A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: what’s bothering the clouds, a mausoleum of flowers, slim needles of flow, the hitchhiking dead, and much more. Enjoy.
Don’t miss this feature on the title poem from Luisa’s new collection Caulbearer at Poetry Daily, as part of their series What Sparks Poetry. Here’s an excerpt:
As an immigrant and a writer in the diaspora, despite the length of time I’ve lived in the U.S. and as a naturalized citizen, I’m still conscious of the feeling of being neither here nor there. There is a fantasy of irrecoverable return, and here is the place to which I’ve carried the ghosts of my own (and perhaps my community’s) nostalgia. Between these two states of being is a veil perishable as a panicle of yucca flowers, sheer as the wings of a yucca moth whose continued existence in an often brutal world depends on mutuality. But it is also a space which I want to imbue with as much tenderness as I can. Read the rest.
This morning I ventured by water abroad to Westminster, but lost my labour, for Mr. Montagu was not in town. So to the Wardrobe, and there dined with my Lady, which is the first time I have seen her dine abroad since her being brought to bed of my Lady Katherine. In the afternoon Captain Ferrers and I walked abroad to several places, among others to Mr. Pim’s, my Lord’s Taylour’s, and there he went out with us to the Fountain tavern and did give us store of wine, and it being the Duke of York’s birthday, we drank the more to his health. But, Lord! what a sad story he makes of his being abused by a Dr. of Physique who is in one part of the tenement wherein he dwells. It would make one laugh, though I see he is under a great trouble in it. Thence home by link and found a good answer from my father that Sir R. Bernard do clear all things as to us and our title to Brampton, which puts my heart in great ease and quiet.
a lost war is a road
to no place
to give birth
the lord of abuse
dwells under a title
in great quiet
(Lord’s day). Did not stir out all day, but rose and dined below, and this day left off half skirts and put on a wastecoate, and my false taby wastecoate with gold lace; and in the evening there came Sir W. Batten to see me, and sat and supped very kindly with me, and so to prayers and to bed.
You’ve been courting disaster long enough. Isn’t it time you got hitched? You in a suit of rain, with your lucky feet. She in her thunderwear, the ship that launched a thousand faces as close as the phone vibrating in your pocket.
Before my salad days, I was sour as cabbage. I grieved as publicly as a mower for its meadow, cried on every occasion—a virtuoso of tears. Except, my mother noted, when she took me to the woods: as the sky filled with leaves, my last tearful gasp for breath drew in the leaf-mould and the silence and I would fall still. Grief may have been my natural habitat, but the forest soon became my strengthening medicine. Before I even learned to talk, I knew that long sighs could mean happiness among the pines, and that time passes differently in a sunlit glade. And long after I grew out of my bluest period, the forest continued to be a refuge from my own self-centeredness, a place where I could practice being human.
In bed the greatest part of this day also, and my swelling in some measure gone. I received a letter this day from my father, that Sir R. Bernard do a little fear that my uncle has not observed exactly the custom of Brampton in his will about his lands there, which puts me to a great trouble in mind, and at night wrote to him and to my father about it, being much troubled at it.
All day in bed with a cataplasm to my Codd and at night rose a little, and to bed again in more ease than last night. This noon there came my brother and Dr. Tom and Snow to dinner, and by themselves were merry.
