because I thought everyone might be tired and thinking about midday snacks & drinks—however, I was so wrong! What a joy to be overfilled with people—two rooms, all chairs taken, and people on the floor—all writing surreal poems. It made me realize that even with everything in the world, people still want to create something, to write poems, to be in community. I needed that reminder.

Melissa and I also did a little photoshoot for our poetry series, Poems You Need, and I, of course, wore the wrong shoes and sliced my foot (this should be no surprise to anyone who knows me—I always wear the wrong shoes).

The problem was—we had no tissues to stop the blood; it was just me, bleeding onto my discount Italian flip-flops and the sidewalk like a very low-budget horror film. Our photographer, who turned out to be a quick-thinking hero, pulled out a tiny white baby sock (clean! her son’s!) she’d been using as a lens cover and saved the day. (And yes, I was fine, no stitches, just alcohol, Neosporin, and a very tight bandaid!)

Kelli Russell Agodon, The World Is Too Much and Also Beautiful

Being at a yarn show with hundreds of people is a complete contrast to my one-to-one coaching or the times when it’s just me writing poetry, but there is also a lovely cross over with my values of being helpful, listening to people and taking time for reflection. And this week while simply being in a show ground I have felt the lovely tingle of tears of happiness in my eyes when recounting moments that have brought me pure joy in my life and listening to other people tell me theirs. I have laughed a lot and remembered to stay in the moment because after all it is the moment that counts. Oh, and I remembered to still myself and say thank you when complimented by a stranger so that I actually got to feel the complete glow of how that feels.

Here’s to finding the ways we laugh with others, supporting those we love and being ourselves in the moment.

Graphene, from my first collection Magnifying Glass, is shining in my mind as a great poem with which to end this blog…for the wonder of celebrating the shine and the marvel of being human.

Graphene

Perhaps, before their pencil, in that building

it was in me – that flat form carbon atom;

hexagonally honeycombed
undiscovered and waiting.

And before that, did it come from a star?

Maybe it was once inside you.
You are a study in graphene:
cleaved graphite, harder than diamond,

stronger than steel.

Exceptional.

Sue Finch, THREE TIMES A YARN SHOW

over the last couple of years, by far my richest and most rewarding poetry experiences have been the launches of work by long-time friends. these gatherings mean an immense amount to me, and i wouldn’t trade my participation for anything in the world. but – there is always a but – the very things that make these these celebrations so joyful, so moving, and so special – their warmth and intimacy – are also the things that make them tricky. and by “tricky” i mean… what, precisely? i suppose i must mean the sensation of emptiness that assails me in the midst of the social. […]

people are very mysterious to me: how they think, feel, fit together, move through the world. i can – and do – enjoy and admire many of them – but i do not understand them even slightly. it’s like… it’s like life is a fundamentally different force for most humans than it is for me. they have all of these experiences, achievements, ideas, relationships, and these things fill them up, or they enlarge them, give them a shape and a substance, a weight in the world; they anchor them to reality and to each other. for myself, life isn’t like that, it’s momentum without mass, just restless moving energy; it forces me forward, and it thrusts itself through me, but there’s nothing to hold on to, nothing to build on or around. i feel flimsy, i guess. i feel.

Fran Lock, MORNING PAGES

When I look up and away from the screen, there is a community I adore. Throughout multiple visits to a local wetland, I watched a discarded iced donut in the grass slowly get eaten away. Simply because I went for a walk to escape nonsense, I once observed ants protect aphids on a plant called Fireweed because the ants love the honeydew that the aphids produce. Community is everywhere. Symbiosis is necessary. Communication is necessary. Ten years now I have bent down to a plant or pointed to a bird and said their name to my husband. And now he says them back to me, his finger pointing up at the sky.

Sarah Lada, Rich Rich

I’ve drafted three poems now, one each morning. I’m also accumulating a windowsill full of spruce and alder cones, bits of moss and quartz, and other stray items: a rose hip, a mollusk shell, dried stalks of some kind of aster.

I hear owls at night: the deep hoots of a great horned owl, the faster, higher calls of a northern saw-whet owl. I missed some aurora activity last night, though. I gave up and went to bed at a quarter after midnight, thinking it was too cloudy, and others saw the flickering just fifteen minutes later.

Heading toward summer, Alaska, or this part of it anyway, is gaining five minutes of light a day. The sun currently sets at 9:30 but the glow lingers longer, hovering at the horizon until 10:30 or later.

Today, Saturday, is brilliantly bright, at least for now. The snow-blanketed volcanoes across Cook Inlet are perfectly clear. Directly across from my desk rises the cone of Augustine (Chu Nula, translation in progress). Visible at the edge of my view is Iliamna (Ch’nagat’in, One that stands above). I have to walk outside to see Redoubt (Bentuggezh K’enulgheli, One that has a notched forehead).

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemera pt. 3 (the wild life)

Today, my birthday started the day off with French toast made for me by J and sitting down to write some poems to catch up on NaPoWriMo hi-jinks I have fallen behind on.  We don’t really have plans for the day since J has three gigs today stretching from early afternoon til 2 or 3 am. So I am on my own, and will probably work on editing things, tidy up the bedroom, and watch something trashy later. […]

In the end 51 was a wild year. Depressing on a global scene, and dysfunctional even on a level that my previous half-century had not seen. Yet, on a personal level, things feel good, though ever precarious financially (but then again, while things are more expensive, I have never quite been flush there even when they were cheaper.)  I probably wrote over a hundred poems, edited dozens of chapbooks, made many collages and cover designs. I published three physical books (one a regular full-length collection, one a text/visual hybrid, and another special-edition hardcover w/ fauxtographs for Patreon. ) There were also a handful of e-zine editions. A smattering of video poems. Meanwhile there have been countless movies, many plays and musicals, occasional weekends away, and of course, the wedding last summer, which was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. 

Kristy Bowen, 52

Once upon a time, around the time I first moved to London, I wrote nothing but sonnets for a year. They weren’t strictly sonnets, because they mostly didn’t rhyme and when they did rhyme they didn’t follow the right patterns; the metre, to the extent there was one, was rough and ready even by my standards. Never mind. I’d been reading a lot of Robert Lowell (possibly too much). The not-quite-sonnet tradition goes further back still.

More interesting, looking back, was how addicted to the form I was. I couldn’t stop writing and whatever I wrote came out in fourteen lines. Here is Ken Gordon, writing about his own sonnetification in Sonnet by Other Means: “It was like a fever. I began writing sonnets continuously. Daily. Sometimes two or three (or even four) in a day. I was like a chain-smoker: One sonnet lit another.” I don’t think I ever wrote four in a day, but yes—it was like that.

Are people drawn to certain forms? It’s a good question. I am still a sonnet reader, but I haven’t started a new one in years. Maybe it is also a question of timing: to everything its season and perhaps particularly to sonnets, that form which is so contained, so combustible, and apparently inexhaustible.

You can read one of those London sonnets in the The Sonneteer. I am grateful to Ken not only for taking it, but for providing the title—the only title possible, but I didn’t know that. The poem riffs on Jackson Browne’s song of the same name (written when he was a teenager, made famous by Nico). 

Jem Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 24/04/26

Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins.

Leafing through the ballots, one other name appeared over and over, so much so that I was impelled to count.

Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, never knowing how close she had come. It would be many more years until, at 77, she was finally awarded the fellowship.

Long before that, before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had set down her views on writing in a series of essays later collected in the out-of-print gem Predilections (public library). Pulsating through them is a reckoning with the impossible task of the writer — to weave tapestries of truth and meaning from the tenuous thread of words on the ramshackle loom of language.

In an essay titled “Feeling and Precision,” Moore writes:

Feeling at its deepest — as we all have reason to know — tends to be inarticulable. If it does manage to be articulate, it is likely to seem overcondensed, so that the author is resisted as being enigmatic or disobliging or arrogant.

How we name what we feel is not so much a matter of our writing style as of our style of being, because in order to articulate something we must first apprehend it and we apprehend every smallest thing with the whole person — with the frame of reference that is our entire life, the sum of our experience and memory. When “one of New York’s more painstaking magazines” asked Moore to distill her poetic style into a formula, she fought back the “dictatorial” reflex to quip:

You don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of the personality.

And yet a personality can write with more or less persuasion — that is, write more or less well — depending on what the person brings to the writing.

Maria Popova, Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing

This week, I attended a phenomenal reading at the Poetry Foundation featuring Ashley M. Jones, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Donika Kelly, and Patricia Smith. The poems asked a great deal of us—our attention, our emotional depth, our fullest humanity. They were not always easy—that is, they did not always say the easy or obvious thing. They did not lead with something “everyone can relate to” to win us over. They often centered on confronting and difficult subjects.

And that’s one of the things I love about poetry, the way it can immediately deliver identity and experience grounded in the complex and ongoing web of history. In other words, these poems were ambitious. They seemed to hope to outlast their moment in the grit, music, and scope of what they offered and asked of the listener. I felt challenged. I felt moved.

It made me reflect on how I’ve been teaching writing for 14 years, and my list of similes for what the process is like has grown stranger by the year.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

In the opening poem in this collection, “Dear Life,” Popa writes, “I can’t undo all I have done to myself / what I have let an appetite for love to do me.” These lines set the tone for a book that again and again catches us on its barbed hook. Language hooks us. Ghost crabs are a “speculation on shape,” water, “an artifact of loneliness.” Can I capture the essence of this book after only one reading? Probably not.

Toward the end of the book, toward the end of a long poem, “Pestilence,” Popa writes: “Each day I remember / Each day I strategically forgot,” and “how human     is the future / will it let us let / I am listening through my terror for yours…”

Olawaseum Olayiwola in The Guardian described Wound Is the Origin of Wonder as “purposefully heart-decelerating.” It balances contemplation with a sense of walking through the natural world, balances woundedness with a deep, profound healing. I’m wholly intrigued.

Bethany Reid, Maya C. Popa, WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER

I can’t let Poetry Month go by without sharing a few notes about books I’ve spent time with this month. So, here are a few brief recommendations:

#evolutionarypoems

by Mihret Kebede and translated from Amharic by Anna Moschovakis

When’s the last time you read an Ethiopian poet? Or poetry translated from Amharic? Well, it was a first for me, and I continue to be impressed by the incredible work that the good people at Circumference Books are doing. So many of their books are from regions and languages that are so rarely represented in English translation, and thus, feel so very new and surprising in all the right ways. And if you, like me, are looking for an activist poetics for our times, these are politically engaged poems that provide a very personal model for literary resistance.

Yes & Now

by Yvette Nepper

Yvette may be one of my earliest friends in poetry land—we met our freshman year, when we were both at Ohio University for a time. I greatly admire Yvette’s work within the poetry community in Cincinnati, and we share a Gen X love of DIY and zine culture that continues in many of Yvette’s chapbooks and projects. Yes & Now is one such limited edition chapbook (in this case produced by FTP), “printed on a mimeograph machine in Mike Cowgill’s mom’s basement.” I love Yvette’s ability to balance profound thought with humor and play that makes one feel like it’s totally okay and maybe even preferable sometimes to have a dance party within what feels like an apocalypse. Come hear Yvette read at my house this September, and while you can’t buy Yes & No online anymore, check out her other chapbooks.

Carrie Olivia Adams, April Sunbeams & Books

This, Ian Storr’s second, beautifully-titled collection of haiku (and haibun), has been a long time coming, 16 years in fact, since Seeds from a Larch Cone. Ian is my friend, and was my long-time colleague at Presence haiku journal – he was the managing editor from 2014, following the tragic death of Martin Lucas, until last year, a stint in which he undertook much more than the lion’s share of the work involved in cementing its reputation as one of English-language haiku’s best journals, if not the best.

I know I’m biased but I have no hesitation in saying that Late Light, published by Alba Publishing and available here (scroll down) is the most important collection of haiku by a British poet since (at least) Thomas Powell’s Clay Moon (Snapshot Press, 2020) and the two collections by our late Presence colleague Stuart Quine (Alba Publishing, 2018 and 2019).

Ian hails from Sheffield and still lives there. He spent his working life as a children’s social worker, an immensely important and difficult job. The compassion, objectivity, resilience and intelligence needed for that profession shines through in Ian’s haiku.

Matthew Paul, On Ian Storr’s Late Light

Marriage is one of the most marked gaps in classical literature. I can’t, off-hand, think of a single good classical poem about being married, and barely any even about a wife (as opposed to a lover or would-be lover). Marriage is of course depicted quite often in Greek tragedy, though generally not very positively. But that’s not to say there’s no good Latin poetry about marriage — around 1500 the Renaissance Latin poets Pontano and Sannazaro, in particular, pioneered the Latin poetry of marriage and this sub-genre remained fashionable for a good century or so. […]

I’ve been thinking about marriage in literature, and especially in poetry, partly because I have been rereading Women in Love for the first time in decades, and partly because this week I finally received the copy of Matthew Buckley Smith’s Midlife, which I’ve been waiting for — I ordered it a while ago but it took a good few weeks to make it across the Atlantic and through French customs. Smith is the host of the popular, if oddly named, Sleerickets poetry podcast, which I’ve been on a couple of times — once a year or so ago and then just last week. I’m not a big podcast-listener myself but I enjoyed talking to Matthew, who’s a gifted interviewer, both times. Sleerickets’ trademark is plain-speaking so in that spirit I hope Matthew won’t mind that this week I’m writing about his own poetry.

Midlife, published in 2024 by Measure Press, was Smith’s second collection and the winner of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award in 2021. (This is an American poetry prize that recognises excellence in formal poetry, with a particular interest — in recognition of Wilbur’s legacy as a translator — in poets who also translate; previous winners have included A. M. Juster, A. E. Stallings, Rhina P. Espaillat and Maryann Corbett.) Last year he was also one of the Rattle Chapbook Prize winners, which means that his pamphlet The Soft Black Stars was circulated to all Rattle subscribers (including me) a few weeks ago (if you’re not a Rattle subscriber, you can order it here).

The first thing to say is that Smith is a very good poet in various ways: he is technically accomplished, he has some range in both form and style, and — a feature that readers of Horace & friends will I think particularly appreciate — he conveys an enjoyable impression of literary depth. Midlife contains one excellent (and one less good) version of Horace, one fairly good version of Catullus 51/Sappho 31, one version of/response to Rilke, as well as versions, responses and allusions to Homer, Tennyson and (especially) the dramatic monologues of Browning. The Soft Black Stars, though on the whole a bit less ‘literary’, contains poems responding to the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’ and to Ezra Pound. (The title of the pamphlet is taken from a short story by the American horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, but I haven’t read these stories so won’t comment on that.) Smith is writing in that American formalist tradition that sometimes sounds to my British ear just a bit too clickety-clack, and at times I find him a little boxed-in by his forms. But this is a pretty minor niggle: if you enjoy collections written entirely in “traditional” verse, he is obviously one of the very best US poets writing in this way today.

Victoria Moul, On marriage

Rhina P. Espaillat published this sonnet, titled “Here,” after the passing of her husband, Alfred. And it is as precise a description of what remains after losing a spouse as anything English literature has to offer. It is a poem, in my own lingering grief, I can hardly bear to read and yet cannot bear to set aside.

After the death of Dylan Thomas, Caitlin Thomas published a 1957 memoir of her time married to the poet, with the unbearable title Leftover Life to Kill. Espaillat catalogues instead the actual leftover objects.

Born on January 20, 1932, Rhina P. Espaillat had her 90th birthday in 2022 celebrated by several of the better poetry publications. Back in its heyday, Prairie Home Companion featured her work. The godmother of the New Formalism — the counter-current that emerged in the late 1980s to offer alternatives to the endless free verse of modern college writing-program poetry — she occupies a section in every contemporary anthology of rhymed and metered verse.

The authorized translator of Robert Frost into Spanish, and the translator of such works as the poetry of St. John of the Cross into English, Espaillat is a major poet working in our lifetimes. Which is why we’ve featured her work several times here in Poems Ancient and Modern: the comic “Undelivered Mail,” the dimeter of “Things That Go,” her translation of “Songs of the Soul in Intimate Amorous Communion with God.”

And in “Here,” the reader will find several of the features that recur in her verse. The sonnet form she often uses. The simple rhymes, for example, that do not strain for effect. The list-making. The precise observation of “his red Swiss Army knife / hiding its tiny arsenal of blades” and the near personification of those knife blades: “like legs tucked under.” A refusal of hyperbole: “I almost hear him say . . . ” And a powerful emotion never named but completely expressed, with the unbearable ending […]

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Here

The latest from Colorado poet and critic Camille T. Dungy is America, A Love Story (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a powerful collection of poems that provides a table of contents listing single poems and poem-clusters, arranged in untitled sections counterpointing with occasional stand-alone pieces. The book-length suite of America, A Love Story is exactly that: a heartfelt declaration and examination of a complicated country and culture, and a history of aggression, devastation and racism that still ripples across the landscape of generations. “America,” she writes, as part of the brilliantly-devastating opening poem, “This’ll hurt me more,” “there is not a place I can wander inside you / and not feel a little afraid.” Writing of childhood, her father and grandmother, the use of the switch and of her father being pulled over by the police, the second page of the same poem offers: “Of course my father fit the description. The imagination / can accommodate whoever might happen along. / America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire, / you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface / looking placid though you know the water deep down, / dark as my father, is pushing and pulling, still trying / to go ahead. We were driving home, my father said. / My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way / home.” This is a book of consequence and heart, and the cruel nature of love itself, articulating a detail of people and movement, history and storytelling with an attention to intimate detail. Amid the story of the neighbourhood women amid a shared stray cat in the poem “True Story,” a piece that tells far more than I’ll offer here, she writes: “One woman believed, as Issa believed, / that in all things, even the small and patient / snail, there are perceptible strings that tie / each life to all others.”

There is such a delicate way that Dungy articulates her narrative collage around the idea of love, of America, including an America that will impact her children, and all that might lie ahead; of the ties, and even the traumas, that bind people together, offering poems from a variety of sides and perspectives, coming together to form a coherent shape around how she understands and approaches her love, her America, from the best elements to the worst, and what all that requires and declares, demands and articulates. 

rob mclennnan, Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story

If [Liam] Guilar’s approach to translation is to reimagine, then the way Kit Fryatt and Harry Gilonis work in Book of Inversions is to take things apart and then put them back together in carefully random disorder. As the author/translators note in their introduction, it’s ‘a book of inversions, turning the world upside down’.

The introduction also mentions some antecedents to their approach, including Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s homophonic Catullus, Anne Carson’s versions of the same Latin poet, Richard Caddell’s transmogrification of I Gododdin in his elegiac For the Fallen, and Geoffrey Squires’s My News for You: Irish Poetry 600-1200, not so much an antecedent as it was published while Fryatt and Gilonis were hard at it, but certainly a kind of gold standard for anyone tackling the field. There are also notes that indicate textual sources, other translations (full disclosure, three of them are mine), and further interesting titbits about each poem inverted. The notes also indicate if the version is by one or other of the authors or a joint effort.

Their title plays on the Lebor Gabála Érenn, englished as The Book of the Takings of Ireland, or The Book of Invasions. As such, it is fitting that, after a couple of dedicatory snippets, they open with a version of Amergin’s Song from that text. Not the famous, or infamous, ‘I am the wind on the sea’ one, but Amergin’s third song. Amergin Glúngheal is Ireland’s mythical first poet, and the songs represent a moment of claiming Ireland, which, maybe, makes this a doubly appropriate opener. Here it is in the Irish Text Society version by Macalister, the official version, if you like:

A fishful sea!
A fruitful land!
An outburst of fish
Fish under wave,
In streams (as) of
A rough sea!
birds,
A white hail
With hundreds of salmon,
Of broad whales!
A harbour-song—
An outburst of fish,
A fishful sea!

And here’s the Gilonis take:

Fishfilled sea!
Fertile land!
Fish erupt!
Fish in waves
bird-flock-like!
Ocean’s wild!

White sea hail,
salmon hordes,
widespread wales!
Harbour song:
‘Fish erupt,
fishfilled sea!’

And the Irish text as best as I can manage to reconstruct it from what’s to hand:

iascach muir
mothach tîr
tomaidm n-eisc
iasca fothuind
rethaib ên
fairge chruaid
cassar finn
crethaib én
lethan mîl
portach lág
mniportach lugh
tomaidm n-eisc
iascach muir

What’s immediately apparent, even to readers with no Irish, is that the new version adheres much more closely to the chant-like terseness of the original, short lines and an emphatic rhythm and an echo of the Irish tendency to composite word formation. 

Billy Mills, Celtic Matters

The poet J.H. Prynne died this week, at the age of 89. I’ve been reading his work since I was a student. My first experience of it was very like the one described in this tribute by Ian Patterson for the London Review of Books blog:

[the] poems were like essays in their apparent substance, but they had a manner, a rhythm and a music, as well as a density of thought that shifted my idea of what poetry was and what it could be and do

So this week I thought I would try to give some account of that experience: the reading of words that sound explanatory but resist explanation, and which resonate with a musical air of meaning that repeats itself as a kind of thought.

[…]

wresting the screen before the eyelet lost / to speech tune you blame the victim: I’ve quoted these unpunctuated lines together because I don’t know how to split them apart. Following the clear but abstract statement of the distinction between knowing and doing, we are suddenly plunged into a confusion of violent action. To “wrest” is usually to “wrest control” of something: here, “the screen before the eyelet lost”. This is — to use a synonym for darkness — “obscure” (Latin obscurus, dark, hidden, secret). But obscurity is also what is being (obscurely) described: to put a “screen” before an “eyelet” is to block a small hole for light. So clarity of knowledge has been followed by a cover-up. “Lost”, at the line-break, is the hinge word here, the moment of maximum confusion before an immoral argument emerges which inverts the dynamics of power: “you blame the victim”. How / why do “you” do this? Because you are “lost / to speech tune”, like a good poet. But here it sounds as though your eloquence is a bad habit.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, In Darkness by Day

We’ve been thinking a lot about the poetry of Douglas Dunn recently, especially Douglas’s superb and undervalued pre-Elegies poems. This seemed a good excuse to give this little essay a second airing; it appeared in a recent-ish issue of The Dark Horse devoted to Dunn and his work. It’s about my own debt to Douglas, and to one poem of his in particular. Since that poem is unavailable online, I’ll risk reprinting it at the end of the piece until I’m told off. You can, however, still read it in Dunn’s essential New Selected Poems. […]

I remember reading ‘Remembering Lunch’ in an appropriately wine-stained paperback copy of St Kilda’s Parliament, bought in the Charing Cross Road in the late eighties. I’ll have picked it up it from one of the second-hand bookstores where, twelve or fifteen years earlier, Douglas would have flogged his review copies to pay for his long Soho lunch and its longer bar tab. I had just read and fallen in love with Elegies, as we all had; but with the young male poet’s atrocious impatience to have everyone sprawling on a pin, I decided I had Dunn’s measure. I opened at ’Remembering Lunch’. So much for that theory. For one thing, even the measure was new to me. What’s with the long line? Isn’t it prose when you keep bopping your head on the right margin? Clearly not; but are poets permitted such long sentences? At the time, one knew just enough to reach for the word ‘Jamesian’ whenever one encountered such fluent hypotaxis, but little else. I was, at least, used to poems ending with the sea. The sea is literally a great place to stop. But it was clearly going to take me years to catch up with the rest of it, and I had best make a start.

Don Paterson, Learning from Dunn

At age 76, [Robert] Cording has been writing a long time; he started before he was out of college, and he published his first book of poems in 1987, almost 40 years ago. To look back over that lengthy career is to begin to understand something about the meaning of his new book’s title: what he’s been able to achieve through decades of devotion to his craft, which produces both an accounting and an appraisal of all that he has written and published, and what is possible to ascertain from what the poems tell us about the life Cording has experienced and lived and shared, not only with those he loves but also with his readers.

About the latter, Cording’s poems make quietly clear his life’s through-lines:

[. . .] family and friends, [. . .]

our blessings—the disarming joy of being
loved, the bounty of the natural world
that still takes our sight beyond ourselves. [. . .]

~ from “Talking Through a Storm” (p. 114 )

As that excerpt implies, Cording is an observer of the interior life, one from which he draws energy and consolation, as much as he is a poet who looks out into the world of both the ordinary — “all that is / too humdrum for our notice,” the “nothing much” that characterizes daily goings-on (“Ode to Ordinariness, pp. 130-131) — and the inexplicable and divine, whether it is “the perfection of birdness” (“Lord God Bird,” pp. 132-133) or “some accidental loveliness / we put our hopes in” (“Massachusetts Audubon Chart No. 1, 1898,” p. 185).

As attentive as Cording is to these constants, as much as he can praise the recurrence of “the sun returning like a second chance / after this evening’s shower” or “the moon rising like a clockface” (“Ode to Ordinariness,” p. 131), the world, he writes, “keeps moving to its tasks, random with pain, / rich with surprise” (“All Souls’ Morning,” p. 54), landing him in an “in-between” space where grief and lament reside alongside praise and “a source of awe”: “the colors // of dawn on the earth’s other side. Everything— / the tamaracks and maples, the spruces and their / smoke- winged / sparrows, the painterly sky darkening toward infinity” (“For Rex Brasher, Painter of Birds,” pp. 75-76). The lesson to be drawn, then, is that both suffering and cause to celebrate can and do coexist, that a day can be “perfectly made for delight” while “grief is endless” (“Four Prayers,” p. 151).

Maureen Doallas, Robert Cording’s ‘What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems’

May 2026, next month, marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of my first book of poems, The Silence of Men, which I think is worth celebrating because it is—and this is a testament to CavanKerry Press’ commitment to its authors—still in print and, somewhat remarkably (to me at least), still selling. I just received my 2025 royalty check for $4.83. It’s easy to laugh at that amount, and we’ve all heard the jokes about how poets are only in it for the money (right?), but I have always believed that poetry does its work in the world very slowly. I don’t know how many copies of the book that check represents, or how many people will ultimately read those copies, but it makes me happy and not a little bit humbled to think that poems I wrote more than two decades ago are still doing their work somewhere.

[…]

How To Write A Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times, by Adrian S. Potter:

Perhaps we sink too much energy into pretending to be unoffended when we really should feel insulted. As part of his unapologetic reign of bluster, one of our so-called leaders keeps teaching a master class on how to parlay hot takes and brash rhetoric into votes and profit. Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to write a poem that will finally put an end to bigotry, and yes, even within the false mythology of a post-racial society, bigotry still exists.

The tension in this piece is between the self-important navel-gazing that characterizes the way some writers live “the literary life” and the implicit call to action with which Potter ends the piece: “But when I try to write about [these unprecedented times]…my hand instinctively tightens into a fist hoisted high above my head.” The essay was published in 2004, and I imagine that, in light of what’s been happening in the United States and the Middle East, it lands with even more urgency than it did back then. I found myself thinking of Louise Glück’s essay “The Idea of Courage,” in which she critiqued the use of the term courage to described what it took for a poet to write poems that revealed aspects of their life they might not otherwise have revealed. Specifically, I found myself remembering Glück’s point that this usage of courage “concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech.” We all know the stories of the poets in totalitarian nations throughout history who risked that political result and paid with their lives. Iran, of course, is one of them. How far are we, I asked myself when I finished reading Potter’s essay, from a time when the difference between writing a political poem and raising one’s tightened fist into the air will not be as different as he suggests.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #54

in the front yard, the ferns
are unfurling their fists. i wonder what it is
that they reach for. i should probably open
my hands too. catch something. not a star,
maybe just a petal from the peach tree who might,
if the world is real enough this year, bear fruit.

Robin Gow, poem in which i am an activist

The Heart of American Poetry

Based on A Poet’s Glossary, a book I always enjoyed opening, I impulse-purchased this new critical work by Edward Hirsch. But it is not a book I will finish, though I will keep dipping. The attempt to link poetry to the state of America is far too blunt, the readings are often too anecdotal, and thus the page count is far beyond the actual interest, though the book is not without interest and if some compressed version of this was available in online essays, I would read it. In general, this might be a worthwhile book for someone new to the topic, but it feels old-fashioned to me. If the topic at hand is so important (as I agree with Hirsch that it is) some other way of discussing it must be found. No easy task, and perhaps an unfair criticism, but that is where we are.

*

The Modern Element

Adam Kirsch’s 2008 book about modern poetry is much more lively, gets to the point, and has Kirsch’s own strongly-held views to sustain it. It is less about “who we are now” or whatever, but has a lot more to say about the poets and the nature of poetry. Kirsch is against “poetry’s neurotic obsession with the modern”. He thinks the “poetics of authenticity” which prevailed after the war, and which finished the job Romanticism started and led to the removal of formal qualities, “has thoroughly failed” and has prevented poets from writing major works. He wishes us to return to the pragmatic tradition of Johnson, Aristotle, Horace, and Arnold. A very worthwhile book.

Henry Oliver, Palms, poems, moderns

It was late May, and I had a day off, or was killing time between my day and evening jobs, and I missed campus, with its grassy quad and emerald oaks and bobbing tulips, its redbuds and dogwood, magnolia and cherry, and so I went to the park in search of something like it. There was nothing there that one would call manicured, and what I missed most of all, I’m sure, was the people who’d sit in the grass and read poems with me. I remember I wrote a letter to a friend—we had email, but nobody had a computer; word processors hulked on our desks like suitcase bombs—and then I read Sweet Machine for the first time, and “Door to the River” is the poem that left me breathless in the grass.

What’s to like? I’ve been asking another version of that question a lot lately: Why do I like what I like? It’s a simple poem, so far as the literal circumstances: it begins in ekphrasis, more specifically interpretive ekphrasis—the speaker doesn’t tell us what the painting looks like, but attempts to interpret de Kooning’s intention or meaning—then progresses to narrative description, recalling yesterday’s meadow, then proceeds through a series of questions that feel by turns existential and self-directed, arriving at something like certainty, then a turn to exhortation and another narrative that leads to a moment of lyric epiphany—of transcendence. Why do I like it? Because it is transcendent, and it brings us along on its path towards insight.

Maybe simple isn’t the word.

“Door to the River” is sort of the antonym, conceptually and formally, of another field poem, Mark Strand’s compact little “Keeping Things Whole.” I’m tempted to call it an antidote as well. There’s paradox at the heart of Strand’s poem: If his speaker is what is missing, he is also the missing piece; in that sense, he belongs wherever he is—and yet the division seems to be absolute. There is “the air,” and there is “my body,” and though the two meet, they remain separate. There is such a thing as lack: the air can lack the body; the body can lack the air. Together they “keep things whole,” but this wholeness is only accomplished by continuous motion, is comprised always of its individual components.

In “Door to the River,” we have another mind contemplating another field, but the insight that arrives is entirely opposite: in this field, there is both stillness and fullness: “some / balance . . . no lack, nothing / missing from the world.” It’s an experience of completion, wholeness, abundance. And so the final revelation at the end of the breathless penultimate sentence—this is a sentence that began thirty-one lines earlier, with “It was her voice”—arrives as an utter surprise: that this experience of wholeness must be the same as the experience of death. Having tumbled through to the end of this astounding claim, we end with the simple finality of a one-word sentence: Fine.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Door to the River” by Mark Doty

Spring of course is the season of possibilities. April has been a busy month but now the big weighty tasks are behind me — giving workshops, which is not a task I do with ease, memorializing a friend — and I feel lighter and the mornings have been so sweet with a perfect mix of chill and warmth from the heating sun. Trees are crazy with buds and blossoms and the azaleas across the street are laden. A squirrel ate my one lone tulip, as it does every goddamn year. And it’s been very dry and my least favorite season, summer, is on its way, and it could be a scorcher. So it goes. I try to give participants in my workshops a sense of possibilities, but memorials for friends signal an end to possibilities. One possible outcome of possibilities is nothing. I think of this often. And so. The old eat-drink-and-be-merry, the old eat-dessert first, the old be-here-now. I can only shrug or laugh or be wry. I like the word wry — it’s a tricky little devil: that sometimes-y vowel, that silent w. You can speak it without opening the jaw, the maw of possibility. I like this wry poem by Aidan Chafe for that very thing, its wry embrace of what is possible.

Marilyn Mccabe, with snot and ice cream

Listening to Kathy Acker, dead twenty-five years, read her translations of the poet Sextus Propertius from Blood and Guts in High School … let there be no double winter dead winds … I understand my missteps are all colossal flaps for the wind to carry me, whether I want to be carried or no. The landing isn’t up to me. The wind decides. All my successes or perfections don’t need the head of a pin to stand—that would be too vast—so I never keep one around. My journey needs no island. I’ve given up maps. Since having is believing, I don’t believe. Call me useless, call me criminal, call me undigested pizza with hallucinatory moments of despair—but nothing has always been greater than something.

If one assumes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is correct … Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away … then perfection is the blank page before the poem gives words to lyric, the imagined story before its told, before the idea of Venus de Milo Apollo gives shape to stone, before strokes of paint find a fence or sky or face on canvas, before the note is played. The saying, the doing can only muck the truth.

How to have one and not the other is the real task at hand, the work behind the work—the bottom of the glass reached as the meal is finished—plates carried to the kitchen—the chair returned to its place.

Sam Rasnake, Monday Works… #14: “On Perfection and Flaws”

The poets on the farthest end of the table are laughing
and the visiting scholar on the other end is trading
jokes with the futures trader, and no one quite notices
when the waiters come to fill and replenish cups of water
and tea. Your colleague is rhapsodizing over the thick
clouds of chicken and corn in the soup, and you give
your whole mind to all of this, for here as in the world
attention is a practice that asks nothing from you except
to be here. Though when all of you walk back into the night
and the air is cooler and all are hugging and waving goodbye
or someone is suggesting you find somewhere else to go and
have margaritas, you know the world is waiting to slip into
your mouth again— another kind of communion, the kind
you have every day, the kind that stains your fingers
and leaves a slight film of oil, even now in this kitchen
where, standing barefoot on cold tile, already you are
chewing on the future.

Luisa A. Igloria, Poem at 3 AM with Leftovers and Rilke

This week: the beast we were given, frothed verses of salt‑song, a man in a suit with pink bunny ears, a million mirror neurons, and much more. Enjoy.

Grass: The vitality pushing through us
is stupendous. The green appears
from monochrome, from the shade
into a shadeless shameless glow.
Every blade is singing from the force
of its lit universe. Psychedelic!  
No trade-offs, no slippery motives.   
Today, now, pick herbs from our 
healing garden. Leave the narrow places, 
(suffer the stabs of pain in leaving),
let the grass, even in the cruelest month, heal.

Jill Pearlman, Healing according to our Sages, the Grass

And the message from the universe came when said carrots were getting peeled. And I was rushing because I just wanted it done because then I could…uh oh! I temporarily mistook my left index finger for a carrot and managed to potato peel its tip. The fact it was THAT finger made me feel a bit wobbly so after I had rinsed it and hidden it under some firmly gripped kitchen roll, I chopped the carrots nice and small so they would be done in the same time as the peas, and then got Kath to pop a plaster on it to seal it back down so I wouldn’t see it. (THAT finger being the finger I once had an ‘axecident’ with.)

In the morning it looked a little sad when I removed the plaster, but I showered and nothing much happened except it was a little sore. Magic healing, I thought until I hit it on the basin when cleaning my teeth. And then the world went a little narrower than usual and much blacker.

Thank goodness for a wife who bounces out of bed on her only lie-in day, a local minor injuries unit and the kind and gentle nurse who helped me clean it up, applied steri-strips, popped a bandage over it, and told me I wasn’t making a fuss.

So this week I will be re-establishing the joy of focusing on one thing at a time. I will also be remembering to pause for stillness when I can hear that I am carrying a whole conversation of thoughts around in my head. I will be taking time to think about what needs setting down, and what it is that I need to pay attention to. And for an easy and quick reminder, I will be binning all the shoulds. They are definitely not helpful with their not good enough, critical tone. I will instead be thinking about my coulds and exploring their potential benefits and how they match with my wants rather than giving myself a hard time.

And if you see me peeling carrots in the future you will probably notice that I am intentionally quite mindful about it. Here’s to the art of zen peeling and listening to what we need.

I do of course have times when I truly revel in the way my mind can ask lots of questions and go off at different tangents in response to each one. So for this week’s poem I am choosing to share again a one that I wrote after tidying my desk one evening. During the day I had been coaching and had also reviewed a list of coaching questions. I wanted to organise my workspace and spend some time with my own creative writing to unwind. One of the questions on the papers I was filing away was: ‘What would you like to achieve?’ This question continued to echo in my head after my desk was clear so I used it as the title and set to writing…

Sue Finch, SLOW DOWN

I was asking myself, what have you done of worth yet today, and my answer, well you did dogear two new pages in your Tomas Tranströmer book. (Bright Scythe).

Shawna Lemay, Notes on Photography, Poetry, a Better Good Life, and the Eternity of the Instant

Shajareh Tayyebeh
— Elementary girls’ school in Minab, Iran
bombed during “Operation Epic Fury” February 28, 2026

Panic painted gentian arrows on our feet
between the carpal and the sour toe
a molecular transfer of energy the red
thread pulled us all the lure
and the reel pickled our sorrows
count on happiness as revolutionary
because the beast is at the door
carnivorous two headed
the secrets we were promised as dangerous
girls lying low in the tall grass
imagine the animal’s astonishment
finding us swimming there
arms finally let loose from their silks
it was a measure of time
we were not inevitable
violence or salvation
it’s all the same a constant ache
trade these stories like currency
in the land of indulgence
we were too small for fatigue
we craved the beast we were given
we will not be targets
of this horror 

Rebecca Loudon, April 17, 2026

Sixteen years ago on a day much brighter than it is this morning, my husband picked me up from the hospital where at seven months pregnant I had been admitted, days before, due to my baby’s movement’s lessening. I’d been given steroid shots to prepare for an emergency birth, and then a strange set of events; a domino fall of miscommunication, led to us suddenly not being treated as an emergency. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the story. This is not what I’m here to tell you about today. The story is exhausting. After sixteen years I find myself wanting on this day, the day of her birth and her death, to remember her as the joy that came into my life and changed me. Not the trauma that almost killed me. […]

Her grave in the tree shadowed cemetery, her headstone are the focus of my loss, in many ways, they are unchanging, but not still. It is a slow life, in the cemetery, her grave sees a seasonal life of slow changes and animals and insects, and I like that.This is a kind of life for her too. I find it difficult to explain, this concept that she is a part of the nature and the life in the cemetery, of which there is much and often it is this life that finds its way into the birthday poems.

The birthday poems are a way of immortalising her, and of marking the passage of time, of capturing the moments of loss as we grow around it. Unusually, perhaps because it feels like a significant birthday, I have written several poems for today, but most of them are for me, not for you.

This year, after sixteen years, I need to get her white headstone cleaned. It has become darkened, has absorbed the weather and the lettering is becoming unreadable. Tomorrow the stonemason will come and assess her grave. This is where the poem led me today.

The experience of this loss has changed me as a person, but I have a good life, and much of that goodness came from the experience of her loss and being forced to look at life in a very different way.

For this I am grateful..

The Stonemason’s Visit

The year has rolled over us, again.

Another day of cherry blossom,
of crow-call beneath the beech leaves,
of wind-blown roses; offerings
to the small god of your grave.

The white marble is foxed
with sixteen years of your loss.

I imagine the mason’s thumb
touched to the sharp edge

of your M, of our loved
and missed and wanted,

the way your poem is hushed
to him on the breeze:

you are still the first sigh of spring.

Wendy Pratt, Poem for my daughter on what would have been her sixteenth birthday.

I recently received my contributor copies of On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House Books, 2026), edited by Montreal poet and critic Sina Queyras, an impressive volume of more than one hundred poems by contemporaries, friends, mentors and fresh voices. I have three pieces in the collection—a poem composed in response to Kingston poet Steven Heighton’s death, another composed upon the death of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell’s beloved dog, Niko, and a third, responding to my own Covid-era birthdays, holding off on my fifties (“Forty-twelfth birthday”) until the whole crisis passed. Honestly, this is exactly the kind of anthology I’ve always wanted to be a part of, offering a rich overview of some of the best contemporary writing across Canada and beyond. Queyras has done a remarkable job assembling this work and I thank Queyras, as well as everyone at Coach House, for allowing me space within these pages.

The volume offers itself as “A twenty-first-century reconsideration of the occasional poem by contemporary writers.” Poems for “occasions,” as Queyras offers, whether births or deaths or any other kind of event worth noting. “I start this introduction with bookstores and books because these are essential components in the life of a poem. Poetry happens like this all over the world. Poems are written at café tables and library desks,” they write, early in the introduction, “on buses and subways, in fields and forests. They come out of bodies, comprised of synaptic flares, offering glimpses of the divine, tapping into deep-rooted feelings that are cross-hatched all through the poem, threads of worry and observation. Poems are best shared on paper too, and in person: hand to hand, mouth to ear. I have spent the last fourteen years of my life making such occasions happen at my university in Montreal.” I like this notion of the “occasion,” and was reminded a couple of years back, while judging a poetry contest, how elements of the public view the purposes of poetry: poems elegizing the loss of a spouse, a parent, a pet. A poem for a birthday. Although Queyras also offers the idea of the “occasion” one of the public reading itself.

There is value in witness, the occasion. Value in acknowledging a birthday, an anniversary; or as atrocities occur, armies move and the bombs drop, whether close by or in another country. Ordinary moments are worth noting, as are the extraordinary. There is value as well in acknowledging resistance, survival and trauma, and how portraits remain incomplete if only the positive moments are offered their due. The world is filled with such moments, out of which the stories of our very lives are built. There are moments that require themselves to be seen, otherwise we become lessened through the absence, the dismissal. And thus, the space for writing, whether poems or stories or memoir or essay.

Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, jwcurry prodded at me that not every occasion deserves a poem, and that might be true, I suppose, although I slipped his complaint into a poem as well, noting that particular occasion. Throughout that particular period, I was more consciously following American poet Robert Creeley’s lead, as many of his poems did appear to be prompted by occasions, whatever that might mean. A drive in the car, or the dishes put away. Poems that were set in what also be called the “domestic,” another term used as complaint, usually against writing by women, on those subjects dismissed as merely theirs (children, household, family, etcetera). What, then, the occasion? This particular element of “occasion” is where my three more recent poems, composed across those first few months of 2022, in On Occasion firmly sit, I’d think. All three of these poems are from the as-yet-unpublished manuscript “Autobiography,” a collection that sits as the third in a trilogy begun with the book of smaller (University of Alberta Press, 2022) [see my write-up on such here] and continues with the book of sentences (University of Alberta Press, 2025) [see my write-up on such here]. The current work-in-progress, “Museum of Practical Things” [see my note on such here] emerged a bit later, after a break of a couple of years, during which I purposely worked on other projects, including non-fiction.

The notion of the “occasional poem,” as I have long understood it, is different than poems on the “occasion.” These are poems that don’t fit with anything else a poet might be working on. One might say this is all about approach: those of us working large projects might have poems that sit outside that project, thus are unable to be incorporated. The poems, as Michael Ondaatje once paraphrased Jack Spicer, can live on their own no better than can we. Not everyone writes this way, but for those that do, these outliers, at least for me, are few and far between. My outliers continue, cluster, and eventually form books. 

rob mclennan, Poems, on occasion

If memory serves, I saw the call for submissions right here on Substack, maybe a year ago, and now “Pandora Addresses the Court” appears in the section titled “Occasions of Public, Protest, & Address.” A whole host of personal faves, among them Karen Solie, A.E. Stallings, and Luke Hathaway, also contribute, and I’m grateful to Sina and the whole team at Coach House for giving this poem another home, and for all of their good work on behalf of poetry.

Because I am recalcitrant and weird, I opted not to provide a comment in the contributor notes regarding the occasion for this poem. The actual reason is that I find poetry far more interesting as a reader when it’s just me and the words working it out alone and don’t care to know what the poet thought she was doing. If you feel the same way, stop reading . . . now.

If you are well-adjusted and cooperative: The occasion that prompted this poem was Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, which I found excruciating in every direction, and so it was either launch myself directly into the sun or write a poem. 

Vanessa Stauffer, “Pandora Addresses the Court” (poem)

That Broke Into Shining Crystals (Faber, 2025)
Richard Scott

I am late to the party with this one. I have Richard’s first collection Soho (Faber, 2018) which I really enjoyed, and this one has been on my radar for a while but just haven’t had a chance to buy it.

However, one of our stops in Ireland was Galway, so I took Ally for a rainy walk to Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop. It has the most amazing poetry section, and I picked up this and a book by Richard Siken as well at the same time (more on that later!)

This collection has entered into my top ten contemporary poetry collections (alongside such brilliance as Stags Leap by Sharon Olds). The subject matter is male-on-male sexual assault, rape and the trauma associated with it. Perhaps this explains why it hasn’t been on as many prize lists as it should have – not because of the subject matter, but because of the original and unique approach to language and formal craft that Richard deploys throughout the book.

The book is made up of three sections, and my favourite was probably the first, called “Still Lifes”. Each poem is a Still Life with something i.e Still Life with Rose, Still Life with Lobster, Fruit and Timepiece. In the notes at the back of the book are the painting, or paintings that the poem is in conversation with. It took me a long time to read through these poems because I was reading the poem, then looking up the painting and then going back to re-read the poem again. I’ve never really appreciated the particular genre of 17th and 18th century still life paintings that the poet is engaged with before, but now I’ve read these poems, I feel like I will never look at them in the same way again – which is an amazing thing for a poem to do – to change the way we look at the world, the way we encounter art. Of course I believe the best poetry can do this, but it’s always a shock when it happens.

Kim Moore, March Reading Diary

Readers of the April edition of The Candyman’s Trumpet, edited by the remarkable Sanjeev Sethi, will have been reminded of the rich seam of poetry and abundance of talent to be found on the Indian subcontinent. To that distinguished company can be added Saraswati Nagpal, a Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, whose debut collection, Drench Me in Silver (Black Bough Poetry, 2025), explores cultural heritage and personal identity through vivid imagery and reflective insight. These are uplifting yet economical poems that linger long after the final line. […]

For many readers, the cultural specificity of these poems — infused with references to Hindu deities and traditions — may feel unfamiliar. Yet Nagpal consistently grounds her work in experiences that resonate universally, particularly in poems addressing love and loss. My personal highlight of the collection, Love’s Absurdity, captures the paradoxical nature of love through striking and original imagery: “My heart must tumble like breakers / off a reef, beating their foam‑flecked / braids, moaning frothed verses of / salt‑song loss unforeseen.” The poem conveys both the exhilaration and vulnerability of passion, the uncertainty of a world in flux where “each moment is dusk, light leaving the sky / in purple splendour.” Yet it also offers moments of luminous contentment, when one “wakes wondrous / in warm hands, shadows dispelled / in the balm of his sun‑gaze.” Few poems, Shakespeare’s sonnets included, convey the emotional range of love with such intensity and lyric grace.

Loss, too, is treated with impressive delicacy. A daughter’s grief for her mother permeates the collection, nowhere more movingly than in Libation for Mother. Cooking becomes an everyday ritual that summons the mother’s presence, rekindling memories of being guided through the recipe at the age of eleven. There is solace in the realisation that the mother survives in both the dish and the internalised voice offering instruction, culminating in the image of the daughter “bathed in your sun‑laugh ringing in my kitchen.” Here, loss is tempered by warmth and continuity, affirming that our predecessors endure through the selves they have shaped.

Drench Me in Silver is an engaging and beautifully crafted debut that immersed this reader in an unfamiliar world, rendered vividly through sensory imagery and multilingual textures, while simultaneously exploring universal themes of identity, belonging, love and loss. It marks Saraswati Nagpal as a poet of considerable assurance and emotional intelligence.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Drench Me in Silver’ by Saraswati Nagpal

This is a collection in four parts – Unravelling, I have never met Joseph Gilgun, Breadcrumbs, and Wendy. Each sequence has its own microclimate, but the weathers of each also influence the others. It is darkly funny, smart and knowing in its self-sabotage. Helen Mort calls it “a brilliantly controlled unravelling”.

Unravelling, the first part, is an intriguing mix of a highly innovative choice of format with a condensed, elliptical style of writing. At first, I thought it was a poetic maze, but on a few re-reads I think it’s more like a circle. Whichever direction we follow the logic, we end up passing back through the same spots. This feeling of stuckness fits with what the reader might glean as potentially a difficult subject matter. At the same time, she shows us the nuances of looking back at the before, during and aftermath of situations we may have found ourselves in – how there is no easy closure to be had. There is, nonetheless, a compulsion to pulling at the same threads and hoping for different results;

“You keep trying to edit yourself, like a poem. It won’t work.”

“Your path is littered with half-formed thoughts. You whisper to yourself, That one. No, not that one, maybe that one. You’re searching for something – what, exactly, you’re not sure.”

It’s hard to quote from the individual poems because, more than anything I’ve read recently, the effect of Galia [Admoni]’s work is in the accumulation, the 3am logics that spiral from one piece to the next. Her control stops it from being stream-of-consciousness – this is more like the obsessive cataloguing of the artist or the collector. 

Victoria Spires, Sad boys are not my kink

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?
Most sentences come to me fully formed while I’m going about my day. The only thing I have to do is make sure I write them down before I forget them. I collect these sentences in my Notes app until I have enough of them to see a narrative or image unfold. I then start shaping the sentences into poems. I trim away as many lines as I can until only the essence of the poem remains. This process can take 10 minutes or 18 months, depending on how capricious the poem’s central sentence is. It usually only takes one sentence for a poem to work as a poem.

4 – Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
Everything I write begins in the Notes app. I usually start getting really passionate about a project once I’ve thought of a title for it. There are titles that have lived with me for many years. But it takes the right amount of experience and thought to write a book that fits the title I’ve envisioned for it. I try to be patient so I don’t ruin my ideas before they’re ripe.

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes! I love performing and reading my poems to people. It gives me a lot of confidence.

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?
The main question that runs through all in my work is: How vulnerable can a person be without getting ostracized? I often wonder what it takes for a person to be rejected by society. So far I’ve learned that people are willing to forgive sentimentality, but not cruelty.

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?
The writer creates a private space for working people. Most people have to keep their emotions hidden to survive at work, or in daily life in general. These people need stories to decompress. This is why, as a writer, you cannot afford to be vain, insecure, or easily ashamed. You have to put it all out there so that people without the privilege of emotional visibility have a place to go.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nadia de Vries (rob mclennan)

It begins with scratching out
the night sky, thread by thread, one
at a time, layering thin
line over other thin lines,
until only the full moon’s
light slices through. Next, days go
gray, glimpsed through lids or lashes …

PF Anderson, Darkness (#NaPoWriMo 19)

Taken as a whole, my work writing poems for strangers addresses what I call PMM—Pervasive Modern Meaninglessness—a disorder I believe affects all of us in various proportion.

PMM didn’t surface suddenly. The agricultural age became the industrial age, which became the digital age, transforming work from something you did tangibly to something you did intangibly. The information age became the disinformation age, and now, on the precipice of an even more Artificial (AI/AGI) age, authenticity is poised to become something of an anachronism.

“Authenticity” was the topic of my master’s thesis in 1993, so it’s been something of a lifelong obsession for me, as it turns out. Growing up on a Midwestern farm had something to do with this. Child of back-to-the-land hippies, I had a tangible relationship with the food I ate (because I’d gardened it) and the heat our wood furnace produced all winter (because I’d chopped and stacked and hauled it). Even the soap I washed with was handmade. (Did you know lye is made from wood ash? I knew it viscerally, at fifteen.)

My parents made the mistake of buying a farm in winter, only to find that, when the snow melted, they’d purchased an 80-acre junkyard. I was enlisted in the cleanup effort from age seven onwards. It was tough, but we eventually made a heaven of that mess. I didn’t love the farm. I often resented the limitations inherent in a rural lifestyle. But I also had a real connection to that land, the animals on it, and the life we built there. When I talk of “authenticity,” that homestead’s where I’m coming from.

There is no telling what will happen to humanity when the majority can no longer grasp after authenticity with any success. When nothing we encounter over the course of a day is of any substance. Or a week, or a month, or a year. How long is too long for a person to play at being human?

The world is watching an American presidential administration unravel under the pressures created by artifice. There is only so much fakery a democracy can bear. False narratives add up. Misdirection and distraction entangle. Conspiratorial relationships are volatile. Leadership that lacks integrity bloats and sags under its own structural problems.

This administration is a disaster, but I believe the underlying disaster that gave rise to it is PMM. Too many people are too far removed from the things that matter most. FOX News exploits this, big brands use it to sell products, and social media thrives on the dramas that result from it. The world economy is increasingly chugging along on these false fumes. “Data centers”—factories for the data mines that are already carting their loads of information from our bodies, our minds, and our hearts, into the dark machinery of industry, and its banks—are being built on what should be our nurturing farms. These artificiality factories are guzzling our real-life water, overheating our real-life air, sucking our real-life power from us, literally and figuratively. It is not a model of humanity to build a future on.

My prediction is that, as this crisis deepens, poets will have unique leverage on a lot of good rope. Poets are trained to question the language, not repeat it like AI’s “Large Language Models” do. AI is looking for patterns; poets are looking to disrupt pattern in order to mint fresh meanings. There is real currency in this.

Todd Boss, PMM: Pervasive Modern Meaninglessness

And this is the era of dementia, of the post-liberal order,
and all the celebrated maniacs have decided to build for us
a brain big enough to hallucinate the future of all
eight billion people waking and sleeping and driving
and walking through rows of parked cars in an age
of lifestyle-brand packaged-meat influencer-burnout bait.
These are the costs of love among executable files.
And this is my most complete answer, my most sincere
and faithful attempt to keep to the confines of the prompt.
Each world arrives like a glare from the police station.
Each evening is an exit from the pickle ball court. Nowhere
will you find a way to avoid the turn lane, the trash compactor,
the sound of plumbing, the trillion trillions of transistors
that bind our psyche like a musculoskeletal system
or a vast armature of steel and plexiglass and insulated wires.

RM Haines, DAYTON, OHIO / 20 SOMETHING & 6

I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever.

[…]

If the king sleeps content upon his throne,
I doubt the poor will sleep undisturbed,
but if he lights the night with watchful eyes,
sleep will bring his subjects a soothing calm.
Thank God the Atabeg, Abu Bakr ibn Saad,
has made the proper way to rule his own!
The only signs of trouble plaguing Pars
are the women whose lunar beauty turns our heads.

A verse from last night’s party caught my ear:
“I held my moon-faced lover while she slept
and wanted nothing more from life than that,
but the sight of her so fully lost in sleep
moved me. ‘Your slender grace shames the cypress.
Wash this sweet slumber from your narcissus-eyes;
smile, show us your lips like rose-petals;
sing for us with your nightingale voice.
Why let sleep hide the mischief your charms can do?
Come! Bring the ruby wine you poured last night.’
She opened one indignant eye, ‘You say
I’m mischievous, but rouse me nonetheless?’”

Under the rule of our enlightened king,
no other mischief dares to stir.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, From Saadi’s Bustan: Umar Ibn Abd al-Aziz Sacrifices A Jewel To Help the Starving

Sitting in the packed playhouse of the Bowery Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side one balmy evening in the summer of 1833 is a teenage boy who can barely afford the theater — he can barely afford his bread — but there he is, rosy-cheeked — an almost baby-like rosiness that would remain with him into old age — exhilarated by the spectacle on the stage, by having made the ferry crossing from Brooklyn in the warm salty breeze, by the triumph of having bought a ticket with his own money. He has just turned fourteen. Three years earlier, he left school to begin earning his living — partly to allay his family’s perpetual financial struggle, partly to allay the numbing of his soul. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” he will later write. At eleven, he entered the labor force as an office boy for two lawyers, one of whom took the boy’s intellectual development under his wing and introduced him to the splendors of literature with a gift of a circulating library subscription. Within a year, he was apprenticing with the Quaker editor of a Democratic newspaper.

His parents — a twenty-one-year-old woman descended from a lineage of Dutch Quakers and a twenty-seven-year-old man whose ancestors arrived from England in 1640 on a ship named True Love — married the summer of the Year Without a Summer. The rosy-cheeked boy was the second of their eight children. Conceived the year Frankenstein was born, born months after the landmark legislation that proposed the abolition of slavery in Missouri and sparked the tensions that would eventually erupt into the Civil War, this Brooklyn boy would soon be shaking his young country awake from the slumber of complacency — not with preachings, not with politics, but with poems: poems that would effect more spiritual elevation, kindle more moral courage, seed more ideas of the basic humanity we call social justice, and thumb them deeper into the soil of culture than all the preachings and politics of his era combined.

“I would compose a wonderful and ponderous book,” he would resolve, not yet out of adolescence, his gray-blue eyes already drooping with a weary wisdom. “Yes: I would write a book!” And so he would — his life would become this book, then the book would become his life. He would revise it obsessively until his dying hour, expanding and republishing this swelling book, hoping it would beckon to “others who look back on me, because I looked forward to them.” […]

“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” he writes. This overarching belief in the unity of everything, the interconnectedness and interbelonging of everything, colors his entire cosmogony. It would also render him wildly controversial, for he channeled this belief by writing about science and sex and the equality of the sexes and the races and the classes — ideas thoroughly countercultural in his day, in the most literal sense, for they are drawn not from culture but from nature. Verse after verse, detail after detail patiently recorded in his notebook, absorbed and distilled into some essential truth, he writes of the natural way of things, before society and civilization have disfigured them into biases and borders, into the hubrises and hierarchies of which the rickety scaffolding we call society is built.

At the same time, he recognizes that these hubrises and biases spring from the selfsame source as our noblest and most generous impulses, and in this recognition, he gives room for our own multitudes to unfold in his vast heart — the beautiful and the terrible equally welcome as particles of our humanity, for he knows that they are particles of his. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he writes in an era when atoms were still an exotic notion to the common citizen, an incomprehensible abstraction. Only by being porous to the whole of the universe, to every expression of existence, can he harmonize those particles — the cosmic and the earthly, the temporal and the timeless, the scientific and the spiritual, the human and the nonhuman — particles charged, always, by the reality of the present.

Because of his time and place and particular predilections, perhaps more so than any other poet’s in the history of our civilization, Whitman’s poetic development took place in the fragile, fertile ground between the personal and the political. Another titanic poet, Audre Lorde, would capture this fertility a century later: “The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word I.” Walt Whitman was the great absorptive and adhesive I of his era. “The book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853,” he would later recall of Leaves of Grass, “absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”

Maria Popova, Walt Whitman’s Field Guide to Being Yourself: The Trial and Triumph of Leaves of Grass

Will it be saag paneer, warmly
green with spice, or pork belly
glossy under bar lights; that pupu
platter at Alkaline where cocktails
are cute and the sake is tinged
with the smile of tropical fruit?
It’s noon and we’ve changed
our minds at least half a dozen times
but there’s no need to apologize
or forgive the wild swings of desire.
After all, isn’t this our practice?
Tasting, arranging, revising,
paring away then calling out Wait,
bring back the menu? We want it all […]

Luisa A. Igloria, Come as You Are

As I stood in the queue to get into the gallery last night I felt old demons rise. The avant garde doesn’t like waiting in line. And as I looked around at others shuffling up or slouching out for a vape I heard myself say, “Well, at least the art crowd still looks the same.”

There were some familiar faces, people I vaguely recognised from past lives and I made sure my mask was on tight as I moved up the line. And between the elbows and the puffed out chests I began to think about my Sunday walks, my weekly saunter through history where, a mile at a time, I visit old ghosts, make connections with poets across the city. And how glad I am that they’re all dead, how they no longer have to put on show, how I can know them without wearing a mask.

Last week I walked briefly with Marlowe down Hog Lane where he’d gotten into a fight over an unpaid bar tab that ended with an inn keeper’s son being stabbed to death. I was rather glad I didn’t meet Marlowe while he was still alive but I took a vicarious pleasure getting to know him on a brisk Sunday walk. I wondered if I might manifest him here, summon him up, have him rush the gallery doors. Me and Kit, the bad boys of art, back on the PV circuit. I decided against it, politely gave my name to the girl checking the guest list and quietly I made my way inside. Everyone was on show.

A man in a suit with pink bunny ears. Another with eyeliner and heroin skin. A girl in a cape and a Pillbox Hat. They were all here in pleated beards and thigh high boots, with tattoos and tiaras and tantrums and traumas and tears. It was glorious and exhausting, I wanted stay and I couldn’t wait to escape, for what nourishes me destroys me. I needed the silence of my own solitude and this bold brightness to drown my disquiet. I had to go out for a walk in order that I might return. I needed a change in order to find more of the same.

Jan Noble, Nº60 What nourishes me destroys me

The Literary Business, Peter Finch, Parthian Books, 2025, ISBN: 978-1917140522, £20.00

How do you sell books? Get the customer to pick up a copy and then give you the money. Why is this so bloody hard?

This quote from quite early on in Peter Finch’s The Literary Business lays down one of the key themes of the book. Right through his life, from early days as editor and publisher of Second Aeon, through his time running Oriel Books and then the Welsh Academi, and on to the pages of this very book, Finch has sought to get the book into the reader’s hands. However, he’s also fully aware that the one valid counterpoint to his theme is the sad fact that there really is no market for poetry, and no end of poets in search of that non-existent readership.

…pretty much anything in the business of poetry could be made to generate an income, other than the poetry itself. Teach it, discuss it, review it, write about it, edit it, publish it, go on TV and talk about it. These were all activities that resulted in the transfer of money from one hand to another. But be the author of the actual poem in question and money would rarely head in your direction. The best the poet could expect was applause, now and then, if they played their cards right.

As editor of Second Aeon, Finch had first-hand experience of all the wrong ways of going about getting your work into print, among the results being his excellent, and still relevant, How To Publish Your Poetry, a kind of guidebook for the obsessed and his contributions to The Writers Handbook.

Even after Oriel, whose death by a thousand administrative cuts is related in the book, the bookselling impulse continues, so that, for example, in a much later chapter on Chris Torrance, Finch tells the interested reader how to find out about a forthcoming title, Path: the later work of Chris Torrance, that will bring Torrance’s Magic Door sequence to a posthumous close. (As you asked so nicely, the answer is here.)

But there’s a lot more to this book than that. Part memoir, part pen-pictures of other poets and literary figures, part history of Welsh poetry since the 1960s, it’s an invigorating, often humorous read. And there are heroes: Torrance, John Tripp, Bob Cobbing, numerous booksellers and, more than anyone, Meic Stephens, the arts administrator, publisher, singer, Welsh nationalist (to understate his role wildly) whose activities made so much of what Finch charts here possible. As Finch puts it, Stephens didn’t enter the mainstream, his strategy lay in ‘creating that mainstream and wrapping it around himself’. A worthy hero indeed.

Billy Mills, The Literary Business by Peter Finch: A Review

not, in fact, the newest member of our team, but a bobble-headed novelty: a mascot.

not, in fact, a friend to the up-and-coming poet, but a rung on his ladder, a photo-op.

never a contender, the shortlist of two was the other candidate’s name. twice.

not, in fact, valued, or wanted, or loved. but so fucking useful, and so fucking nice.

Fran Lock, REALISATION DITTY

Today, April 17, is Haiku Poetry Day! To celebrate, I’m sharing a piece on a classic haiku theme: cherry blossoms.

Last spring, on a visit to my sister Yoshi’s house, I noticed that her flowering cherry tree was absolutely humming with hundreds of honeybees.

That inspired a haiku:

spring fever
the whole tree
buzzing

At home later, I mixed acrylic paints in the colors I wanted. I then used a gel press to apply the paint to an old typewritten letter, an insurance statement, rice paper embedded with mango leaves, and other specialty papers from Asia.

Using reference photos, I carefully tore the pieces into the desired shapes, then laid them in place on the cradled wood panel.

Next I took a second panel, placed it on top of the first one, and flipped both together. Now the whole collage lay upside down on the spare panel, so that the background pieces—the first ones I needed to glue down—were on top. I then worked my way up to the foreground pieces.

Inspired by the Japanese tradition of haiga (art combined with haiku), I added the haiku to the collage digitally. It is the April art for my 2026 calendar, and I also made a birthday card version, above.

Every spring, I spend some time with a Yoshino cherry tree on our country road, soaking in the delicate beauty of the pale pink blossoms. The experience is joyful with a tinge of heartbreak, knowing how briefly this stage will last.

blossom season
earlier each year
this fleeting world

It’s the impermanence itself that makes these days of peak blossom so precious. The bees certainly seem to know they need to make the most of the moment! Happy spring and happy Haiku Poetry Day.

Annette Makino, Cherry blossoms for Haiku Poetry Day

This newsletter has swung between the two poles of my writing life for the past two years: The leadership writing for tech companies and executives that is the foundation of my leadership communications consultancy, and the creative work that is the heart of my writing practice.

Perhaps this seems a bit mixed-up. But the two are actually deeply connected. Yes, the business writing is more focused, the creative work more expressive. The business writing is more about tech and AI; the creative writing is about presence and not at all AI. 

These two types of writing inform and enhance each other.

If you are writing for business, a creative writing practice can help lift your copy out of the bland, soulless, fake-upbeat style that is increasingly ubiquitous online. 

If you are a creative writer, learning to write more clearly and effectively can help keep your writing from becoming too divorced from its audience. (If that’s what you want!)

For example, when I am stuck in my work writing or looking for inspiration, I turn to poetry. I read poems, and I write drafts of poems, to rejuvenate my sense of the possibilities language contains. 

I read and write poetry to rekindle my sense of myself as a human being, speaking and writing, not a mere creator or consumer of content. Poetry recharges me. 

But, as I admitted in my last newsletter on finding your flow as a writer, it has not always been easy for me to write this way. 

Haiku, as it turned out, were the wedge that reopened my mind’s door to the poetic world. And they also opened the door to a deeper appreciation of the world. They’ve made my life richer. 

Deeply infused in Zen, but with a humble, unassuming form that tends to undercut any pretensions of enlightenment or specialness, haiku cut straight to the chase. They are all about appreciating the mundane world in its ordinary, miraculous, beautiful, ugly, tiny, grand details. Merely noticing and pointing out, like a friend saying: Look, over there. Isn’t that cool?

Over and over, haiku have been the sleeper agents that snuck past my prosaic, practical mental censors, only to activate themselves within my (sub) consciousness as representatives of another world: The one outside my head. The world of stars, autumn leaves, dog fur, green tea, and grasses. The world of rounded rocks and tumbling water, of echoing urban canyons and deserted suburban intersections. 

The best haiku are like that. Like stones, they drop into your consciousness with a little splash, making a few ripples and then leaving nothing behind as the surface returns to glassy calm. (Or whatever your consciousness is doing, which is probably not calm at all, come to think of it.) But meanwhile, the stone sinks to the bottom of the pond, solid as anything, bringing news of the world out there to the submarine life forms that populate the bottom strata of our minds.

Dylan Tweney, How haiku can help you be a better writer

Perhaps
When he leafs through that book

It might feel like skin
As if parting the warmest part of her

He might bring
Forefinger to tongue

Luciana Francis, Interlude

As planned, I am spending my April reading poetry, though some mornings a blogpost feels out of reach. This book, not new, but a fairly recent addition to my book hoard, is one I definitely want to share.

Necessity of Flight is a showcase for its author’s craft. Jane Alynn is also a photographer (see her website for a sampling), and these poems are filled with images and light. To quote the back cover blurb from Lana Hechtman Ayers, at the heart of this book is “a profound reverence for and kinship with the natural world.”

I heard Jane read at Edmonds Bookshop about a year ago, and I can still hear her reading this poem: [click through to read “In Want of Wings”]

Necessity of Flight is alive with wings, “cloudburst / of starlings”; hummingbirds “keen on honeysuckle”; “feathered beggars”; a gull, “dull and brassy and fat / as a wallet on payday, / swelled with longing.” Dreams and memories are longing, too, and almost fly, long-deceased loved ones passing through, and everywhere the rising of the poet’s words from line to line and page to page.

Bethany Reid, Jane Alynn, NECESSITY OF FLIGHT

Honestly, I had not read Etheridge Knight in years until I came across Terrance Hayes’ gorgeous masked memoir, To Float in the Space Between. A masked memoir (or braided memoir) is a term I believe I might have invented. A masked memoir (you heard it here first, dear reader) is when a writer (a poet) begins writing a book about an influential poet (or writer) in their lives, but along the way subconsciously or maybe consciously, begins to focus gently on the poet’s own world. Another masked memoir that begins in biography but then turns to personal history is Mark Doty’s, What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. This is also true of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall.

To Float in the Spaces Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, (for my first read, I must have skipped the subtitle) begins with a poem of Knight’s, “The Idea of Ancestry,” which functions as a frontpiece and philosophical treatise for the book. “I am all of them, they are all of me; they are farmers, I am a thief…” This satisfying juxtaposition of identities continues throughout the book and float(s) in the spaces between, which is also the last line of Knight’s poem.

More of this masala mix happens again on page 4. Hayes writes, “When I began collecting interviews and stories about Etheridge Knight more than a decade ago, I said mostly to the few people I cornered for interviews, that I’d never write a biography because it would take more than a decade to do it. This is not a biography…Consider this a collection of essays as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself.” There’s so much to love here, isn’t there? First Hayes tells us that he’s been working on this project for more than a decade. He follows that up with how he can’t write a biography because it would take “more than a decade to do so.” And then the definitive, “This is not a biography.”

I have read To Float in the Space Between three times now and I’m getting ready for a fourth visit. Where does the narrative move from Knight’s life to Hayes’? I expect it happens somewhere in Pittsburgh where both poets lived in different times. For me the emotional core of the book is towards the end, it happens between Hayes and his parents at a baseball game…I guess you will need to grab a copy!

Susan Rich, Ethridge Knight on the Outskirts of My Life

Now there’s another word I think and that thought smiles into the light of the next platform. Not my stop. Don’t want to stop this merry go around of abstracted creativity. Even as the cables outside undulate into the next tunnel my smile is personalised to me alone. Not one snake knows me or my thoughts I think, neither I theirs. This black and white journey colours my thinking. We all sway in unison our separation lost in the timelessness of our thoughts. Schuum ~ the doors open ~ I get off on it again. 

Jim Young, A ride on the tube ~ a prose poem

April is National Poetry Month; but this year, I am in hibernation mode.

I’m not going to readings or writing a poem a day for 30 days, not posting much of my or other people’s poems or poetry books on social media, and not doing much poetry writing or any submitting. What’s gotten into me? Some kind of malaise? Or just a sense of being overwhelmed by, you know, life and aging and perhaps too much reflection. Plus there’s garden catch-up to tend to, since I was away for the early part of the season opener. And we’ve had a heat wave with a dry spell and lots of wind, so I’ve had to pace myself with the heavy stuff. Thankfully, Best Beloved can pitch in with much of that. Yet I am reading poetry, and if that ever stops I’ll know I’m in trouble.

So–back from traveling westward-ho. While in Fort Collins, Colorado, some dear friends introduced me to Wolverine Publick House, Cafe, and Bookshop, where there’s a lovely poetry book room in which I found my colleague Ian Haight’s book, Spring Mountain: The Complete Poems of Nansŏrhŏn. Also lots of other fabulous poetry that I had to restrain myself from purchasing, lest I overload my carry-on luggage weight. I read many of the Nansŏrhŏn translations in earlier versions that Ian emailed to me, and it is wonderful to find the book in print (from White Pine).

Ann E. Michael, NoPoMonth, but…

In my first term reading English Literature at university, we studied the Victorians. Busy as I was making friends, falling in love and learning how to do my own laundry, I struggled to keep up with the reading list of weighty novels, but I did manage to write an essay on Robert Browning’s poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ (1852), and it is one of those pieces of writing that – looking back now – I realise has haunted my work ever since. For example, it was through Robert Browning I discovered the power of the dramatic monologue, or persona poem – he is considered an expert at the form (if you haven’t read ‘My Last Duchess’ do yourself a favour and read it now).

I have always been a frustrated actress, and there is something about the intimacy and urgency of the first-person poetry that I’m very attracted to. I love the slipperiness of persona poems, the potential of that ‘I’, and have since translated Ovid’s Heroines, the first book of dramatic monologues.

And then it’s set in a courtly, Arthurian world, and I love myth. And there are faeries and fairytales buried in there somewhere too, and ballads. The poem’s dark depiction of a supernatural waste-land is evident both in my own ballad ‘The Lure’ and in the scenes set in in the kingdom of Carbonek in my novel The Untameables…

Clare Pollard, Reading ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ by Robert Browning (Part 1)

Today’s Poem marks the April 17 anniversary of the death of its subject, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790). The poem’s author, Philip Freneau (1752–1832), is known to us today as the “Poet of the American Revolution,” though it’s hard to say who first settled that mantle upon him, or when. It’s far less difficult, however, to say why Freneau became famous as the poetic voice of the Revolution. Freneau became that voice because there really wasn’t anybody else.

In late-18th-century America, poets were relatively thin on the ground. The Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor had belonged to the previous century. Although Taylor had died only in 1729, 23 years before Freneau was born, still he had been a Metaphysical poet, a successor to George Herbert and far more of a piece with Herbert’s age than with his own. William Cullen Bryant, meanwhile, would become, in the early years of the 19th century, the new voice of American Romanticism. Bryant’s lifetime and poetic career would overlap with Freneau’s—but in the 1770s, again, for various plausible reasons, relatively few people in America were writing poetry to any appreciable degree.

This is not to say that nobody in Freneau’s day was writing poetry. Any educated person, in America as in England, possessed in his stable of basic competencies the ability to turn a few verses. Thomas Paine, for example, far more famous as a prose polemicist than as a poet, also wrote verse. But it’s worth noting that almost the only person writing poetry seriously, the only person of any real literary fame in the American colonies in the mid-to-late 18th century, was Philip Freneau’s close contemporary in Boston, Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784). Wheatley, however, was writing in enslavement, a circumstance perhaps not quite congruous with the idea of a laureate of freedom, and her subject matter, as her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, demonstrates, was more interior and personal than political. At any rate, it’s Freneau who was recognized, and whom we remember, as that laureate of American independence.

It’s good that we remember him, if for no other reason than because he was an interesting figure: born in New York City, the son of Huguenot French parents; James Madison’s roommate at Princeton; writer of anti-British pamphlets in the early 1770s; business agent on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, where he developed a loathing for the practice of slavery and a consequent commitment to abolitionism, a conviction expressed in his poem “To Sir Toby;” and during the Revolutionary War, crew member on an American privateer. Captured at sea, he spent six weeks on a British prison ship, a traumatic and nearly fatal experience chronicled in his long poem, straightforwardly entitled “The British Prison Ship.”

After the war, he married and began a career in political journalism, positioned by his friends Madison and Thomas Jefferson to be a polemical thorn in the side of the Federalist Party. Jefferson, then Secretary of State, also hired Freneau as a State Department translator, a post that served as more or less a sinecure for Freneau, whose only language besides English was French. Until the end of his life — he froze to death at the age of 80, on his way home in a snowstorm after visiting friends near his estate at Matawan, New Jersey — Freneau continued to write poetry in a vein that anticipated his Fireside successors.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: On the Death of Dr. Benjamin Franklin

Paul Revere’s Ride, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, is the most famous poem about the American Revolution, but it’s mostly myth. Revere did not wait in Charlestown, and watch

with eager search
The belfry-tower of the Old North Church,

to count the lanterns: no, he knew, before he left Boston, that the British were coming by sea. Nor was it

Mostly Aesthetics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribe

two by the village clock
When he came to the bridge in Concord town,

for Revere never made it to Concord: he was detained near Lexington by British Regulars. I don’t begrudge Longfellow his myth-making, and maybe there was a special need, as Civil War erupted, to remind America that

In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken…

Still: Longfellow’s Revere is more theme park ride than man. It has thus been left for us, to put the man himself into a poem. And that call should be answered, for he, and the true events of that night, encapsulate the revolution as well as, or better than, Longfellow’s imaginings. It’s all there: the defiance; the assertion of rights; and the bold declaration of British overreach. “I was not afraid.”

Memorandum on Events of April 18

I was sent for by Doctor Joseph Warren,
The night of 18 April. He desired
I go to Lexington, and there inform
Adams and Hancock, that light troops and grenadiers
Were marching to the bottom of the Common,
Where boats were waiting; aiming, it was thought,
For Lexington, to take them prisoner
Or else destroy colonial stores in Concord.
I left at once, and crossed the Charles; in town,
Acquired a horse, and rode. The moon shone bright. […]

Brad Skow, Lexington and Concord

A successful sonnet requires considerable rhetorical control and a kind of density of language: in the earliest examples, we see vernacular poets struggling to pull this off. The style required was new in English in the mid-sixteenth century as it had been in French a little earlier. But it wasn’t new in Latin: in fact, both classical and Renaissance Latin verse offered multiple models for a rhetorically tight, somewhat paradoxical, carefully argued but also passionate short poems, especially in the broadly Catullan tradition, but also in elements of the (overlapping) traditions of epigram and love elegy. […]

Latin poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries never developed a standard way of doing “a sonnet” in Latin because they had no need to: rather, the importation of the sonnet made possible in French and English a kind of closely argued, highly artificial but also passionate poetry that had previously only been doable in Latin. Most of the distinctive features of the sonnet simply weren’t required in Latin because there were multiple existing models that served much the same purpose. A few elements of the sonnet form, however, had no obvious analogue in Latin: namely, the ability to mark a rhetorical ‘turn’ by a shift of form (rhyme scheme) as well as of style and tone, and the particular emotional and rhetorical possibilities offered by a long sequence of poems in an identical form reverting frequently to an established set of images and ideas. Accordingly, if we look carefully, we do find some evidence of poets experimenting with ways to borrow these features in their Latin verse.

Victoria Moul, The Latin sonnet: on a non-existent form

Something a little different this week: I’m delighted to share an interview with Moul. Victoria is a scholar, poet and translator living in Paris. She writes weekly about poetry and translation on her Substack, Horace & friends, which I cannot recommend highly enough. She is also the editor of a new pamphlet, Poems Beautiful & Useful, now available from Headless Poet, a new small press dedicated to the art of the introduction, published by yours truly.

Headless Poet aims to (re)introduce readers to poets of the past, especially work which has been buried by time. There will also be a series of short introductions to (my pick of) the best new poetry. In that spirit, Poems Beautiful & Useful presents twenty ‘popular’ poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which are, in most cases, not well known today. It will, I think, be of interest to curious readers and specialists alike. In this — and in the masterful way in which Victoria has navigated the format’s limits (just thirty-six pages, including the intro) — it really exemplifies what the project is all about. […]

Jeremy: In his (rightly glowing) review, Henry Oliver makes the point that you haven’t included anything by John Donne. I found that interesting, because I don’t think Donne quite fits here. Rightly or wrongly I think of him as a poet who overwhelms the reader, whereas these poems are more companionable, for want of a better word. But of course, presumably in part thanks to T. S. Eliot, we do tend to associate this era with Donne in particular and with the ‘Metaphysical’ poets generally. Some of the poets here would, in other guises, appear in a ‘Metaphysical’ anthology, but not all of them and perhaps not these particular poems. Do these distinctions make any sense to you? Is it fair to describe the selection as a whole as a kind of response to Eliot?

Victoria: Yes, I think Donne and Milton are probably the two most obvious omissions, though we don’t associate Milton so much with shorter verse anyway. Donne is a good example of a poet who was demonstrably popular at the time — there are quite a large number of manuscripts containing copies of his poems — and is central to the “canon” today, though as you imply in your question, he was out of fashion for a long time in between before being revived in the earlier 20th century. I left him out for two reasons. For the pragmatic one, that I wanted to use the pamphlet to introduce readers to less familiar poets, and if I had to guess I’d say that Donne is probably the single best-known poet from the early seventeenth century, at least for British readers. (He was on the A level syllabus for a long time as well.) The other reason is one you also hint at in your question, I think — in this pamphlet I was interested in showcasing verse that, though quite varied, gravitates towards or centres around a kind of practicality or simplicity. That’s not to say that these are all simple poems, but that they have a kind of rootedness to them that I don’t associate so much with Donne — they are tethered a bit more straightforwardly to a message or an occasion. I think that the prominence of the ‘metaphysical’ tag, especially at school level, means that a lot of readers have this idea that early modern English poetry is paradigmatically rather difficult. I wanted to show how poetry of this period can also be rewarding in a rather straightforward sort of way.

Jeremy: I’m thinking about that wonderful line from Geoffrey Hill, which I someone shared on Substack the other day: “We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other… Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be any different than we are?” But, of course, it makes just as much sense to say that, since being human is so difficult, why shouldn’t art offer us a place where we can experience something else? Being simple, beautifully, is terribly hard, in both form and in feeling.

I’m sure this says more about me than anything else, but I’ve always felt that there is a strain within modern poetry that sees difficulty as a virtue in itself and simplicity or clarity as somehow selling out — that there are certain poets who seem to take pride in being obscure. And then, on the other hand, there are clearly popular poets who take pride in being, for want of a better word, bad (see the recent ‘Worst Poets Club’ tour). We are back to the old split, real or imagined, between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ work. That split seems as perncious now as ever, almost intractable. Does it go back to this period?

Victoria: Yes, it’s very hard to write simply isn’t it? This is noticeable in poetry but also everywhere else. One of the hardest things of all, with my scholarly hat on, is to write about very complex and quasi-technical matters in a genuinely straightforward way. To say just what you mean.

I like Hill very much and of course he’s right that everyone is difficult — perhaps complex is a better word. But I’m sure I’m not the only reader to feel, also, that Hill made a bit of a fetish of difficulty, that he used difficulty of various kinds, including setting complex technical challenges for himself, as a kind of strategy of avoidance. There’s something in Hill that seems almost daunted or embarrassed by the magnitude of his own lyric gifts. It’s an interesting phenomenon that I recognise in Cowley as well. I suspect Hill’s poetic “afterlife” might be rather like that of Cowley.

Most people, I think, would acknowledge that people and relationships and the world are indeed very difficult but also that there are moods, or moments, or aspects of life for all of us in which the important things actually seem simple.

I’m not at all against complexity or difficulty in poetry and wouldn’t want to give that impression. If anything I am rather obsessed by it — I come back and back in my own work to Horace, to Pindar, to Sanskrit poetry and grammar — these are all sort of paradigmatic examples of literary difficulty I suppose. I work a lot on very obscure early modern Latin verse and I am fascinated, both as a critic and as a poet myself, by translating poetry, which is immensely difficult — impossible, really. But I suppose like you I don’t see a contradiction. Poetry should be beautiful because that is, as it were, its proper virtue, and it should also have something to say. Pindar is very difficult, yes, because the literary conventions in which he was working were highly complex and they are very distant from ours, but he is also supremely beautiful and there is no doubt that he has something to say. Very “simple” poems can also be very beautiful. And of course many apparently “simple” poems — poems in what we might call the plain style — are in fact underpinned by very subtle and complex effects.

But I think the kinds of difficulty in Pindar, or even Donne, are probably rather different from what you meant when you talked about some kinds of contemporary poetry ‘taking pride in being obscure’. I think I know what you mean there and I don’t really have any patience with it. I’m thinking of something like the poem that just (depressingly) won the UK National Poetry Competition, ‘The Gathering’ by Partridge Boswell. Now that seems to me like an almost comically bad poem and a very good example of this kind of pointless and overwritten obscurity. When ‘meaning’s / odometer is broken’ — indeed!

Jeremy Wikeley, Rewarding in a rather straightforward way

Jane Hirshfield is a master at giving life to unlikely objects. “At Night” is a poem that amazes the reader because of the described living presence found in the world, in terra firma itself. Note the “steadfast gaze” of the earth toward the unknown. The closing lines leave the reader with an image that is precise, easily understood, but almost unapproachable in its vast scope. Hirshfield writes of “the given world” – not the earth but the world the earth experiences from its own point of view: “flaming precisely out its frame”. What remains is the darkness and depth of a space that has no end. An absolutely wonderful possibility.

The poem begins off-center, viewing the horses a bit out of focus. Looking away from the center to the edges makes recognition possible. The black horses become a strong, visual and aural encounter in the poem: “cropping,” “winter grass,” “white jaws that move,” “steady rotation,” and “sweet sound”. After the stanza leap, the horses find shelter among trees, leaving behind the dug-out spots of snow. These circles function as an opening into another world or another sort of existence. Hirshfield writes that you, the reader, will find these circles. The point of view shifts from an observer of the scene to the earth itself – “its single, steadfast gaze” – and the reader identifies with that gaze outward. A powerful transformation. A poem that approaches infinity for me.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Jane Hirshfield, “At Night”

Oak Woman

Dear Lucille, I treasure your poem as a reminder of all
the life that’s left to live in a culture that worships the young.
What is a forest but the strongest of bones, what is
a blossoming but an awakening of self. The sapling
girl is still inside but the Oak woman is stronger & fiercer,
still chasing wildness & wonder. You showed us how.
Respectfully, your ardent admirer

Na/GloPoWriMo day 17 prompt: For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.

I chose this poem [“There is a girl inside”] by Lucille Clifton. I love it & have this screenprint in my photo app.

Charlotte Hamrick, Oak Woman

On a whim, because I found myself in the vicinity, I went for a hike I hadn’t done in a while around a small pond fed by a few trickling streams and dammed at one end for some purpose I do not know. Cedars bent themselves toward the water, and small islands sat covered with the reddish branches of low bushes. A fallen tree’s old root system sat half-skyward and bleached mid-pond. I’m not sure who startled whom the most: me or the frog in leaf-strewn mud. The colors were all the greens and duns and browns and rust and ocher. The sound: low gronks from geese at one end, a jay scree, somewhere far away, always, a motor, even here in this middle of nowhere. Slowly the mind-nattered plaints fell away and I was huff and humidity and the swing of legs and soft stump stump of the perfect walking stick I’d found, and all eyes and notice — lichen like a congregation! trees all knees astride a rocky beast! knobs like balls at the base of that cedar! — all pleasure. Then I slid on a hidden root, twisted my ankle, fell, had to sit and put my head between my knees because I thought I was going to faint, hobbled up and missed the trail’s turn to the parking lot so added fifteen more slow minutes on the sore leg, castigating myself all the while because I KNOW not to hike in low boots with no water and how many times am I going to have to learn this lesson. In other words, my “everyday self,” back again. And in echo, here’s this lovely prose poem by Miriam Drev, translated from the Slovene by Barbara Siegel Carlson. I found it on the recent edition of Ron Slate’s On the Seawall.

Marilyn McCabe, Removed from my usual self, just footsteps

My debut, full-length collection of poems, Night Court, took three years and thirty submissions before it found a home at Glass Lyre Press, winning the 2016 Lyrebird prize, with publication in 2017. Over those years, the book changed considerably, from its title to its content. I even had it professionally edited, a process that helped me understand that a book of poems, just like a novel or a memoir, has a plot, characters, point of view, theme, and structure.

Armed with those lessons, I thought my second collection couldn’t possibly take as long as the first. After all, I was a seasoned writer who’d published a chapbook, Wild Place, and a book of writing exercises, Vibrant Words, as well as Night Court. Surely, I would benefit from the lessons I’d learned sending my first book out.

I was wrong. My second book was just as much work as the first, and followed a similar path: early versions, different titles, multiple rejections, and painstaking reworkings. On the first pass, I chose, carefully I thought, from the poems I’d written after Night Court’s publication, crafting a story about motherhood, mental health, moving from California to Oregon, the environment, and world events.

Looking at early drafts, however, I can see that these versions weren’t focused enough. Still fresh from my move, I tried to force the manuscript into a book about place, but even though many of the poems are place-based, it refused to cohere around that theme.

Gradually, it dawned on me that every poetry collection possesses its own personality, motivations, and twisty logic. To paraphrase Kahlil Gibran’s poem, “On Children:” “Your books are not your books. / They come through you but not from you, / And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” I realized, belatedly, that I was not the boss of this book but its guide; my job was not to order the poems but to allow them to find where they belonged.

Lessons From a Second Poetry Collection – guest post by Erica Goss (Trish Hopkinson)

In my musing over Aprils past and past projects, another year is heavy on my mind recently. Mostly because it occurs to me that there has been a span of 30 years(!) between these two fixed points in time. In 1996, I was still a college student in undergrad. I was all of 22. Youth is all about not realizing how young you really are, but in 1996, I felt like I was as old as I was going to get. I was living with my parents and perhaps enjoying the last year of only minimal obligations as an adult. Within a year, I would be off to the city and my first apartment and grad school. But in 1996, I was finishing up my senior seminar on Milton, which I was ill-equipped for with no/minimal knowledge of Christian mythology and history and only rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Roman myths–also important with that text. I was struggling with the language, much as I did in my teen years with Shakespeare. […]

That spring semester of 1996, I was also  taking my first poetry workshop ever. A couple years before I had enrolled in a fiction writing one. After seeing a few stories, the instructor, one of RC’s alum done good, offhandedly suggested my long and rambling Faulkerian sentences might be suited better for poetry. He was right of course. I already knew that, having been scribbling poems since I was 14 or so. I had already started publishing, first in vanity-esque anthologies you’d find in the back of Writer’s Digest, and in the college lit mag. My poems were pretty bad, but I was writing a lot of them, so was getting better. That spring, I had, up to then, one of my most productive spurts of activity, pounding out poem after poem on the typewriter I’d procured with high school graduation money. […]

Every once in a while, I pull out those undergrad poems on their weirdly-thin typing paper filled with cross-outs and whited out segments. For some, I even have the original messy handwritten drafts. As someone who has hasn’t drafted much in writing, only typing, since the late aughts,  these seem too quaint and anachronistic to throw out even though I should. 

What did I write about that semester?  If I remember correctly, it was probably a lot of the same strange and gothic fuckery I write about now..lol..just much more overwrought and rhymed at the ends.  Poems about artifacts and museums, about the execution of John Wayne Gacy, abandoned houses and formidable forests.

You know, the usual…

Kristy Bowen, another April | 1996

This poem (rooted in this week’s parsha, Tazria-Metzora) emerges from Leviticus 16:29, which reads, in full:

וְהָיְתָה לָכֶם לְחֻקַּת עוֹלָם בַּחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁבִיעִי בֶּעָשׂוֹר לַחֹדֶשׁ תְּעַנּוּ אֶת־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם וְכל־מְלָאכָה לֹא תַעֲשׂוּ הָאֶזְרָח וְהַגֵּר הַגָּר בְּתוֹכְכֶם׃

And this shall be to you a law for all time: In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall practice self-denial; and you shall do no manner of work, neither the citizen nor the alien who resides among you.

My favorite reading of this verse comes from my dear friend and frequent collaborator R. David Markus, who pointed out that while the word תענו is usually pointed and read as t’anu, “afflict,” the same letters could spell תענו ta’anu, “answer.”

I checked several translations (thanks for making that easy, Sefaria) and all were a variation on the theme: afflict your self, afflict your soul, practice self-denial, etc. But the letters are the same as the letters of the word (you, plural) answer: the only change is in the vowels. Which, of course, aren’t actually in Torah, though they are in the Masoretic text.

Reading תענו as answer, as R. David suggests, wholly changes how I experience Yom Kippur. The purpose of the day isn’t “afflicting one’s soul” or “practicing self-denial.” Yom Kippur is not a day for causing oneself to suffer, it’s a day for answering the soul. For me, that interpretation dovetails beautifully with the season’s practices of self-examination, deep inner work, and teshuvah.

And, of course, all of this is a reminder that — as we say at SoulSpa all the time — every translation is a midrash.

Rachel Barenblat, Answer

Ours was the last leg of the ‘French Way’ of the Camino de Santiago, and we left on Easter Sunday. Elsewhere, large groups of pilgrims had timed their walks to reach the cathedral at Santiago to coincide with the Sunday’s celebrations, and so our roads – far from this end-point – were quieter than usual. Our first day’s journey was 23km from the town of Sarria to the little scenic outpost by the water, Portomarín. We left before dawn and walked out of the quiet streets in the dark. Soon we crossed a bridge then a railway line, and then we seemed to quickly hit open fields. That first morning, we walked until it was light, stopping only when we reached the first roadside café, one whose television in the corner played a late-night Honduran music cabaret. The music was bad, the coffee the best of the trip. It was only after lunch, with 15km under our feet, that I took out the first printed poem from my backpack. I opted to begin this with Derek Mahon’s ‘Everything is Going to be All Right’.

Why this poem? I recalled the debate around whether it was a poem of comfort or not – and was drawn to start with something suitably ambivalent. As a poem to memorise, I found it quite absorbing. There is life in it. It jumps around a little, even while repeating images (clouds, light). Where do I fall on its irony or reprieve? In the mouth, it has the taste of the apocalypse. I can see something happening outside the window of the poem’s room. It also reminded me of James Wright’s ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’, but with a significant difference. The end of Wright’s poem seems to come to him like a thunderbolt. It is as unexpected to the poet as it is to the reader; Mahon’s poem feels the opposite. Mahon has been mulling on the phrase long before it is uttered. It feels like a childhood memory of a parent trying to soothe him – or like a friend who had recently tried to console him. Everything is going to be all right. Things will work out. But the world keeps suggesting otherwise. Yes, it feels like a poem of grief for hope. Hope finally lost. But how beautiful in the mouth.

Niall Campbell, So … What Poems Did I Memorise?

I […] received my copy of Prairie Schooner‘s Spring 2026 “The Loneliness Issue,” in which I have a poem, “If I Will Be Queen, Let It Be Queen of the Dead.” Also check out my friend Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poem “The Immigrant’s Very Good Daughter.” (I loved the poem and maybe you will too!) […]

This year we had the chance to see apple trees, cherry trees, daffodils, and tulips all blooming at the same time, though we missed our snow geese and trumpeter swans. It has certainly been a weird month for weather—didn’t it just snow here a month ago? We also visited not just RoozenGaarde but also a new smaller tulip farm called Garden Rosalyn. After a dreary cold beginning to April, it was nice to have some warmer temperatures and sunshine. We didn’t really have enough time to do everything we wanted, but it was a good reminder of how beautiful April can be out here. […]

This week is super crowded, but I am very much looking forward to a poetry break on Thursday, when we’re hosting Kelli Russell Agodon reading from her new collection, Accidental Devotions, at the J. Bookwalter Tasting Room in Woodinville at 6:30 PM (wine and open mic after!)

Kelli’s book is a wonderful combination of thoughtfulness on anxiety, middle age and mortality, and the nature of love and sex, with her usual whimsy and humor. I hope you’ll come out and see her read!

I hope you get a chance to celebrate something poetry-related this month. It’s good to balance the insanity of the world with a little bit of poetry and tulip-gazing.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poem in the New Issue of Prairie Schooner, Welcoming a Nephew to Town and Tulips, and Hosting Kelli Agodon at Bookwalter’s This Thursday!

I’m hoping that you’re all enjoying the arrival of Spring – over the weekend, I saw my first sundew of the year, first damselflies, first lizard, first adder basking on a sun-warmed boardwalk at Cors Fochno.

I will post photos soon. In the meantime, welcome to the blanket bogs and the wind-battered hilltop villages of West Yorkshire.

“My second-oldest sister takes me on the bus to Haworth. It’s her favourite place – which means that it’s also mine. The steam train and sweet shop are fine, but what I love most is the stone, the cottages clustered against the wind, the moor like an ocean. I know nothing about the Brontës, but I stare at the sofa where Emily died, the empty dresses”.

This tiny extract from my essay “A Love Story of Walshaw Moor” (Book of Bogs, 2025) describes my first encounter with the Brontë Parsonage, and with Haworth’s steep, cobbled streets. It was love at first sight – the ghosts held in the thick stone walls, the open moors. In the coming decades, I’ll make a careful point take everyone I love to the ruins at Top Withens – and I’ll always, always wail “It’s MEE! It’s Kath-EE!” at the empty window, because this is the reputed setting of Wuthering Heights, and just like Cathy says, if I died and went to heaven it would break my heart to be taken away from those moors.

So I’m absolutely chuffed – this Thursday 23rd April at 7pm – to read at Haworth Old School Room, hosted by the Brontë Parsonage Museum, to celebrate the launch of Lydia MacPherson’s “The Heights”, (Calder Valley Poetry). Tickets are available here.

Since 2024, I’ve been fighting for the survival of Walshaw Moor in the face of a proposal to build the UK’s biggest onshore energy park on its blanket bogs and peatlands. Campaigning can be an exhausting, dispiriting business – but when you find yourself in the company of kindred spirits, when you are fired by the same passions and furies, it can also be a joy. I was already aware of Lydia Macpherson as a talented West Yorkshire poet, with her first collection published by Salt. Over the last two years, she’s become a comrade-in-arms in every sense of the word – along with her gentle genius of a partner, Nick (himself a wonderful writer and a past winner of the National Poetry Competition). With their warmth and intelligence, and their single-minded commitment to the moors, they are a force not just to be reckoned with, but to be enfolded and fed by.

Clare Shaw, On the Wily, Windy Moors

Buried

under the silent forest
the dead bird sings –
the whole world, motionless,
face black and rotted,
slipping
farther away

Source: Memoirs by Pablo Neruda (Tr. Hardie St. Martin)

Rajani Rashakrishnan, An April full of poems -2

Why am I/are humans in general so moved by birdsong? It’s complex and varied. It reminds us of human song and often, human instruments such as flute or oboe. There’s something existential that we can relate to in how birds call out or call to each other, in a way, for example, we don’t feel comopared to the sounds of cicadas or mosquitos. That feels more environmental. We relate to birds. They fly. A million mirror neurons go off when we experience birds in a way they don’t with flies or lizards. Do we have hollow bones and feathers? Do we wish we had hollow bones and feathers? Birds are in our world and somehow exist in a parallel world. As if they exist in another coincident dimension (I mean other than the more 3-dimensional world they fly in.) They are part of our dream, myths, stories. I imagine the inside of my mouth is the shape of a songbird.

Gary Barwin, STARLING: music with birds

Even without the complications of humans, this world is miraculously complicated with patterns and -ologies. How miraculous it is that while I while my time away at a desk 40+ hours a week staring into a screen and rejecting peoples’ paperwork, little chambered piths sit in the papery darknesses of flower stems. That while I roll my eyes at yet another protocol change or misspelled word at work, Trillium blooms in the woods because an ant dispersed its seed. That while we go on our necessary walks to process the nonsense and wonder of humans and being human, we pass last year’s dilapidation of flowers, native bees nesting in their stems like a secret. Nothing I do in an adjustable rolling chair makes flowers bloom or provides structure to a plant. Nothing I do in Excel Spreadsheets or E-System provides a safe haven for insects.

Sarah Lada, Chambered Pith

This morning, entering Moorlands Woods
the scent of bluebells reached me before 
I really noticed the swathes of blue 
between the trees, my lungs involuntarily
taking a double breath, prompting me to think, 
how could I ever have forgotten this sweetness? 

Last night I dreamt of my parents when
they were young and healthy, my mother’s
red hair, my father’s arms with a summer tan.
Perhaps sometimes it is worth forgetting 
if remembering provides us with such joy.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ From forgetting to remembering

Arlington is full spring. Blossom lines our paths. Redbuds contrast against fresh leaves and white magnolia. Along the path shrubs mound purple, dark pink, light pink, bright pink, mauve, and white. Above the car, a thin-branching tree has bright pink flowers with a white centre that look as sturdy as thick silk. It glows against the redbud and the darkening trees behind. Hostas grow abundantly here, uneaten yet. The birds are always singing the passing time. The cherry has already fallen like old confetti.

I read in the shade, interrupted for coffee and children and to write. Virgil is dying. A passing garbage man talks to Siri. A few leaves fall. Robins run along the grass, territorially alert to each other, sometimes dancing in a spiral fight, and sparrows ruffle solitary in the trees. Early, before the lights are on, or if you catch a quiet moment when no-one is passing through, you can see rabbits occupying the peace. This time I think of Elizabeth Bishop.

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!

Like the raccoon, they keep their own time, moving off as they please, waiting for nobody.

Henry Oliver, Spring-time, night-time, rabbits and raccoons

the sound of the falls
within reach
trout lily

Tom Clausen, trout lily