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: intense incomprehension, the strings of things, apple maggots, plastic words, and much more. Enjoy.

Spring begins today. The seasonal gate swings open on its equinox hinge. And I’m also in-between things : the end of a years-long writing project, on one hand, and a new and unexpected set of social responsibilities, on the other.

So this is just a diary note, a fugitive transition report. Stray thoughts.

When you are absorbed and propelled by the magnetic field of an extended poetry project, you are really in that world. Wearing thick horse-blinders donated by Pegasus. So when you emerge, everything looks slightly changed.

And what have I sought for, all these years, eyes fixed on poetry? Yet maybe this is the wrong way to put it. The ideal, the model, of poetry is out there, in the world; yet the quiddity of poet-qua-poet is constituted by an ongoing relationship, with an emerging process – that is, between the poet and poems themselves. And over time, sometimes, this relation becomes more symbiotic, more “second nature” : “Time silvers the plow, and the poet’s voice” (per Osip Mandelstam).

When Mandelstam was asked by one of his Soviet media handlers to define “Acmeism”, the literary movement which he helped bring to birth, he replied : “Nostalgia for world culture.” His remark encapsulates one of the evergreen, effervescent aspects of the poet’s métier : a sense not only of tradition, but also solidarity with fellow workers in the verse-furrows – all over the world, all through both time and space. It can make you giddy just to think of it.

Henry Gould, Message in a Battle

I have twelve hives of bees. Some are on a farm, at the edge of a field in a long strip of woodland. Amid the scrub there is a small tree which in late Spring is a cloud of blossom. I notice it because it sings: the insects that are feeding on it are so tiny, they can only be heard. They greet the nectar with a high, sweet note – pure elation. […]

Sean Borodale’s wonderful Bee Journal should be prescribed reading for all aspiring or armchair apiarists. Everything happens : they swarm, they die, they reinvent themselves, all while he learns to do the hardest thing of all – nothing. From its Introduction: “When the wider landscape parches in high summer, this shaded, humid locality divines its insects and flowers; re-builds itself delicately in colour, sugar, water and sunlight”. He understands the life-force of the colony as a manifestation of Lorca’s “duende” :

All that has dark sounds has duende. Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art …

Bee Journal came from notebooks he took to the hive : “inside the increased effort of simultaneously writing and ‘keeping’, I experienced a pressure, a slight emergency of the senses”. His poet’s attentiveness allows him into their world. He quickly gave up trying to write while also tending to an open hive, but the poems really do hold what he hopes is “the poetic pulse of the poem in progress”. This “raised alertness” – to the radical geography of the bees’ orbit as well as to the tiny intimacies of the bees themselves – really do capture the experience, including, frequently, “intense incomprehension”.

Lesley Harrison, Bees: an Equilibrium

already spring is the little death of fall:
the wind brushes the tulip tree
with the back of its hand
and a clutch of petals falls,
falls, 
irremediably.

Dale Favier, Already Spring

Another reason I love reading poetry in the morning is that, more often than not, reading others’ poems inspires me to write my own.

I have a “daily” poem exchange with a few friends on email this month (we’re calling it “rogue” since we’re not actually required to write every day—so yes, we’re definitely playing fast and loose with the word daily here). But it’s been a reminder to me that writing has always been the one thing when I’m doing it, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. And many times, just by showing up, I end up with a draft of a poem. Other times, nothing—or a poem that feels like it was written by a feral raccoon who just discovered he has big feelings. But I’m okay with that, I’m okay with a not-so-great poem. When it comes to poems, I realize I’m less attached to outcome and more attached to the idea of play and process.

But as you know, it’s a hard mix these days—to be creative, happy, engaged, and informed without short-circuiting. So I’ve been trying to keep things simple when at home, I reach for the natural world and books (my two comfort animals in tough times) along with daily Biscoff vanilla cream sandwich cookies (sometimes a few or more) and Mighty Leaf Ginger Twist tea at night (no, I am not a sponsor of either of these products, I just somehow became accidentally devoted to both of them recently—some of you will remember my expensive French yogurt kick). Yes, it might sound a little dull (poetry, cookies, tea, the sky, robins, early spring flowers, etc.), but I’m recommitting myself to the small luxuries in life. 

Kelli Russell Agodon, Rogue Poems & Reasonable/Unreasonable Amounts of Cookies

I write to my elected officials, I donate when I can, I hold a sign at rallies, I feel helpless.

After reading for a few hours, most nights I still lie awake trying to keep my mind from heading back to poet and activist June Jordan’s question, “How many gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?”

Laura Grace Weldon, Cow-Inspired Calming Practice

Every once in a while, you stumble upon something so lovely, so unpretentiously beautiful and quietly profound, that you feel like the lungs of your soul have been pumped with a mighty gasp of Alpine air. This Is a Poem That Heals Fish (public library) is one such vitalizing gasp of loveliness — a lyrical picture-book that offers a playful and penetrating answer to the question of what a poem is and what it does. And as it does that, it shines a sidewise gleam on the larger question of what we most hunger for in life and how we give shape to those deepest longings.

Written by the French poet, novelist, and dramatist Jean-Pierre Simeón, translated into English by Enchanted Lion Books founder Claudia Zoe Bedrick (the feat of translation which the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska had in mind when she spoke of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes … a second original”), and illustrated by the inimitable Olivier Tallec, this poetic and philosophical tale follows young Arthur as he tries to salve his beloved red fish Leon’s affliction of boredom.

Arthur’s mommy looks at him.
She closes her eyes,
she opens her eyes…

Then she smiles:

— Hurry, give him a poem!

And she leaves for her tuba lesson.

Puzzled and unsure what a poem is, Arthur goes looking in the pantry, only to hear the noodles sigh that there is no poem there. He searches in the closet and under his bed, but the vacuum cleaner and the dust balls have no poem, either.

Determined, Arthur continues his search.
He runs to Lolo’s bicycle shop.
Lolo knows everything, laughs all the time, and is always in love.
He is repairing a tire and singing.

So begins the wonderful meta-story of how poetry comes into being as a tapestry of images, metaphors, and magpie borrowings. Each person along the way contributes to Arthur’s tapestry a different answer, infused with the singular poetic truth of his or her own life.

Maria Popova, This Is a Poem That Heals Fish: An Almost Unbearably Wonderful Picture-Book About How Poetry Works Its Magic

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
If I were a liar, I would say it was thanks to the mentorship of [INSERT IMPRESSIVE NAME] and [INSERT PRESTIGIOUS SCHOOL]. The truth is that I squeezed between Jim Morrison lyrics and the skips on Dylan Thomas records I took out of the library. How else does someone like me discover poetry? I’m from the Bronx. Nobody had books in the house.  

3 – How long does it take to start a 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?
Writing is slow for me. Until it speeds up. Until I have something I have something to stretch across the room. Each project is intended as a new experiment unto itself. For /face, I started sampling images and language from Google Patents on facial surveillance technology. My first ten or twenty pieces were nothing anyone cosplaying mid-century Confessionalism would recognize as poetry. That’s the standard I set for myself. That’s how I view “experimentalism.” I was confused but also encouraged when I heard right back from editors who wanted to publish the material. Of course, unlike in the movies, any acceptance was followed by ten more rejections. Anything I achieved with this book came after this 1-in-10 ratio, which, for me, became a game of how weird I could make the work and which snob magazine I could freak out. That was my “journey,” as the kids say. That and a lot of reading and research. Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Shoshana Zuboff. They all rode along in the back seat. In the front was Nancy Spero squeezed alongside Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.   

4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
All poems begin at the bottom of the esophagus, where gastric acids begin breaking down anything I’ve ingested. Nutrients become energy; the rest, the materials that cannot benefit the body; they become poems. Everything starts with a few lines, then a few more. I cannot work without an idea for a “project.” Everything has to be an attack on a larger order, or why am I even bothering? 

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with William Lessard

Its origin is unclear: it may or may not have been Oscar Wilde who said a net is just a bunch of holes woven together with strings. He may or may not have been quoting some ancient Asian wisdom. But I like the notion. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by John Irving, but I loved the books of his that I loved because of how the strings of things in the stories would wander around then come together in the end not in a tidy bow but in a weave, the weft bending to the warp of all the crisscrossed lines, the gaps suddenly making sense. I try sometimes to think about my own life that way, to catch a glimpse of some fabric of it. It’s hard to see the fabric of one’s own life, so close are we to the weave, trying to peer through the holes, missing the overall pattern often. I like this poem by my friend Jessica Dubey because of its filaments, and how they dangle and tangle, and how by the end something unexpected is woven, and something is caught in the net.

Marilyn McCabe, like silver dollars dropped in the deep end

 I want to share this essay in Annulet by Ryan Eckes and Laura Jaramillo: “Searching for the Commons through Precarity and Crisis: American Poetics since 9/11.” Both Ryan and Laura are my age but they feel like my elders in the world of poetry and politics, as they’ve both been tapped into things throughout the entirety of the last few decades (whereas I have been playing catch up for the last 7 years or so). This essay offers a really insightful history of what it was like as a poet on the left through the Bush years, OWS, and beyond. There is also a really astute analysis of how social media and the internet more broadly has impacted us as poets striving for a common connection. It’s a great essay and one not to miss. (They also happen to give a brief shout out to Dead Mall Press, which is much appreciated.)

R M Haines, Einstein was a Pisces

Rabble rouser, organizer,
bold bright spirit wrapped in awkward
flesh and cotton ball softness and
carrying the most essential
pastels (pink as your cheeks, baby
blue like your eyes, and white as grief
and graves and talcum powder). You
flung your arms up, shouting over
signs and crowds and floats wheeling on
hidden wheels with black treads. You lead
the Pride parade; you celebrate
the you others have yet to learn
to see—

PF Anderson, Day of Visibility

The past couple days have found me stuck on the latest play script, at the end of Act I, which is about usually where I’ve been getting stuck. It’s turning into a mystery, almost, and I am not sure I want it to go in that direction. I am the writer, after all, you would think what I say goes. But then again–many poem projects have gone in entirely different ways than intended, so maybe I should let the writing wander as it may.  I will return in a couple of days and see if it’s working better or if I can find a way to make it so. 

In the meantime, I have been writing some early bits to a newish project, the bone palace, which was meant to accompany a set of fun fauxtographs I made up a couple years back. The images are proving a ripe and fertile space for building stories around and within them. The project as it starts feels very similar to errata, which was just a little chap of borrowed formats, something which I love doing in the midst of other kinds of projects. But the narrative feels sharper here and less collage-like […]

Kristy Bowen, the bone palace

On Thursday, I finally submitted the manuscript for my fifth collection, I Saw What I Know. For the past six weeks, I’ve needed to write a blurb for it – the short summary which appears on the back cover. Instead of writing it, I wrote an article about blurb writing. In the process of finishing said article, I began researching the process of caring for cat litter trays. ADHD procrastination and paralysis is REAL.

The thing is, I don’t have a cat. So I invite you to celebrate with me the miraculous fact of having writing not just this article, but also my fifth collection. […]

If you think that writing a blurb for someone else is hard, try writing your own.

Seriously, try it. There’s a lot to be gained from it. Not only in practicing your skills for concise, original writing – but also, developing a deeper understanding of your own work. If you can’t explain concisely what you’ve written; if you can’t describe what someone may gain from reading it – maybe you don’t know your work enough; maybe you don’t love or believe in it enough. And maybe you can change that.

You don’t have to have written a pamphlet or book. If you’re not working towards publication, or you’re years away from a completed collection, it doesn’t matter. Just pull together a bunch of your writing; say 10-50 poems.

Read them; make notes. Identify your primary concerns, the recurrent topics and themes. State – at least to yourself – what your strengths are, how a kind and interested reader might describe your voice. Consider what that reader may take away from the experience of your work.

Writing about your own work will give you a stronger appreciation of your own voice; an understanding of your techniques, your intention, your focus. The river of poetry has its own currents. It will – and should – always take you in unexpected directions – but at the same time, you have oars, you can build your own craft, you can follow a chart. You get to decide what you are writing about, and how, and why. A blurb is a great way to dip into the process.

Let yourself be lavish. Get drunk on your own wine.

Clare Shaw, Pulling your own oars

The other morning, leaving our Mexico City apartment after reading the news, I had the thought, “Everything I do is meaningless in the face of all this violence, and in the face of death.” But then we spent that day in the National Museum of Anthropology, where thousands of ancient objects from the civilizations of Mexico, all made with extreme care, are housed in a magnificent building, also made with care and attention to every detail — and I came back to myself and my purpose.

We are living in a time when the concentration of money and power, ruthless economic competition, and the demand for everything being done immediately are forcing the prioritization of speed and efficiency over perfection and care. Carefulness will increasingly be found in individual and small enterprises that exist more and more outside of, and independent from, mass production. In Japan, master craftspeople are revered as “living treasures”, but there is a real question of whether our western societies will have the capacity in the future to appreciate and preserve not only what artists, craftspeople, poets, and musicians produce, but the traditions, rooted in care and attention, that are the foundation for these arts.

For a long time, we’ve counted on arts organizations and institutions to do this work of preservation, education, and passing on. Not only are those institutions under political and financial assault, but their “gatekeeping” has been criticized as exclusionary and discriminatory — and rightly so. That in itself is another subject.

The point I want to make here is that living in a very different culture, as I’ve been doing for these weeks — one that has had a long history of political disruption, colonialism, violence, discrimination, and economic hardship, and where individuals could not expect much of anything from outside themselves and their communities — makes certain things clear. The vibrancy of the arts here is the result of a choice: people have taken that responsibility upon themselves because they know that art is intrinsic to life. The work that is shown in the National Museum of Anthropology is almost entirely unattributed: these are extraordinary objects that were made by anonymous master craftspeople. Many of the people who live in Mexico today have spent their lives knowing and valuing those traditions more than they value personal recognition. The indigenous woman sitting in the street selling exquisite needlework take pride in her craft, sells it to make a small living, and smiles when she sees that you appreciate it. The older man who takes my hand and draws me into an impromptu salsa in a city street is filled with an ebullient joy that he freely gives to me. I doubt that either of them has an easy life. But I would argue that both are more in touch with their humanity than many of us.

The sickness and malaise we are experiencing in the western First World is a disease that comes not only from the top down — which it surely does — but because too many of us have lost the conviction that art for art’s sake is vital for our own spirits, and for our communities. When we, as artists, buy into the capitalist model, thinking that money, fame, titles and rewards are the measures of our self-worth as creators, we have already missed the point and made it far harder for ourselves. One does not have to be a famous poet to write words that matter. Art and music that lift people up can happen when two or three people get together to make some “house music,” or dance in a park.

Beth Adams, Care

There’s been a good sprinkling of words in my week all round because as well as reading I have been writing. One of my favourite ways to write poetry is when there is a compelling feeling of being pulled to set something down. This week my sister was my muse. We had been talking on the phone and after telling me something she hadn’t told me before she said it would make a good poem if I wanted to write it. I pondered on what she had said on one of my walks and came back with a pretty much fully formed poem. I remembered to leave it to rest overnight as well as read it out loud to check it sounded right before editing it and smoothing its edges. Then I recorded it as a voice note and sent it to her.  We both agree that is has something special about it so I am hoping it will find a home in the not-too-distant future.  

Sue Finch, A DAFFODILESQUE DALEK, THE FIRST MOW, AND THE MUSE

Rather incongruously, I am a member of the French Rugby Federation (FFR) — this is because I do all the admin for my middle son’s rugby club membership — and as a result I had access to early booking for the last game of the Six Nations tournament, which was played last Saturday night at the Stade de France — a huge, 80,000-seat stadium in the north of Paris. Thanks to my prompt use of the booking link, I managed to secure for my son and I what turned out to be amazingly good seats, just behind one of the goals, for a very reasonable sum. […]

Pindar’s victory odes are some of the most sublimely beautiful poems in the entire Western tradition. But they are also, quite sincerely, about sport. We don’t have a Pindar today, but I was struck by how the spectacle and conduct of the match provided in many ways most of the elements of a traditional epinicion. The match itself was preceded by a very impressive show, featuring two men dressed as medieval knights mounted on horses riding onto the pitch (they carefully covered it up first, presumably to avoid the possibility of the players ending up face-first in a pile of horse manure). I’m not sure exactly what they were meant to represent, as there was no explanation as far as I could tell, but the pageant was clearly intended to allude to the long history of conflict between France and England — as an Englishwoman, I thought of Agincourt, but perhaps the French would recall rather the Battle of Hastings.

Pindar’s epinicia, similarly, always have a structuring myth linking the present-day victor and his sponsor to the distant past — generally, Pindar liked if possible to work in Achilles, Hercules or Ajax, presumably as their manly credentials seemed the best fit for athletic victory. But unlike the organisers of the Six Nations spectacle, he had the somewhat harder task of creating in each case a link between a reasonably well-known myth and the specific family, town or island of the victorious athlete and/or his aristocratic sponsor. Partly as a result, Pindar’s versions of myths are often eccentric or obscure, and he may have invented details to suit his purposes. The style of formal epinicia, which generally avoids direct names and narrative in favour of complex allusions, adds to this effect. So overall, the fact that I wasn’t quite sure exactly what story this moving and impressive opening show was alluding to was also rather authentic.

Victoria Moul, A Pindaric ode for Louis Bielle-Biarrey

Great imagist poetry is distinguished by its ability to immerse the reader fully in the immediacy of emotion. Amy Lowell’s sensual warmth, Richard Aldington’s taut emotional energy, and the deceptively simple yet resonant details of William Carlos Williams all exemplify this tradition. I Am Not Light by Louise Machen (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) demonstrates that same capacity. The collection is arranged in three parts—Into the Darkness, Origins of Darkness, and Into the Light—and throughout them Machen’s urgent, sensuous poems exploit the powerful cultural associations we attach to darkness and light. Darkness appears as a space of turmoil, threat, and uncertainty; light signals growth, clarity, and renewal. Yet in Machen’s work, the two are not oppositional. They are symbiotic. Darkness becomes a necessary condition of transformation, a landscape to be endured before light can be reached. […]

Louise Machen’s nomination for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem feels entirely justified. As Briony Collins notes in her endorsement, there are echoes of Sylvia Plath in these poems, but Machen’s voice remains unmistakably her own: contemporary, incisive, and deeply resonant. I Am Not Light establishes her as one of the most compelling poets writing today.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘I Am Not Light’ by Louise Machen

There’s a folio of 45 Ottawa poets up at Periodicities. 2 of my poems are included, “memento vivis” and “a placebo science” which are ghazal or ghazal adjacent. Don’t miss Michelle Desbarats‘ and Sarah Kabamba‘s and Tamsyn Farr‘s while you’re there. Ooh, and Cameron has a book of essays coming out this fall.

Word from David O’Meara, “When you’re starting off, it’s easier to take writing really seriously while also having a really good time doing it. I want to do whatever I need to, in my writing, in order to be doing those two things simultaneously again. “This matters” plus “This is fun,” the whole time I’ve got my notebook open.”

Pearl Pirie, New Poems Up

Reviewers, particularly poetry reviewers, aren’t usually paid (the commissioning editor themselves might be an unpaid volunteer so this isn’t a ‘pay the writer’ argument). They get a free copy of the book they review. That’s not to say the reviewer doesn’t benefit from reviewing. They get an introduction to a book they may not have chosen to read or couldn’t afford to buy. There’s value in writing a review: assessing the poems, developing critical skills, learning how to justify an opinion and argue a case. Reviewing is also a way of getting or keeping a reviewer’s name in print in between publications of their own work where the reviewer is also a practitioner. Occasionally a reviewer may be thanked.

There should be no reason to unpublish a commissioned review. A review is only commissioned on books that a magazine editor has deemed worthy of a review. A reviewer has read and re-read the book, written and edited the review, the review has been further edited and agreed. After that lengthy process, which gives the editors and reviewer plenty of time to withdraw if there’s a disagreement about the tenor of a review or the reviewer can’t edit it to the correct length, before the review is published. The writer or publisher of the book under review may ask for inaccuracies to be corrected, but they cannot dictate what a poetry magazine does or does not publish if the references to the book are accurate. A disagreement about the opinion expressed should not sway a magazine editor to take down a review.

It is galling to see a review taken down after publication, when there was nothing wrong with the commissioned review. When Gutter magazine took down their commissioned review of Polly Clark’s “Afterlife”, a review good enough to be used as part of a ‘book of the month’ feature, alarm bells rang.

Alarm bells continued to ring as the review was not withdrawn for reasons of quality or even disagreement with opinions and arguments put forward in the review.

It seems the withdrawal was actioned on the basis of a complaint from a reader (whose name may be known to the magazine editors but has not been revealed publicly) not about the review, not about the contents of the review, not about the book being reviewed, i.e. not for any legitimate reason. The review was taken down because the complainant drew the editors’ attention to social media posts made by the poet whose book was reviewed. While I’m not discussing what those posts were or the views of the poet, this review was withdrawn after agreement to publish for reasons that had nothing to do with the review.

Emma Lee, Reviewers deserve better than the Gutter

Power and authority are at stake when we talk about what makes a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ poem. This is what animates much of the discourse. Without power and authority, the critical judgement of poetry experts has no answer to the popular appeal of Insta-poems and other money-spinning media forms — they are reduced to customers reviewing niche products.

But power and authority is hard-won; genuinely illuminating, convincing evaluations of individual poems and books take time to muster. Meanwhile, there is the constant need to promote interest in those same poems and books, as well as related events.

So shortcuts are taken. Agreement among a small and insular group is presented as widespread consensus. Authority is extended far beyond its natural purview, as when a poet who is successful and well-liked among his coterie, but limited in range, makes pronouncements on the state of the whole scene. Bad poems need to be invented, and need to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the authoritative critic to have a function. What’s more, the criteria must remain somewhat hazy in order to avoid the average reader learning how to consistently apply it themselves. Periodic trenchant denunciations of work that, to the untrained eye, is remarkably similar in character to that which the same critic praises are a smart move.

By the same token, the real offence committed by those editors and activists who rule out work by avowed political reactionaries, or are overly interested in poets’ claims to membership of an oppressed group is that their criteria are too transparent. They make it too easy to jump through the hoops, and in so doing threaten to mortally wound the power of other editors and critics — which is wielded on the basis that they possess an exceptional capability when it comes to judging poems.

Jon Stone, ESSAY / What is a ‘bad’ poem exactly?

2. In the thick of the monsoon, the poem should hold its breath and sink into standing water. In the deepest murk, lie the choicest words. A poem must be an abalone diver.

3. Through mango-hued summers, the poem cannot be shadow. Cannot be shade. The poem should climb up a light beam to interrogate the sun. To look into its eyes. To hold itself up to that light. A poem must sweat.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Things you should teach your poem-child before it leaves home

This morning, I’m thinking about the downside to surprise—the sudden stroke that leaves you fatherless, the burst in the dot-com bubble that evaporates wealth you realize was only ever imaginary, the rollover that leaves your twin brother paralyzed from the neck down. . . . During the summer of 1988, my mother went into an operating room for a routine hysterectomy and woke to a diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

This kind of surprise has a profound effect on character. Often, during the seven years of my mother’s intermittent treatment, I thought about how hardship turns some of us bitter while others become better versions of themselves. Once during those years, I visited the family farm after my parents had gone dancing. During that season, chemotherapy was having its way with Mother. “Well,” she said to me, “I could stay home on a Saturday night. And be alone with the side effects. Or I can be among friends. I can dance with your father. The music, the company will take my mind off how I feel.”

During the years I lived in Austin, my husband Scott and I became friends with the Houston poet Erica Lehrer. I well remember the time I saw Erica get out of her car for a reading and walk toward us with a cane. A decade younger than I, Erica was a vital, healthy presence in the poetry community. She’s turned an ankle, I thought. Soon she’ll be tossing that cane. Erica’s need for a cane, I soon learned, was far more serious than a sprain. She’d been diagnosed with ataxia, one of three in every hundred-thousand. Also known as Multiple System Atrophy, ataxia is progressive, affecting coordination, affecting speech, affecting everything.

Once on a visit to Houston, Scott and I stayed with Erica and her husband. By then, Erica was using a wheeled walker. She spoke haltingly, her tongue uncooperative. Still, Erica entertained us. She made us laugh. She found humor in carrying a medical document about her diagnosis—to save her from being arrested for public drunkenness.

Yesterday, I pulled Erica’s poetry collection from my shelves. The title says so much about this remarkable woman: Dancing with Ataxia. The poems are sometimes bluntly honest about the grueling losses exacted by ataxia. But never self-pitying, always alive with the resilience that defined Erica Lehrer. 

David Meischen, “I Am More”

I get as close as I can to Turtle, careful to read their body for signs of unease. Turtle does not move, but stares right at me. Or through me. A heft. A mountain. A gargoyle. A carapace of watery wisdom. There are so many ways to describe and honor Turtle. Staring into the ancient, the ancient stares back. Maybe someday I too will be craggy. Maybe someday I too will have deep rivulets across my skin and in them a language of time well-spent. But right now I am soft. My shoulders are worldless. My language, young and unsure.

Sarah Lada, Sprout Became a Woman

My head

pushes from
the mud, the primordial

churn, seething,
thick with salty
activity.

Shit or fish sauce?

Call
it March.

Jill Pearlman, March: A Sooty Skin

William Wordsworth famously described poetry as “strong emotion…recollected in tranquility,” and that is how I want to think about—or think with and through—this collection of poems by Thomas A. Thomas, a photographer and an extraordinary poet, now the Assistant Managing Editor at MoonPath Press.

Because My Heart leads us down the path of a partner’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease, through the painful decline, to loss, I both wanted to read this book, and I very much didn’t want to read it. Before my own husband was moved into a residential care home, I picked the book up multiple times, but couldn’t make myself continue. Around the first of this year, however, I told myself it was time, and I took it with me to a local café. Once I began, I read it all the way through. Five sections, 29 poems: I thought I could easily gin out a review. Tried. Couldn’t. A few weeks ago, having read it through again, I found my way in. Narrative arc of disease and death aside, My Heart Is Not Asleep is primarily a love story. So that’s the book I’m here to tell you about.

“Around Us,” the second poem in the collection, lights up the two main characters like gods in an ancient Greek drama. They may be on their way to a hard fall, but, reading this poem, I knew I wanted to be there to see it:

A beam of full moonlight falls through the skylight and
graces our pillows, our faces, lights up
dust motes, like stars turning silently above our bed.

Silver lights reflect “high knotty pine ceiling / and the knotty pine walls, each knot / you said, a galaxy.” The poem holds the arc of the whole book, ending with “eons exploded and long gone dark stars.”

Bethany Reid, Review of MY HEART IS NOT ASLEEP

When I was 17 or 18 years old, we read in class Milton’s Paradise Lost. The poem, written in blank verse, retells the biblical Fall of Man — Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden — in over ten thousand lines of verse, first published in 1667. Lucifer, cast into the fires of Hell after his failed rebellion against God, resolves to take revenge by corrupting humanity and its innocent residence in paradise. He arrives into the Garden of Eden and, disguised as a seductive serpent, tempts Eve into eating an apple. She bites, then Adam bites into the apple. Their disobedience to never taste the forbidden brings upon the world sin, death, and shame, and they are expelled from Paradise. But Milton reassures his readers: the divine angel Michael reveals that Christ will one day redeem humanity’s fall.

Last summer, I went to Giverny. Among the purple, and the pink, and the red, and the blue flowers, in the middle of ice cream shops that sold melon and strawberry parfums, there are rows and rows of apple trees in bloom, with green and red apples hanging off the branches, apples of varying colours rotting on the soil, apples eaten by worms, insects and birds. Codling moths and apple maggots laying eggs on apples, living inside apples, feeding and living their lives inside the flesh of apples. Have you ever seen apple trees in bloom? On a sunny spring day, have you seen fully ripe fruit, a pear or a fig or even litchis, placed right next to each other, full and bright? A few days ago, at the Port Royal farmers’ market, where I like to go sometimes, a man cut a section of a mango that could almost have been as good as an Indian mango. 

If I were to choose between god and an apple, I would always choose an apple. But I am one of the fallen people. 

It’s the biting of the apple that makes me human.

It’s the fall that ungods me. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Interregnum

Read literally, alongside its setting, “You Are Not Christ” might be regarded as a kind of prayer for, and to, the people of New Orleans who suffered during the flooding: a simultaneous wish for strength and softness. It is a poem of tremendous compassion, its employment of the second person performing a kind of compassion transfusion in the reader: Imagine this, the poem insists: the moment of your drowning, of the body overruling at last—as it will—what we call the mind and by which we mean insight, planning, steadfast belief in futures. What you wish for yourself in this instant, the poem reaching into your chest, itself a sort of “strange new air,” is what you’d wish for anyone alive to these same circumstances.

I’ve called this a prayer because it insists on a variety of humility. Both “wonder” and “a need to know” are presented here as separate from actually living, from the need to simply continue doing so; at the same time, the poem predicts, you will not ask after meaning: What, after all, could be the meaning of drowning? What is meaning to the one who ceases seeking it? So unguarded, or defenceless, you become “like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,” but here the simile is load-bearing. You’re not prey, not the lamb—not some Christ figure suffering a millenia-defining passion—but what makes Christ possible.

What can this mean? So we bleat on, Christs against the current . . .

It’s been a difficult month, but I’m still here. Reading this poem now, with the knowledge that a strange new air, of sorts, does fill my lungs, I’m delighted to follow Laurentiis’s instruction. If I read it as a prayer for the already departed, for myself I read it as a kind of spell, an incantation for continuance: “You will not ask / what this means.” This is the way to be ill, at least for me, I have come to understand. It’s also, I’ve begun to suspect, simply the way to be alive. I knew this, in the blithe repose of health, acknowledged it far more than I ever felt it, but now, having run short on the prophylactic illusion of mortal exceptionalism that mostly keeps us sane and swimming, I find I need something else: whatever it is that precedes meaning: that makes it mean.

Vanessa Stauffer, “You Are Not Christ” by Rickey Laurentiis

i have been reading up
on how to become a ghost.
i think i was made to stay
past my welcome in a house
no longer my own. i was born
in the united states which means
i was fed a sick promise
that everything should arrive to us whole.
someone else can fuss with the pieces.

Robin Gow, assembly required

We make such a fuss of the dead. It is as if they’ve gotten closer to god, have become untouchable, holy, sacred, elevated. They can no longer make mistakes or let us down. It’s almost of some comfort when they’re gone, both the good and bad, the tyrant and martyr become stars we gaze upon or curse safe in the knowledge they’re floating in a far off orbit.

The living piss and shit and make a mess of things. They will talk out of turn, interrupt us, upset us with sudden opinions we wish they never held. Half the time we wonder what they’re on about. Sometimes, regrettably, they explain. Worst of all they will show us their poetry. They want us to listen as they read and then, when they’re done, they’ll ask for applause or money or love or praise or prizes. A dead poet will do none of these things. A dead poet rises above such vulgarity, a dead poet no longer has success to suffer, has no further failure to relish. Their work is done. Ours, set to continue as we carry them on, perhaps out of duty or pity or for beauty and the eternal.

I must tell you of the morning I left that house. We – and I say we because he was there too, the dead poet. I had sensed he’d been awaiting my arrival, approached me ghostly when I first crossed the threshold. He was cold and unfriendly but gradually he’d warmed to me. Or maybe I’d cooled to him, met his temperature, adjusted my thermostats accordingly. This is what you have to do with poets, dead ones especially, this is how we must approach poetry. We need to reconcile with it, become accustomed to it, assimilate with it. It requires effort. We must fully immerse ourselves in it.

Jan Noble, Nº56 The palace of misfortunes

Mat Riches’ poem puts me in mind of Margareta Magnusson’s 2017 book Döstädning: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. The aim of this practice is to go through possessions before death to avoid leaving your family with the huge task of clearing them after you have died. Sadly, the experience of many of my bereaved midlife friends belies this, and they end up burdened with emptying entire houses of a lifetime of things whilst also trying to deal with their grief; something Riches skilfully evokes in this poignant poem. I was startled to find out whilst researching this piece that Magnusson died very recently aged 92; I assume she left everything tidy.

As with Anne Stewart’s poem last week, the title is a ‘Ronseal’ title: does what it says on the tin, appropriately enough for a shed poem. It immediately signals either illness or bereavement; “Dad” is not able to do this job himself, and no longer needs the things in his shed. The first stanza sets out the Herculean task, and we share the speaker’s sense of overwhelm as he shows us how: “Tobacco tins of tacks and screws / cover every surface and shelf.” (1-2). The departed dad is of that war-born generation which remembers rationing and never throws anything out that might be useful; commendable in today’s need for sustainability. However, these repurposed tins from the days of loose-leaf tobacco are full of things that have not, in fact, been re-used and now won’t be. […]

If this is a man cave, the man is missing; we are in the territory of absence as presence. There is life here, but it is the sort that contributes to decay: “The spiders have been working hard” (5).

Suzanna Fitzpatrick, The Deeper Read 11

I don’t know about you, but when I read this I found it an incredibly uncomfortable, but joyous experience. I knew from reading previous editions that this wasn’t going to be a kicking, and look. I knew it was coming because Suzanna asked me, but even so, until it landed in my inbox on Friday morning, I had  no idea what she would say. How deep is deep (deep, man..), etc.

And I think this is about as deep as it’s possible to get with that poem. As with all good critical writing, I think it teaches the writer themselves something back to them. And Suzanna has really made me see under the hood of my own work. I’d be lying if I said all of the things that she points out were intentional. I’d be lying if I said that some of it isn’t the work of craft and having worked on poems enough now to sort-of-have a sense of what I’m doing (not always, but sometimes).

Mat Riches, Pull the Uther One

                                              I bought
it on impulse, Corydalis solida “Beth Evans”—so
pink!—knowing my friend Beth would smile at how
her namesake shows me early every spring the way
life comes and comes again despite Beth being years
dead. Both of us content that the cultivar name will be
lost, shaken loose, once the bees visit my garden.

Lori Witzel, Cultivar

I was very pleased to receive my copy of this poetry pamphlet, published by Jem and selected (with an introduction) by Victoria. […] I have left behind me in England all my books of Elizabethan poetry. Bullen’s Shorter Elizabethan Lyrics, collections of madrigals, that sort of thing. I do have Gardner’s Oxford Book here, and now a Golden Treasury, and Fowler arrived recently, but not my Ben Jonson, my Cavalier poets. No Donne! One manages, of course. First world problems and all that. Still, this was a very welcome addition to my stocks.

Naturally, Victoria Moul has made a very fine selection, and with some unfamiliar poems. The idea is that some of these poems are rarely anthologised. At least two of them, Like to the falling of a star by Henry King and Dazzled thus with height of place by Henry Wotton, are in Gardner, but not in Ricks. (Why Ricks excluded them is a mystery to me, though it’s not his period and it was Gardner’s.) Some of them are in Fowler too. But there are several poems not always available elsewhere and the overall selection has a good balance of the familiar and the unexpected.

Victoria says in her introduction that it was taken for granted in the seventeenth century that a poem “teaches or expresses something that it is helpful to remember as one tries to conduct a decent life.” This is the theme of the pamphlet. Here, in that spirit, is the Henry King.

Like to the falling of a star,
Or as the flights of eagles are,
Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue,
Or silver drops of morning dew,
Or like a wind that chafes the flood,
Or bubbles which on water stood:
Even such is man, whose borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to night.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies;
The spring entombed in autumn lies;
The dew dries up, the star is shot;
The flight is past, and man forgot.

Hot stuff, and really quite modern. Clive James was writing things like that final couplet in his early days. One can mistake this for mere verse, too simple, too gross to be “great literature.” Well, read it again with a real sense of your own mortality. The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entombed in autumn lies—this is the good stuff.

Henry Gould, Poems Beautiful and Useful

Publishing by subscription has a long history, of which the platform that hosts this newsletter is only the most recent example. Once upon a time, publishers would send letters out drumming up interest in a title before committing to print. This continued (and evidently continues) right into the era of commercial publishing, especially for niche or expensive works; Edward Lear was always buttonholing wealthy friends and patrons to support his books of illustrations. There is nothing new under the sun, as the teacher said.

I’m working in a tradition, then. I had more recent inspirations, too. Several small publishers I really admire, like Galley Beggar and Peirene Press, both of which mainly deal in fiction, offer annual subscriptions to supporters as complement to a traditional distribution method, though complement isn’t quite the right word given the scale of the challenge facing independent publishers these days. The subscription seems well suited to poetry: poetry publishing is scrappy, and slow, and it relies on individual risk-taking to make things happen.

The model also suited me because I am doing this, for the most part, in that fabled thing called “spare time”, so wanted to publish in a way which at least felt sustainable, while also allowing me as much time and momentum as possible to find a readership for each pamphlet—or at least, to give each one its moment in the sun. That moment is something that, from my own observations, poetry presses often struggle to create. The model also imposes a limit and a rhythm, both of which seem well suited to poetry. Well, we shall find out.

Jeremy Wikeley, Like to the falling of a star

When we sit down to work together, it isn’t just about placing an image next to a stanza. It is about a “shared attention,” temporary alignment of perception, where the boundary between your inner world and another person’s becomes briefly, thrillingly permeable. It’s a commitment to looking together until something new emerges. Our latest collaboration, Feverdream, grew out of Renée’s poems of grief, illness, and the complex physical and healthcare landscape in Appalachia. In this context, attention, when it is shared, becomes a form of care. 

For the artist and writer looking to embark on a similar journey, we’ve distilled our process into a practical roadmap for creating a book that is more than the sum of its parts.

1. Find a Root System (The “Why”)

A collaboration needs a foundation stronger than just “liking each other’s style.” For Feverdream, the root system was Narrative Medicine and the bodily experience. Renée spent two years writing with patients in a chemotherapy clinic while her own brother underwent treatment, experiences that profoundly shaped both the content and the process of writing these poems. Sally’s work, centered on the human form, met those poems in a deeply personal space and allowed for word and image to create a reflective intimacy. The body itself is where external and internal meet, and both the art and poems share this embodiment. The body doesn’t belong fully to either world, which makes it such fertile ground for both poetry and visual art to speak to each other.

The Shared Lens: A Practical Guide to Creative Alchemy – guest post by Renée K. Nicholson & Sally Brown (Trish Hopkinson)

In my last post, I wrote about habitat loss and language. I considered how language can act to connect us to the increasingly “lossy” habitat of the material world. This leads me to consider how language itself, language as a habitat in itself, is also subject to the depredations of the modern world. I do feel that language as a habitat is under threat. It is being taken over by corporate and other geopolitical sources of power.

In Uwe Pörksen’s conception, according to Andrew Sweeney, “plastic words” are “words that have become supremely abstract though being stripped from their original context or meaning.” I can’t help but imagine a further process whereby microplastics have entered language like they’ve entered everything else. Language is suffused by capital, technology, commodity. In the contemporary world, it’s hard to find an outside.

If feels like, down to its bones, language has become entangled. Of course, language has always been implicated, forged, through power relations. Made from the societies it is part of. But something has changed with virtuality, AI, and the acid rain of the contemporary media panopticon. We’re soaking in it, Marge.

Gary Barwin, Against Language as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Depth is the culprit hastening shrinkage,
meltwater and the salty layer

drivers both of change and loss.

We measure warmth and the salinity,
quantify the calving and new fracturing,

conclude our lack of means to stop
makes faster flow and level rise,

philosophers to think; the scientists, surmise.

No slow surrender, they to land.
No adaptation, for us no plan.

Maureen Doallas, In Greenland, Glaciers Fall

I studied with a famous poet when I was in college. I took two poetry workshops with her, and it’s safe to say that her approach to critical reading and revising made me a much better writer. It also made me into an editor, and that led to a long career in journalism. Although I was writing and editing prose about tech, I used skills I had developed in those poetry workshops every day: Close reading, attention to nuance, an ear for rhythm and flow, a sense of structure and drama, an ability to hear what’s left unsaid or what could be said better. 

But for about ten years after college, I wrote no poetry at all. She was such a sharp critic, and her voice was so powerful and distinctive, that I could not write a single line without hearing her comment on it. Fairly or not, I imagined her voice as a disparaging one, and it discouraged me from continuing to write my own work. Without explicit assignments, I simply couldn’t get started. 

My way back into writing for myself (poetry and otherwise) started with haiku. I found the form was spare enough, and modest enough, that it could slip past my internal poetry sentries. 

Haiku are extremely short, and the form eschews most of the tools used by modern poets: Metaphor, overt allusion, excessively self-conscious wordplay, direct descriptions of emotions. It is a self-effacing form, Zen in its origins and aspirations. I found I could write haiku about the plum petals in my daughter’s hair, an orange-brown leaf twirling down next to a Calder sculpture, a flock of crows crossing the space between skyscrapers, or the moon rising over a neighbor’s house. I might not have been writing great poetry, but these little moments satisfied my need to connect with the world and to express myself. Then I found that the words on the page set up a kind of resonance that started to shake loose the rust and get the poetic wheels turning again. 

That gave me enough of a charge to keep going. I discovered the haibun (a form mixing prose and haiku) and from there started experimenting again with longer poems and essays. 

Dylan Tweney, Finding your flow as a writer

returning the water
from the vase
to the flower garden…

waiting in the wings by tom clausen

Belfast Twilight – haiku, senryu and micro-poems, Liam Carson, Salmon Poetry, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-915022-96-7, €12.00

Upward Spiral – haiku and senryu, Tim Murphy, Red Moon Press, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-958408-73-5, $20.00

It appears that Irish haiku poets are like busses; they arrive in twos. And while my previous reviews touching on this genre have focused on women poets (think Maeve O’Sullivan and Rosie Johnston), this time it happens to be two male writers, one based in Ireland, the other in Spain.

The inclusion of the word ‘senryu’ in the subtitles of both collections raises some interesting questions around what the haiku/senryu distinction might mean in the context of urban-dwelling, 21^st century English-language poets for whom the urban landscape is more present than the natural one and whose world is more defined by human behaviour than the motion of the seasons.

In Japan, the distinction began to dissolve with the New Rising Haiku movement of the 1930s and 40s, with works like Sanki Saitō’s airport haiku and his war poems which were derived from news reports rather than direct experience. These poets also tended to dispense with the standard kigo (seasonal identifier words) that typified traditional haiku. And so the lines became blurred. […]

I’m tempted to link Carson’s use of assonance to his positioning of his work in a distinctly Irish tradition. It may be fanciful to hear an echo of the Celtic Twilight in the book’s title (less so, perhaps, given the Jack Yeats poems), but the Irish literary link is most forceful, unsurprisingly perhaps, in a set of five haiku in the Irish language under the title ‘Séideann An Gaoth’ (The Wind Blows). One poem in particular has a very specific and resonant allusion to the Early Irish:

londubh buí
I measc na gcrann
séideann an gaoth

yellow blackbird
among the trees
the wind blows

(my translation)

It’s impossible not to be reminded of the widely translated 9^th century poem often referred to as ‘The Blackbird of Belfast Lough’ behind these lines, particularly given the broader Belfast connections in the book:

Int én bec
ro léic feit
do rinn guip
glanbuidi:
fo-ceird faíd
ós Loch Laíg,
lon do chraíb
charnbuidi.

one small bird
whose note’s heard
sharply pointed
yellowbill

whose notes fly
on Loch Laig
blackbird’s branch
yellowfilled

(again my version)

Along with, perhaps. a hint of the tale of ‘Buile Shuibhne’, the mad birdman of Irish legend. The poem also resonates with Carson’s English-language ‘nature’ haiku, quite closely in this example from ‘Island Haiku (Árainn Mhór)’:

sheets of rain
a robin shelters
inside a thorny bush

Belfast Twilight is a fine collection, full of quiet moments of delight.

Billy Mills, Two Irish Haikuists

I’ve had an interest in translating poetry for as long as I can remember. As an undergraduate, I was awarded the B’nai Zion medal for excellence in Hebrew, largely on the basis of an independent study I did with Professor Robert Hoberman for which I produced translations of biblical, medieval, and contemporary Hebrew poetry. If I am ever able to locate those translations, I will publish them in a future issue of On My Desk Now.

If I had to trace my interest in translation to a single point of origin, though, it would be to the year in junior high school when I-don’t-remember-which-rebbe encouraged our class to buy the ArtScroll edition of Shir Hashirim: The Song of Songs, so that we could better understand “the most misunderstood book in the entire Tanach.” Because the ArtScroll translation was allegorical, he explained, it revealed the text’s true significance in a way that translations based on the text’s plain meaning did not. I don’t think I understood at the time what the word allegorical meant, but I was in for a shock when I opened the book. I understood Shir HaShirim to be a book of sometimes quite erotic love poems, the beginning of which is usually rendered as something like “May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The same verse in the ArtScroll version, however, is translated like this: “Communicate Your innermost wisdom to me again in loving closeness…” Many years later, I would discover a podcast episode in which the host offers a really interesting, philosophical, and very-much-worth-wrestling-with justification for the allegorical translation. At the time, though, my only response to what ArtScroll had done was anger, since the only purpose I could discern for their allegorical approach was to obscure the eroticism of the original. Ever since then, I have been fascinated by what’s at stake culturally and otherwise in why and how a text gets translated from one language into another.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On My Desk Now: Translating Korean Poetry

Selecting one Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem is no easy task because of the depth of her work. But, I settle into “The Bean Eaters,” one of her most visible poems, mainly for the poem’s richness as a love poem but also because of its sharp contrast to much of today’s world. The lines point toward a future that has dissolved aloneness: “Two who are Mostly Good. / Two who have lived their day”. They go about their lives, always moving in the same direction. This is one of the secrets to their shared life. They’ve become accepting of their moving together.

What’s gained isn’t the accumulation of material things – though their physical world is always present to them – but the gain is in the actual living. There’s repetition, surely – they “keep putting on their clothes / And putting things away” – but the writing shows this more as a natural flow, as an order to their world, rather than actions or fear that have trapped them. There’s no real glamor in the simple things that surround them, that give them comfort, but Brooks makes clear the lasting value of this life that is theirs. It’s their world on their terms.

This is also a beautiful poem about memory, about aging. The “twinklings and twinges” that are the real stuff of living a full life – are significant because they’re shared. The pair is busy at work – nurturing their love, taking in the necessary source of life that will allow them to continue. Happiness finds itself in the intimate simplicity of chipware, creaking wood, and tin.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Bean Eaters”

Tonight, at a literary event at Parnassus with our author Laing Rikkers, I met up with Major and Didi Jackson. I also met a woman who told me she would like to be a poet. I asked the woman whether she had ever studied poetry, and she said no. I asked if she had read much poetry, and she said, “Robert Frost.” It’s a good start. Robert Frost is a man of letters, well-loved for a reason. But becoming a serious poet requires reading, writing, and living with poetry. Going to readings is a part of that journey. I grabbed dinner with Major and Didi after the reading, and I thought about how being in the company of great poets—having an artistic community—is also part of the building blocks of a creative life.

The building blocks of a creative life aren’t really blocks at all. I like to think that what moves you toward a creative life are nonlinear, wild spaces you wander through that might add up to a creative undertaking. […]

What you don’t want to do is carry invisible suitcases with opportunities you didn’t get. I didn’t go to a good college. I didn’t have the resources to go to Breadloaf or any other writing conference. I could take stock all day, but it doesn’t help me write my next book. I’m working on a different frame of mind when it comes to creating a life that centers on artistic work.

All the men on my list started the race way ahead of me; that’s a fact. But if I stop to complain, I’m not in the race. And it isn’t a race. For them, maybe it is. They are building a Literary Career.

I am walking out into the clearing and finding my writing self. That creative self reads, writes, dreams, arches toward sunshine, swims, stretches, trains for greatness, learns from mistakes, is crazy and afraid. In my writing life, I’m not clawing my way out of the bottom of the well. I’m walking the clearing, finding my way toward creative work, soul work, publishing work, body work, family life, dream life.

Expectation is everything. So, young woman who wants to be a writer: Read a lot. Create a writing schedule, and make it flexible enough to adapt when work and caretaking pull your attention. Send out work to literary journals and magazines at least once a quarter. Try to spend some time with other writers or literary professionals. If the people in your life don’t take your writing seriously, get some people who do.

Most importantly, don’t compare yourself to others. Writing is hard enough.

Kate Gale, Walking Through the Clearing: The Thrum of a Creative Life

Last night’s rain still lines the undersides
of leaves, and the lamps on the street have not
yet gone out. I am always standing in the in-
between, one hand folded around a dream, the other
raised toward the shape of a decision. My ear
turning toward the last place it remembers
an animal once stopped for water.

Luisa A. Igloria, Poem with a line from Linda Gregg

So I have these boxes of postcards and letters I’ve received decades ago, ticket stubs, hard copy photographs that are so badly out of focus or dark, but there was no option but to keep them as they may have been the only record of an event. My analog past I can’t bear to throw out. I’ve been scanning some of them to print in photobooks. I love the accidental finger, the overexposed blanch. That’s who I was, I barely remember her. 

In the midst of this paperwork bog, I’m trying to write poetry about happiness and where I find it. Finland has been voted happiest country again and my writing group has decided the theme for our next anthology will be ‘happy places’. So with war everywhere, job insecurity, my kids growing up and a lack of happiness where I am, I’m looking backwards, trying to remember what happiness looks like. 

Gerry Stewart, Wallowing in nostalgia is better than red tape.

Here in Seattle, though so far it’s been cold, I love to see the cherry blossoms and daffodils that are the first heralds of spring. Also, more birds popping up. I’m hoping I can make it back up to Skagit Valley some time in April though my schedule is packed with book clubs, the Poetry night at J. Bookwalter’s restarting with a feature with Kelli Russell Agodon and her delightful new book from Copper Canyon, Accidental Devotions, and more medical appointments that tend to come around in my birthday month for some reason. (Does this happen to you too?)

I really like celebrating National Poetry Month—it’s nice for the world (and myself) to put a little more attention on this mostly neglected art form. Do you look forward to cooking something in spring? I love the influx of fresh peas and asparagus, and I love the rituals of Palm Sunday and Easter, which always feels like a celebration of chocolate and pastels (even if you’re not particularly religious). The myths of rebirth are generally hopeful, aren’t they? April is also my birthday month—and though I am getting older, I am thankful that I am still here, even for the hard parts. I am trying to adjust to 1) surviving ’til I was 50 and 2) realizing I am, if you’ll forgive a pun, no longer a spring chicken. I am adjusting to the shift into elder mode—along with losing so many friends and family, which seems like a part of aging. I am actually physically in better shape and in less pain than I was ten years ago—food allergies sorted, out of my wheelchair thanks to my MS diagnosis and subsequent physical therapy focusing on balance, and better able to appreciate the smaller joys of life.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, First Day of Spring, Hawks and Cherry Blossoms, April Rituals: Poetry Month and Birthdays

My Lenten poem-a-week project has been going better than I expected, and I’m grateful that I’ve actually been able to produce a draft poem a week as intended. It’s been freeing to not overly-worry or think too much and just get something written and posted on whatever topic or prompt was occupying my spirit in a given week. But as Holy Week and Easter approaches, I am feeling a sense of needing to slow down and really take time with these last two. They are on heavy topics that I feel extremely ill-equipped to deal with as a poet and a human being, not to mention a somewhat newly-reverted Catholic. Yet they are haunting me, and I feel the need to go deeply into their mysteries. And going deeply into a mystery takes time, silence and attention.

Kristen McHenry, Poem of the Week Interlude, Catana Lives!

So far in this National Year of Reading, I haven’t bought any new books. At the end of last year, my daughter suggested buying Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020) for me as a Christmas gift, since she knew the film was coming out but, once I’d heard the plot involved a child’s death, I said no. Then, when I saw a trailer for the film, I thought perhaps I should have said yes. Then there were advertisements, trailers, clips, snippets EVERYWHERE and I thought perhaps I should have tried to read the book before seeing the film. After that, the onslaught of film publicity turned me off both the idea of the book and the film, but, THEN, my friend Isy gave me her copy of the book, when I popped in to see her and her new baby. So, I started reading and, without meaning to, I still haven’t bought a new book. […]

Although never named as William Shakespeare, Agnes, her playwright husband, and their family live in Stratford-upon-Avon (although the playwright has to spend much time in London),in the late 1500s. The book’s introduction plainly states that it is a work of fiction, so a few esteemed Shakespearian experts who have questioned the accuracy of the story are rather missing the point, in my view.

It’s been a long time since I was so moved by a book. What an extraordinary phenomenon reading can be. I still haven’t seen the film – I think I need a little distance from the effect the book had on me before I book any tickets.

Josephine Corcoran, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

It’s World Poetry Day so instead of talking about my favorite famous poets (Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Jericho Brown, Dorianne Laux, Jane Hirschfield – is there anything that hasn’t been said?) I thought I’d share this epistolary poem written for me, something I never dreamed would happen. I’ve known poet Robert Okaji for many years, after we virtually “met” on his poetry blog and mine around about 2010 or so. Robert writes the kind of lyrical, meditative poetry that I could only dream of writing.

Thank you, Bob, for your years of friendship! Here’s to many more.

Letter to Hamrick from the Century of the Invalidated

Dear Charlotte: The sun here winces daily, stumbles
across morning before smudging gray like an old slate
scarred with decades of chalk dust and erased messages.
I’m hunting work, and there are days when it feels
as if past experiences have been rubbed out, or maybe
I can’t make myself slog through the powdery white
crusted blend of ennui and discounting youth. […]

Charlotte Hamrick, A poet once wrote me a poem

“Dear March — Come in —,” written in its author’s great creative surge of the early 1860s, feels slighter and lighter than many of the poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) we’ve discussed here before. In this poem, no carriage bears the speaker toward eternity. No life has “stood a loaded gun.” The “frock I wept in” never offers itself to be worn here. But then, we knew already that Emily Dickinson liked March, having read only recently her lighthearted “We Like March,” which dates from roughly a decade later.

That poem of the early 1870s turns on Dickinson’s knowledge of and love for natural philosophy, with its references to violets (which are certainly March’s purple “shoes”), the Adder’s Tongue fern, the sudden nearness of the sun after the long winter, the ubiquity of mud as the snow melts, and the “buccaneering” bluebirds. It is a poem of the out-of-doors, full of the wind and bluster that signal New England’s return to life.

Today’s Poem, by contrast, bustles with a hospitable domesticity, welcoming back the traveler-month after a long absence. March returns like an old school friend, its bluster reduced to mere windedness after a long walk, to be beckoned upstairs for a gossip. In precisely this way the young Dickinson did write to her school friends, with ardent affection, longing always to see them and trade news.

Her speaker’s emphatic tone here — alternately chiding March for staying away too long and turning up without notice, and apologizing in a hostessy manner for not turning the hills purple enough — is underscored by the poem’s meter, a variation on her characteristic common or hymn measure. Here, especially in the first stanza, she has cast many of her lines in dimeter, as though to divide the expected tetrameter in half, an effect that suggests a hostess’s distraction, bustle, and fluster when a guest arrives at a time not precisely appointed.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Dear March — Come in —

フィッシュアンドチップスに塩風光る　庄田ひろふみ

fisshu ando chippusu ni shio kaze hikaru

            salt
            on fish and chips
            the wind shines

                                                Hirofumi Shoda

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 23, 2026)

I don’t think of this blog as being primarily about hope, but hope is certainly an undercurrent. Possibly one of my favourite poems that I’ve ever posted is “Hope is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat” by Caitlin Seida. It of course refers to the Emily Dickinson poem. In her brilliant book on the writing life, Opacities, Sofia Samatar quotes a friend who talks about “doing an Emily Dickinson” which is to say, disappearing from the internet, and who knows where else. And isn’t it tempting?

But then, also, I think of Simone Weil, and unrelatedly, ageism, or being an artist and writer these days, or being someone of the artist class, and this line by Weil: “Indeed for other people, in a sense I do not exist. I am the colour of dead leaves, like certain unnoticed insects.” I think about my goal, after Rumi, to be the one in the room the least in need. (Bad career move, good soul move). And then, I also think about what Anne Bogart says about how “we have something to learn from the person who has not yet spoken.” (This in the context of civic conversation, the hope and the notion that everyone should be heard). I think of the line from Elizabeth Gilbert who said, “no one is thinking about you” — that salve. And it’s true, it’s really true. What to do with these gifts?

I recently quoted Rebecca Solnit on hope and her saying that “maybe the community is the next hero.” And while I do believe that this is the answer politically, I, a bundle of contradictions myself, also crave the hermit life. At the same time, I also wish to be seen, heard. (Generally speaking, the eternal writer’s conundrum/quest — how to be known and seen but also simultaneously invisible). We want our due and not too late, unlike Jean Rhys, quoted as saying at an award ceremony where she received accolades late in life, late in her career, “It has come too late.” In a James Wood essay in The New Yorker, he said of Rhys, “She lacked hope, but never courage.” In truth, most of us are unlikely to win any awards.

Ah well, it’s courage that’s the thing. It’s not time we lack, said Adam Zagajewski, but concentration. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all in equal measure, hope, courage, concentration.

Shawna Lemay, My Prima Donna Rat Hermit Era

Go green. Green light, go. Green thumb deep digging in flowered earth. Greenhorn morning wet behind the ears. Green promise. Green renewal. Greenbacks riding cash cows in green-dawn calm. Green hornet. Green goblin. Grass is greener where envy grows, green screen sky edit me a ton more trees. Green frog rap, green moss nap. Green apple. Green peas. Green light, go get me more world peace.

Rich Ferguson, Green

‘Rosie Jackson and Friends’ gave a short reading of poems celebrating kindness on Saturday evening at Rook Lane Chapel in Frome. It was the final event in a week-long Festival of Kindness co-ordinated by The Good Heart, a volunteer-led community group. The chapel was decorated with local schoolchildren’s kennings on the theme of kindness.

From left to right in the photo above, the line-up was Morag Kiziewicz, Stephen Boyce, Tessa Strickland, Rosie Jackson, Ama Bolton, Michelle Diaz, B Anne Adriaens, Rachael Clyne, and hidden behind me is Dawn Gorman, reading for Claire Crowther. We had a wonderfully attentive and responsive audience of about thirty. Rosie selected and sequenced the poems with great sensitivity. The programme included three pieces by the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Some of the poems featured personal encounters, while others responded to appalling recent events. Morag’s poems celebrated the kindness of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. One of Rosie’s poems was addressed to the schoolgirls who were killed during the first wave of air-strikes on Iran. At the end, Rachael led us all in a short Buddhist meditation. […]

Yesterday skylarks were singing above a nearby field. This morning the sky above me is full of the noise of military aircraft. I have heard this sound twice before in the past forty years; the first time, the target was Libya. The second time, it was Iraq. What can fifty minutes of focus on compassion do to counteract the daily horrors of these terrible times? Perhaps it effected a small change in us. Be kind to yourself, dear reader, and do no harm to others.

Ama Bolton, Poems of Kindness

This week: cave fish, unnamable muscles, the armpit of the fire, an abandoned glass factory, and much more. Enjoy.

My fingers press on these cold keys and shed
bits of skin too small to see. The wind presses,
too, slips through gaps in the window casings.
A busy wind, chilling my hands while ripping the
last of the winter abscission hold-outs on down.
Leaves shed, dropping off and piling, so slow to
dance. The scars on stems. 

Lori Witzel, Shed

As a young BBC business reporter during the first Gulf War in 1991, I was attached to the rolling Radio News service known as ‘Scud FM’, a reference to Iraq’s powerful Scud missiles. Reporters like me (see the young me in pic) would scuttle down to the rolling Radio 4 studio and throw ourselves in front of a mic to answer the eternal question : what’s happening on the oil markets?

I would talk breathlessly about the latest price of Brent Crude and what had sent it up or down, prices at the pump, inflation and interest rates. […]

It is amazing to me how a few words from a news presenter can instil mild feelings of panic in so many of us.

That’s true even when the real economic effects of a headline have not been felt yet. We go through the same cycle of emotions, distress at the human disaster of war and muted fright for ourselves. And it is the familiarity, the repetition, that hits our neural buttons – we have felt it before and we will feel it again.

When I think calmly about the wider phenomenon of repetition, I see its potential as well as the downside.

It is sound and echo, expectation and confirmation. If you put it in a poetic context, we gladly use it all the time. It is one of our most important aural (and visual) tools. Think of tools such as villanelle, sestina, pantoum, anaphora and epistrophe.

It pushes powerful buttons in our minds and makes us listen more carefully. Something repeated is always going to be something significant. It may be a warning.

In the real world, when history repeats itself, it usually is. 

Lesley Curwen, Repetition and Gulf Wars

The men who killed poetry

Hated silence . . . Now they have plenty.

Quoted from Larry Levis, “Garcia Lorca: A Photograph of the Granada Cemetery, 1966” in Larry Levis, The Selected Levis | Selected and With an Afterword by David St. John, Rev. Edition (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000, 2003), pp. 62-63

Maureen Doallas, The Sunday Quote

Sharp crack startles the room
vegetation maps forgotten
we regard each other

And then the fighter jet howl
and Tehran
suddenly seems next door

Chris Clarke, Letter From the Desert: Ajo

I keep returning to May Sarton’s description of the “poignant evening light,” and the strange shape of poignancy when pronounced — how it goes from the stillness of poignant to the shimmer of that added “ancy”, a sound that reminds me of a city called Nancy in Alsace-Lorraine.

My first glimpse of bears rutting occurred in a park in Nancy, not far from the lycee named after Chopin where I spent part of my seventh grade year unlearning the stability of language.

Today, the adjective “poignant” means “evoking a keenly felt sense of emotion, especially of bittersweet sadness or regret.” But the archaic meaning of this word — “sharp or pungent in taste or smell” — also appears regularly in poems.

And there is the prick of it as well . . .

Alina Stefanescu, “Poignant” in a poem by May Sarton

It is no surprise:
Dove flies,

Startled
By an approaching human.

Light, smooth as a pebble
Minus the few feathers discarded in fright —

Luciana Francis, Dove

Eight of us met in Bron’s print studio at the Dove on Saturday to critique new work and work-in-progress for our upcoming exhibition at ACEarts in Somerton, featuring new work by the nine active members of Artists’ Book Club Dove, and a selection from guest artist Fiona Hingston. If you’re in the area, do come to meet the artists on Saturday 21st April 11am to 1pm. […]

where nothing happens
the women worry
the men play golf

two colours going
down one side and up the other
a third is the overlap

this is the Grand Canyon
put it on white
put it on black

Ama Bolton, ABCD March 2026

I spent the weekend before last with my brother Adrian at his home in Bath, which is the longest period of time we’ve spent together for donkey’s years and was really lovely. I then caught a bus which travelled through the former mining areas of Somerset around Radstock and Midsomer Norton, before going through the Mendips, with Glastonbury Tor on the horizon, and descending to Wells, the (self-proclaimed) smallest city in England. Wells has a lovely centre – mainly but not only the beautiful Gothic cathedral and the adjoining, fully-moated Bishop’s Palace. […]

Ama Bolton and her group of like-minded folk, the Fountain Poets, were very welcoming, and read – and, in Rachael Clyne’s case, sang – some fine pieces. I read from both my collections plus a couple of new poems too. Ama has kindly invited me back for another reading next March, so I’d better write lots more poems in the next 11 and a half months. I must add the not-quite-random fact that both Ama and I have had poems published about dental hygienists!

Matthew Paul, Beetle in a box

When Kim and I set up Shaw & Moore, both of us were in the final stages of our next collections, and neither of us were convinced that we weren’t just seeking distraction from the monumental tasks of drafting, ordering, editing, setting out, proofreading and the hundred other vital jobs involved in finishing a book.

We probably were, but it’s worked out well all the same. We intended to share our journeys towards completion and publication, whilst reflecting on our lives as poets and parents and friends, our various enthusiasms, the challenges we face as poets with ADHD.

Inevitably, the Substack has evolved and expanded over the last two years to encompass many shiny, sharp or fascinating things which have distracted us along the way. As my therapist says, it’s not that I lack attention – it’s that I have too MUCH of it. I am constantly distracted by the world.

Kim’s new book “The House of Broken Things” is finished, and it’s due out on 23^rd April. You can pre-order it here, or you could come to the afternoon launch in the Wainsgate Chapel on the hills above Hebden Bridge on 3^rd May, where she’ll be supported with readings from me, Amanda Dalton, Carola Luther and Malika Booker. There’ll also be live music and cake – tickets available here.

Clare Shaw, You were the forest and you were my mother

Facebook, Twitter, Blue Sky, Instagram, TikTok, Substack…Which feel useful to you instead of like distractions, or worse, something that makes you feel worse, that drains you? I am contemplating this as I am trying to decide where to stay, which to cut, where to spend energy. As you can probably tell, I’ve been blogging for a long time, and I don’t really want to stop now. This is where I feel most comfortable.

I was thinking about how I follow writers, artists and musicians—like I learned about the Aimee Mann concert from a post of hers on Instagram and the last piece of art I got I learned about from an artist’s Instagram post as well. I hear about books from my writer friends mostly on Facebook—but books from authors I don’t know—it’s harder to pin down where I hear about them. The next time I have a new book, I’m not even sure what social media network will be working, not run by a supervillain, or where writers and readers congregate. I do know that I keep in touch with friends and family on various platforms—even LinkedIn sometimes (yes, I do have an old profile there). It shouldn’t be hard to cancel one social media or another, but somehow, I just keep hanging in there, posting once in a while.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Surprise Snow, Aimee Mann and Daffodils in Mt Vernon, and Social Media Musings

in a zen temple
near Arashiyma, an old man
dragged neat lines down soft gravel

nothing else stirred
cloud and bird and leaf and eye and breath
paused to watch
though later, each one would swear
that they had seen something different

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Stuck on a hospital bed at fifty-six, mortality mixing with the saline in my IV, I wondered if writing poetry would be a good use of the time I had left

I gazed upon several astounding pieces, one after another encased in a glowing, golden light, a rotunda filled with Surrealist alchemy. My she-roes on full display, the intensity and intricacy of each painting and photograph I beheld with new eyes, though I’d seen a few of the Varo pieces up close at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen in Chicago many years prior.

And yet, one solitary painting stole my heart, captured it, and left me thinking for the rest of my journey: “The Inner City” by abstract expressionist / Surrealist, Alice Rahon.

Rahon (another Gemini) was a French-born Mexican poet and artist who used the technique of sgraffito (scratching into canvas or metal) in her work. Like Frida, Rahon suffered a serious childhood accident which put her in casts and affected the rest of her life: one of the injuries was a fracture in the right hip, which forced her to recuperate lying down for long periods of time (like Frida). Rahon was invited, with two other artists / writers, to visit Mexico by Andre Breton and Frida. (Rahon was the first female to be published in Editions Surréalistes in Paris in 1936; as well, she and Frida had become fast friends).

One of Alice’s poetry books, À même la terre (On The Ground), featured a poem in which a woman “removes her face / safe from the traps of mirrors”. And another line, almost describing the painting (done years later): “Like the ember with blue down / in the armpit of the fire / that speaks in sparks”.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Inner synchro-cities.

Canadian winter is not the only reason we like to come to Mexico City in March. We love being here when the city’s iconic “purple trees”, the jacarandas, are in bloom. For northerners like us, the very idea of a purple-flowering full-size tree is astonishing, and enchanting.

Beth Adams, Jacaranda

HOPKINSON: There’s something surreal and completely sad about seeing a poem for only a second and then having it wiped away by technology. I think I’m crying and excited at the same time. What emotions do you hope participants will experience?

MEDSKER: Haha! I hope that people feel startled, then sad, then excited. It’s an exercise in being present. Something I’ve struggled with every day of my life. Ugh!

HOPKINSON: Why poetry?

MEDSKER: Poetry is sort of the way I think now. Condensing a slew of complex feelings and observations into as tight a space as possible. Their economy lends itself to accompanying a photo on a smartphone.

Composing the photos is the big feat for me. I’ve always wanted to be adept with visual art. Hopefully this will hone my eye!

HOPKINSON: This could be seen as commentary on the whole concept of social media, the lack of tangibility, the short attention span of humans, or the fleeting connection of life to art–is it any of these things?

MEDSKER: Absolutely. It’s a direct comment on the digital glut we live in. I don’t know about you, but I get overloaded with info very quickly. And it just turns my mind into a fragmented mess. It’s comforting, in a weird way, to know that these poems and pictures can be experienced but not held on to. I think that’s the real key… that these are meant to be experienced, not consumed. And there’s a difference between reading that statement and actually experiencing it in real time.

There’s this assumption that people have, I think, that we can stave off death if we work hard enough, care enough, consume enough… I hope this project helps people to be more contemplative about the fleeting nature of experience.

I have been doing a lot of pictures of flowers and wildlife. Sometimes I’ll throw a curveball like a thick metal chain on a gate or something. An old brick apartment blocks in the Bronx. The photos are often just something I think looks interesting and has a tangential relation to the words. Hopefully the juxtapositions are interesting to people.

I am always on the lookout for something to snap, and then I come up with the poem on the fly. I don’t like to fret too much about the lines. It’s a direct conversation between me and one other person, so I like to keep it intuitive.

Trish Hopkinson, Disappearing Poems on Instagram – Interview with Josh Medsker

Each of the poets involved in the project, which was designed by Gill Connors, was sent a poem as part of a chain and asked to write a poem in response to it. I remember being excited when I saw that a poem had arrived in my inbox. I purposefully did not open the email until I had time to be at my writing desk with a dedicated time to think and write because I was keen to capture my response as cleanly as possible.

Firstly, I read the poem on the page in the same way that I read all poems that I am meeting for the first time. Then to increase my interaction and feel for the poem I read it out loud to myself. My usual way of starting the drafting of a poem when I know I am going to write is to use a fountain pen and a notebook. On this occasion I jotted down the parts of the received poem that resonated with me most strongly and let my mind take these thoughts for a walk. I found myself focussed on plate spinning, things imagined, and the passing of time. An idea began to emerge around the comments related to the t-shirt and the fact I had invented a persona that was beautifully fantastical.

Once I have ideas for a poem, I like to swap to typing into a word document so I can chop and change words and lines easily as the poem takes shape. Forming the whole on a clean page helps me think. I used this method to form a solid draft before rereading the poem I had received to find out if I could sense a link. I decided that I could, and that the evolution of a new poem from one read was happening naturally and in that sense, it was good to just go with it. After spending a little more time drafting and editing my work and reading it aloud, I left it alone overnight.

Sue Finch, STUNT GIRL

As there is habitat loss in the world, so my sense of the habitat of my body feels reduced. Fragmented. The points of contact feel diminished. I’m virtual, a ghost floating over place, even as I understand how my body is written on by its environment. That what my body is is a result of its entanglement, its symbiosis with the ubiquitous network of materials and forces it lives in.

I look to language to help me understand. By putting pressure on the language I have access to, I hope to gain insight into how I am entangled in environment. I use language for points of contact with the world, points of interpretation for that contact. Speaking or reading my way into a more aware connection with the world. My habitat is being lost, so I attempt to rebuild it by finding a home in the words that help me relate to it. Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt becomes Umwort. The environment constructed through an organism’s awareness of words.

Gary Barwin, Language as habitat, as ecotone,

According to Lawrence Beaston in Talking To a Silent God: Donne’s Holy Sonnets and The Via Negativa, the Holy Sonnets, which Donne wrote between 1609 and 1610, render a spiritual struggle that many contemporary readers find troubling. For these readers, Beaston asserts, the “note of despair” the poems consistently strike is “out of keeping” with Donne’s position not just as an Anglican priest, but also as the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Given the spiritual leadership Donne was expected to provide, Beaston goes on, these readers expect the Holy Sonnets to arrive at some version of “spiritual health.” Since the poems explicitly do not do that, he argues, since they actively resist such a reading, to find them wanting on this account is to fail read them on their own terms.

Instead, Beaston proposes a reading that places the poems in the “long tradition of Christian mysticism,” known as the via negativa, which “insists upon…the vast difference” between God and humans not as a reason for despair, but as evidence that God “work[s] to effect the salvation of his believers even in their experience of his silence, his apparent absence.” In this view, Donne’s speaker becomes a “penitent individual…beseeching God for some spiritual grace,” despite the fact that he receives “no apparent response;” and God’s silence becomes not an occasion for the speaker’s “despair,” but rather the poet’s way of representing God’s “radical otherness”—the impossibility of rendering God’s presence in words. Read in this context, the homosexual violence the speaker calls down upon himself, metaphorical though it may be, becomes a final, desperate act of abject surrender, offered in full knowledge that God will neither accept nor reject it; and the speaker should be understood as being fine with that, in the sense that God’s response is not his goal. Having arrived at the point where he can surrender himself in this way is.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Power We Pretend Not To See – 4

Cruel, needless death: arms, legs, dismembered
Bodies, all blasted in a heavy cloud of dirt
And blood. The wounded horses we could shoot,
But for the human beings we had nothing.
This was the enemy that we would fight.
We made our camp, and after darkness fell,
By lamplight our commanding officer said
Heads down, my boys, spirits high, you’ve trained for this.
We’re now at war. When you shoot, shoot to kill.
We stood, and grabbed our packs, and marched into the night.

Brad Skow, Prelude to a Storm

The latest title by Montreal-born Olivia Tapiero [performing virtually next week as part of VERSeFest] is Nothing at All (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), translated into English by Kit Schluter, and published with a Foreword by Anne Boyer. Nothing at All is a collection that Boyer describes as “a vital, accruing, distributed process.” “The threat precedes me. The chkoumoune,” Tapiero writes, via Schluter’s translation, mid-way through the collection, “the shour, which my grandmother pronounces zhor when she tells me about the spells the crumpled spirits impose on those women who attract the evil eye. One morning, in a village where the wind drives people mad, her mother wakes her up screaming, forbidding her to look in the mirror: the zhor has disfigured her, her childlike features have drained from the right side of her face.” Nothing at All reads as an expansive lyric gesture of shadow and liquid, relaying story and trauma across an expansive suite of fragments composed via an accumulation of prose poems, prose poem sections, writing of endings and beginnings; writing history and its devastations, accumulations; its ripples, and its waves. Set in sections of self-contained but interconnected prose sections—“Black Hole,” “Now You Say Nothing,” “Letter,” “Here I Am, a Dull Transplant,” “Zhor” and “The Unthinkable Orifice”—Tapiero’s precise, prose abstracts on and around war and memory, family story and upheavals read as echoes of works by the late Etel Adnan (1925-2021) [see my review of her most recent here] or even Canadian expat Nathanaël, asking, precisely, what one inherits through such a history, and one so deeply present.

rob mclennan, Olivia Tapiero, Nothing at All (trans. Kit Schluter

Peter Dent’s Previous consists of five titled short prose poem sequences, each of five numbered sections of three lines of text. The poems are made up primarily of oblique observations of the world in a language that is simultaneously hermetic and transparent, or flickering between those two states. Here’s an example, the fourth part of the opening piece, ‘States of Undress’:

No fraternizing with those at the top who keep mouth-to-
mouth records in high duty alloy files marked LATER.
Think freely. Sleep it off in the comfort of your own bed.

No one sentence necessarily leads to the next, and yet, taken as a whole, they cohere as a series of near-impossible imperatives; ‘think freely’ is as reasonable an instruction as ‘don’t think of an elephant’, for instance. But the overall effect is not unlike, say, a condensed version of 1984.

Billy Mills, Two Peter Dent Pamphlets

My debut collection (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) explores an era of change through the speaker’s relationships with people and the world. The symbolic juxtaposition of light and dark runs through these poems to highlight the contradictory nature of our experiences and subsequent transformations at different stages of life. It suggests that darkness is a necessary, if not temporary, state as we face grief, doubt and despair – one that will eventually give way to hope, freedom and a light that shines through personal growth.

The title poem, I Am Not Light, serves as a thematic hinge as the final piece in the first section of this three-part collection. This poem began as an observation of a pair of curtains that had faded through exposure to sunlight. This image and the first line of the poem sat with me as I ruminated upon the ideas of physical and emotional transformation through loss. The “sun-bleached” curtains became a metaphor to explore aging, memory, and the gradual alterations of identity, ultimately suggesting that fading does not erase value but creates a more complex sense of self.

Drop-in by Louise Machen (Nigel Kent)

Let us turn first to that evergreen truth: the only time poetry ever makes the news is when poets fight. It’s never because someone’s written a great poem, or an unusually terrible poem, or a poem which has upset the authorities enough for them to bite back. (We could try writing something they couldn’t get out of their heads; that would annoy them. Aye, sorry; crazy idea.) No: it’s always ‘poets at war’. You may have noticed a couple of recent news stories involving two journals, Gutter and Aftershock, both of which cancelled work when they later discovered its author or subject held opinions that were offensive to them.

It’s all a great shame. There have been positive signs over the last couple of years that our fractious little community is slowly coming back together after a period of unprecedented and often horrible division. Many of its architects, however, remain in positions of some administrative influence. As peace slowly breaks out, we can expect to see them directing some rearguard action.

It’s almost comical, for those of us old enough to remember how it all started: a good faith attempt to correct for biases in poetry publishing that had obtained for as long as anyone could remember. For countless decades in the UK, these had operated primarily and most egregiously against women; poetry had also shut out the provinces, the working class and ethnic minorities. By the 90s, things had markedly improved. But from the start of the millennium, this project was subsumed by wave after wave of sociocultural, demographic, technological and economic change. These great changes brought with them new political priorities, but also a raft of peer-group rules and incentive schemes which older artists often found impossible to parse. We watched as our well-intentioned project changed from one of redress to progressivism, from remedial balance to ideological correction.

In the case of poetry, this involved the revision of what was meant by literary merit. Some folk began to tell themselves a different story about the value they found in certain poems. Their critical attention shifted from the skillfulness of the poem to the authenticity of its performance; this was a sign that their cultural attention was shifting from the poem to the poet. It led, in the end, to the creation of two different camps, with each reading poetry – and, eventually, defining ‘the poem’ – in very different ways. You could attempt to belong to both, but not without a lot of mental contortion. […]

It takes very little time to alter the meaning of words. They go to wherever their value concentrates. A ‘good poem’ once meant a poem which demonstrated something like ‘the skilful manipulation of symbols within a word-game whose rules were broadly agreed’. Now I’ll often hear folk use it to mean ‘the work of a good poet’; and in ‘good poet’ I know they mean ‘the kind of person I find admirable, or feel I should’.

Don Paterson, Poets are in the News Again

How
is it a flaw to be moved by the world,
to be undone by what was felled

or disfigured, torn from its bed?
May we be tender through the frost
that comes to kill everything,

the scrubbing after the stain that
reddened the walls and toppled
the chairs to the floor.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Winter Garden

When I first began my study of saijiki, I found it difficult to operate within two calendars at once. The classical haiku calendar, which uses the solstices and equinoxes as the midpoints of the seasons, made more sense in relation to my lived experience. However, the Gregorian calendar guides the country in which I live. Sometimes, it is deeply frustrating to see people celebrating “the first day of spring” when spring has been evident for weeks. I get irrationally annoyed that The Old Farmer’s Almanac – an inherently agricultural text! – eschews the preindustrial boundaries of the seasons and adopts the Gregorian seasonal boundaries. However, my exposure to different religious traditions helped me understand that all over the world, people adhere to different calendars. I’ve of course learned about the Jewish liturgical calendar; life in St. Louis has also exposed me to the Catholic liturgical year, as well as the Orthodox Christian year. In my own personal studies, I’ve learned about Hindu and Buddhist calendars as well. Most people with a specific religious or cultural identity navigate their specific calendar along with the Gregorian one. There’s no reason why a haiku poet can’t do that as well. 

Likewise, my understanding of season words and what they mean cannot be limited to my experiences living in the Midwest and the American South my entire life. I have to recognize that my experience of summer will never be the same as the experience of someone living in Iceland. The world is too big to contain any individual’s limited knowledge of seasons. In fact, it’s too big to contain any one saijiki’s attempts to categorize the seasons. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study saijiki. Rather, we have the saijiki as a foundation that guides our experience, but doesn’t dictate it. After all, even the strictest saijiki won’t refuse to let poets write about the moon in the spring. 

As I wrap up this post, I’m reminded of this enduring haiku from Shiki:

for me going
for you staying—
two autumns

This haiku points to the individual experiences of two friends who will spend autumn in different regions. Today, it has me thinking about how there are in fact innumerable autumns (and winters and springs and summers). That is not to say that we should take a purely individualistic approach to the seasons, but rather that we should recognize the incredible variety within collective experience.

Allyson Whipple, Innumerable Autumns

Here’s something I drafted two weeks ago. A seasonal poem with a hint of frustration and a little relief:

Late February

And I’m awaiting
the buzzards’ return.
Each year
they migrate just
two or three months
then reappear
on their snag perches
and on updrafts,
wings outstretched
to embrace
the sky.
I can’t say I miss them
in winter
yet am glad
of their return
which signals
a tiny season
one wedge in winter’s grip
that says
it is just warm enough
for decay’s odors
to reach turkey vultures’
nasal cavities.
Soon there will be
skunk cabbage
and skunks will awaken.
Here, spring commences
with leaf-mold stink
and buzzards.
Reader,
try to be grateful.

Ann E. Michael, Ides, ideas

The Oregon poet Hazel Hall (1886–1924), paralyzed at age 12 following an episode of scarlet fever, left school after the fifth grade to educate herself at home. Like other bright girls in literary history, left to manage themselves in a house full of books (Anne Bradstreet, for example, comes to mind), she read voraciously. It’s no surprise that as such Modernist poets as Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay began their ascendency, in the 1910s and 20s, Hall not only read them but responded to their influence with poems of her own.

In the course of her relatively short life and poetic career, which included three books of poetry — Curtains in 1921, Walkers in 1923, and the posthumous Cry of Time, which her sister compiled and published in 1928 — she gained a reputation as “Oregon’s Emily Dickinson.” Today Hall shares (with William Stafford) the name for the Oregon Book Award for poetry.

Today’s Poem, “Two Sewing,” takes the severity of spring weather as its overt subject, though its real concern is its own music. Its couplet pairs with their tight rhymes create one level of pattern, in tension with a metrical pattern of predominantly tetrameter and trimeter lines. The poem’s sounds become as mesmerizing as those of the wind and rain it describes.

In particular, the repeated “In, in, in” of lines 5 and 22 strikes in much the same register as Tennyson’s “Break, break, break.” Its three monosyllabic stressed feet, set off by commas whose enforced pauses suggest the missing unstressed syllables in those feet, drive home the intensity of the actions of spring wind and rain. But what’s also fascinating in this lyric is the conceit of sewing, which presents the often destructive vagaries of weather in the springtime as actually constructive, engaged in putting the world back together, stitch by stitch, “for all the springs of futurity.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Two Sewing

I didn’t know this, but when news of his death reached London, around this time, in March but of 1821, thirty-four newspapers published announcements of his death. Thirty-four. Most were only brief notices, just a few lines, but typically they described him as “John Keats, the poet” Not a poet but the poet. The poet.

When I first arrived at Keats-Shelley House, and I say this to you in confidence, I felt a presence. I’m not going to get all woo-woo with you and I’m quite sure I brought a certain energy there myself, conjured something in that space having become intimately acquainted with the poet over these last months, I most likely manifested my own projection of him.

Of course there was expectation, stepping inside that house, stepping inside his house, moving through the poet’s rooms, well, you’d want to feel something too wouldn’t you? And just as, if you’re receptive enough, you can feel moved reading a poem or hearing music or witnessing drama in theatre or film, so it was there, elevated from the page, a vibration, an atmosphere, the essence of poetry. Only without words.

That first evening, after they’d closed the museum, when they’d locked all the doors, after the crowds had drifted away from the Piazza, there was the kind of silence you might imagine being or not being heard two hundred years ago. And I felt it, a sense that I’d interrupted something, had intruded, arrived without invite. The coldness of London stirring in the ancient heart of Rome.

“This is my patch pal, my manor, my gaff” the spirit might have said and yet it wasn’t entirely unwelcoming, more it was trying to assert dominion over the territory, not chasing me out simply deciding whether I might be accepted there, to share the air, bunk in his crib, couch in his cell.

I know this feeling well. This, this is what it is like being a writer, what it is like doing the poetry, among snobs and toffs, in the presence of gatekeepers and taste testers, parvenus and pretenders. They will jostle and muscle and budge but they wont throw you out. Neither will they let you in. The best advice I ever received about getting on in this business was, “Just keep reminding them that you’re not going away.” And so, in order to make claim on the space, I undid my laces, removed my boots, walked bare foot across the night tiles, those same clay tiles that have carried centuries of feet and l felt, if not a connection then a stronger closeness to it, to him, to the poet.

Jan Noble, Nº55 Signals sent from the poet’s house

The Island in the Sound (Bloodaxe, 2024) is Niall Campbell’s third full collection, though the first of his that I’ve owned. Campbell is a fairly high profile young-ish/early middle-aged Scottish poet who’s done the sort of things you’d expect for an established poet of his age in the UK: his first collection won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and his second was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Back in 2011, he won an Eric Gregory award, the traditional post-university prize for the up-and-coming UK poet. (You have to be under thirty.) More recently, he took over as editor of Poetry London and his approach to the magazine persuaded me to re-subscribe. […]

I enjoyed the lightly-borne but unapologetic literariness of this collection, with poems referring or alluding to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. S. Graham, Jules Laforgue, William Blake, Borges, Hart Crane, Robert Browning, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare and the Persian poet Farid ud-din Attar. There’s a real sense of a range of experience and reference, reflected in a variety of form that emerges naturally from the “world” of the collection — without that sense that you sometimes get that a poet is making a careful attempt to show us they can do more than one thing.

Naturally I liked some of these poems less than others, and I could have done with a few fewer pieces self-consciously ‘about’ poetry itself. I disliked, for instance, the arch and internet-meme style title ‘Three Folk-tale Characters Who Are Definitely Not Metaphors for the Poem’, but I liked the three poems themselves. They reminded me a bit of similar short sequences of folk-tale-type poems in recent collections I’ve read by Rory Waterman (Come Here to This Gate) and Reagan Upshaw (In the Panhandle), in both cases presented ‘straight’. If a fine poet can’t tell a fairy story, who can? I don’t think there’s any need to add defensive scare-quotes.

I appreciated also the sense of a real range of addressees in Campbell’s book — I think this is a kind of corollary of the range of literary reference. Sometimes a collection contains lots of essentially similar poems dedicated or addressed to a range of people and there doesn’t seem that much connection between the style and form of the poem and the addressee. Here, though, there’s a real sense of speaking in different ways to different people. A moving and understated series of verse epistles, ‘Love Letters from the Tenth Year of Marriage’ run throughout the collection (tantalisingly, numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8, so not, presumably, quite all of the sequence). Written in rather loosely metrical lines, these are some of the most conversational poems in the book.

Victoria Moul, Two good poetry books

The Tattoo Collector – Tim Tim Cheng (Nine Arches Press)

“Your train passes a valley –
Mountains around you
are unnameable muscles.
Your insides
shift like sand
as animals go ashore.”

I’d had this book on my ‘to read’ list for over a year and I’m so glad I finally got it for Christmas. Tim Tim is a poet of real skill and deftness. She plays a lot with erasure and other forms where the poem is found from within another text. This is a great way of dismantling and undercutting received narratives, and has now inspired me to try similar things in my own work. I enjoy the precision of Tim Tim’s work, even where she is working within and across multiple languages – the clarity of thought is always there.

Victoria Spires, Some things I’ve read recently – Part 2

I realized at some point during this convention that it’s 20 years since I attended my first AWP, in Texas. I didn’t know anyone in 2006 and approached AWP less artistically than critically: how are the readings and panels framed, and what literary values do those formats express? How do writers represent their affiliations through their performance styles and self-presentations, scare quotes and square coats? I’d been learning how to look and sound like a literature professor, and my attendance, after all, constituted research (I analyzed the conference, alongside other ways poetry manifests in public, in a 2008 scholarly book, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present).

The 2006 AWP panels, while closely resembling those at scholarly conferences in format, seemed scattershot in quality. The scholar in me was shocked by how little background work some presenters seemed to do preparing for them. AWP panels are better now, yet I attend fewer of them. I’m interested in many of the topics. I’m just running around in my writer hat: connecting with old and new friends over lunch or tea, doing signings and off-site readings, checking out the Book Fair.

In 2026, I can report on only one AWP panel that wasn’t my own. Early on, I lost my hand-written list of what I planned to attend, along with my favorite water bottle, thus ramping myself up quickly to Maximal AWP Disorientation, a condition that eventually takes down many conference-goers. I forgot the time of one panel I’d been determined to make; I got shut out of another, “Poetry and the Sacred” (room at capacity).

The panel I did squeeze into, though, was funny as well as thoughtful. (I couldn’t see if they were wearing thematically appropriate outfits, since the room was full and I sat way in the back.) “Alternative Nation, or Whatever: Gen X Perspectives on the Writing Life” reminded me about the wars, epidemics, economic crises, and toxic prejudices of the late twentieth century AND the mixtapes, miniseries, and problematic literary smashes (Flowers in the Attic, anyone?). Tara Betts talked about reading as a pleasure and a freedom–and how hard that reality can be to translate to her students now. Most presenters addressed the stereotypes of slacker, wiseass nihilist, and the “loser with pointless integrity” (that’s a quote from Matthew Zapruder’s poem “Generation X,” discussed by B. K. Fischer). Paisley Rekdal described the literary culture she entered as a Gen Xer: creative writing workshops, mostly taught and enrolled by white people, characterized literary subjectivity and political engagement as naive, anti-intellectual, and anti-aesthetic (a position espoused VERY strongly in the scholarly world, too, where only the avant-garde among contemporary writers seemed to be breaking into the canon). Rekdal cited Cathy Park Hong’s influential critique of this attitude in “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde”. (I flashed back to the modernism conferences where male Language poets in leather jackets held court in the hotel bar.) Gen X writers, according to Rekdal, went on to break down some of those attitudes and open a lot of doors–but remarked that our generation is also responsible for the current accommodationist ethos in universities. I’d like to hear a whole keynote by Paisley Rekdal one day. As I might have put it in the 80s, she’s wicked smart.

Lesley Wheeler, Square coats: AWP & Shenandoah

everyone has their own private capitalism
like a daughter in their coffee cup.
a hand beneath a pillow. the self without
any lungs. the little hunger that eats the dark.
mine is a gone flavor. something marketed
with shiny teeth & iridescent packages.
mystery flavor the color of cave fish.

Robin Gow, limited edition flavor

Do you ever wake up wondering how to live? I don’t mean in the face of terror and imminent death, as so many around the world are facing in this war torn world, I mean just the daily ordinariness of getting up and getting on with things, whatever those things are. I look around and wonder if there’s something I’m supposed to be doing, something that I don’t know about or have forgotten. And why. I wonder: Is despair a reasonable response to some days’ unfoldings, or is hope the only way to go? Is gratitude just a way of distracting from doing the vacuuming? When is trying to make something happen worth doing and when is it folly? And do you only know when you’ve either succeeded or failed? When is desire just a failure of gratitude and when is it a useful engine for change? And when is effecting change a useful effort and when should you just sit still and breathe for a while? And when have you been breathing and sitting still for too long like a scared rabbit and you should just go make a run for it? These are things I wonder some days. Dysphoria, c’est moi, as a natural state of being, some days. More days than I care to admit to. So, sometimes, poems can provide some momentary stay against all that. I said “momentary.” There’s only so much poetry can do. Here’s a little prayer from Pádraig Ó Tuama, from his book Kitchen Hymns, from Copper Canyon Press.

Marilyn McCabe, When the wren wakes I’ll ask

Li-Young Lee is a strong poet of family – creating throughout his works an atmosphere of home that is vivid and inviting – even when he conjures up the small terrors familial relationships can display. The image of father looms in several of his best poems. In “Eating Together,” Lee focuses on the absence of father, or, more precisely, on the family space the father once occupied.

The poem, which melds the tenderness of family with the ache of loss, begins with the rich smells of a shared meal. I like the attention to detail here: “slivers of ginger, / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.” The “we” of line four gives the family a hallowed moment – this is the clearest descriptive I can write for how I react to these lines – a moment made warm by their gathering around the table for the meal that is surely a good-bye to the dead father.

The physical motions of the mother, probably addressing her own grief, recall the recent past, tasting

“the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago.”

Human action in most of Lee’s works, certainly in this poem, takes on an almost sacred presence. This meal is such a beautiful setting, made even more sharp and direct by the use of few words – and it’s perhaps the brevity, with nothing wasted, that shapes the poem’s impact on the reader – definitely this reader.

In the closing lines, however, the warm scene surrenders to the cold inevitability of loss. Lee finishes the poem with a powerful simile for death: “a snow-covered road / winding through pines.” The loss is real and is felt in the depths of the silent, snowy road – a strong poetic visual that recalls the isolated but compelling winter images by the artist Hiroshige Ando. It’s the final line I can’t escape – a road with no travelers but “lonely for no one.”

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Li-Young Lee, “Eating Together”

Swaddle them in manuscript.
Mold them with the soft indent
of pen, of ink, jet-black as their hair.

Your characters will be their playmates,
your stories their dreams, woven
for them like any toy a mother weaves
from scrap yarn, remnant cloth.

When they taste simile and metaphor
they will be glad to have a literary mother,
glad for the sweet drip of language
over lips and tongue.

Renee Emerson, Literary Mama

There is an idea that more people write poetry than read it. Often, this argument is made by people who edit poetry magazines. Most recently, Sam Leith has made this argument, in response to this Note worrying that the Venn diagram of people who read and who write poetry is a circle.

To a certain extent, this is just the sort of exaggeration one expects on the internet. But it is important to note that the idea is false. According to NEA data, something like 9-12% of American adults read poetry. That is some thirty or forty million people. In the UK last year, over a million books of poetry were sold.

Now, maybe these numbers have changed from earlier times, but do we think they are very much higher than in the past? There is simply no way that these millions of people are sending poems to magazines. That is not what the editors’ anecdotes suggest. They are seeing the multiple submissions, the prolific minority, the enthusiastic “Sunday poets”, but they are not seeing the silent readers, who don’t talk much about their reading, let alone write about it, who don’t go to readings or workshops.

Theirs is an understandable point of view. Beleaguered editors are inundated with submissions from people who do not subscribe to the magazine, but all the people reading Poetry Foundation or Poetry Archive, pulling down an old favourite from the shelf, discovering a new poem as they scroll—they don’t need or want poetry magazines. (Maybe they should, though: Victoria Moul reviews some options if you are interested…)

A lot of poetry magazines, we must be honest, are full of poems that not all poetry readers want to read, either because they will read them in books and anthologies (or online) later on, or because there is never going to be much of an audience for the work. These magazines are part of a winnowing process, in which many readers will not, understandably, wish to take part.

It is reasonable to think that we must have flourishing poetry magazines of the old-fashioned sort, but lots of poets publish online—some of them here on Substack!—and they do just fine.

There are still plenty more readers than writers of poetry, they just may not be reading what the editors wish them to read.

Henry Oliver, Do more people write poetry than read it?

favourite corner
the cat takes ownership 
of the sun

Jim Young [no title]

I woke in the middle of the night with the germ of this poem circling inside my head. I got up and sketched the bare bones in the light of a street lamp.

HOW TO CORRUPT YOUR COUNTRY

• start with the teachers. Make them mouth your new lies. Fashion the curriculum until it mirrors your twisted logic and hate is triumphant
• control the media. This goes without saying. Pass laws that make truth telling illegal.
• silence all who dare to disagree. Show trials can be effective, as can framing the innocent. If this fails fall back on the death squads.
• have neighbour inform on neighbour, brother on sister. Offer incentives to ensure that none will know who they can trust.
• once all this is achieved, begin to purge those closest to you. The corruption you have condoned will provide real evidence.
• try to sleep at night, if you can. 

It is an angry poem. How many times have individuals sought to destroy democracy? Probably since we invented democracies. This is a work in progress. I worry it is too hectoring, far too much tell and not enough show. Plus it is essentially a list poem and it is difficult to pull off a list poem without it sounding simply a list!

Paul Tobin, HOW TO CORRUPT YOUR OWN COUNTRY

I got an MFA in Writing years before I went to rabbinical school. (Thanks, Bennington.) Writing is my other vocation, and a lot of my identity is wrapped up in that. I know that rabbis are exhausted — the last several years have been a Lot. I know not everyone has time or capacity to develop the literary skills I hold dear. And yet hearing that some (many?) of my colleagues turned to AI for sermon help filled me with uncomfortable feelings.

So I sat with that. Why does this bother me so much? Here are the seven answers I’ve landed on. […]

AI is good for large-scale data processing, and for things like searching medical scans or DNA code for markers of disease. AI translation tools can be useful in medical settings, especially rural ones (and especially in conjunction with live human translators who can offer nuance and context.) AI is good for automating repetitive tasks. And some of these things are probably worth AI’s current environmental cost, though I still think we need to figure out how to exact less of a price from the earth.

But writing, painting, poetry, composing…? Not a chance.

Using AI to create art (and in case this needs to be said, I see poetry, sermons, and divrei Torah as art forms) bothers me both because we risk the atrophying of our artistry and because creating art is something human beings can do. An AI can mimic the product of a human heart, but it is fundamentally not the human heart. I fear that something spiritual is lost in us when we outsource our creative capacity in that way.

I wouldn’t ask an AI to help me write my poetry. Or to write a love letter, because what makes a love letter matter is not the information therein but the stumbling, imperfect, human expression of its author’s heart. And that’s also why I wouldn’t ask an AI to write (or even to help me write) a d’var Torah or a sermon.

Rachel Barenblat, The words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart (or: why I refuse AI)

This past week, I managed two nights sleeping on the cold floor of the Pittsburgh Airport. I am a pro at airport sleeping. One flight was at 6 a.m., so it wasn’t worth getting to a hotel. As I settled in for the night, I remembered getting up in the night at the Farm, all the kids who used to wet their beds. I did not because I did not drink any water. The kids who got thirsty would wet the bed because they were lonely and cold. I found myself in that same cold in the airport, sleeping in my clothes with my golden coat draped over me.

Earlier, as I wandered through the airport, I got word that there was a thing about a cover. I needed to talk with an author about a cover change, and the production team was feeling exhausted because they had already tried out so many covers. What to do next! I listened. I registered. I called the authors. I solved the cover. To me, that’s a tiny problem. Yes, we must have a great cover, but of course, we will.

The big problems that keep me up at night, whether I’m on the floor or in a bed, are raising funds to keep publishing poetry, and fundraising in general. I want to keep our poetry program alive. Find new board members. Build the editorial circle. Pay the bills. I want the authors to love their covers as well, but keeping the machine going is the wheel on which I turn and turn.

Kate Gale, The Story of the Summit: Finding My Footing in Risk

I wanted a break from schmoozing and talking to strangers at the writing conference. But that did not happen. He introduced himself as Thomas and I learned that he is a mythology professor at a university in Ohio, so of course he liked my response to the writing prompt from that morning in which I spontaneously took my legs off my body, planted them in the woods, rendering my torso a trunk writhing with cicadas and in wonder of watching my legs grow amongst the trees as the years go by.

The four feet of dark, gray space between my childhood home and the neighbor’s house. The abandoned glass factory near the Allegheny River and its grimy floor covered in ledgers, the handwriting within them almost impossible to decipher. The Allegheny River and its pits of gurgling mud and green riverside oases. The wooded edge of anyone’s backyard, away from the crowd of the party, where I have seen red fox, mice, and of course the birds. The forbidden, dangerous landscape of railroad tracks. The dark tapering world of my childhood home’s closet, well beyond the hanging coats, the sound of people looking for me as they go up the creaking steps above my head. All my life I have been drawn to the lonely, dark, once-was places. Away from the adults. Away from my peers. Knee-deep and stuck in mud. Entering abandoned mine shafts like a reverse birth. Decades-old exhaust grit lining the part in my hair and crunching between my teeth as I walked hunched-over in abandoned turnpike tunnel ventilation shafts. All my life, I’ve felt out-of-place and alien to nearly every person around me, even my closest friends. All my life, I’ve laughed at and belittled myself around them so that I wouldn’t have to explain myself.

Earlier that morning, in front of an audience of just under 100 people, a celebrated poet called writing for one’s self precious. I hadn’t heard that word in a negative connotation since my MFA program about 15 years ago. You don’t want for your writing to be precious. It is precious to say that you only write for yourself when you actually mean that you fear rejection from an audience. Listening to this poet, I allowed my mind to groan and roll its eyes. I am guilty of just writing for myself. It is something I have done nearly all my life. Right? I allowed what he said to steep in my mind as I sat through the morning’s next panel discussion. I thought of an interview I once listened to with the writer Ocean Vuong as the guest. He talked about his books being “sent down the river,” meaning that once the book is out of his hands and in the public, the book takes on a life of its own. A life he cannot control. I thought of my own writing and how when I release it into the river, it just spins in circles and bobs back and forth from shore to shore, always within reach of a long net that I carry in my hands.

Sarah Lada, I Can’t Put My Teeth Together And I’m Seeing Stars

when you say,
Give me silence,
purify my sour heart –

I prepare yellow gills of liminal poison,
brush damp earth from caps
scented of hoar and musk,
slice then grind under mortar and pestle
emetic fungi, season with butter and salt.

[…]

This poem was inspired by the 2017 film Phantom Thread, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis. If you’ve never seen Phantom Thread, it’s a dark and twisted story of a haute couture dressmaker played by Day-Lewis whose structured life is upended by a chance meeting with a waitress played by Vicky Krieps. Her ability to perfectly remember and serve his large and detailed breakfast order intrigues him and is the spark that begins her role as muse, model, and lover. Their relationship gradually turns to the dark side with scenes of fevered outbursts and mutually toxic behavior that flirts with death:

“I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open, with only me to help.”

If this is a love story, it’s one of masochistic obsession that will keep you mesmerized, if you’re in the right mood for it, as it does have long stretches of silence and drawn-out scenes. There are no nude or explicit scenes because none are needed. There’s also lots of gorgeous 1950s fashion and interiors. A good movie to watch on a chilly, stormy day or on a too hot, blindingly sunny summer day. Milder days are for outside living; nature’s breath on your skin and dark thoughts behind cobwebs in your mind.

Charlotte Hamrick, Roots and Rituals

Our apricot trees are blossoming, 
always the first. Next the greengages. 
Then the cherries. In the Alborz mountains 
behind Tehran the cherry trees blossom

around Nowruz, the Persian new year – 
a time of joy, gratitude, and fresh starts, 
of visiting families and celebrating nature. 

Is this where we can begin to find hope, 
in the things that tie us together, not 
drive us apart? Branches of blossom,
the shared miracle of their fragile scent.  

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ordinary Miracles

snowflake melts.
path’s completed.
somewhere darkness flowers.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: yellow plastic whistles, white matter, inhabiting unfamiliar thoughts, eating ice, and much more. Enjoy.

February this year started with a full moon, and it felt good to turn the calendars over to welcome in a new month before taking time to take a stroll under the Snow Moon. Cloud meant I could not see it, but I knew it was up there somewhere and I sent it a gentle howl!

On the last day of January I took a walk before going to the last session of January Writing Hours with Kim Moore and Clare Shaw. It felt good to clear my head in anticipation of the final session and to give a gentle nod to all the hours I had spent in their zoom room with my writing. It was important to me to mark the ending of this particular daily practice and to think what I am taking forward with me. As well as writing poems in my own style (it’s always right in there!) I have enjoyed experimenting with different forms and approaches in response to the poems and prompts provided. I have some lovely drafts to work on over the coming month and that feels wonderfully celebratory as does the recognition that carving out this daily space has given me the chance to write poems that were definitely waiting inside me.

Sue Finch, SNOW MOON AND GRATITUDE

And when I reach
the grounds of the gym the heat of the sun
slanting through the branches of the giant oaks
is raising wisps of steam from the icy ground,

like wishes, like dreams. Small moments
of pause, when we allow ourselves to notice
the ordinary beauty in our lives, are always
welcome, aren’t they? Especially after a few
days of despair at the inhumanity we have all
now seen, the terrible darkness of a man shot 

in a city street, killed for witnessing and caring.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ What we remember (for Alex Pretti)

It’s 5:00 pm, and there’s still pink light making the rising clouds of steam blush in the distance beyond our windows, and turning the glass and steel surfaces into mirrors. We’ve noticed, just this week, that the days really do seem to be getting longer — and what a welcome thing that is. Winter will last two more months up here, but there will be more bright days like this one from now on.

I will gratefully take all the brightness I can find. We are all struggling for words, for focus, for stability. I hope that you can see that our biggest reason for hope is each other. I am so heartened by the steadfastness and courage of the ordinary people of Minnesota, and all those who are speaking out with their words, their feet, their presence. And I hope you can also see that the nefarious forces are afraid of this power. I do think that those closest to the struggle can feel the support of the millions of us who cannot be there in person. So please do hold them in the light of your consciousness, or whatever way you describe this act of intention that we humans do. I wish we had more of a solidarity movement here in Canada, with a symbol like putting a candle in our window after dark, but maybe doing it anyway is a gesture that can help us.

And please do your own creative work, as much as you can. If we are aware of the plight of others, and do what we can to help, it’s an act of resistance to also continue to make things, to allow the creative life force to flow through us. I’ve had a busy week full of dental and eye appointments, a dead car battery, and days that seemed to dissolve without much to show for them. But I’ve drawn a little bit, and reworked the recent oil painting so that I’m more satisfied with it.

Beth Adams, Longer Days

Somehow, the new year seems to be both dragging and chugging along. Both brisk and slow, as January is wont to be sometimes. We’ve had quite a bit of snow and cold in Chicago so far, which feels unduly personal when the digital world feels so jagged and depressing. I am trying to stay focused even when the constant barrage of terrible news is unceasing and overwhelming—working more on poems in the SWINE DAUGHTER series (which you can catch in some #workinprogress snippets on IG) as well as some more edits on the second act of the play, on which I vacillate between its genius and its ordinariness (sometimes all in the same hour.) Of course, perhaps at a time when I most need art to function, it fails me sometimes. It occasionally feels like yet another thing we have to continue to do as the ship goes down (playing the violins and making the beds on a Titanic full of water already. ) I don’t have answers on how to navigate it—the decline and disillusionment we all feel. The drag of it on our limbs. I look for moments of lightness: a few sunny and clear but cold days. A slice of lemon pie. Good coffee. Covers to design and collages to make.

Kristy Bowen, January Paper Boat

Recently, someone commented on a poem of mine, “I wish we could force the president, and these ICE agents, to read poetry every day.” As if maybe, just maybe, if they read poems, they couldn’t keep doing what they’re doing. As if the poems would change them. I thought of the wise words of Richard Blanco, who was the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet for President Barack Obama.

Poems may not change the world directly,
but a poem can change a person
who can change the world.
—Richard Blanco

YES. Poetry changes us. Poetry has certainly changed me. But I approach poems with openness, expecting to be changed. I approach it with gratitude for what I know it has to offer. I approach it as someone who is interested in humanity. It’s hard for me to imagine not being interested in humanity. If I found myself in that dark, narrow space, could poetry reach me there? Can poetry reach the people among us whose hearts have been hardened? I don’t know, but we can try. I’m not ready to give up on us yet.

I’ve also been thinking about something I read in the New Yorker, from the writer Philip Pullman.

Poetry is not a fancy way
of giving you information;
it’s an incantation.
It is actually a magic spell.
It changes things; it changes you.
—Philip Pullman

We’re transformed by our experiences—the people we meet, the things we try, the places we go, and the art we engage with. Poetry can be part of that transformation, if we let it. It’s my hope with every episode of The Slowdown: that a poem might reach someone where they are and work its magic.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

“I’m not smart enough to come up with solutions for how to fight this,” I said to my husband Brian over Bluetooth as I drove home from work. While talking with him, I took stock of my surroundings, how they look now, before the storm would arrive later in the night. The river, mostly covered in ice from the below-zero temperatures, was black mottled with white. “And the people smarter than me,” I said to my husband, “don’t seem to be doing anything besides posting online about how horrible things are.” I feel my voice crack. “And everyone is full of so much hate.”

969 miles away from Minneapolis, I imagined myself as a dot on a map of a huge country. Zooming in on the map in my mind, I became a dot in the lowlands of a precipice, contour lines surrounding me. Zooming in further, I was suddenly a moving dot, meandering along River Road in some small Pennsylvanian town, angry and helpless. Zooming in further, I was a human distraught in the driver’s seat with thoughts volleying between this country is fucking itself and I wonder how the animals are preparing themselves for the storm.

And then,

“Brian, thanks for being who you are.”

And then,

“I might go take a walk in the wetlands this evening, even though it will be getting dark when I get there.”

Sarah Lada, Go Feed the Birds about It

This last couple of weeks have also reminded me of the power of community. In Minnesota, community protests have meant a little boy released from ICE detention, a change of leadership of ICE in town, and even friendly National Guardsmen handing out hot chocolate to cold members of the community. I hope this means that ICE will back down (Trump noticing his poll numbers shrinking, too, no doubt helps), and we’ll have no more horrendous human rights offenses or trying to take away Constitutional rights (freedom of speech and assembly, the right to due process for all on American ground, the right to bear arms, which the GOP is usually quite quick to defend, and birthright citizenship). People are making a lot of noise—and though sometimes it feels like nothing is being accomplished, if enough Americans make enough noise, occasionally we can change things for the better.

In my own life, a gathering of poets reminded me of the small, good things we can do for each other. I noticed that in encouraging each other, there is power—more success that seems to follow meeting together. That has been the case in my own writing life—and at least, things are more fun to celebrate (and commiserate) in a group. And the scary things of life don’t seem quite as scary.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy February! Snow Moons, Unusual Birds, Cancer Scares and Big Birthdays, the Power of Community and More

It’s a chilly full moon Saturday here, so I’ve made a little world of my own for a few: Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda is playing my headphones – it’s long been one of my Saturday albums. And I’m just reviewing recent photos that I’ve made some exploring the ‘Democratic Forest’ style, and others where I’ve really been looking at composition that holds shadow and light. So I thought I’d share another batch of Democratic Forest shots with you. These are a mixture of X100VI and iPhone shots – you use the camera you have to hand, though I do find myself wishing I’d also packed my small Leica, which is so easy to throw in a bag I’d use it over the iPhone, so I’ve used the Leica app on the phone to make the phone shots, so that I get some of that feel.

One thing I’ve sworn to myself with my photography here is to deliberately circumvent my own internal impulse that is endlessly informed by the western gaze. We’ve seen so many photos of India in the last century from that angle, that I realised that it is just too easy to make the ‘Indian’ photograph. My question always is what actually interests the artist I am, and how to let the writing or the photography serve my deeper eye.

John Siddique, Full Moon in The Democratic Forest

That night, as I was feeling alone, I thought of that line, Tell me your despair and I’ll you mine. But my despair is not so great. I live in a house. I publish books. Sometimes it feels like a wild prayer keeps us afloat. I have a life. I can make magic. Life outside the house is a good story. The press is a good story. Finding sleep in February is a good story. It’s imaginary, more a fantasy, but fantasy is a well-loved category these days. 

Kate Gale, Toward the Winged Horse: On the Stories That Lift Us

Whatever normal or paranormal trigger gave me the dream, the commission and its deadline gave me the daydream, what Gaston Bachelard calls reverie: “Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream.” In The Poetics of Reverie he describes it as a space one can inhabit, like a secret hideout, “a phenomenon of solitude” that helps us also to “escape time.” It is a state, he writes; it exists. In reverie I was able to return to an experience that was – ironically, given the mandate of the discount store – rich, multidimensional with fear and comfort, awe and novelty. In my memory it’s always busy, it’s always winter, puddles on the floor from snow tracked in, people visiting, smells of cold air and cigarettes on their coats. As I remember it, we arrive in the morning and leave in the late afternoon as new snow falls and streetlights blink on. Which isn’t, of course, true. Writing on house images in The Poetics of Space, Bachelard notes that “The phenomenology of the daydream can untangle the complex of memory and imagination; it becomes necessarily sensitive to the differentiations of the symbol.” I’m generally wary of nostalgia; but the poem is definitely nostalgic.

Karen Solie, Reverie and Deadlines

I dreamt of my anger:

An animal wrapped up in a bright red shawl.

It looked me straight in the eye as I anticipated its rapid advance.

It was raining. We were in my garden. […]

I celebrate my birthday in winter now. Valentine’s. I was born on a Saturday at noon. It was Carnival.

It snows in January. A boy’s prayer has been finally answered, slowly over time.

And suddenly, it thaws. In between snowing and thawing, our footsteps printed on the path towards and back from the field where we laid down on the cold and soft snow, laughing. Our arms spread out, flapping. We left angels in our trail.

Further along, index finger to the snow, he traces one of his favourite characters from a Nintendo video game.

A few moments earlier, he had spotted Blackbird pecking on a snow-less patch, under the protection of very tall pine trees.

Everywhere else and around was covered in winter white. It was as if Blackbird had its own force field.

Luciana Francis, Chiaroscuro

The Age of Aquarius has long ended,
the music we heard then replaced

today with yellow, plastic whistles
purchased cheaper by the box,

dangled from the neck on string,
worked like ancient talismans

to ward off our daily troubles.
Whistles shrill, like an out-of-tune chorus

from some Shakespeare play
we didn’t get at the time, portending

Fate’s own black hands on our backs.

Maureen Doallas, No One Is Going Ice-Fishing

You would think that with two snow days this week, three actually counting cancelled church on Sunday, I wouldn’t feel desperate for some early morning writing time.  And yet, at 1:30 when I couldn’t fall back asleep, I decided to get up for a bit.  I’ve enjoyed this early morning writing time so much that I didn’t go back to sleep. […]

I turned my attention to a poem I’ve been revising.  I first started writing it on January 15.  I was inspired by Jan Richardson’s poem about wise women also coming to the baby Jesus. […]

This morning, I decided that it was time to actually finish the draft.  I was partly inspired by the end of the month approaching and my intention to end the year with 52 finished drafts.  I was successful, and then I thought about revising another poem–that would mean I am on track for the year, not slightly behind.  

I’ve decided that my intention to finish drafts can extend to rough drafts written before 2026, so I went back to my folder of rough drafts.  I pulled out a rough draft from December, about Noah’s wife looking at Realtor.com and seeing her old house.  I should be able to finish that revision by tomorrow.  I’m waiting to see if some final lines come to me today as my brain works on the ending.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Yearly Intentions Report: The Poem Revision Edition

As a creative, it helps to have clear objectives for your creative work that are not about validating your work through publication of course, but that’s a lot easier to say than do. Writing is a conversation, it needs an audience. This is our evolutionary creative drive – to share experience, to share stories about what it is to be human. It’s hard then to say to oneself, just don’t think about it, let the creativity itself be the reward.

Self belief, and the desire to achieve, will get you so far, but I don’t believe that confidence in the work is the key here. I believe that tenacity is the key: a kind of blind refusal to give up. It’s that, rather than confidence, that will keep you going when the odds are against you. However, the truth is that there might not be a successful outcome at the end. Not everybody’s work fits into a traditional model, and it’s worth considering if the traditional route to publishing is the correct vehicle for your work. There is more than one way to reach an audience and often we only see the one that involves agent-publisher-bookdeal. But let me also remind you that you have reached a place in this particular journey that is hard to get to. Turn around and look behind you, the road to a completed MS and an active submissions plan is littered with writers that have fallen at the wayside, writers that gave up when they got stuck at 30,000 words, writers who let rejection frame how they value their own work. You have already beaten those odds to get to where you are.

I also think that there is something else to consider here. You cannot control how your work is received. You cannot control whether a publisher or an agent says yes or no, or whether they say anything at all. But you can control your own reaction to it. If you can, and it seems like you are already doing it, make the part of the process at which you seek representation less of an end goal, make it just another part of the process. Scale it down, don’t make that one response the thing on which you hang your potential. Get on to the next project while you wait to hear about that one. It defuses the feeling of all eggs being in one basket.

This is what we do. We push on, push forward, we keep writing and refining and reaching out into the dark. We keep throwing our work into the abyss, and we keep the blind faith of our tenacity. One word at a time, one submission at a time.

Wendy Pratt, The awful abyss into which you throw your years of work

I consider myself lucky to have had an immensely talented partner who had a deep passion for poetry.

I have abundant books and poems, videos and photos of readings to always dive into. And my grief tending / legacy building happens incrementally each night, as I am working on compiling an almost 500 page post-humous uncollected works to be published in mid-late 2026 and tag-team editing his Canadian book due out in 2027.

It is a meditation, this experience. Like a sacred ritual, it has carefully shuttled me through the cycle of this first year without him. (I don’t call it a process. The way the word minimizes grief and loss, that it is step-related, chronologically based, that it will “end” is a patently false, limited way to think of it. Much like the word “widow”, it’s a word I really make a concerted effort to avoid.)

So every night, for months, at first, I would sit by the small altar I created and read his work aloud to him by candlelight. Then it became clear, once all the poems were read—all nearly 3,000 of them, hardcopy—it was time to begin grouping them, detecting themes/tropes/patterns and arrange them in some sort of book form.

The love poems were first. Countless bittersweet moments I relived: our first poem exchanges after we met, our first kiss, our intense physical attraction, the unwavering devotion to one another. My heart broke in a million pieces reading each intricate etching to me.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, The nightmare of normal.

I’ve been reading John Rowlands-Pritchard’s glorious Hymns of the Worcester Monastic Antiphoner (circa 1230), with painted inscriptions, and Beowulf in the verse translation by Seamus Heaney, which usefully has the Old English text facing.

Together, these influences have shaped my writing in response to the terrifying world of 2026.

Te Deum laudamus

Only a dictator would demand
only an egomaniac could enjoy
the tedium of tireless praise.

Lord lend us mercy
rescue us from the ravening
world-wounder over the water.

Sanctus sanctus sanctus
the hymn of the heavenly host
hallows a world of wonders.

Ama Bolton, Reading and writing in January

I’m rereading Etel Adnan, her SURGE (2018), as part of an acknowledgment of her centenary. The Poetry Project in New York is running a symposium on her work that begins tomorrow night, “Etel Adnan: In the Rhythms of the World.” As the website for the event offers: “Etel Adnan’s oeuvre did not follow a masterplan; it expanded and shape-shifted ceaselessly. Each book invented its own genre. And yet her tone is unmistakable, combining sharp observation with the associative logic of dreams.” I would have been curious to attend, if such had been possible. “Organized by Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal on the centenary of Etel Adnan’s birth,” the text adds, “this symposium gathers together old friends, confirmed specialists, and younger disciples of Adnan’s. They will offer talks, poetry readings, and musical performances in response to multiple aspects of her literary and visual work.”

I admire the ways in which Adnan’s long sequences extend across books through small moments, as her work explored violence, culture, power and memory. She composed her books across small abstract moments that accumulate in a way that echoes for anyone even faintly familiar with contemporary French writing, but in a way that also reminds me of the work of the late Eastern Townships, Quebec poet and translator D.G. Jones (1929-2016), another poet who stretched out the sequence from accumulated small abstracts, as well as one influenced by French writing. You can see it, whether through his poems, or through his translations of the work of the late Quebec poet Anne Hébert (1916-2000), a writer born a decade earlier than Adnan.

“Etel,” what my phone attempts to autocorrect to “Ethel.” Cellphone, I’m onto you.

A circling of sentences. A simultaneous circling and straightforward line. The silence of a Wednesday evening, reading Etel Adnan in my usual St. Laurent and Innes Road sportsbar corner, an hour-plus awaiting Rose in the first session of her nearby gymnastics class.

The logic of dreams, and of temporality. I first caught Adnan’s work through TIME (2019), as translated from the French by Sarah Riggs, a collection constructed out of six extended lyric sequences, each of which are clearly situated, whether in time or place or both, tethered to the ground so the abstract of her lyric thinking won’t float away completely. Since then, I’ve read at least a half dozen titles, maybe more, still so clearly behind. Not enough to begin to wrap my head around the largesse of her accumulated short lyrics, short sentences. From SURGE:

A radical pain traversed my life from end to end—a large band of light crossed the moon’s hidden face. That kind of motion alters the world.

There is something comparable, to my mind, between the prose poems of Etel Adnan and Rosmarie Waldrop: their use of the prose sentence via the poem, and the potential shared factor of utilizing sentence structures and syntax from their individual mother tongues across English language lyrics.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

At the start of 2025, I had a slightly-used date book from the Field Notes Index quarterly edition (now sold out). I prefer a much larger notebook for keeping track of my schedule, so while I’d made a few halfhearted attempts at using it, I couldn’t get traction. Then I got inspired to use that notebook to help me observe and track the seasons as I experienced them.

The goal was to write down three simple observations about the day, and at the end of the month, type them into a single file. Over time, that computer file would be filled with enough daily entries that I could track my perception of the seasons–especially in relation to climate change–over the long term. I typically recorded the high and low temperatures as a baseline, and whether there was sun, rain, or snow. I also noted whether I observed wildlife or indicated the time of sunrise and sunset. Over time, I tried to pay more attention to the night sky, and occasionally added cultural events and holidays, as those human aspects are a way of tracking the seasons as well. 

While I missed my goal of recording every single day, I still made observations more days than most. In addition, I’ve continued the practice into 2026, and I’m happy to report that I have not yet missed a day in January. The old Index book ran out, so now I’m using one of the notebooks from the Is a River Alive? quarterly edition. I’ve set up a single page for every day, which has usually resulted in me recording more than three observations. More page room means that my mind naturally stays open to finding more to record.

My biggest takeaway from the first year of this project is that a daily walk is vital not just to my phenology practice, but to my writing practice as well. Between last winter’s prolonged cold and last summer’s persistent, record-breaking heat, I walked less in 2025 than I had since . . .  probably 2014. (It doesn’t help that walking is not Maybelle’s favorite activity.) But the days I didn’t walk were the days I was most likely to skip recording anything, and these were days I was most likely to skip writing. I wasn’t expecting that this would be the lesson of the year, but as a result, I’ve tried to get back in the habit of daily walks. (Though this week’s snow storm has really put a damper on that.)

I imagine that in the second year of this project, as I begin to gather build up my observations, I’ll start to have some insights about the seasons in St. Louis. Or maybe I’ll have a different insight altogether. Only time will tell, and I look forward to reporting and reflecting in January 2027.

Allyson Whipple, Personal Phenology

枯草の線沈黙の骨空の耳　対馬康子

karekusa no sen chinmoku no hone sora no mimi

            a line of withered grass
            a bone of silence
            an ear of the sky

                                                Yasuko Tsushima

from Gendai Haiku, #728, January 2026 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (February 2, 2026)

I have met new friends in Sweden and Shropshire in the past year: friends who know about water, and who know about trees. The words on my autumn bowl encapsulate what I’ve learned about my Willow nature, which seeks water, and my need to be around the dependability of Oak. And I have learned to respect in myself the natural rhythms of needing to go underground, to seek rest and stillness, in order to grow again. 

“I fall into earth-life.
Acorn. Willow-seed.
We are the making of ourselves.”

Liz Lefroy, I Paint My Year

This one came back to me as a single phrase: “Troy after Troy after Troy.” If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you know I love repetition, whether it be the anticipated patterns of a received form, or a rhetorical device unique to an individual poem’s argument or emotional arc—anaphora or epistrophe or something looser and organic—or simply a sequence of matching sounds, regular or not, that chime between the lines.

It was this repetition that sent a shiver down my spine the first time I read “Things Seem Strong,” so it was no wonder that that’s what called me back to it this week. What was terrifically surprising was discovering that what was in my memory a pivotal moment actually occurs early on—it’s an exposition, the aria’s opening gesture, and not the thunderclap I carried in my memory, which had become a kind of stand-in or synecdoche for the poem as a whole. Some words and phrases cling to a consciousness like burdock to a cuff. I’m tempted to say it’s just some fascination of the pattern-loving mind, that the scraps that stick are, if not arbitrary, perhaps without much significance, though if you asked a magpie, I imagine you’d find that every shiny treasure in her nest was somehow meaningful to her.

What’s to love about “Things Seem Strong”? Hirshfield is a Zen Buddhist, a translator of Classical Japanese poetry, and these practices carry into her own poems in ways that I find captivating. She is a poet of presence, observation, direct experience, connectedness. What I love in this poem is the way that the poet’s philosophical concerns are born out by its making: how the form enacts habits of mind—until, of course, it doesn’t—and, likewise, the music of its construction regulates tone, until it is subsumed by it.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Things Seem Strong” by Jane Hirshfield

Earlier this week my middle son was surprised and even a bit indignant to discover that the words in English for le compas (which you use to draw a circle in maths) and la boussole (which you use to find which way is north) are the same. But aren’t they at least pronounced differently? he asked, crossly. I don’t use either kind of compass very often these days, though I do have to remember to buy the mathematical type depressingly often as for some reason it is the most frequently lost or broken element of the older boys’ fourniture scolaire — the baroquely complex list of school supplies that French schools send you in mid-summer and which you have to assemble (and label) in time for the new school year. This is a ritual element of French family life, part of the preparation for the grand rentrée at the start of September, and poorer families get a special grant to help with it.

We moved to France in the summer of 2021, when the older children were 6 and 8, so one of my first challenges was taking them to the vast “back-to-school” section of the nearest Monoprix, clutching two very long lists, in both of which I recognised, at best, about 50% of the vocabulary. The boys were already bilingual but only in the sense of chatting to their Dad and reading Tintin: they’d never been to school in France before and they didn’t have any more idea than I did of the difference between pochettes and classeurs, or paper that’s in feuilles simples rather than feuilles doubles, with grands or petits carreaux — though they were naturally very anxious not to turn up at a new school in a new country with all the wrong kit. As a result the whole thing was a bit stressful. Much as I love a good vocabulary challenge, I remember feeling literally dizzy in the aisles — though that might also have been because I was in fact already pregnant with the next one.

Le compas, though, was one word I did recognise, and because I read Jonson pretty much continuously for five years or so in my 20s, I can never think of a compass without remembering that for him it was the perfect emblem of a life well lived:

Stand forth my Object, then, you that have been
Ever at home; yet have all Countries seen:
And like a Compass, keeping one Foot still
Upon your Center, do your Circle fill
Of general Knowledge; watch’d Men, Manners too,
Heard what times past have said, seen what ours do:

These lines are from his epistle to John Selden in Underwoods, and they draw upon a common Renaissance emblem of the compass as an image of labor et constantia — an ethically ideal combination of wide-ranging effort and psychological constancy. Jonson’s verse letters, by the way, are both a triumph and a lasting consolation — I wrote about why I love this aspect of Jonson so much in this piece last year.

Victoria Moul, Love and compasses

A funky used bookstore. A local coffee shop. The living room of a brownstone with people on the floor and homemade biscuits in the next room. A little bar that has jazz musicians ready to start after the poets are done. An art studio. Another small bar with cozy tables and a little stage (that from the outside looks like it’s not even open.) Another bar with neon pinball decorations. A small local theater. A brewery. These are just a few of the places I have read or have attended a reading in the past year.

Like most writers since the pandemic, I have consumed and participated in most of my poetry readings online, but there’s something about a live reading that cannot be replicated online. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the availability and scope that online events provide, the exposure and access to so many writers that would be geographically impossible to achieve otherwise. It’s why I love to curate A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and why I’m a regular listener to many other series.

But a real live reading, even to just a handful of people, creates a different kind of magic. You can see and hear people respond in the audience. You can connect eye to eye with someone while reading and/or listening. You can appreciate the unplanned laughter or appreciation from a reader’s remarks and demeanor. But one of my favorite parts of being a part of live readings is meeting poets/curators I have never met IRL and being exposed to their work.

For example, as an audience member, I recently attended my first Neon Nights reading in Chicago, curated by Benjamin Niespodziany, a celebration of Johannes Goransson’s translation of Aase Berg’s Aase’s Death from Black Ocean featuring Johannes and Black Ocean editor Carrie Olivia Adams (and curator of Poetry & Biscuits), Nathan Hoks, Paul Cunningham, and Hedgie Choi. I had heard Hedgie’s work before and love her book award-winning book Salvage, and I have long admired the work of Johannes and Carrie and have attended and read for Carrie’s series in her lovely home But I hadn’t heard Johannes or Carrie read from their work before, nor was I familiar with the other readers. The evening was full of surprises – Ben’s intros which include fictional erasure bios, Nathan fashioning antlers from sticks onto his glasses in honor of reading from Aase’ Berg’s With Deer, Hedgie turning in a circle each time she ended a poem. Everyone was at ease.

Donna Vorreyer, IRL

Also, I’m suddenly obsessed with –

The Half-Finished Heaven by Tomas Transomer, translated by Robert Bly
Everytime I love a poet in translation, I inevitably hear from someone that I am reading the VERY WORST translation – so if I am, let me know. Actually, I like to read poets in multiple translations and see which one I like best.
Read “The Bookcase” on page 4 (I am sorry I could not lift this from the internet somewhere- but this is a good link!). I have been thinking about this poem for weeks. First off, a prose poem – those I read less often than the lineated variety – but also the breath on the glass… ah it is so good! So please stop reading this and go read that, it is much better than anything I have to say here.

Renee Emerson, Snow Books, Fullmetal Alchemist, Theo of Golden, Time of the Child, & more

“A translation,” I thought as I’d paused on the ski trail to catch my breath and look around, listen around. (No sound. No birdsong, no human sound: no gear shift or metal grind or churn of airplane overhead.) I looked up. A complex skeleton of tree overhead, each limb outlined in thick white. A translation of a tree, those thick white lines underscored by thin lines of black beneath. A white tree version of the damp-black tree beneath, a bit cumbersome, a bit heavy, but beautiful, the two kinds of lines living together. I love side-by-side translations, love to eyeball the disparate marks between the two, to see how the translator handled the line break, the punctuation. Love to examine the original for repeating words or ideographs or glyphs. When they live side by side on a page or set of pages, the original and the translation can reside like limb and snowshade.

I may be flirting with the limits of free use here, but I’ve just had such an enjoyable time poking through Wickerwork, poems by Christian Lehnert, translated by Richard Sieburth, published by Archipelago Books, 2022, and messed around with by me, with help from a certain unmentionable online translation program, and some German-English dictionaries. Again, I realize, given Lehnert’s interest and careful attention to form, rhythm, and rhyme, I am guilty of the treason of translation. Sieburth’s translations are perfectly fine. I mean no disrespect to this lovely volume. It’s just that I poked around and found some little gems in the language that delighted me. So. Here are two more poems from this intriguing collection, and the results of my meddling.

Marilyn McCabe, der Nebelgang

At a recent translation slam, three translators read their remarkably different translations of the same passage of prose in Ukrainian, each explaining their process and choices. All three were faithful to the original. None made anything up. And yet each translation had a distinct sound, rhythm, and feel. Prompted by a question from the audience, one translator likened the practice of translation to a dance. The voice of the text, she explained, is what activates the emotion, energy, and movement of words and sentences in translation, what guides her in delivering the author’s intention and text’s meaning.

The audience of translators, writers, and readers nodded in unison and for me, as a bit of all three plus a social salsa dancer, her analogy had special resonance. It echoed the playful negotiation between rules and artistry, the formal steps and the ways dancing bodies interpret them. Though the translator was speaking about what it feels like to translate, the metaphor applied just as well to the experience of reading translated literature. Reading a story in translation is like being pulled into a dance by a poised, mysterious stranger—the translator—inviting us to follow their lead into an unknown.

When I first moved from the drills of salsa class onto a real dance floor—loud music, no talking, no step-count chants—I could only surrender to the rhythm and attune to my partner’s cues. To enjoy the dance I had to both pay attention and give into abandon. Neither myself nor my partner knew ahead of time how the dance would go, but we were willing to be in it together, trusting that wherever it took us—whether seamless compatibility or, more likely, awkward steps salvaged from a mortifying fall by clumsy grasps at each other’s bodies—it would be an adventure.

Translated literature guides me into inhabiting not only inner worlds of people, places, and cultures I know little or nothing about, but different ways of organizing thoughts and ideas. It makes me experience the words of a language I know—its order, sounds, and textures—in unfamiliar ways I might otherwise overlook when reading the smooth, intuitive syntax of a native speaker.

Bergita Bugarija, The Beautiful Dance of Literary Translation

Today’s Poem by Babette Deutsch (1895–1982), taken from her 1925 second collection, Honey Out of the Rock, feels in some ways like a poem we’ve seen before. Or if not exactly that, it feels of a piece with a kind of poem we’ve come to identify with women poets of the 1920s: brief, imagistic, lyric, and characterized by what Elinor Wylie identified as a “small clean technique.” If we were going to identify a school of women poets of this era, we might well call it the Small Clean School and include in it not only Wylie, but also Sara Teasdale, whose “There Will Be Stars” we’ve recently examined as an exemplar of this minimalist technique.

While these poets don’t absolutely eschew events relayed chronologically, as narrative, (see Teasdale’s “Summer Night, Riverside” and “A Winter Bluejay,” for example), their defining concern is with the isolation of a particular moment, suspended outside time — though even that suspension may be transient or illusory. The context of Wylie’s “A Crowded Trolley Car” is, as the title suggests, a trolley, moving from stop to stop in a linear progression. Yet once the clanging bell and the swaying of the car are dispensed with, that movement never again intrudes on the view of hands clutching the rail and the omniscient speaker’s meditation on what those hands reveal. Time stills; its movements are of no concern. What matters is the image of each hand and the associations that unfold from it.

Deutsch’s own technique shares both Wylie’s predilection for imagistic miniatures and Teasdale’s intimations of rapture. But where Teasdale’s joys verge on pain, Deutsch’s literary persona — as we’ve previously seen in her 1919 poem, “Silence” — seems, to a great extent, genuinely and generatively open to happiness. It’s easy to think of happiness as inimical to art, or even to interest: “Happy families are all alike,” and so forth. It’s easy to think of the definitive bitterness of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, as well as the veiled despair of Sara Teasdale, and to forget that some women of the same generation were relatively happy in love, did not live their lives continually on a precipice, and declined to nurse a continual state of regret as energy source and fodder for art. And those women — Janet Loxley Lewis and Genevieve Taggard, for example, as well as Babette Deutsch — made good art.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Ballet School

Greetings Dr. Vaishnavi Pusapati. Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. Let’s start with your background. Where did you grow up in India? What was the landscape like? What kind of wildlife did you see there? What was one of your favorite experiences in Nature as a child?

Thank you so much for having me. I have been reading the Haiku Poet interviews for a long while now and it has introduced me to many poets I admire in the haiku community.

I grew up in many states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, among others, sometimes changing cities within the same state. I currently reside in Bangalore in Karnataka state. The landscapes I grew up in were like sand dunes, always changing, and I witnessed the uniform loss of nature in the face of fast urbanization.

The first two places I grew up in were beach towns, and there is a certain awareness of nature in that. Hokusai’s paintings of the wave must have come from a reverence of a natural place when residence changes to resonance and belonging. I believe the rhythm of the wave was internalized for me, then.

The wildlife was flame of the forest, coconut groves and Ashoka trees, bougainvillea, poison ivy, bee hives, barnacles on oars, woodpeckers, ant hills, mushrooms, shallow ponds, old wells with tadpoles and lily pads, scurrying squirrels, wasp nests, occasional monkeys, weaver birds, parrots, butterflies, abandoned pets, migratory birds, a lot of pigeons, and a few sparrows.

Then, when we moved to the northern arid areas, it was sad to see the occasional tree, the dry wells, and thinning rivers. I saw the concrete and glass buildings begin to take over the silhouette of old sleeping cities, the slow stripping away of individualism of a place, and the sprouting of matchbox apartments.  

My favorite adventure into nature was to the mountains in Ooty where I touched a cloud for the first time and watched it dissipate and saw my first waterfall. […]

When and how did you discover haiku and Japanese poetry forms?

When I started writing poetry seriously, I was searching for a form that resonates with my minimalism and the themes I find myself most comfortable with. Then, I chanced upon online haiku journals. My initial haiku were no good, without that haiku moment or the technique, but it was a fun way to write, much like having a conversation with nature. The draw was perhaps the scale of the ambition, intentional refrain, and the insistence on not having a title or rhyme but rather aiming for musicality. It was radical and non-anthropocentric, an antithesis to everything I believed poetry to be. Reading contemporary haiku really helped me advance. I did not expect to write more than a few, alongside my longer forms, but I have found a routine of attempting to write haiku frequently. The haiku sequence form, or linked haiku, is an enticing hook, too. The other Japanese forms came much later and although I read them, haiku remains ideal in my poetic approach.

Jacob D. Salzer, Vaishnavi Pusapati

Addiction is not romanticised, the addict knows she’s abusing herself and it’s not a solution even if it brings temporary relief. However, it is also buying her time to fix and work on herself. The first step there is to accept that the speaker now has to become the parent she wanted as a girl and parent herself into an adulthood where she gives herself the permission to feel and emote which she should have had as a child.

[Bonnie] Tobias uses plain, pared back, stripped down language to reflect the place she had to start from. A minimal place free of distractions where no euphemistic phrases were allowed to gloss over the problems that were being avoided. A place where emotions can be expressed and acknowledged instead of buried. A place of safety but not dishonesty. At its heart that’s what “about this” focuses on. How emotionally neglected children have to adjust to adulthood without the confident and support from parents. Its plain speaking may lack poeticisms, but it underlines authenticity and emotional honesty.

Emma Lee, “about this” Bonnie Tobias (Warren Publishing) – book review

I like the mandala of everything in a poem, the leaching in, the leaking on, the letting out, the marginalia, the parts that don’t fit, the honouring of non-story, of no-conclusion, of clustering bits, of oblique, of pointing at wonder and neutrality and grief in everything.

If no pattern, why gather, why present it? 

But there’s white matter connecting under. It is not as obvious as a true or false sonnet or multiple choice haiku, or an isolate mood or depiction of diorama of traipsing a crying figure along a seashore.

It is open to inference instead of deduction. invitation to look together instead of echo each other. 

It’s another kind of reportage, reflection, assembly of things that hang together and matter in a similar inclusive ample way.

What draws suspense through a poem’s frame?

Pearl Pirie, Further

The poem must do more than complete or fulfill: it must defy the given order that makes us feel comfortable. Or secure.

More than anything, we want to feel safe, and secure in that feeling.

Our sense of security warms its feet by a fire that thinks it knows what needs to be known. Warmed by prediction and the coziness of predictability, we reify contingent things as if they are known and graspable. But what exists is always in dialogue with what may be otherwise. Poetry knows this better than prose, I think.

To quote Dean [Young] again:

To be only comprehensible is to be fully known is to be already seen, predictable. The next poem must shake us, must wake us, must entice us toward the denied, the disallowed. It is what wasn’t. Someone had erased a YES out of the charcoal Nos. The new is always scrawled over the old. Anything fully known offers us no site of entry, no site of escape, no site of desire. In the morning we mistook the roofers on the hill for flames. Desecration is the mix of opposites, that field of contact, the tear that draws us. […] Some of them chased each other, some of them fell to the ground. Coyote vanished into the smoke. The clash of the seen with the unseen, the broken seam, the unmasked with the masking that amazes us, sticky-out red thing, outrages and liberates us, embodies possibility.

This possibility inheres in each word. Increasingly, the word “content” appears as noun that designates slop or world-salad spliced by the energy of bots. I miss the gist of light happiness of in it, miss the absence of contentedness as a cultural frame of reference, miss the slower pace of time prior to the hustle-economy.

And I was made even more of this missing in Washington DC last week, with only a few hours to spend exploring the National Gallery of Art, trying to find a place to squat and scribble notes in my notebook.

 “I think one could spend one’s life having this desire to be in and outside at the same time,” said Willem de Kooning, “content as a glimpse.”

Content as a glimpse— yes. This is the content I dearly miss.

The idea must be unfixed from its iconostasis. One must unhinge it a bit.

Alina Stefanescu, “To comprehend is to complicate.

木蓮の
落ちくだけあり
寂光土
（川端茅舍）

Petals falling all at once
—Magnolia flowers
Reborn in the Pure Land

—Kawabata Bōsha (川端茅舍, 1897–1941)

木蓮の Magnolia flowers
落ちくだけあり petals falling apart completely
寂光土 the land of Quiescent Light
Mokuren no / ochi-kudake ari / jakkō-do

It’s hard to capture in English what this poem conveys about magnolia petals falling. Unlike sakura blossoms, for example, that scatter on the wind like snowflakes—sometimes floating away in great clouds—magnolia petals fall heavily and directly, “falling” not “scattering,” more like peonies. Their descent feels deliberate and weighty. You could almost hear them land. Thud.

What is so brilliant about this poem is how it evokes the seeming willfulness of their descent. As if the flower had undergone spiritual training like a Buddhist anchorite walling himself up to await death with perfect resolution. Climbing up a tree or tower to pray. Or sitting in meditation like Daruma until his legs and arms and eyelids fell off—an admirable commitment to self-cultivation.

My writing mentor says, “the writer is the last person standing.” Perseverance and resolution are everything.

Magnolias, ancient like conifers and waterlilies, must be tenacious indeed, since they’ve been around since Tyrannosaurus was traipsing around in forests filled with ferns.

In Tendai Buddhism, jakkōdo (寂光土) refers to the “Pure Land of Still and Radiant Light,” the highest paradise where Buddhas reside. I love how this poem entangles human emotions with flowers—As the Nirvana Sutra teaches, all beings have a Buddha nature. In just seventeen syllables, you feel the flowers striking out on their path toward becoming a Buddha.

Leanne Ogasawara, Magnolia flowers

It follows us like a shadow, dragging its roots along—this garden.

It’s there behind us in the coffee line, at our workstation,

beside us when we’re looking in the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing our appearance.

In bed at 3 AM, it hogs the covers.

Rich Ferguson, The Garden That Follows

when others were in bed,
i would go to chew ice in the kitchen.
groaning mechanism. bowls & bowls.
all kinds of feast. no one ever caught me.
i learned to take only what will
not be missed. the ice maker, refilling
before anyone else was awake. water coming
& going. the rain on the roof. barefoot july
eating a hole through the wall. now, i still
keep a mouthful of the cold. bite down
harder. years of practice. they think
i am scared of creatures that eat our flesh
but i eat bone. i devour the cold.

Robin Gow, ice maker

The other day, we noticed a coyote limping down the meadow. We hear them now and then, at night, but we seldom see them; and this one was out at noontime. A bit unusual. I felt concerned about it as it moved off into the undergrowth at the field’s edge.

Out of curiosity, I guess, the next day I traced its tracks from the treeline between our property and the next one, down through our meadow, into the woods beyond our lot. […]

The average cat weighs 10-12 pounds, the average red fox 30-ish pounds, and eastern coyotes in our region can be 45-55 pounds. This one was, I think, a male because it left quite heavy tracks, though possibly it was putting more weight on three legs because the front right paw was injured badly enough it never set that paw down. I recall once when our family dog got caught in a neighbor’s “soft-paw” fox trap. As soon as I got her loose, she ran for the house, and I noticed her prints in the snow–three heavy prints and a lighter one since she was favoring one foot. This coyote wasn’t using its leg at all. In a few places I could see a swash on the snow surface where the snow was deep enough that the coyote’s foot had skimmed it. The circuit led into the woods and I pressed no further.

That’s about the extent of my animal-tracking knowledge. It was, however, an interesting departure from my usual winter walk, and a nice day for walking. Everyone else in the county was out buying gasoline and groceries because a big storm was in the forecast for the weekend. Which did arrive (the storm, I mean. Well, also the weekend.).

I’ve been working on new poem drafts lately, after weeks of barely any new writing, focusing on revision instead. What do you bet that coyote, or its tracks, or at very least, the snow, will show up in at least one new draft?

Ann E. Michael, Tracks

Heaps of snow on the chaise longues 
are body shaped. Aha! There lie the outsiders
who live outside. Others, unwanteds, the ones 
they now see, are said to be among us. 
If only we knew who the “we” is.  

If only shadows didn’t seem doomed. 
The drip-drip of the faucet, shoe-sized. 

They can’t even let the full moon off the hook.

Jill Pearlman, UltraViolet Night

We try to gather our

courage into kindling:
speaking and naming,
watching and witnessing.
We know we can hold

silence and words in
the same hand, that knees
can sing on the hard
streets packed

with snow. The child
sleeps with his mouth open.
Look at that kind of trust
his body still has.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Child Sleeps

This week: falling snow, a broken country, walking on an icy sidewalk, the space in which to take a small breath, and much more. Enjoy.

free fall and crystalline

intricate machines of vanished moments

the outside of silence

Grant Hackett, snow

Something is scratching in the walls and I imagine it’s the stucco itself, chilly and damp out there in the dark morning, seeking to ease inside for a bit of warmth. “Is a River Alive?” asks Robert Macfarlane in his recent book, and I have long wondered the same of rocks. I have a nodding acquaintance with many. Well, I’m doing the nodding, anyway. At least in the quick time frame of human life.

An animate world is the kind I want to live in, so I make assumptions that anima is everywhere. “Sorry,” I say to the throw rug whose corner I flipped up with careless footing. I feel a little bad it has to stare up at that water stain in the ceiling I can’t get around to painting over. But the stain looks like a feather. So that’s nice.

It is an old tradition, to see the world this way. I am reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Simpson is a member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario, Canada, and is a scholar of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, the indigenous people of southern Ontario. This book is an imaginative and strange telling of tales in which characters are at once human and other-animate — a tree, for example, that pushes its shopping cart around Toronto; a caribou spirit who wears a backpack it found on the street. One section is voiced by the geese preparing for departure, trying not to feel judgey about the ones choosing to stay behind (in the changing climate that allows such choice now). Two sections are the voice of a frozen body of water, Mashkawaji, which in Ojibwe means “is frozen.”

Marilyn McCabe, the methodology of giving up

“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” asked the Proust Questionnaire. “Living in fear,” answered David Bowie.

The most menacing word of the three is the smallest, for fear really is something we live inside, not with — a cage, a tomb, a small dark room that comes to eclipse the world as the hand quivers outside the pocket in which the key is kept. The best key I know to the prison of fear is curiosity, and the most generous form of curiosity I know is poetry.

An inquiry, an invocation, an invitation, poetry opens a side door to consciousness, bypassing our habitual barricades of thought and feeling, allowing us to enter into the unknowns of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, into the desolate haunts of our own interior that words have not yet reached. Poetry is a kind of prayer: for presence, for understanding, for seeing the world more closely in order to cherish it more deeply. To name, to understand, to dignify and hold — these are the gifts of poetry, and these too are the antidotes to just about every form of fear.

In Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (public library), poet extraordinaire and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith offers what is essentially a field guide to loving life more, anchored in the recognition that “the opposite of love is not hatred or rancor but fear” and in a passionate insistence on “how important is it — how critical — to understand there is and has always been, for each of us, a wilderness within.”

Maria Popova, A Spell Against Fear: Tracy K. Smith on Poetry and The Art of Productive Impatience

I keep thinking about this phrase for a poem, the next worse thing, because that’s what it can feel like living in America today: waiting for the next worse thing to come, bracing before it even arrives. I don’t think this is good for us.

Which is why I deleted all my social apps from my phone last night. I never know what video will pop up, what headline will slap me in the face, what will send my brain into high-alert. The strange part is that I’m supposed to be promoting my upcoming book right now, and social media is “where you do that,” but for a bit—I’m choosing something else. I’m choosing to protect my mind. I’m choosing the forest, the page. I’m choosing this little corner of the internet and decaf coffee. […]

It’s unfortunately funny that my first Copper Canyon book came out during a global pandemic and now my second is coming out during the fall of democracy, so clearly I have a gift for impeccable timing. If Copper Canyon publishes a third book of mine, please check on your neighbors and stock up on beans.

Kelli Russell Agodon, How To Live in a Broken Country

It feels like a strange time to be talking about a new book of poems. I’m heartsick. I’m angry. But in harrowing times, I also think we could use more poetry and more time in community. I’m craving both right now, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to visit a handful of cities this spring with A Suit or a Suitcase.

It’s always surprising and moving when we can get into a room together, isn’t it? We leave those rooms a little different than when we entered them.

My last collection, Goldenrod, came out in 2021 (how was that five years ago?!), and the tour was virtual because of the pandemic. So this will be extra special, because it’s my first in-person poetry book tour. I’m sharing my schedule with For Dear Life subscribers before I share it on social media or my website, so you’re seeing this first. Thank you so much for your continued support of me and my work. It means more than I can say.

Maggie Smith, Book Tour Announcement

“People escape into other things; you don’t escape into poetry. You confront yourself when you are reading poems…” ~Mark Strand

I’m overwhelmed. Everyone I talk to is overwhelmed. There are so many crises happening simultaneously that it’s hard to keep paddling the little rowboats of our own lives through the ongoing cataclysms.

Anyone who has studied history surely wondered what it would be like to be alive during the fall of the Roman Empire or what they’d have done during the Nazi reign of terror. We may be finding out.

We live in a society that upholds profit as a de facto god. Bombs are dropped to enrich military contractors, schools are twisted to serve corporate test-makers, and the Supreme Court has given corporations the right to secret political spending–offering them vast influence over elections, laws, and federal policy. The average person is squeezed on all sides as billionaires grow every more wealthy while our (billionaire-owned) media fosters divisions between us.

Infuriating is not a strong enough word. I don’t think there is a term yet coined that sufficiently expresses how we feel let alone helps make sense of our anger. That’s where poetry comes in in all its beautiful, inspiring rage. Here are a few examples, with gratitude to the poets.

Laura Grace Weldon, Furious Poems For Infuriating Times

The sky above:

a park filled with cloud benches, breeze swing sets, songbirds echoing playground’s blue dazzle.

The world below:

ash and collapse, shootings and protests, the autopsy of so many regrets.

When violence comes to a neighborhood near you, it helps to recognize the world beyond its horrors and sorrows—

dogs walking their owners; neighbors saying hello; children biking by, untouched by bullets’ bloodied fists.

Once the smoke has cleared and all the mourners have left the church,

let’s meet in the sky park’s most dazzling blue.

Somewhere there’s a cloud bench with your name on it.

Rich Ferguson, The Sky Park

In the golden space between house and tree —now magenta, now indigo— in that space of fiery fervent sky, I swim, lost in the bleeding striations of sunset.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Once More to the Attic (reprise)

I’m rarely in a food court because I’m rarely in a mall, however, when somehow I find myself there, I find it strangely comforting and a productive place to write. I feel enveloped by a coherent context but also feel like a still point, a hole in the context, surrounded.

Mark Strand writes:

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.

I don’t feel that “I am what I missing,” but I instead like I’m wearing the context like a blanket around me. And amidst all this quotidian businessing, writing seems unbounded. It’s not that I feel better than or more serious or thoughtful than the denizens of the foodcourt or the “filthy lucre” of the mall and its capitalism—after all, whatever issues I have with the system, the people are just people having lives. We’re almost always inside of this larger system, despite what we might think about it. That is, in many, ways how such all-encompassing economic, epistemic systems work.

But I like the feeling of kindling a small flame in its middle. Writing what is only marginally saleable, what exists outside of the system. And I feel fellow-feeling with the people in the food court, eating, chatting, being humans.

Gary Barwin, Utopia or neartopia or bettertopia: a then-and-there literature

I hear God in the breath
sounding a 3D-printed whistle
alerting neighbors to stay home.

I see God in all who comfort
every frantic family,
every grieving widow.

But “Come to Pharaoh” tells me
there is no place
where God is not –

even where corruption festers.
I’m not generous enough
to see God there.

Rachel Barenblat, Come

Yesterday, January 19, was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Dr. King, whose was born on January 15, 1929, would have been 97 years old.

Twelve years ago, in 2014, celebration of the holiday and Dr. King’s real birth date fell on the same day, and in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, Greenwell Springs Road Regional Library invited teenagers to use found poetry as a way to “engage with” Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which he had delivered at the “March on Washington” in 1963. The idea, as explained to the youths, was to try composing a poem using words from a transcript of the speech.

I took up the challenge myself and wrote the poem that appears below.
[…]

for one hundred years
hope was tranquilizing

despair a mountain
of solid stone in hands
crippled by manacles

but we emerge now
not drinking from a cup
of hatred, of violence,

of bitterness, not jangling
chains of distrust
but able to sing here, today

our protests in community
battered, suffering, we will
not turn back, cannot walk

alone but demand to work
together, pray together
struggle together as one

Maureen Doallas, one nation

Focusing on my own work hasn’t been so easy lately, as I’m sure is the case for many of you. At such times I turn to certain things that help me: meditation, exercise, repetitive and absorbing activities like knitting, drawing, playing the piano, and reading — especially poetry. I want to try to share some peacefulness here in the days and weeks ahead, but not peacefulness devoid of meaning or significance for the moment in which we find ourselves.

Today I took down from my shelves a volume titled Postwar Polish Poetry, selected and edited by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1982. The work of 20th century Russian and, especially, Polish poets has always spoken to me. These are poets who have seen the worst; they write with irony and sometimes black humor, but they have not lost faith in humanity or its basic values, or in what is noble or beautiful in the world and in each life. 

Beth Adams, Two Polish poems, and a sunflower

I planned to get my third novel started this January, and I have. I wasn’t far in, though, before my brain started playing hooky. Psst, Lesley, I have a poem idea for you. Poetry always seems to prefer a sidewise approach, when I’m looking the other way. There’s nothing to do but obey.

Arthur Sze’s 2025 collection Into the Hush, however, is also to blame for any bloom of inspiration. These days I often feel struck silent by horror. What can I possibly say about ICE abductions and cities under assault by their own government that others aren’t saying more powerfully? Hey, um, most of us are glad for Greenlanders’ sake that they’re NOT part of the US? So I found myself all the more impressed by how Sze, in the face of so much nightmare, bears poetic witness. These meditative poems brim with wondrous gestures and small creatures closely observed, including spiders crawling across laptops and sipping from taps. In the opening poem “Anvil,” though, butterflies and apple trees share space with the names of vanishing languages, reports of human violence, and how “a matsutake emerges from out of the rubble of Hiroshima.” Somehow these juxtapositions carry argument without becoming argument. Understanding the technique inspires me to try the same.

Lesley Wheeler, Arthur Sze’s mushrooms

Full disclosure: I am typing this under a blanket next to a box of tissues and a very hot cup of tea, fighting the urge to take a nap. A nasty cold/cough (thankfully not COVID) has me down for the count the past couple of days, and I woke up this morning thinking about how, when I was teaching, I would push through this type of illness to avoid the hassle of wondering if I’d get a decent sub or the worry of not having left lesson plans ahead of time. (This is common for LOTS of jobs, but particulary for teachers.) Being retired now, the only battle I fight when I don’t feel well is the urge to berate myself if I don’t workout or do anything productive. (Like this morning, when I actually got on the stationary bike for thirty minutes until my body said “bad idea” and pushed back by making me woozy. I decided to listen. Thus the blanket and tea.)

I guess you could say I’m still trying to be productive by writing this post. You wouldn’t be wrong. However, I am getting better at passive productivity. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but hear me out.

With regards to reading…During lockdown, I struggled to focus on reading, and I started listening to audiobooks on my walks or while cleaning the house or gardening. A passive and yet enjoyable way to complete books while doing something else, an efficient way to consume the latest suspense thriller or bestseller. I save my physical reading for poetry and for books I imagine I’ll want to savor, study the language, stretch out the story, hear the characters the way I want to hear them instead of interpreted by an actor. Of course, I don’t always know this ahead of time, so if I really love the language of an audiobook, I’ll often stop listening and check the book out of the library to finish it.

It’s the same with writing lately. Instead of pushing myself to draft new work daily (as with the Stafford Challenge) or on any kind of schedule, I’ve adopted more passive strategies for approaching the page. One way is by reading through older, unpublished poems and looking for salvageable or interesting pieces that slipped through the cracks. This way, I’m not starting from scratch, and the productivity comes in small, manageable pieces of revision time. Another way is to use my reading time to generate writing exercises, like the grammar imitation I wrote about in the last post. These usually leave me with strange and interesting blocks of language that might become fodder for a successful poem later. Another way is to actually submit work that is lounging around in my computer looking for a home. This makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something writing-related without any writing actually being done.

Donna Vorreyer, Slowing My Roll

This week, a poem I wrote for a dear friend was published by a new journal that I admire! I’m so glad to have “Love Poem with Tumor: A Translabyrinthine Approach to a Large Cystic Vestibular Schwannoma” in Issue 5 of Asterales.

Katie Manning, “Love Poem with Tumor” in Asterales

James Reeves published A Short History of English Poetry in 1961, and boy is it fun to read, if you like nastiness, especially that unique nastiness about poetry that only a practicing poet can muster. In today’s academic literary criticism, filling the pristine pages of selective journals, interpretation is the aim, and that aim takes lexical priority over evaluation—if, indeed, any evaluation is offered at all. For Reeves, it’s the delicious opposite. He tells us what’s bad and he tells us what’s good, and rarely bothers with what the poems mean.

Fast forward to chapter 10. The discussion of Romanticism starts off with a bang, a rare moment of adulation: William Blake

was a poet of the purest inspiration, at once a man and a visionary. There is about his best lyrics a rightness of tone and feeling, an inevitability of rhythm and language which give them a kind of authenticity, even authority, that we accept without question.

This judgment itself, we are to accept without question. Indeed the whole book is a display of what you can get away with, if you are free to assert and not defend.

Reeves isn’t done with Blake’s importance:

There are times in the history of society when accepted ideas and forms have become rigid and stale, and when the only possibility of new growth lies in the capacity of gifted individuals to renew the contact between the human mind and the primary sources of experience.

Rigid and stale, that’s surely right, but come on, does the human mind ever lose contact with the primary sources of experience? Aren’t those sources impinging on all of us at every moment, yea even on me right now, as I type away?

Wordsworth and Coleridge also come in for praise, but fainter praise—Reeves admits that they “transformed English poetry”; and Coleridge, we are told, “was at no time a great technical innovator, but he had a superb ear.” Nothing like the praise reserved for Blake. It’s much the same with Shelley and Keats.

And it’s at this point that the awesome negativity comes full to the fore. Regarding Byron,

It is doubtful if even his most fervent admirer today would accord him a fraction of the praise lavished on him during the last ten years of his short life.

His poetry is

the sort of intoxicating stuff which easily persuades immature or undiscriminating minds that they are enjoying fine poetry.

O ye undiscriminating minds!

Brad Skow, Tell Me What You Really Think

Berryman has been ‘in the air’ on substack recently. A week or so ago I was in the middle of composing a note asking whether anyone still read him when I saw one from Paul Franz saying that the summer issue of Literary Imagination will carry a review of the new edition of Berryman’s unpublished Dream Songs. And now Robert Potts, who has learnt all of the original 77 Dream Songs by heart, is kicking off a series of readings of them which looks like it will be fantastic — definitely worth a follow: https://robertpotts.substack.com/p/dream-awhile […]

There was a period of a few months at the beginning of 2007, a rather miserable time for me personally, when I was clearly reading Berryman and Robert Duncan quite intensively. I know for sure that I encountered Duncan for the first time around this time in Michael Schmidt’s superlative Harvill Book of Twentieth Century Poetry in English — still for my money the best such anthology there is, in which neither “side” is an afterthought. In the autumn of 2006 I had moved from Cambridge to Oxford to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College and I bought it in the long-lamented Oxford branch of Borders. This was the first time, I think, that I read systematically in modern American poetry and I learnt a great deal from this anthology about how American poets and poetic trends fitted in with, or differed from, what was happening in Britain.

Enthused by the brief section on Duncan, I remember looking for more and being delighted to find that Borders also had a copy of the Selected Poems, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and published by New Directions, which remains an excellent introduction to his work. Borders used to be surprisingly good for poetry and one of the few places in the UK where you could reliably find US poetry collections. (As Jem’s recent piece on Matthew Buckley Smith points out, this is still quite difficult — perhaps in fact more so than it was twenty years ago.) Indeed, it took me years and a lot of trans-Atlantic shipping fees to complete my collection of Duncan’s poetry, because all the other books were only available in America. Or as Berryman in England put it:

These men don’t know our poets.
I’m asked to read; I read Wallace Stevens & Hart Crane
in Sidney Sussex & Cat’s.
The worthy young gentlemen are baffled. I explain,

but the idiom is too much for them.

This fragment comes from a poem called ‘Friendless’, part of a pretty straightforwardly autobiographical sequence — almost a memoir in verse — which was published in his 1971 collection Love & Fame. Berryman was in Cambridge in the late 30s, just before the start of the Second World War, so these poems are recalling events from more than 30 years before, with such local detail and precision that I suspect that he, too, was relying on diary entries.

Victoria Moul, Gift us with long cloaks & adrenaline: on reading and its consolations

Sunday was Burns Day — January 25, the birthday of Robert Burns (1759–1796) — and we shouldn’t let it slip away without a gesture toward the Scottish poet. As we noted when we looked at “To a Mouse,” Burns’s rise to fame came in part from the advantage of coming early: a proto-Romantic to whom the Romantics would turn, a genial promoter of Scotland whose work would seem nation-defining to later Scottish nationalists, a poet who could write in English with a light Scots dialect that would endear him to the English-monoglot descendants of Scots scattered around the world.

What’s more, his poetry showed a genius, unmatched till Kipling’s prose, for using unfamiliar words (Scots, in Burns’s case; typically Hindi, in Kipling’s) and not defining them — but giving just enough surrounding information that the reader can more or less triangulate the meaning.

In his explicitly Scottish verse, Burns would take an existing anonymous song and work his magic on it to smooth it out and make it sparkle — and with the added benefit of his fame, his printed works distributed across the Anglosphere, the result would become what later generations took as the standard version. “Auld Lang Syne,” for example. “John Barleycorn.” And Today’s Poem, “Comin thro’ the Rye.”

There’s some suggestion that early versions were bawdier, and there are later versions in which the sex between Jenny and her swain — or multiple swains, one each time she passes through the rye — is spelled out. Burns’s own version is milder, but even that is often Bowdlerized: erasing the draggled petticoats, for example, dropping the suggestive “wet” and reference to Jenny’s “thing,” and implying that all they did was kiss. Knowing the bawdiness of the song makes even more ironic Holden Caulfield’s mistaken use of the song as an image of protecting innocence in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Comin thro’ the Rye

Burns was born in 1759 in Alloway in Ayrshire and died, neither very much later nor very much further away, in 1796 in Dumfries. He wrote his best poems in Scots, and his best poems were so good they did a great deal to guarantee the Scots language some kind of literary future. He suffered for his art, and lord knows others suffered for it too, particularly the women who loved him; but his art was also fuelled by his experience of suffering, especially that of watching his father beaten down by authority and exhausted by farm labour. While he became many other poets besides, this helped form Burns into a satirist of the kinds of religious and political thought that perpetuated or condoned inhumanity. And just as inhumanity has never gone out of fashion, neither has Robert Burns. What he made of us remains as true now as then.

Though one comedic aspect of Burns – maybe I mean tragicomic – is what we’ve made of him. Since his character was so complicated as to effectively not exist – there’s barely a single human trait that Burns did not exhibit at some point as if it defined him – everyone’s free to make their own reading of Burns according to their own personal, critical or neurotic agenda. And heaven knows they have. Burns is a everything from a noble savage to a brilliantly read autodidact; he’s a male-chauvinist pig, and he’s a champion of the rights of women; he’s a rather dodgy English late Augustan poet and a brilliant Scots proto-Romantic. Most bewilderingly from our contemporary perspective, the author of ‘A Slave’s Lament’ almost took a job at a Jamaican plantation as a ‘bookkeeper’ (which was ‘junior overseer’ in all but name). In view of all this, you should be aware that any single assessment of the Burns and his work will be one that many will disagree with. Folk tend to see themselves in Burns, even if it’s the self they most dread, and must condemn the most harshly.

Don Paterson, The Burns Identity

Fifteen years ago, on 25th January 2011, the poet R.F. Langley died. His death, at the age of 72, has been one of the ongoing sadnesses of my life. I last saw him for a cup of tea to celebrate the end of a course of treatment for cancer, and to look forward to spring that year. But a week later, recovering at home, he died, suddenly, in the middle of the night. We had known each other for ten years, and there was no other contemporary poet I admired more. Living in neighbouring East Anglian counties (Norfolk and Suffolk), I had also become very fond of him as a person: dry, modest, knowledgeable, and then intense and twinkling when something interested or delighted him. I was in my twenties when we met, in my thirties when he died—by which time his words had become a permanent part of the way I see the world. To give just one example: I think of him every time I see the constellation of Orion in the southern winter sky, which hung high there as I left his wake in the unlit Suffolk countryside, as if it had stepped out of a poem just published, “At South Elmham Minster”, with its “twelve stars / in the winter night, under the feet of / Orion”. […]

In the last poem that he published, “To a Nightingale” (18 November 2010), R.F. Langley […] “stopped at nothing”—as he often did—and started to look. “Nothing along the road”, runs the opening sentence. Then the mind’s eye begins to unclose what is there: “But petals, maybe. Pink behind / and white inside.” Word by word, the empty road is framed and sketched: “Nothing but / the coping of a bridge”.

More details meet on this concrete surface: “mutes” (bird droppings), moss, insects. By a play on words, which ties up disparate etymologies, “the coping of the bridge” is also the poet’s mind finding an image for its own patience, bearing with this emptiness just as the bridge bears the road, carrying its “nothing” to an unknown destination, “coping” with it by being something in between.

Speaking of the “Man of Achievement especially in Literature”, this is the quality that Keats called “Negative Capability”: the state of being “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. The poem searches for precisions around the edges, lighting on “lemon, I’ll say / primrose-coloured, moths”, which “flinch / along the hedge”, and “are Yellow Shells, not / Shaded Broad-bars”. But it aims further along the road, beyond “the nick-nack of names”, at Keats’ condition for poetry, in which “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration”. Finally, it is the sound of a nightingale that brings release from wondering about “caterpillars which / curl up as question marks”:

… I am
empty, stopped at nothing, as
I wait for this song to shoot.

To know Roger Langley was to learn the virtue of both knowing and not knowing about beautiful things. In 2001, I reviewed his Collected Poems in the London Review of Books. The volume gathered 17 pieces from three decades of small press publication. Here, suddenly, was contemporary poetry like nothing else I had read, with—as I wrote then—“rich, tightly-orchestrated diction and rhythms” which followed the “close mapping of subjectivity […] relieved by moments of lovely objective clarity”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, We Speak From Out There

As I write this first review of 2026, it would be easy to despair at the current national and international news.  Well, Chris Campbell’s new collection, Why I Wear My Past to Work, is just the antidote for any despondency that we might be experiencing. It turns our attention away from such concerns and focusses on the domestic, for it is here that he suggests true fulfilment and happiness can be found.

Of course, he acknowledges that our lives are demanding and not without threats. In Today I met an Armed Robber he amusingly reflects upon our vulnerability, as we never truly know the nature of the people we interact with in our communities. There may well be ‘a torturer’ and an ‘armed robber’ in our supermarket queues too, but we can only ‘guess’ if that’s the case: we can’t be sure. What we do know is that there are people like that in our society and that recognition may make us feel vulnerable. This notion of vulnerability is reinforced in Section 2 of the collection, It Rains Tulips, in poems that  vividly portray the effects of serious illness on the speaker. In Today I Can’t Speak, the title alone suggests the suddenness with which the speaker’s life has been transformed for the worse. The life-changing symptoms are powerfully captured through spacing, repetition, and questions as the speaker struggles to find words to make sense of what is happening to him: ‘Can’t    speak    speak/    speak today, or/    did      did    I repeat it?’ As a consequence of this experience, the speaker becomes acutely aware of his own mortality. In a later poem in the same section Campbell writes:’ There is a mortuary on the horizon, where the traffic ends.’ Death is a certainty and we can’t afford to ignore it.

Now all that might sound quite dark. However, in Section 2 the patient recovers, and he is wiser for it. 

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Why I Wear My Past to Work’ by Chris Campbell

The father tries to comfort his small daughter by telling her not to worry. But behind his words, the father knows, “the monster, unmasked, has come to life,// as real as the splattered flesh/ and candle crushed beneath our feet.” What goes unsaid is that the daughter will have to learn to navigate this world of unmasked monsters in time. The couplets suggest though that the daughter will have her father’s support in a way the father didn’t have the support of his own. […]

[Bruce Parkinson] Spang’s poems are rooted in the ordinary, looking back through a forgiving lens. They explore how an individual is shaped by parental and societal expectations and how wearing a mask to fit in distorts an individual’s shape. It’s only when an individual is able to twist from expectations into their true selves that love, including self-love, can be found.

Emma Lee, “Twist” Bruce Parkinson Spang (Warren Publishing) – book review

Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry, by Roger Sedarat:

As important as source language remains in any discussion of literary translation, Emerson further follows the Sufi mystics in his conception of an ideal poet who can “speak through the symbolic language of nature” (Loili 112). Important to an application of Emerson’s approach to translation and its early effect on his own verse, such a seemingly translingual symbolic connection helps to build a strong case for his having anticipated Ezra Pound’s appropriation of the East in his influence of the American poetic tradition.

This is a book for scholars of American literature, in particular those who are deeply familiar with Emersonian scholarship, which I will admit up front that I am not. Nonetheless, despite the fact that my ignorance made it difficult to follow a good deal of what Sedarat had to say, as someone who, like Emerson and Pound, produced what some call “bridge translations” of classical Persian literature I resonated with what I was able to understand. (“Bridge translation” is a label signifying that I used an informant because I am not literate in Persian.) I wrote a little bit in Four By Four #41 about the translation work I’ve done and the ethical dilemma(s) attached to it. What I appreciated most about what I could follow of Sedarat’s argument is that he allowed me to place that work and my thinking about it in an American literary tradition I’d never really thought all that much about. In particular, I appreciated the way Sedarat set up a kind of continuum, with Emerson, who respected the integrity of the Persian poets he translated on one end—which is where I have tried to place myself—and, on the other, people like Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinksy, who so deracinate the poets they “translate” (Rumi and Hafez respectively) that they are almost unrecognizable as the deeply religious, Muslim poets they were. (If you want to read a critique of Barks that is completely in line with but far more accessible than Sedarat’s, check out The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi, by Rozina Ali.)

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #51

I have been missing my dad, so today I put on his old cotton knit sweater, the one that’s developing holes in the weave, the one I kept because his scent lingered in its fibers. It’s been over five years since his death and, alas, that familiar scent has finally vanished from the sweater. Though I like to think that it has been absorbed into the other items in my closet, maybe the hoodie my daughter knitted, maybe the flannel pjs, maybe the four old pairs of jeans I wear continually or the one full-length gown I’ve seldom donned but have kept for reasons not entirely rational. I’m hoping my dad has somehow permeated my closet, the things I wear next to my skin, my life.

And I came across this poem recently in Gary Whited’s Having Listened. Indeed, it resonates in the way a poem can, a sort of slanted parallel of feeling, affinity, relationship. I love the idea of “shirt knowledge,” the thought that inanimate objects might “know” in ways humans cannot perceive. Those last lines: “how to be private and patient,/how to be unbuttoned,/how to carry the scent of what has worn me,/and to know myself by the wrinkles” seem accurate to my current state. Comfortable, comforting.

Like an old shirt. Like a good poem. Like a memory of my dad.

Ann E. Michael, Shirt knowledge

I first read this beguiling lyric as a sophomore in college. Like so many poems from that formative year, it’s been with me ever since. I have only half an idea what it means, the result of a lifelong effort towards comprehension begun that term with an essay I hazily remember as a comparison-contrast with, of all pairings, Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter.”

I don’t think any great poem necessarily exists in order to be comprehended, but “The Waking” tips further east on the comprehension–apprehension spectrum than most of the poems that inhabit me. Etymology teases out the distinction between the two poles. They share prehendere: to catch hold of or to seize. Comprehend derives from comprehendere: com, meaning “with, together,” with a sense of “completely.” Apprehend, meanwhile, is from apprehenden, to grasp with the senses or mind, to grasp, or take hold of, physically. It’s the same action, a catching hold, with a difference of what I first want to describe as degree, though I think that impulse is merely the result of our old Cartesian wheelrut, the one that privileges the thinking mind over the sensing body, that doesn’t allow that the mind might feel, the body think, despite the plain fact that there is no mind without flesh, that the inarticulate gut is packed with neurons.

When “the mind” catches hold we say we understand, we comprehend; when “the body” does the catching, we have apprehended. And yet don’t we experience a third kind of grasping? Apprehension allows a mixed state, one in between: a knowing that precedes thought, a physical sensation of insight, a clicking-into-place as we proceed through a well-cast metaphor:

Life
Candle flame
Wind coming on

(from Asian Figures, trans. W.S. Merwin)

We comprehend the meaning before we can say it, and the sensation it engenders—the quiver in the chest, a chill on the nape of the neck—similarly precedes our own words. Think of walking on an icy sidewalk and seeing someone, even a stranger, slip: your own stomach lurches, and you reach for them before you can think I will help. There is something inside of us that calls to connect, that can’t help itself connecting. There is something that knows what to do. I want to call it presence, a moment of perfect awareness in the instant of apprehension. Not the awareness of having awakened, but an ongoingness, an eternity of the present: a waking.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke

Martin Kennedy Yates is a poet and mixed-media artist (as well as many other things) based in the Black Country. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University and began to seek publication for his poetry around this time. Since then, he’s been published widely, including in The Rialto, Stand, Magma, Poetry Wales, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Broken Spine.

He’s led and collaborated in workshops and multimedia projects with other artists and featured on Brum Radio Poets with Rick Sanders. This Wilderness & Other Concerns is his debut collection and it won The Broken Spine Chapbook Competition in 2024.

I’ve known Martin for a little while now and consider him to be an excellent poetry friend and all-round human being. I was delighted for him when he won the Broken Spine competition and was lucky enough to see an early draft of the book. Then, as with reading again more recently, I was struck by the inventiveness and ambition, as well as the humour and pathos. Martin is very sensitive to real human quirks and foibles, and his characterisation is spot on. As a reader, you really feel for this cast of characters the poems summon.

And what a cast. The book is divided into three parts: This Wilderness, Other Concerns, and a sequence of so-called Scousenlish poems. This Wilderness is a kind of modern day Brummie reckoning with TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. As such, it’s presented as a collage of different voices, places and identities that weave in and out of each other and the spaces they inhabit. The middle section, Other Concerns, is a collection of shape poems ranging through personal, spiritual and political concerns. And Scousenlish … Well, we’ll come back to Scousenlish.

Victoria Spires, This Wilderness & Other Concerns

Geoffrey Squires in conversation with Fergal Gaynor, LegalHighsPress, 2025, £4.00

This fascinating little book is a record of a conversation carried out by email over a number of years, with half a dozen Squires poems dotted through it, in order of original publication. The conversation ranges across the body of Squires’ work, both original and translation, starting from 1978’s Drowned Stones through to the 2024 volume Triptych, reviewed here. And it is a conversation; though the focus is on Squire’s work Gaynor is not just asking questions. For example, he offers a detailed and compelling case for reading the book-length sequence that is Drowned Stones as a verse bildungsroman, a reading that Squires agrees with.

It’s a tricky book to review, so I’ve decided to focus on what is the main thread that runs through the conversation, Squires’ evolving view of the nature and role of language. Here’s one of the things he says:

Insofar as language poetry is founded on the belief that language constitutes the world, á la Wittgenstein, I think mine embodies the exact opposite. Ever since I was a boy, wandering the hills above our house in Raphoe, I have been struck by the limitations of language, the difficulty and often impossibility of describing or expressing what we perceive, visually, aurally or physically, the fact that language only partly covers the world. So, paradoxically, while my work is often and obviously preoccupied with language, and thus may have a superficial resemblance to LP, in fact it stems from the diametrically opposite position. In it, the verbal is often under threat from the non-verbal, and has only a tenuous or precarious hold on things.

Much as I admire a great deal of language poetry, I think Squires is making a significant point here, and one that reflects his move away, rejection of, the ‘short personal lyric’ poem as discussed earlier in the conversation. In a sense, his discrimination can be read as a more nuanced replacement of the distinction between, for want of better terms, ‘mainstream’ and ‘experimental’ poetries; poets either believe in the efficacy of language in charting or constituting the world or they accept and embrace its imperfections as a medium. On this spectrum, it could be argued that Robert Grenier has more, philosophically speaking, in common with Seamus Heaney than might meet the eye.

Billy Mills, Geoffrey Squires in conversation with Fergal Gaynor: A Review

Something about “the drying soul / of the world” made me think of an oil painting by Donald Roller Wilson that pulls us into the room ghosted by its inhabitants. There is always a tinge of ghostliness in representational art that seeks to depict an interior.

Wilson wrote a poem to accompany (or enhance) (or revision) (or animate) his painting. Reading it adds [to] the scene a bit: many of the actions — peeked inside, seen the light, we fooled, it seemed, she was inside — play [with] the idea of seeing against the materiality of the sight. I treasure the way Wilson keeps the whole lettering of “all” in the closing portmanteau word. Moving back and forth between the image and text, one has the sense of being populated by the voices in Mrs. Jenkins’ “interior,” looking for verbs inside the shadows and left- open drawers.

Alina Stefanescu, A few by William Heyen.

When I come across a title that connects math and poetry, I become interested — and want to read more. Google helped me discover here, in China Daily, an article featuring German professor Andrea Breard entitled “Reading numbers like poetry: A journey into ancient Chinese math.”  She goes on to tell about some algebraic methods that were written as poems — the rhythm allowing easier and better memorization.  

Andrea Breard is a German historian of mathematics, specializing in Chinese mathematics.  Her remarks took me back to my childhood when we frequently repeated “counting rhymes” as we dressed or played or whatever.  “One, Two, Buckle my shoe …” and “Hickory, Dickory, Dock . . . the mouse ran up the clock …” were frequent  parts of my childhood chatter.

JoAnne Growney, Reading Numbers Like Poetry

I am behind on more things than can be dreamt of, in your philosophy. The days of the past few weeks have been breathless, moving task to task, keeping my head above water. Our spring poetry festival organization moves ahead, I work a stack of reviews, I am putting together a mound of spring chapbooks. Every evening: Fold, staple, repeat. Fold, staple, repeat. I address and fill envelopes. Everything moves as it should, working up to a particular deadline of our Vancouver trip, attempting the space in which to take a small breath. So that I might breathe.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

It’s at least a year since I’ve written anything that’s been accepted. What am I doing wrong?

• Maybe I’ve been writing too much, and the quality’s gone down – well I’ve certainly written more this year. My output in 2025 was 5 poems, 36 Flashes and 7 stories – about 22k words. I’ve hardly ever written more in a year.
• Many of the magazines I used to be in frequently have gone – I’ve found nothing to replace Poetry Nottingham (20 poems) or Weyfarers (24 poems).
• I’m reluctant to pay submission fees, but the magazines most suited to my work now ask for them – I’m generally in favour of fees. $3 for 3 poems or a story is fair enough. However, I struggle with paying $3 to submit a single 100 word piece of Flash.

This year I shall pay to submit stories that I think merit publication – a couple of my favourite stories remain unpublished – and cannibalize the rest.

Tim Love, Rejections 2025

I amused myself this week when I found myself emerging from the rabbit hole that was me reviewing my hair in my poetry videos. It had started as a dedicated period of time to tackle some admin jobs and before I knew it I was giving my hair ratings out of 10 in the videos. I am not sure how productive this was, but it definitely entertained me. Along the way I loved rediscovering the poem about the time I felt a sudden urge to get a haircut on holiday, and the way everything the following day suddenly became linked by things that cost seventy pence. It has not been published anywhere, but I do like the fact that it is a poem that sets down a moment in time.

Sue Finch, HYDRATION, CONVERSATION, AND GOOD COMPANY

My task this week is a return to the play script I began in November, whose subject matter and more is drawn from a chapbook series I wrote two decades ago.  Revisiting archer avenue has been wild, even thought I love these poems and feel like they came at a time when my work was evolving quite quickly. Initially, I managed to draft what felt like a decent few acts, but on rereading, much like the fiction I occasionally try to write, it felt rather boring and ho hum compared to the poems I was working on in the interstices. I’ve spent the last few weeks reading and researching poetic drama (not necessarily verse drama) but feel I may be getting close to integrating the poetic and the dramatic with an eye toward performance. The result is a mix of portions of the original chap blended with dialogue and action sequences that I think may work well (or it may be a starling disaster, we shall see.)

The ordinary language feels flat sometimes when you are trained, as a poet, to be highly specific and imagistic. To create something out of nothing on the page. With drama, the dialogue becomes speech yielded amidst a barrage of other elements that make up the stage. The movement and performance of the actors who are the mouthpieces. The sets, the lights, the logistics of mounting any production (moving props and sets and setting a mood.) Luckily, my previous theater experience makes it easy to juggle these things, but then again, its the language I am struggling with most. The ordinariness of it. 

Kristy Bowen, on poetic drama

On July 12, 1873, in Brussels, Verlaine shot at Rimbaud with a pistol injuring his left wrist after a long and stormy affair. Rimbaud decided to leave Brussels without immediately pressing charges. On the evening of the incident, Verlaine and his mother accompanied him to the Gare du Midi where Verlaine behaved even more erratically. Fearing that Verlaine might shoot him again, Rimbaud sought police intervention, leading to Verlaine’s arrest. Verlaine was charged with attempted murder, underwent a medico-legal examination, and was interrogated about his relationship with Rimbaud. One of the police examination reports read, “In morality and talent, this Raimbaud (sic), aged between 15 and 16, was and is a monster. He can construct poems like nobody else, but his works are completely incomprehensible and repulsive.”

After the bullet was removed on 17 July, Rimbaud withdrew his complaint and the charge was reduced to wounding with a firearm, and on 8 August 1873 Verlaine was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Mons city jail. In jail, where Verlaine spent 555 nights, he composed his finest poetry. […]

If one looks at his black and white photographs, the one in which he is young, it’s quite arresting: a young man with a sort of troubled regard, impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit like a true Parisian, and bearing the weight of a heavy moustache, he is the portrait of a poète maudit, accursed poet, a term used for poets at odds with society with a life marked with crime, insanity, and addiction. Verlaine himself composed a work titled Les Poètes maudits, as an homage to three other accursed poets (apart from himself): Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. 

I think I could never be a respectable person and I don’t think I would ever refuse to be photographed alongside thieves and pimps. I would like to walk in the rain, slightly drunk with absinthe, grateful for my accursed life. I would like to hold a rose in my hand that I know will wilt. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Paul Verlaine

I came upon the work of Clarice Lispector because I read about her in the work of Kristjana Gunnars and after reading this passage I thought to read again one of Lispector’s Chronicas. It’s titled “Yes.”

“I said to a friend:
— Life has always asked too much of me.
She replied:
— But don’t forget that you also ask too much of life.
That is true.”

There are books that are gifts and there are some that surpass, so generous are they, and The Silence of Falling Snow is that. I’m grateful for the thinking through of living, of being there for someone at their ending, of all the details, observations, dailiness, intermingled with the thoughts of others, the Buddhist philosophy and its application to the conditions at hand.

She reminds us that if the wood is wet there will be no sparks to light a fire. “Conditions for clarity of thought have to be created; they do not happen on their own.” Which is something to think about in a number of contexts.

Shawna Lemay, Bibliotherapy: Loss and The Silence of Falling Snow

the snow falling. a buried house. one day
my brother & i went too far. his boots filled
with snow. he does not remember this now
so i often wonder if i made it up but
i took his feet in my hands
to warm them. breathing on my own fingers
& flexing. the blood, a water cycle.
corn husks all sleeping gilless under our feet.
i think i saw my reflection too in the snow.
it was that bright.

Robin Gow, two feet

独り言落として枯野から帰る　山路　花

hitorigoto otoshite kareno kara kaeru

            dropping a monologue
            I return
            from the withered field

                                                            Hana Yamaji

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), June 2023 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (January 20, 2026)

Stand here so that your view is between those two trees. Do you see the telephone pole at the bottom of the hill? Now look directly above that to the top of the hill and then to the right. There is a tall tree. You will see the pair of them on different branches in that tree.

Locating birds is an intimate act. Numerous times, I have smelled the detergent or musk of a fellow birder as they approached me to guide my view to a kinglet or warbler. I am always reminded of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Lying While Birding”:

Yes Yes

I see it

so they won’t keep telling you

where it is

But I saw them, the pair of Bald Eagles, as my husband guided my view. While living within such an undesirable and regressing timeline, our attention has gone more to the birds, books, and each other’s interests. He has taken to building things. I dive into making and learning about art. He wants to work out more with me. I want to raise mealworms. We spend time on our own branches within the same tree. […]

If one were to have used their binoculars, they would see two people on the path in the distance. Both of them hold binoculars. The male holds a camera and wears a bright orange hat. He smiles at the female. Between them their voices materialize into a cloud and dissipate in the air around them. In cold air, sound carries. If one were to listen closely, they would hear a conversation about serendipity and the romance of two animals following one another. Eventually, the two people would walk off together into the distance, a snow squall enveloping them.

Sarah Lada, And the Rest Is Rust and Stardust

Have you told your daughters
your most important stories, what they
should do with all these books and all
the trinkets you saved from your other
lives? You’ve never had a financial
adviser but now you’re standing in
the lobby of his building, about to take
the elevator up to your appointment. Perhaps
this means something in you still believes
in the future, something now willing
to join the game of risk and gain.

Luisa A. Igloria, Returns

This week: gods of brokenness, a hollowed-out hosiery factory, end paper mood-matches, quokkas sleeping in the shade, and much more. Enjoy.

There’s something energetic about having vibraphone and parachute in the same poem. Is the opening too seemingly glib in its absurd surrealism? Or is it a good way into the more emotionally more real element of the poem? […]

I do love this failure.

Gary Barwin, ERRATA: how to know if a poem “works” or if it’s finished

Something weathered in the voice that greeted me, a bit creaky, like worn mahogany. Pin-point sharp, too. Trained by my father as a child to guess the voice of a speaker without it being announced, I plumped straight away for Margaret Atwood. She said:

This was Canada. You didn’t think you were going to be successful. You thought you were going to be dedicated. It wasn’t considered a career, it was considered a vocation, like a priest.

Margaret Atwood, Woman’s Hour, 5 November 2025

And I thought: that’s it. That’s all I need to listen to. Nothing can improve upon its wisdom. (I was wrong: the whole interview is studded with such nuggets.) Thank you, Radio 4, I take it all back. My other thought was: that is a proper poet’s answer. It’s basically the same thing a prizewinning friend of mine said to me a thousand years ago: ‘I don’t write for prizes. In the end, the process is all any of us have.’

The coffee now made and the stairs climbed, I shuffled back into my chair, took a sip, and reached for my notebook. Where had they got to, those lines about the [———-]? Could they be worked on for a moment? Could I remember again my vocation and commit to being dedicated? I gazed out of the window. This was not Canada, but Plymouth, in the rain. It turns out I could.

Anthony Wilson, This was Canada

This month is always a tricky one. Some of the best things in my life have happened in November, but also some of the worst. It always feels like an unruly month anyway, posed between the spookyness of Halloween and the festivity of Christmas.  With the end of daylight savings time,  the dark comes even earlier and stays so long.  I am never sure what to wear or which coat to bring. How warm or cold spaces will be. The other night I made sure to wear tights for the first time this year, but still found myself burrowing under my coat while we watched Frankenstein in the chilly theater. I can’t just throw on my shoes and run downstairs or to the alley to throw out trash. Leaving the apartment requires preparation. Tights. Coats. Boots. Many layers. When I stay home,  hours after 4pm are dark and strange and I never quite know what to do with myself. It’s too early to stop working but way too early to just go watch something. It feels like midnight but its only 8pm. 

Still good things can happen. In 2000, I managed to land the library job that changed the course of everything and brought me back to Chicago and settled into the place I worked for two decades after that. I came in for an interview on November 1st, was hired on Veteran’s Day, and moved over Thanksgiving weekend to the city I had left after grad school a year and a half before.  In 2005, I received a call one morning from the press that wanted to publish my very first collection of poems and floated on a cloud all day on that momentum alone.  Other Novembers are hazier. Some delightful. Some darker. Like the one in 2019 where I moved out of the studio, sad that it was no longer financially doable due to rising rents and salary stagnation, which had been supplementing my shop income for the 12 years I had the space.

Kristy Bowen, novembers

The title and first line establish the situation of the poem: a tour guide is showing us around the labyrinth; we infer pretty quickly that this particular labyrinth is the mythic home of the minotaur: the “it” that was kept here. The pathos is quickly established as well, the hard rhyme of “their own” and “soup bone” providing an ironic conceptual rhyme—one typically doesn’t require their kin to subsist on scraps—and the shorthand of “beneath the stair” for the dungeon beneath the palace shrinking the scale down to human domesticity. We need not dismiss this story as yet another expected excess of royalty: instead, Stallings encourages us to think of our own kin, our own homes.

The passive voice that opens the second stanza introduces another sort of ironizing distance in “When howls were heard.” The suffering of the imprisoned minotaur, chucked down into Daedalus’s basement funhouse, is perceivable, sure, but no one’s here to own up to it. Instead it’s presented as an agentless action, the language of academic and corporate writing, employed as abdication from accountability, a means of distorting or mutating language to obscure the active cruelty. Again the scale is reframed, and the king and queen of Crete are imagined as your average upper-middle-class couple sipping sherry after dinner and politely excusing their guests so that they might go manage the monster in the basement.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Tour of the Labyrinth” by A.E. Stallings

Laura Theis’ Introduction to Cloud Care is physically slighter than the Finlay and Kinsella books, but it has its own heft. Theis is a German poet who lives in Oxford and writes in her adopted language, English. The poems collected here offer a series of windows into a world that melds the private and public, domestic and natural spheres. For instance, the opening lines of ‘There Used to Be a House Here’ moves the reader quickly from observation of the world to a meditation on natural magic

but now it’s a tree-walled
ruin under an open sky

she has learned that
the generosity of birds is

a witchcraft beyond
pendulums or sage

But Theis is not indulging in a kind of nostalgic longing for some kind of pure nature, as she calls out in ‘Oak Coppice’, a coppice being a kind of technological intervention in natural process:

Poets have told me over and over about sitting in nature,
staying away from screens. But I am typing this on my phone.
I wish I had not looked up
the meaning of coppice.

Coppicing is, in its way, a form of imposed metamorphosis, and shapeshifting is a central concern of many of these poems, from tips on dating a were-hare, through a lover who it seems is being unfaithful with trees:

She returns home to me with leaves in her hair,
her cheeks flushed,
always satisfied, serene.

to a prose poem called ‘I Wonder How Ovid Dealt with This’ in which the work itself is the thing that shapeshifts.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading November 2025: A Broken Sleep Special

Tourists scale the tumulus and find,
at sunrise, eagles, lions, and Apollo,
gods of brokenness, unhumbled despite
centuries of disregard. Extinct.

Ann E. Michael, Magnificent

I started studying this parsha last week in preparation for writing poetry about it and teaching it this week. I had drafted a line or two, but it just wasn’t flowing. Last night I woke in the middle of the night and suddenly realized: I was going about it wrong. Instead of trying to put myself in Ya’akov’s shoes, I should put myself in Rachel’s. The combination of that spark, and this teaching, brought the poem through me.

Of course it’s anachronistic to imagine the Biblical Rachel quoting psalms, which wouldn’t be written for a few thousand years. But that’s no big deal in the garden of Torah interpretation. As the saying goes, אין מוקדם ומאוחר בתורה / ein mukdam u’m’uhar baTorah, “there’s no before and after in Torah.” In God’s time perhaps it’s all simultaneous anyway.

Rachel Barenblat, Rachel speaks

I just finished proofing some poems (a poem in the Jan/Feb issue of Poetry, two in Sugar House Review) and an essay called “The Unfenced Field and Poetry” (forthcoming in Third Coast), and winter is so in the air here in North Carolina. I’ve been binge-reading Susan Howe after reading her gorgeous new Penitential Cries (so. good.) as well as 100 Years of Solitude, and feeling surrounded by good books, if nothing else.

Han VanderHart, Poetry, Poetry for November and December

How does your most recent work compare to your previous?

Well my most recent work, IRØNCLAD, an illustrated hybrid collection, is coming out mid October with Spuyten Duyvil. I always try and approach a new work from a fresh angle, and IRØNCLAD is my first book that was not written on a typewriter or in word-processing software, but directly into the layout program, InDesign. The reasoning was to try and take advantage of the actual typography of the poem or prose piece. The book is set in the fictional world of The Iron Plier Society, who themselves are trying to make sense of their own archeological record. Fragments uncovered in the geological strata inform the book and the narrative. As you move deeper into the book, you discover, fragment by fragment, artifact by artifact, what appears to be the evolution of a civilization—yet, you can never quite be sure that what you have discovered in the damp earth faithfully represents your progenitors intentions (every interpretation comes with its own set of biases also). And, it is easy to misinterpret those too!

My previous collection, which came out with Unlikely Books in May this year, is the poetry collection Spells for the Wicked, which certainly informs IRØNCLAD. In fact, you might say that IRØNCLAD is the culmination of many years of addressing the subject of mythology and how it informs the later narrative and structure of a given society or culture.

How does it feel different?

Although they are two entirely different books, narratively, linguistically, typographically even, they do address some of the same principles in their own fashion. I consider myself a writer of books rather that a writer of individual poems or pieces of fiction. Much of my more recent work crosses the boundaries between fiction and poetry. In my earlier work, I may have been more concerned with presenting a given poetic form. These days I allow the book to inform me, rather than lying down rules in advance. Essentially though, I always try to approach each book project with a slightly different angle: be it the method for writing it (i.e. handwritten, typewriter, direct to computer), the environment I am writing in, or in some cases with a collaborator, the collaborative process itself. All of these things can significantly influence the outcome and inform the work, sometimes in surprising ways.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marc Vincenz

Now I am standing at the little window on the landing watching the weather and there the magpie is again, sitting in the sycamore, staring straight in at me. I have no fight to argue with a bird today. I’m watching the weather. After driving all the way out to the cancer hospital this week, full of nerves and strategy for sitting through five hours of treatment, they cancelled the chemo and rescheduled. The day the chemo is supposed to happen has snow and ice warnings, the Wolds might be thick with snow and I know we’ll struggle to get across, so we’ll have to cancel and move it to next week, unless my brother can get away from work and take his four by four. If it’s cancelled, my mum will be relieved because she is dreading the treatment like nothing I’ve ever seen. But it will be yet another delay, the clock ticking. Her precious days taken up with all this bullshit of waiting and driving and waiting and driving.

I work on the poetry commission. Finish it, sign it off. A job well done. I’m excited to see it in its next evolution. The simple pleasure of artists working together. The sparks of excitement over idea exchange. I make a big pot of tea, return to the desk.

Snow. But it doesn’t last long. I feel it before I see it. The room darkens around me, the sky pushing down on the trees, then that silent strangeness of snow falling. Frida and I stand at the window and watch.

Wendy Pratt, Blotmonað: Month of sacrifices

I’m happy to share the third poetry video from my book Temporary Shelters. The poem, Gunpowder Homestead, explores my fascination with the old house ruins and foundations I sometimes run into on woods hikes in my home state of Pennsylvania.

Whenever I encounter a place like this, I think about the people who lived here once 150 or more years ago–how their lives were different from mine, how the land and the world may have been different, and what happened that the place fell into ruin.

Grant Clauser, Video for Gunpowder Homestead

Well, I probably shouldn’t write a review of Christopher James’ new pamphlet, The Ice Sonnets (Dithering Chaps, 2025), given that my endorsement appears on its back cover, but I can recommend it thoroughly and suggest you get hold of a copy for yourself by visiting the Dithering Chaps webshop. To give you a flavour of this top-notch collection, here’s that aforementioned endorsement…

‘In The Ice Sonnets, Christopher James tells the story of Shackleton’s expedition via a collage effect of juxtaposing exquisitely drawn pen portraits of its participants, interweaving the characters, drawing out the group dynamics that develop in extreme conditions. These poems tell a highly specific tale with universal ramifications.’

Matthew Stewart, Christopher James’ The Ice Sonnets

In effect, it’s a sequel to The Penguin Diaries of 2017, which dealt with Robert Scott’s ill-fated attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1912.

Inevitably, The Penguin Diaries, though similar in that it is a 65-sonnet sequence, had the mood of an elegy, because the expedition ended in tragedy with Scott and his final team dying on the ice just a few miles from safety. While Scott’s story has taken on the legend of heroic British failure – they reached the Pole, only to find the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, had beaten them to it, then died on the way back – The Ice Sonnets is a celebration of survival against enormous odds.

Once again James chooses to give each member of the expedition a sonnet to themselves. Each acts like a snapshot, a pen-picture, of what made each man remarkable. After all, it was a bonkers idea. Having worked in Canada in winter, I know how horrendously cold it can get – and I was nowhere near the (North) Pole. It seems to me just plain weird that anyone would bother to freeze themselves to death, in Scott’s case, to go to the extreme point of our planet and plant a flag in it.

Exploration of the earth is not something we bother too much about, however, in 2025, because it’s been mapped, scanned, analysed, explored physically and psychologically in intense detail. Any one of us can see satellite images of the tiniest scrap of land or sea. This is obviously a vast contrast to how the ‘globe’ appeared to our ancestors. Britons were fed the idea of Empire, of ‘Darkest Africa’, of a world to be conquered and colonised. Men like Scott and Shackleton captured the imagination – and did, because they took the immense risk of travelling into the vast, frozen unknown, provide us with a greater communal knowledge of the planet on which we all live. Their achievements, as strange as they might seem to some now, remain impressive, their lives enigmatic, worthy in themselves of exploration.

What James has done here is provide, by dedicating to each individual a poem of fourteen lines, a distilled impression of who they were. In doing so, he delves into the character, teasing out detail, giving each a separate identity within the whole, and so providing a convincing insight into not only an individual life but how that person fitted into the overall ‘team’. About how we human beings work individually and collectively.

Bob Mee, THE ICE SONNETS by CHRISTOPHER JAMES

For composers, there is a certain significance in the 8th opus. And Christian Lehnert gestures towards this significance in the titling of his eighth poetry collection, Opus 8: Wickerwork.

Designating itself “a nature book,” Wickerwork is now (partly) available in Richard Sieburth’s English-language translation, and in his tantalizing prefatory essay that supplies context and enriches Lehnert’s wickers. The book is divided into seven linked chapters or movements, overseen by a unique epigraph.

And each of the seven movements is composed of seven contrapuntal poems that face one another across the page’s seam. On the left: the solo voicings of a couplet in alexandrine meter. On the right: the chorales of an octave in iambic tetrameter. Sieburth likens Lehnert’s distichs to the “phanopaeia” that Ezra Pound defined as “a casting of images on the visual imagination.”

Names

The name is an herb / a seedling and a shaft /
Risen from the sound / of wood and oil and sap.

In these poems, Lehnert uses a virgule to indicate a pause or breath within the line, thus connecting the poem’s way of being — and breathing— to a convention in German baroque verse, namely, the use of a separatrix to serve as a guide for oral reading and performance.

Alina Stefanescu, Nominations in Christian Lehnert’s poetic forms.

Frost left its edges on the deck and steps but I find a dry spot to sit, my coffee’s steam seeming to fill the gray sky. I try to still my mind’s constant conversation and just breathe in the damp cold, hear the barrage as individual songs, ignore the intrusion of should-have-cut-back-the-lavender, of next-year-I’ll-dig-up-the-lizard’s-tail. Study again the difficult present, amid the uncertainty of tomorrow, of the next hour, next minute. It takes work to be in the world like this. To be an extension of it, not a mover through it. But of course, I am both. As I am an impatient observer of my species, and inescapably, one and the same.

I admire this long poem by Barbara Tomash for its unreined wander but its careful containment too. There is no escaping itself.

Marilyn McCabe, to hide the sound of the groaning enormity

Kujō Takeko – 11 Tanka (1920-1928), by Dick Whyte:

All the blood in my body is frozen;
Only the cold sword of reason
Flashes within me.

The Forgotten Poets Newsletter, from which this tanka is taken, “is dedicated to out-of-print, obscure, and generally under-appreciated poets and poems, particularly from the late-1800s and early-1900s.” Dick Whyte, the person who curates and writes the newsletter also has “a specific interest in the intertwining histories of tanka and haiku, both in Japanese and English, and their relationship to the beginnings of free-verse.” The issue from which the above tanka comes is about Kujō Takeko, a woman whose poetry would be a “significant influence on the shintai’shi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) movements in Japan. The tanka I’ve quoted above, along with all the others in this issue of Forgotten Poets, were translated by Glenn Hughes and Yozan T. Iwasaki. (There is a slightly more detailed bio of Takeko here.)

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #50

3rd Wednesday has published my poem “Le Plus Ça Change” on their website.

I am very pleased with this small poem because it was formed by looking at two poems which were not quite working and taking the best parts of each (the images, of course) and combining them. Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to try connecting these pieces, since they were both about things French. But the brain gets into ruts of thought sometimes; the process is a great pleasure when something breaks through.

Ellen Roberts Young, Poem On Line

I’m pleased to have five poems and verse translations in the new issue of Literary Imagination (volume 27.3, pp. 299-304). Literary Imagination is the journal of the American Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers and is unusual in publishing a mixture of scholarship, essays, poems and translations accessible to writers, critics and teachers outside as well as within academia. The new editor, Paul Franz, is doing something really exciting with it — the long piece in this issue by James Tusing on Alice Monro is really superb and has already garnered a good deal of attention.

The five pieces I have in this issue are quite varied: the first is a translation of Ancient Greek prose into English verse, from Julian the Apostate (readers who read this post about Greek a while ago will recognise the extract). The second is a poem of my own linked loosely to that passage, called ‘Reading Julian the Apostate on my late father’s birthday’. The third is a verse translation of a Pāli poem from the Therīgāthā, a collection of poems written by early Buddhist nuns. (I wrote briefly about this collection here.) The fourth is a loose and experimental version of Horace, Odes 1.10. The fifth is a poem of my own called ‘Latin didactic’ that is in part about reading the Georgics.

Victoria Moul, Five poems and translations in “Literary Imagination”

If you haven’t heard the term, a beta reader is someone who reads an early draft of a book and provides feedback. They are not editors. They don’t provide line-level changes or suggestions. Instead, they answer questions and give overall impressions.

If you ask ten people for an opinion on poetry, you will get ten different answers. For that reason, I chose to keep my pool of beta readers very small, sticking to only four writers—Heidi Fiedler, Jillian Stacia, Michelle Awad, Elise Powers—and my mom and husband.

It’s a strange thing to share your work with beta readers. You’re not just putting the book out there for people to read. You’re sharing it and asking the hard questions: What’s working? What isn’t? What would you cut? Etc.

My beta readers’ reflections helped me see the book more clearly than I could on my own, and most importantly, made me feel less alone in it all. After years of working on the poems in this collection, sharing it felt incredible. I’d chosen my readers with great intention, and they treated my work with care and respect.

Allison Mei-Li, Behind the book

I’m thrilled and deeply honored that my poem “Clutch” was selected for today’s Poem-a-Day series by The Academy of American Poets, curated by the incredible Tacey M. Atsitty, author of (At) Wrist (University of Wisconsin Press, November 14, 2023).

This recognition means so much to me, and I’m grateful to Tacey for championing voices and poetry that connect us all. Make sure to check out the other poems she selected in the month of November. Each poem includes comments from the poet about the poem and an audio recording.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Clutch” selected for Poets.org Poem-a-Day series!

cloud gazing…
I thought about it
but wasn’t sure
what I’d do
with an empty mind

cloud gazing by tom clausen

I’ve been writing a lot about the Firth of Forth. I live near where the estuary opens into the North Sea, and when I look south across the Firth, it’s easy to imagine that this is a scene from thousands of years ago. In certain lights there aren’t many visible traces of human presence. What’s more difficult to picture is how the Firth looked during the Last Ice Age. Immeasurable tons of ice flowing out to sea, scraping away at the land. All vegetation, all animal and bird life, all traces of early human habitation erased. The islands and hills of today are what remain of larger geological forms eroded to stubs by glaciers.

It makes you feel small, thinking on this timescale, reflecting upon the massive impact of the ice on a landscape which you might assume is unchanging. I wanted to explore this feeling in a poem – a long poem, almost in essay form, which progresses incrementally and implacably. I was interested in how human history might be understood alongside a vaster geological history, not least because – from the point of view of an individual – the drawn-out events of human history can themselves seem like unstoppable forces.

Like an essay, my long poem ‘Glacier’ makes a lot of use of quotation. This was influenced by Marianne Moore’s marvellous poem ‘An Octopus’, about a glacier-topped mountain in North America. I like the instability created by the intrusion of other people’s words upon the poetic voice, and the frisson when terminology from other disciplines is put under pressure in a poem. Glaciers pick up all kinds of debris, from grit to huge boulders, finally depositing them far from their original context. I want the quoted phrases in my poem to be repositioned in a similar way.

Garry MacKenzie, Glacier

I know this last year has been a lot for many of us (personally, I’ve felt in some sort of crisis-mode since May 2024!) But I read the other day that the opposite of anxiety is creativity (I always thought it was calmness, as I am highly creative with my anxiety and worst-case scenarios!) But what the author shared was that we can take all those uncomfortable emotions and make something from them—write a poem, journal, paint something, or even string fairy lights in the laundry room just because. Make beauty where there wasn’t any. And I like that idea—leave the world a little better each day. Create when you can. […]

The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi — I just finished this book and I adored it! Gabrielle does something in these poems that reminds me why we read in the first place—to feeeeel (yes, with five e’s). If you’re someone who has one toe dipped in sadness, but who also walks through the world noticing the small miracles of being alive—this may be exactly the book you need right now. Its opening line is: The days I don’t want to kill myself are extraordinary. From there, the book keeps opening up into how temporary everything is, and yet somehow it keeps choosing wonder and finding joy. It’s my current favorite read—the book I keep returning to, the one that keeps returning to me.

Kelli Russell Agodon, My *Favorite Things* List

Publishing a chapbook starts with encountering a mind.

There’s a lot of poetry in the world that can take any shape or position. Authorial summary, imagist embroidery, foregrounding feelings or ironed down lessons, or poet voice’s uniform containment, unshaped lashing, formal, anarchist, anti-hierarchy, storytelling, language-y foregrounded.

Here was a mind questioning and admitting how things don’t quite reconcile. There’s the considered footstep of word choice, and risk of embedded emotions but an exploring mind as if talking to itself not performing an established script. This is a mind that can be self-deprecating. Observant, humble, vivid, self-questioning, That is an exciting brain. 

At an open mic, Tamsyn’s poem (and I don’t recall which, it being a couple years ago) stood out in glittering neon sparkle of aha. What is this alert mind here? Hm, hm, think I might need to meet this person.

Could I see more poems?

These poems reflect a world of citizens I want to live in, to make more of. These are poems I can hear and feel. Ideas and posture relative to the world that make sense to me. Ones that take risk, that can sit with thoughts not all categorically pre-filed for the reader.

So, I got the poems, which I will then sit on as a dragon’s hoard. Read, rest, reread.

I look at line length, poem width and length, consider the potential size of container. Next or simultaneously: Looking at the poems as a critic, call out what is particularly fabulous and goosebump-making. Let it sit, reconsider.

Meanwhile I consider paper types, end paper mood-matches, cover stock options. What sort of cover image would complement the poems? Brainstorm that. Look and draw and make images. That’s a fun imagining stage.

While waiting considering paper stock, reconsider fonts. Doing a few layouts. Give suggestions for edits. Dialogue. Sending a proof of concept for approval and edits.

Pearl Pirie, Process of Chapbooks: for Farr’s

A couple of years ago, Joelle Taylor took part in the contemporary poetry archive project that I was involved in at the University of East Anglia. Her creative response to the project was “dust kings. tough kids”, a “queer crown of sonnets” written in memory of murdered butch women. Here is part of her note on the sequence:

While writing I stared at a cheap plastic snow globe that imprisoned a gold angel. Occasionally, gold glitter rained down on the angel. The snow globe was given to me in the early 1990s by my girlfriend’s brother, Richard. He was the first gay man I personally knew to die of AIDS, and he left behind him a collection of snow globes for the mourners to take home with them from his funeral. As I worked, I thought about the snow globe, about the idea of the vitrine in general, about emergency, about memory, safety, love, and friendship. This Crown of 15 Sonnets is written in response to the idea of the snow globe as an archive within itself.

“dust kings. tough kids” has now been republished as part of Maryville: 1957—2007 (Bloomsbury) […]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #38: A Crop of Frost

When I first read Chaucer Cameron’s In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered (Against the Grain, 2021) I was reminded of Mexican writer and activist, Cesar A. Cruz , who said ‘Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.’ In other words literature should provoke strong reactions, jolt the reader out of his/her complacency, force them to confront uncomfortable truths. Cameron does just that by taking us into the lives of women who work in the sex industry: prostitutes, cam girls, strippers.

She shows us that this is a world in which women are treated as an expendable commodity, their value dependent on their looks. In Erotic, a poem written from the point of view of a pole-dancer, she states: ‘ But here/ tonight/ a pint glass/ does the rounds,/ half full:/ loose change/ that clanks/ against the sides/ is a sign/ I’ve lost./ Skin no longer/ tight against my frame/ fixes me/ at half price./ Doesn’t it?’  The consequence of ageing is a drop in remuneration. There’s something tragic about a woman who describes herself in monetary terms, as ‘half price.’ Her job has undermined her self-image, her self-worth. This is developed further in the symbolic description that follows: ‘My dressing/ room/ has dwindled/ to toilet size./ No door locks/ grime-smeared/ floor tiles/ cracked.’ The squalidness of the environment and its comparison to a toilet suggests the humiliation she feels and the contempt with which she believes she is held. She also feels very vulnerable. Significantly there are ‘no door locks’: she is defenceless. Her position is a precarious one, subject to the whims of her employer.  As a consequence we are told she ‘cower(s) in a corner/ until the owner comes to check.’ She goes on: ‘This time/ he shows pity,/ dresses me/ in finery./ takes me to his table’/ he likes/ the meat,/ the tuck, tuck/twist of me.’ The image ‘he likes the meat’ is shocking in its resonance with its associations of death, carnal appetite, and violence. This is a man who enjoys his life and death power over her: ‘He likes/ to see/ the light/ in my acid eyes/ go out/ just before/ they/ close.’

These notions of male power and exploitation permeate virtually every poem in this pamphlet.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘In Ideal World I’d not be Murdered’ by Chaucer Cameron

Bex Hainsworth is a poet whose work I’ve skirted the periphery of for a while, always enjoyably so. Circulaire has given me the chance to dive in and explore at greater depth, and I’m so glad I did. Hainsworth has been published in The Rialto, Poetry Wales and bath magg, among others. While her debut pamphlet, Walrussey, is described as ecopoetry, Hainsworth says of this collection, in an interview with Sam Szanto, “Circulaire is my confessional era”. Confessional feels right. The poems are corporeal, intimate; concerned with the domestic stage and the everyday dangers of being a woman.

The opening poem somehow reminded me of Colette, who, in her memoirs, gives us a poetic, personal ethnography of the domestic interior. Speaking of her grandmother’s ‘semi-detached’, Hainsworth says:

“It shook knitting needles

and ration books from its cellar,

ready for new visitations.”

(All houses are haunted by women)

A few poems in, in Arcs, she speaks of a first apartment;

“Tucked away in the hips

of a hollowed-out hosiery factory”

and

“the rosy bones of our chilly homes”

There is a repeated merging of the interior space of the home with the interior space of the child, then “almost-woman”. The poems loosely follow a narrative arc from childhood to adulthood, charting “the cycle of female experience” (another interview quote).

Victoria Spires, Tender excavations

I am poor and I owe
an incalculable debt
to the world— I have taken
more than my share of what
it has given, and still
it does not begrudge another
chance to secure my so-called
fortune. […]
And I am rich with
a surplus, always, of feeling.
There is so much, I often
don’t know what to do with it;
and other times, it saves me
from thinking I am completely
bereft, empty as a pauper’s purse.

Luisa A. Igloria, Pauper’s Purse

I came to the cafe thinking I would be able to tap into something creative and instead I found a (nother) way to self-critique. I need to try to use this as a spark (a cattle prod?) to inspire something more. Does this count as writing, this post wherein I complain about not being able to write? What would I tell my students?

I guess I’d remind them that writing is a muscle that you have to work regularly or else risk weakening. Not losing—you can always get it back—but it does get harder the longer you sit on your metaphorical butt.

I’d also tell them (and by extension, myself), not to be too hard on themselves. Life is hard enough. (Especially lately, good lord.) Be gentle. Give grace.

But also: get going.

Sheila Squillante, What Counts?

I cannot wait, I cannot wait, I cannot wait
until we can talk about all of this in the past tense
I cannot wait for these to be the old days
[…]

This week I’m sharing this poem from a wonderful event we did together this month down at STATUS FLO at The Brighton Dome Studio Theatre. This regular poetry night is incredible, with fabulous curation and hosting by Aflo Poet, one of the UK’s rising superstar poets. The evening also featured poetry and vivid story-telling from the excellent Pablo Franco. Both of these poets delivered phenomenal sets and you should check them both out. This film of my poem was kindly sent to me by Gray Taylor. The night was electric, the audience so warm, responsive, which you might hear here, thank you to everyone there. Thank you for inviting me to join you.

Salena Godden, I Cannot Wait To Breathe

Best Small Fictions 2025 is now open for pre-orders on the Alternating Current Press website here. I’m thrilled to be included for the third time & in this 10th anniversary edition! Many thanks to Jeff Harvey’s Gooseberry Pie for nominating my Microfiction “After Reading A Newspaper Clipping Of Emily Dickinson’s Obituary Online” and to judge Robert Shapard for selecting it for inclusion. Thanks to the anthology editors and readers for their hard work. Congrats to my fellow flash writers. I can’t wait to have it in my hands! Please consider pre-ordering which determines the print runs. Thanks!

In other book news, I received my signed copy of Patti Smith’s new book, Bread of Angels, and look forward to beginning reading today. Two of her previous books are among my favorites, Just Kids and M Train. I’ve read them more than once which is a testament to how much I like them. Patti’s is the first Stack I subscribed to a few years ago. I really like her low-key impromptu videos that make me feel like we are having a chat about ordinary and extraordinary things. She spoke about this book as she wrote it so I know it will be brilliant reading. I’ll let you know what I think.

Charlotte Hamrick, Book News!

I have spent some time this morning listening to Patricia Smith’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award for poetry; another poet pasted it in a Facebook post.  I went to the website where one could watch the whole ceremony (here), but instead, I’m listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Patti Smith–the more famous Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, the author of Just Kids, along with more recent books.

Back to the poet Patricia Smith, who was the only poet of all the nominees whose work I had read (go here for the full list).  I hadn’t even heard of the poets nominated until they were nominated.  Some years are like that.  But happily, I have heard of Patricia Smith; I remember a presentation she did at an AWP conference, probably as far back as the one in D.C. in 2011.  I probably wouldn’t have discovered her book Blood Dazzler on my own without hearing her talk about it at her presentation.  It showed me what poetry could do, and I’m glad she’s now gained wider recognition for her poetry.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Various Patricia Smiths and Various Strands of a Life

A book which has been on my shelves forever is A Wild Patience Has Take Me This Far by Adrienne Rich. I’ve culled my books a number of times but this one remains. However, I hadn’t taken it off the shelf for ages. Lately I’ve been saying in my head a lot, I don’t really think I have the wild patience for this. But then I laugh and do the thing anyway. You know? Anyway the book’s title is the first line of a poem titled “Integrity.” In it she speaks of her selves being both “anger and tenderness.” She speaks of how the light is both critical and critical. In another poem she says, “If you can read and understand this poem / send something back…” I’ve always loved her poem “What Kind of Times Are These.”

Shawna Lemay, I’m Giving You a Free Pass (and a side of wild patience)

Once, in Spain, I saw a two pet meerkats on a lilo floating down a bright river, chattering loudly with what might have been excitement, or perhaps more likely, fear. Sometimes, in the bright, sociable suburbs of Perth, I feel like a meerkat on a lilo.

But when I walked into The Moon Café, with its long bar crowded with bottles, its stage and its rainbow flags, I found my footing again. And to open the reading, an Acknowledgement of and Welcome to Country which made me feel, for a moment, like we all belonged to this one moment in millennia of human history, to all the ages of this dizzingly ancient land.

More of that another time. Because now, I want to talk about quokkas.

And Cath Drake. Since the Moon Café, I’ve been reading her collection “The Shaking City” published with Seren in 2020. It’s unusually thick and accomplished for a first collection – and I read it slowly in these baking hot days of wild distractions. By the time I reach the second section – a sequence of fantastical and quotidian character portraits, each equally magical – I return to the first section, and find new narratives in each of the rich, dense yet accessible poems. It’s a collection which deserves to be more widely acclaimed – but it’s the third section – “Far From Home” – which comes alive for me in 30 degree heat, facebook full of pictures of the snow falling back home, Australian Ravens wailing like babies or peacocks, or mating cats, .

The day after the Cath Drake’s reading, I was due to visit Rottnest Island or Wadjemup, the Noongar name of the island. It’s referred as ‘the place across the water where the spirits are’ – the resting place of the spirits, as well as the bodies of the Aboriginal men and boys who died in the island’s prison and forced labour camps between 1838 and 1931.

In her reading, Cath described how significant the island is for anybody raised in Perth – how quickly and drastically it has changed; how she loves it regardless. I was only on the island for five hours, and my engagement was brief, shallow, and wildly enthusiastic. I loved the speed and breeze of cycling down its tracks and deceptive hills. I loved the snorkelling; the fish like silver flames, the shy and sandy flounder. I loved the white beaches, the rough vegetation, the peeling gum trees and the old buildings; the gulls and oystercatchers. But most of all, I love the quokkas, sleeping in the shade near the shops, climbing into unattended bags, begging under benches, stealing ketchup from our table.

Clare Shaw, The Strange and Shining.

It took several days for me to settle into a travel mode, and leave behind the sorrows and concerns of my daily life. I checked my messages, looked at the Guardian once a day, kept up with Duolingo (switching from Spanish to Italian), but I stayed away from social media and any threaded conversation scrolls, posting only a couple of pictures myself and one blog post. We ate out some, at pizzerias and simple trattorias, and we also cooked. At first I was unable to draw or write much, but eventually this loosened up and I managed to keep a basic written journal and worked in my sketchbook; every day, I looked for ideas for future paintings or writing.

We had a lot of remarkable experiences, and I’ll try to share some of them here as the next weeks unfold. I’ve come back feeling like the creative discouragement and inertia of the last few months has lifted, and I feel inspired to write and do artwork over the winter. This is a relief, and I hope it lasts. But in order to do that, I realize I have to be online less, to be less focused on political news, argument, and the negativity I can do nothing about, to say “no” a little more often, and to determinedly focus my energies and time on the areas where I can actually make a difference, both in my own life and in others’. Distraction is everywhere, and it’s there for a reason — and not a benign one. Resistance, on the other hand, also takes many forms. One is to set a meaningful direction for oneself, and stick to it. That’s never easy. It’s the path with greater challenge, and greater potential serenity too.

Beth Adams, Re-entry

Look at the airline staff: all yawns, blank, demoted 
to rote smiles as they correct operating intelligence.

Job description: To Oversee the Blundering
Machine.  But as any parent knows, kids grow

competent; they turn 30, don’t need reminders
to pack and get going. The message is bright and bold:

they are replacing us. But AI ain’t flesh and blood,
the workers’ smiles tell you that in one second.

Jill Pearlman, The New Thanksgiving Travel

I was thinking about how to make this season brighter—with all the political ugliness and Trump and his horrid party boys trying to kill the arts (defunding the NEA means a lot of presses and lit mags shutting down and struggling)—and I came upon this idea. If you have a favorite press or literary magazine—we may not be able to replace a $25K grant from the government, but maybe we can give a little and if it happens from many of us, it will be enough to count. I know a lot of us are struggling with money these days—more than usual, given the layoffs and the inflation—but giving during the holidays has always been a tradition that usually comes—not from the wealthy, not from the billionaires—but from the little people, from the middle class. There are a lot of people who don’t have enough to eat. Animal shelters need donations of pet food. Even cleaning out and donating from your pantry may do more good than you know.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, How to Give a Little, Making the Holidays Brighter…Literally

I know that it’s an incredibly challenging financial time for many, as prices continue to rise and economic inequality deepens. And, there are also so many worthy causes and organizations in need (and even more so with many ends to federal funding), but if you’re able (and don’t forget to ask if your employer offers matching donations) and so inclined, I’d like to offer a couple of ways you can support the arts this season.

First, Black Ocean, where I am editor, is celebrating its first year as a nonprofit publisher and about to celebrate 20 years in publishing in 2026, and is trying to raise money to meet its annual fundraising goal to support its books and translations. Find out more here.

Also, please consider supporting Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), where your gift will enable meaningful arts education partnerships for students, teachers, and teaching artists in Chicago and West Chicago. Find out more about their programs and how to donate here. (What’s more, your gift will be matched by the Wildflower Foundation.)

Carrie Olivia Adams, A Few Reasons for Gratitude

Happy Thanksgiving! Isn’t is amazing that we have a whole holiday dedicated to gratitude? (With a side of cranberry sauce.) There’s so much I’m grateful for, but a key element is the sense of purpose I gain from my Makino Studios work. It turns out that being an artist and poet doesn’t bring in the big bucks—who knew?! But unlike hedge fund managers, I get to regularly hear from people how much my offerings touch them.

This weekend a friend told me that one of my cards was perfect for a difficult situation: her brother is in his last weeks in hospice. Another wrote that she was so moved by a poem that she sent it on to family and friends. And there are hundreds of people who make a point of giving my haiku calendar to friends, family, book club members, caregivers and coworkers every year. It’s a real gift to have that impact as an artist and poet. Your support helps my dreams take wing, so thank you all!

Annette Makino, On grateful wings

it was snowing & the sky was bare.
we both stopped. no porch light,
just the glow of white snow lighting
our faces. maybe he saw the creature
staring down at us. maybe he was looking
at something else. i could not make out
the beast’s full body. eyes. claws.
wing tips like mountains.

Robin Gow, 11/22

the view from what happens decides there’s a road. or a fly

on the wall of winter. all things to be done will be done

over. the dark in a dog set to howl.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: a terrorist’s sunflowers, spirit photography, a missing cha cha cha, the squeeze box of weeks, and much more. Enjoy.

Here in Palo Alto we live on the edge of a creek (dry since the spring) that is the boundary between two towns south of San Francisco, and tree-lined so that we look at what seems to be a forest, but is really a thin screen of green with houses, apartment buildings and businesses cheek-to-cheek on each side. Why do I mention that? Because straight across from us, a leaf blower has started chasing leaves around the parking lot of the building.

Really what I set out to say is how excited I was to receive a copy of Andrew Sclater’s collection Quite Joyful from Mariscat in Scotland. It is a pamphlet (chapbook) and every poem in it is strange and wonderful and playful and deeply serious. I can’t praise it highly enough. I was so thrilled that I sat down and read it straight through, all 30 or so pages in one — well, maybe 2 — gulps. I’m Canadian, we’re pretty low key, but this book makes me jump up and down inside me. I want to shout to everyone I know or don’t know. 

Beverley Bie Brahic, Palo Alto, Friday 12 September 2025

I needed to get out into the woods, but between sciatica and recovering from the sprained ankle, it’s been hard to plan, or for that matter to pick a trail that hits my sweet spot between genuinely peaceful and not-too-rugged. Yesterday my spouse remembered Reservoir Hollow. It’s an obscure out-and-back trail a 15-minute drive away, heading from the edge of a small town into the state forest, climbing a low mountain but gently–and what a perfect morning to walk it, cool and clear, with the blue of the sky deepening as it does in September and just a hint of gold touching the leaves. It crosses streams seven or eight times in the first mile or so, more than I can handle in spring, but the long dry spell made stepping from stone to stone easy. Acorns in shades of yellow, green, and brown pelted around us, but none clocked us on the head, and there were lots of fascinating mushrooms to pore over. It lifted my spirits so much. In the late afternoon I went to a lovely poetry reading (plus guitar) in another part of the county, and we ate a good dinner outdoors. I kept catching my breath in awe at the day’s beauty.

There was a moment, though, when we parked the old Prius with its lefty bumperstickers on that residential-getting-rural edge of a conservative town and I thought: hmm. Am I being stupid? My agitation-machine-of-a-cellphone had been reporting fresh horrors (not to mention the horror of how mainstream media covers them, or doesn’t). The aforementioned spouse has published a raft of editorials in state newspapers lately, about which he gets some thank you notes and some hate mail (here’s his recent blog post about a right-wing alumni group that has called for his dismissal by our employer). He works with a local political organization that got a new death threat yesterday.

Lesley Wheeler, Nuts raining down

Yesterday in the forest, I saw two leaves dangling from a line of spiderweb, twisting and turning. They were just beginning to turn red and yellow. I recorded a few minutes of their twisting. I loved how they appeared to be hovering in mid air like two autumnal ghosts.

When I came home I decided to do something with the video. I was thinking about the varicoloured surfaces, the sculptural shapes and how they turned like dancers or silk scarves making arabesques. In order to highlight the delicate colours, I isolated the leaves in the video and then superimposed three iterations of the leaves.

I love how the leaves intersect in the video, influencing the colour and texture of each other as they cross.

Yesterday I also read a substack by Rachel Rose where she quoted Sartre. (“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”― Jean-Paul Sartre). I’ve been thinking of this in light of, well, the times. What does it mean that “this one is ours”? What is Satre asking us in terms of acceptance and making the best of it (appreciating what we have rather than what we don’t have)? What is he saying about what responsibility we have during this time?

Gary Barwin, “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours”: Leaves in the forest and being a [Jewish] writer in these times

The terrorist tamps
down his longing
for the sunflowers he used to grow,
their bright smiles turned
towards blue skies.
He wonders about the different trajectory
had he chosen seeds and soil
instead of flame and ash.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Osama’s Sunflowers: A Poem for September 11

As I delved once again into a well-thumbed anthology, Poets Of The Non-Existent City, Los Angeles In The McCarthy Era, the struggles of those writers of seventy years ago suddenly seemed horribly relevant all over again.

Anything resembling a realistic socialist revolution seems more remote a possibility than it has ever done in my lifetime as Trump and his flunkies, Putin and his flunkies, with violent imitators and sycophants in seats of authority across the globe, concentrate on defending and promoting their own wealth and power at the expense of the poor and voiceless.

Netanyahu’s relentless pursuit of journalists who attempt to work in Gaza is the most extreme example that comes to mind but there are surreptitious attempts at political control wherever you choose to look. In Britain the news outlets pretty much ignored the election of the new head of the Green Party and his subsequent statements of intent for a better world, but offered us blanket coverage of the extreme right-wing rallying howls of Reform.

Only last week when Trump decided to use the US Open men’s final as a photo-opportunity broadcasters were warned off from showing any negative reaction to his presence. More darkly, the antics of his enforcers are becoming the norm – and therefore perceived as not especially interesting news items.

In Britain, we saw the control of anyone with an alternative opinion with the coronation of King Charles, when people were arrested for holding up placards saying Not Our King, and in one case even a person with a blank piece of paper was singled out as a potential subversive. Now it’s happening with those who happen to think Palestinians have a right to live in their own state. […]

In the introduction to Poets Of The Non-Existent City, I was reminded of the defiance of writer Tom McGrath, who was fired from his job as a creative writing lecturer at Los Angeles State College. He was described as uncooperative in the face of interrogation. He said: “As a traditionalist, I would prefer to take my stand with Marvell, Blake, Shelley and Garcia Lorca… I do not wish to bring dishonour to my tribe.”

And, of course, while some writers might be killed, others imprisoned and tortured, ostracized or simply denied a living, some dissenting voices eventually tend to find a way to be heard and times can and do change.

Bob Mee, POETS OF THE NON-EXISTENT CITY, A TIMELY REMINDER

In Manila, the poor are rattling
mansion gates and pelting glass
windows with balls of mud.

When floodwaters rise, they rise
with the force of imperfect contracts—
Would you build a dike lined with straw

and filched copper wires? Would you
build an empire with melted chains from
designer bags?

Luisa A. Igloria, Concatenation

Large, robotic arms in the industrial plant parallel both sides of the assembly line of metal car frames that jolt ahead and abruptly stop. Jolt ahead and abruptly stop. The synchronized arms bend and reach over the metallic skeletons. Bolting something into place. Welding something into place. Pressing down. Lifting up. Puncturing holes. Bit-by-bit the car’s frame gains mechanism and the likeness of a car, that is, if you squint hard enough when the sparks fly from the metal, illuminating small orbs of space in the dimness of the dark factory where light isn’t necessary.

[…]

Etiolation is the process in which the seed’s light-intelligent stem elongates, pale and yellow, in the darkness of earthly rot. Spindly and thin, all the seed’s reserves went into the burst of the stem’s quick journey to lux aeterna where finally a leaf will unfurl for a cup of sun. Meanwhile, the cool machinery of roots beneath absorb, store, and anchor amongst the granule and grain of the world. In dark factories, the same granules and grains are manufactured into capsules called antibiotics.

*

Sometimes I finally find the light switch in the dark corridor of my mind and it is one of those glorious evenings where as soon as we stepped outside, I spread my arms wide open up to the sky as if it were reaching for me, too. We decided to take a walk along River Road as distant wildfires rendered the evening sky in a smoky wash. What did you just take a picture of? I asked my husband as we walked along the meandering country lane. Our shadows, he said and I glanced down at our dark companions, the sunset’s sepia reflecting off the asphalt. Our shadows stretched ahead of us, devoid of our dimensions and mechanisms.

Sarah Lada, Dark Factory

I might have expected the wine trade to be affected by tariffs (and it certainly has been), but I didn’t bargain for their impact on my poetry sales. Over the last few months, I’ve found a lot of new readers for my books in the U.S. via social media platfroms such as Bluesky, However, all that’s now vanished overnight due to those darned tariffs!

Right now, there’s no way to post a book from Europe to the U.S. with any decent guarantee that it will reach its destination safely and without extra charges. A big blow for the likes of me, but also for many small publishers who were already struggling enough before this extra stumbling block… 

Matthew Stewart, Tariffs on poetry

There is much to see and unsee in the Louvre. The other day, however, I came across a painting that I can’t seem to stop thinking about. 

In an almost empty room is Charles Le Brun’s Alexander Entering Babylon, or the Triumph of Alexander painted in 1665. Le Brun, who served as a court painter to Louis XIV, painted the tableau as a model for a piece of tapestry woven at the Gobelins manufactory in Paris. The painting’s description reads, “The triumphant Alexander, standing on a chariot pulled by two elephants, enters Babylon in 331 BC. The city’s terraces and hanging gardens are visible in the background.” The painting depicts Alexander the Great’s ceremonial entry into Babylon after his victory over Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela but, in the painting, it is rather easy to miss Alexander or his elephant chariot or the hanging gardens of Babylon as right in the centre of the painting is not the great king but, golden and vast like the Sun, the ass of a horse. I sat in front the horse’s ass for several minutes, bemused, sometimes laughing by myself, wondering if that’s exactly what Le Brun intended. There’s something charming about sharing a joke with a dead 17th century painter. Maybe there’s a symbolic meaning behind putting a horse’s ass right in the centre of a painting about a great victory of a great king but I do not know any such meaning. For me, a horse’s ass is the ass of a horse. 

Saudamini Deo, The Louvre and the ass of a horse

Recently one of my (very much appreciated) “founding members” wrote to ask if I could write something about Dante in early modern England. (I promise to write, if I can, on any topics requested by founding or paid subscribers; but all readers, not just paid subscribers, are very much encouraged to make suggestions and requests.) This was an engaging challenge, because direct references to Dante in sixteenth and seventeenth century England are actually fairly uncommon. Certainly, he’s mentioned much less than Petrarch, for example.

But as soon as I read Tim’s email, I thought immediately of one of my favourite and most enigmatic probable Dante references, which is found in the title of a very enjoyable bit of mid-sixteenth century invective, a topical satire on the death of Sir John Gresham (c. 1495-1556), which in one manuscript source is memorably titled: ‘Epitaphium crassi illius ac sordidi Johannis Gresham militis stercorarii cum dante in inferno sepulti’, that is, ‘Epitaph of that stupid and sordid usurer, John Gresham, knight of the dung-heap, now buried in hell with Dante’. Knight of the dung-heap!

Victoria Moul, Now buried in hell with Dante

We have been to a thing. Breaking with this blog’s tradition of oblique references to low-level gossip and self-recrimination at various things over the years, I disclose we were in attendance at the memorial of our friend the literature festival director and educator Kay Dunbar. With her husband Stephen Bristow, Kay co-owned and ran the Ways With Words literature festival, and associated events across the UK, from 1992-2022.

If you have been to Dartington, and sat in its medieval Great Hall, you will know that its height, stone walls, wooden floors and giant fireplace make it a deeply resonant space in which to listen to words. I’m deeply grateful to Kay and Stephen for putting on so many memorable events there over the years. My mind goes back to the waves of love passing to and from the stage where Seamus Heaney read his poems, a year or so after his stroke in 2006, palpable and mimetic. As Stephen spoke in thanks and farewell to Kay, I saw those same waves drawing us all in.

Towards the end of Stephen’s wonderful speech, he invited Blake Morrison to read a couple of poems in tribute to Kay. He began with ‘Covehithe’, the name of a small village just up the coast from Southwold, one of Ways With Words’ many venues. It was not a poem I knew. It begins innocently enough, with bald, almost bland statement: ‘The tides go in and out’. Before you know it, we are confronted with the reality of coastal erosion, the ‘creep’ of cliffs ‘stuck in reverse’ towards the ‘graves of Covehithe church’. A subtle poem of mourning and loss, it was perfect to its occasion.

The turn, when it came, was not one I expected: ‘I blame the dead’. Tonally, it’s out of keeping with the plaintive ‘What’s to be done?’ that preceeds it, not to mention the previous stanzas. I admire it, not least because it risks saying something you would never confess to in normal life, let alone in the solemnity of a memorial gathering. Like a gauche eruption at a dinner party, it brings into play forces, in this case the agency of the dead, that would normally stay silent. But then again, if a memorial gathering teaches us anything, it’s that we aren’t here long. Pick up that pen and write that poem, that memoir, that blog post, that one-woman show. There’s no point in blaming the dead. We’re here now.

Anthony Wilson, I blame the dead

Reader:  Your chapbook “Diaspora of Things” stems from the occasion of dismantling your mother’s house.  In the commentary, I read that the speaker moves from inert mute grief and disorientation to a greater understanding of differences and similarities –moving towards a polyphony.  

Author: Excellent reader. I wish I’d said that!  

R: I’m thinking about the word polyphony. You use words that start with “poly” often.  

A My neighbor has a booming voice, and my windows are open.  Her name is Polly. 

Jill Pearlman, A Short Interview with Myself

I don’t hold too much stock in ideas of the muse, instead seeking the attention of craft. The working class farm-lad in me, I suppose: writing as simultaneous muscle and study, a blend of document and pure sound against and through meaning. Sometimes one needs to simply repair the fence, milk the cows, put up a new building. One doesn’t have to get all abstract about it.

The composition of the book of sentences (2025) began in 2019 and ran two years into the Covid-era, stretching out as our small quartet-plus-cat remained home, home, perpetually home. During those last few months of 2019 and into the first Covid-era spring I was thinking about poems, but also not really. I was thinking about poems, in-between caregiving my father occasional weekends across his final months through Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and the onset of attending Rose in her second half of grade one, shifted from in-person to online. Aoife still sat as a preschooler, then. Throughout my father’s final sixteen months, I had developed a writing routine of alternating between my own work and poetry book reviews: a weekend attending him while sketching out reviews, before two weeks at home on my own work, and then back to a further farm weekend of reviewing. It was hard to write creatively amid his requirements, so I simply focused my time on reading and sketching out notes for later revision, once back at my desk. I saw a full year of this until Covid lockdown, when my anxiety landed directly into the pandemic-era creative non-fiction project, essays in the face of uncertainties (2022): the first one hundred self-isolated days, as the crisis threatened to distract from work, so I made crisis the work. One hundred days from start to finish, almost as a kind of blip in my writing, attempting to return to poems once that project exhausted. I spent that summer sketching out poems, occasionally inflating a backyard wading pool our young ladies ran around and through, wet footprints across the stretch of our first floor, from bedrooms to hallway to living room to kitchen.

Sentences, across the length and breadth. With that first Covid-September, as both our young ladies began online school in earnest (grades two and junior kindergarten, respectively), Christine attended work mornings in our sunroom, converted into her home office, as I sat in the living room, with notebook and pen, and a stack of reading. Rose in grade two, at the dining room table, a few feet away. Rose required an ear, but Aoife, in junior kindergarten, an eye. Once their first session ended at 10:30am, I would have forty minutes back at my desk before rising to prepare our young ladies’ lunch, and Christine would take over in the living room for their afternoons.

Routine is how I get work done. Routine is how I get anything done.

rob mclennan, the book of sentences

I suspect only artists at the beginning and end of their careers have much insight into their own medium. What the art could be; and what, in fact, it was. In the middle, we just become the medium. We’re just part of the current, and far from either the individual source or the communality of the open water. Artists who die young serve to remind us what the clarity of that first inspiration felt like. It felt … personal. Urgent, sharp, immediate, fearless.

We all know what happens if you gaze long into the abyss. [Francesca Waldman’s] photographs give me the Void’s perspective on matters. (It’s so thoroughly invoked in her work, I feel I should capitalise it: respectfully, pretentiously, existentially, Gallicly.) No one is behind the lens, so nothing’s taking the shot. The Void is given an eye. But now I have the Void’s perspective: again and again, I my gaze is met by the artist. Imagine how the Void must’ve felt. The nerve! Of trying to stare me out! … But the Void always wins, the way the house always wins. Anyway, it’s not the really the Void you should be worried about in this life. It’s the Stuff. The mirrors, the doors, the specimen cases, the cold stone floors, the windows. […]

Men and women are bound to read Plath and Woodman’s work very differently. Although the academic quarter are now far more careful (so careful, indeed, that they have backed into whole new fields of screaming prejudice), Plath still occasionally draws some of the old-school misogyny she always did, where her ‘self-dramatising’ – which is literally what poets do for a living – is upgraded to ‘histrionics’. That said, one cannot, I believe, make a non-gendered reading of ‘Daddy’, and it remains one of those great poems which will tell you more about the interpreter than the interpreted. […]

I’ve written a couple of poems on Woodman’s photography: two sonnets made of couplets. (There’s one here, if you’re interested.) They didn’t come easily. They were written to accompany paintings that my old friend Alison Watt made for her Hiding in Full View project, of which Woodman was the presiding genius. I’m surprised I didn’t make any mention of that collaboration in the first version of the above essay; it was a bizarre and unconscious deletion. Although I do hold the slightly perverse position that one’s genuine, organic collaborations with friends – as opposed to the others that folk often kindly arrange for you –– are too private in their exchange of symbols to talk about in public. More generally, if I don’t feel queasy talking about the ‘process’, I suspect the poem of having cost me little.

One of those poems ends ‘All rooms will hide you, if you stand just so. / All ghosts know this. That’s really all they know.’ It’s a tautology, but there’s not a lot to do in limbo but hang out. I don’t think ghosts have a complex gig: they are what they are. They only just push through, so they’re very flat. You might as well make a photograph. Photographs can haunt almost as much as the real thing, and ghosts aren’t that much more real. Ghosts show or hide themselves, and they haunt us, and that’s pretty much the whole show. We conjure them to remind us we are alive. From which one might conclude that those who insistently conjure their own ghosts need the keenest reminding. I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am. ‘Brag’: Sylvia, honest to God.

Don Paterson, On Francesca Woodman, Plath and Spirit Photography

At the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, where I work, there is a longstanding departmental culture that keeps open a speculative space between literary criticism and creative writing. According to Carole Angier’s recent biography of W.G. Sebald — who was Professor of European Literature at UEA — the German writer strongly resisted what he saw as the value-for-money “Stalinization” of higher education under Thatcherite policy in the Eighties, to the point where he is said to have shown the door to Department of Education inspectors who came to conduct a Teaching Quality Assessment. And although Sebald was employed as a literary critic, it was at UEA that he wrote the dream-like blendings of history and fiction that made him famous: Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz.

At the end of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald draws a melancholy parallel between the work of scholars and the silk weavers of Norwich, whose history he has been researching:

It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.

“Even after the end of the working day” is an important qualification — whether we like it or not, much academic research is unpaid because the mind does not put aside its puzzles as easily as a shut-down computer. Nor does the fully funded imagination always work more happily. I often think of the poet and critic Tom Paulin, who in 2000 was awarded a National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts worth £75,000 (equal to almost £150,000 today) to write an epic poem about the Second World War — a windfall that the Guardian reported at the time as

almost too good to be true [and] the antithesis of the Thatcherite notion that all cultural activity should have an economic pay-off.

Unfortunately, Paulin only ever published the first instalment of what he himself called a “monstrous project”, The Invasion Handbook (2003), and seems to have written very little poetry since (so I was pleased to discover, researching this, that he has a new collection, Namanlagh, coming out with Faber and Faber in November this year).

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Unfunded Hobbit Research

It’s not uncommon after a break-up for unbidden images from the relationship to surface and all sorts of wish fulfilment and ‘what ifs’ to play out. The poem appears again, but as a redacted/erasure version. All that’s left from the quoted section is,

“saltwater
dreams”

And a third version of the same poem has the opening seven lines completely blanked and ends “in a salty tear”. These dreams offer no comfort but serve as a reminder of what’s lost. However, it’s also true that the dreams only offer one side of the story. We never know what the other person involved might have thought. Have they moved on or are they also suffering.

“Life-tides” explores both sides. It starts with a picture of a boy in the ocean playing, and then a man drowning and concludes,

“They are the same poem
names written in the sand,
unaware of
how these words
will blend
into
high
tides.”

It’s centred on the page. The first stanza is left aligned, the second right aligned. The centring is a visual representation of the third stanza as a conclusion of the first two. The boy playing is innocence and fund. The man drowning has lost his innocence and become overwhelmed. Meanwhile the waves erase the names in the sand. It seems neither story will survive.

Emma Lee, “Dreamescapes” Jorge López Llorente (Alien Buddha Press) – book review

I used to teach this poem in poetry workshops. It was sort of a dare: beginning poets don’t like to write sentences or tell stories. For all my love of formal acrobatics and linguistic density, the urgency of compressed and original language, the kind of stuff I am typically trying to do myself, I adore a poet like Gerald Stern. I find him instructive in everything I do not think I am good at: frankness, candour, big heartfelt feeling. This one: oof. It’s how unassuming he is, how disinterested in impressing us. He goes around looking for moss. He looks at a line of sticks. He speaks easily, without urgency, lines broken at natural pauses. It’s a delight to read this poem aloud. Try it; I dare you.

As ever, it’s the turns that do me in, here combined with anaphora: the offhandedness of the register abruptly amped by the oblique reference to “a sudden fit of violence” meeting the syntactic pattern “as if,” the lines trying on various relationships between pain and clarity, the grappling with the past, trying to find a way to live with it. The answer, it seems, has to do with myth; we return to the god of rain, the locus of sadness, of pain, and see how his suffering transforms the earth: from his pain comes violets.

Vanessa Stauffer, “God of Rain, God of Water” by Gerald Stern

The idea of ‘missing’ and ‘missing out’ is an important one in this collection. As a consequence of her deafness, Hamlett misses trains, misses out on conversations, and, perhaps most significant of all, misses out on the joys of nature, for [Jenny] Hamlett is a naturalist, who takes much delight from the natural world. Nowhere is this more movingly conveyed than in the poem, Silence and Sound, in which she expresses her desire to go back in time and enjoy again ‘the scuffle of vole,/ the hum of insects,/…the rustle of gorse, the mutterings of willows/…the bluebells whisper, a blackbird call,/ a pigeon breaking cover.’ There is a grief here for what she has lost, and yet in other poems in the collection, she shows she is still able to gain some pleasure and compensation for her present state from the other sensory delights in nature, its sights and smells. In Night Garden, Hamlett paints a vivid picture of its complex medley of fragrances: ‘such a complex maze of fragrance/ paints the garden with colour’. The synaesthetic nature of the imagery here suggests the capacity of one sense to compensate for another. Although the poet can no longer enjoy the sounds of nature, there are still other sensory pleasures to be had and which, as she writes in the final line of the poem, ‘allow peace in.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Sorry I forgot to pack my ears’ by Jenny Hamlett

In Ireland, we have a number of examples of poets creating urban haiku, notably Michael Hartnett’s Inchicore Haiku. The two books reviewed here are notable additions to that nascent tradition. For Liam Carson, who grew up in Belfast during ‘the Troubles’, images from that experience can serve to mark the seasons better than nature words:

busses on fire
in the Belfast night
long hot summer

However, Carson remains attuned to the long tradition of his chosen form; the first sequence in the book (there are no individual haiku here, but sequences of varying lengths) is called ‘Road to the North’, a clear nod to Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi, and there are images in the sequence that recall moments from that work:

road to the north
the weight of ivy
on a ruined cottage

[…]

I first encountered Tim Murphy’s work when we both had haiku included in Pat Boran’s Local Wonders anthology a few years back and just a few pages apart thanks to the wonders of alphabetical order. One of those haiku, also collected here, reads:

lockdown
do the birds wonder
where we are?

eight words that encapsulate what was a shared experience of Covid times, the sudden awareness of the natural within the urban as a reciprocal arrangement that so many of us shared.

Billy Mills, Two Irish Haikuists: A Review of Liam Carson and Tim Murphy

Ethel Romig Fuller (1883-1965) was born in Big Rapids, Michigan. In 1906 she moved Portland, Oregon, fell in love with the landscape, and after climbing Mount Hood dedicated herself to writing poems about the northwest; “Possessor of ‘a husband, two sons, and a most happy home’, Fuller is a Portland writer who has often appeared in The Lyric West, and in other California and Eastern publications.” (The Lyric West, 1927)

Fuller went on to publish three books of poetry, showing her skill at both both rhymed and unrhymed forms of “new” poetry: White Peaks & Green (1928), Kitchen Sonnets & Lyrics Of Domesticity (1931), and Skylines (1952). While her poems address many aspects of the Oregon landscape, the mountain ranges—and especially the Cascade Range, containing Mount Hood—were particularly significant to Fuller, both physically and metaphysically.

Fuller was also an editor, and in the 1930s when the local newspaper The Oregonian announced it was going to stop publishing poetry, Fuller “persuaded the paper to create a weekly poetry section, insisting that poems from all over the world be published, not only those from Oregon, [which] she edited from the early 1930s to the late 1950s.” (Hill, Oregon Encyclopedia, 2022) Fuller’s own work continued to grow in popularity as well. In 1939 the New York Times reported that her poem ‘Proof’ was the most quoted poem in the English language, and in 1957 she became Oregon’s third Poet Laureate. […]

After Ethel Romig Fuller
by Dick Whyte
I.
what the mountain taught me:
there is something beyond exhaustion,
trees will not judge you,
the sky is a mighty long way,
silence is not the absence of sound,—
II.
ah! the valley approaches, emptying itself
of synthetic gods,
like a sack trying to hold a river:
we leak

Dick Whyte, Ethel Romig Fuller – 4 Mountain Poems (1927-1928)

I’m so honored to have my poem “The End of October” included in Denison Museum’s current exhibition M(otherhood)s—open and free to the public until December 5th!

The exhibition “brings together more than a millennia of art, poetry, and film to explore the many ways mothering—by birth, by choice, by circumstance, and by community—takes form across cultures and generations. From the ancient Indian sculpture The Goddess Lajja Gauri and the Renaissance vision of the Holy Family to bold contemporary works by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Judy Chicago, Tracey Emin, and Titus Kaphar, the exhibition invites reflection on care, identity, resilience, and the complicated realities that live alongside love. The works span painting, photography, print, sculpture, video, and the written word, creating a conversation between the intimate and the political, the historical and the now.”

Deepest thanks to Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach for including me alongside so many gorgeous artists, including stellar poets like Joy Harjo, Kai Coggin, Keetje Kuipers, Ada Limón, Maggie Smith, Kendra DeColo, Erika Meitner, Victoria Chang, Ajanaé Dawkins, Luisa Muradyan, Traci Brimhall, Ellen Bass, Danusha Laméris, Kelly Grace Thomas, and her own dear self.

Do check out the exhibition website which includes a guide with all the poems.

Hyejung Kook [no title]

I took my selected poems of Wisława Szymborska off the shelf recently and I keep returning to it. It’s titled View with a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. It’s where I started with her work, later picking up the collected works but this one is hit after hit. Highly recommended. There’s a great article here about where to start with her literature, which begins with the tale of her sneaking out for cigarettes with the King of Sweden during the Nobel award presentation. […]

The world is a lot these days, shock after shock. There’s another poem in View with a Grain of Sand where she says, “After every war / someone has to tidy up.” I always visualize a house party that’s not quite over yet, and the host of the party is going around cleaning up the glasses and mess ahead of everyone leaving. On angels, “If there are angels, / I doubt they read / our novels / concerning thwarted hopes.”

Her poem “Thank You Note” has always been there: “I owe so much / to those I don’t love. // The relief as I agree / that someone needs them more.” Those who don’t love us now will probably never love us. That’s fine.

The angels are too busy now to read our novels or to put the drinks glasses in the sink. I doubt they’re reading our social media posts. I guess this means we’re going to have to do stuff ourselves. Start cleaning up those things in our vicinity. Our poems won’t change the world, says Patrizia Cavalli, in a poem that changed my world. What will?

Shawna Lemay, The Most Pressing Questions – Revisiting Wisława Szymborska

There was a brief period of my life – when I was a full-time PhD student – when I wasn’t tied to the rhythms of the educational year. I still remember the feeling of freedom and giddy excitement that swept through me that first September when I realised September didn’t mean the same thing anymore and wouldn’t for a while.

Now I’m teaching again, but it’s a very different rhythm to my music teaching days. Our teaching doesn’t start till October, but there is preparation and induction events and emails and continued supervision of MA students and PhD students, and left over marking, and meetings and strategy days.

And now I’m a mother and I get to September with feelings of sadness and relief. I’m sad that another summer is over, and this one felt years long and days short. We spent eight days in Spain in a pool and my daughter swam all day, getting stronger and stronger and more confident in the water. I examined a PhD viva. We went to see the live filming of Gladiators. I finished a lyric essay on motherhood and it has been accepted for publication. We went camping with five other families in Cheshire. I marked all day and into the early hours of the morning. I spent all afternoon by the river and watched my daughter learn how to make a bow and arrow. I went away for a week and taught poetry. I went to the Museum of Childhood and watched my daughter shop in the pretend shop, get money from the pretend bank, post pretend letters. I edited my poetry collection. I played Junior Monopoly.

I gave up on trying to have two separate lives and just let them push up against each other. There were no clean borders – motherhood and my writing and my job are distilled into each other, like ink into water, although which is the clear water and which is the ink is beyond my knowing.

Kim Moore, Back to school vibes

“Which kippah goes better with this?”
My teen gestured to his blue sweater.
We chose the navy blue one with
robin’s-egg squares, like a
Sol LeWitt painting in miniature.
We’d been listening to Beethoven
while he finished his AP Euro reading
and I nursed my first cup of coffee.
He glanced at his watch, grabbed
two clips to keep his Jewish identity
steadily visible on his head, and
dashed out the door to catch the bus.
In the silence after he left
all I could think about
was the parents of the two teenagers
shot by a fellow student yesterday
in yet another school, yet another town.

Rachel Barenblat, Before School

A good week to avoid social media. Also, I’m considering becoming a youth influencer for things like empathy, love of science, poetry, and feminism. Any podcasts hiring? (And I want to say more, but you know what? I’m not.) […]

The reality of life for poets can be tough, and our time together brief, so celebrating the wins of your friends is important and deserves time and space. So I got together with a few young local poets who are burning it up – Catherine Broadwall’s new memoir, Water Spell, is being launched at J. Bookwalter’s the 25th and me, Erika and Kristine Iredale will be opening for her, so come on out. That talented girl also just signed for a new poetry book with local press Girl Noise Press, so double the congrats.

In the middle of the week, I was feeling pretty heavy, so it was a good surprise to see my Rainier cherry tree break into blossom, and the little hummingbirds can not leave it alone.

I’m ready for some rejuvenation, the hope in falling leaves of new birth, the unexpected flowering.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Tough Week with Bright Spots: Celebrating Poets, Fall Feels and Surprise Cherry Blossoms

i want to reject nihilism & embrace a thing
with feathers. there is a zoo up the street
from me & i wish the cages were bigger.
what a ridiculous dream? that’s what everyone
has been saying to me though, “don’t you want
a bigger cage?” no i do not. i want a meadow.

Robin Gow, quiet game

Art and writing these days feels like a strange disassociation from the world of screens spewing horrors that grow more ridiculous every day. I am not sure how to reconcile what happens in my head with the world outside it. And there are many good things coming, from new dgp chaps and shop offerings to cool stuff I am cooking up for Patreon in the coming months (including things like Edgar Allen Poe tarot cards and a designing a daily planner that should be available by the time November rolls around if not sooner.) I am knee-deep in a promising new series of poems set in the mid-century, which borrows its tones and inspiration from things like The Twilight Zone and Welcome to Nightvale.

I am looking for the spaces inside these poems to work out my feelings, here in the 21st century, but its slow going. As someone who considers my overall genre to be horror, its a strange place to be making spooky things when the outside world is more disturbing than fiction. […]

The sun raising a frequency
in our blood. A hum in the molars
that signaled doom, weighty as a rock
through the window. Glass fragments
in our hair and in our tea. We’d smile
while our gums bled. While our tongues
probed the holes we didn’t quite believe were real.

Kristy Bowen, September Paper Boat

Why is creativity so important, especially right now? Because it stands in complete opposition to the destruction, violence, and lack of caring that we’re witnessing every day, in politics, in society, and in the environment. When these dark forces enter our bodies continually, through the news, social media, and real-life conversations, they work destructively upon us, weakening our natural defenses — which are hopefulness, positivity, creativity, and love. And those negative forces are so pervasive now that unless we actively seek to strengthen our defenses, we’re going to feel overwhelmed, hopeless, exhausted, paralyzed, unable to resist. That’s the goal; that’s exactly where they want us to be. So I want to encourage you to do something involved with the arts, every day if you can, to remind yourself of the positive forces you have inside yourself and which have always existed throughout time, finding expression through human endeavor and inspiring us, no matter how many centuries stand between us and the creators.

Beth Adams, The Arts and Creativity

these hands are like brothers. one weaker than the other.

one loved more. one wields the knife. the other cleans

a small church. we have great admiration for their faith.

Grant Hackett [no title]

Each morning I listen to the stream, its steady murmuration, plus strange gunks and grgles. Often overhead the scree of jays. Yesterday a gronk and then a shatter of crows, a scuffle between them and a hawk. Low huff when a deer I haven’t seen sees me, gives away the whole game. Which makes me think of performing my poems with a dance troupe, their exhales signaling the next movement. I have tinnitus, so the world is always accompanied by a high chord. I say I haven’t been writing much lately, but I find written things. Prosaic, mostly, and missing something. Music, I think. Rhythm. A cha cha cha. So important for a written thing, a poem, specifically, to have some, sometimes subtle, percussion — a tocketa tocketa, a little high-hat. And to have a glorious array of consonants, a pattern of vowels. What I love about speaking French is that it requires my mouth to move in a different way. I have to hold my face differently. It wakes me up, in a way. I like poetry that requires the involvement of my mouth. This poem I found in the Adroit Journal demanded to be read aloud. I like a poem that gets in my face. It’s yet another yet another yet another elegy. Can’t escape ’em. The dead are everywhere. And life keeps getting in their way.

Marilyn McCabe, through a sieve quick & gone—

a pin in night’s blanket,
the shrewd, the nimble,
the saguaro
and its breathing skin, the field
itself

I want an acre
with which to do nothing

Charlotte Hamrick, Us, On Any Given Day

Time makes an awful racket until you learn to play it competently. All this expansion and contraction and wheezing the old squeeze box of weeks. Fumble the keys like a bare sweaty foot slipping off the gas pedal. It ain’t always pretty but the lack of pretty makes for authentic. More authentic than grocery store bagels.

The more diverse your days the slower the time because less living on automatic. Unless you have fast diversity in which case it’s a blur whir that you let slide past like so much scenery. Trees, Got it. People, Sure. Trauma. War. Screw-up. Sleep. Yup.

To be present and slow down, feel the air temperature, check in with the feet, try to let the parachute settle over your face. You won’t suffocate. You’ve landed.

Pearl Pirie, Time’s Accordion

This week: listener poets, an undocumented sun, a mind full of scorpions, the whisper between things, and much more. Enjoy.

I met a poem that left without
saying a word. I still remember it by heart.

Somewhere between the lake and
the glass house on a nothing afternoon
in Lalbagh, a peepal tree fell.
Four dozen people never
heard it. Never looked up from
their phones. Did the tree fall?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Late dirge for the undead

TGLP is a nonprofit that works with hospitals and other healthcare organizations to reduce stress, anxiety, and burnout, and to increase human connection, using the tools of listening and poetry. The organization has been doing listener poet sessions since 2018 at places like Sibley Memorial Hospital at Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care. TGLP works with doctors, nurses, residents, medical students, patients, and family members, all to help people feel heard.

As soon as I heard about this practice, I had to learn more. I’ve been a listener and a poet my whole life, and these modes of being have played significant roles in my career. Being an active listener made me a better journalist, communicator, and leader. Being a poet (even a shy one, of “Barefoot Rank”) has helped me stay attuned to the power and dynamism of language, and it’s made me a better writer and editor. Listening has been an increasingly important part of my spiritual practice in the past decade. […]

The course was a profound experience. Over five weeks in June, ten of us came together twice a week, for three hours each time. Our cohort included a wide range of amazing and talented individuals with deep experience across both poetry and healthcare. Our instructor, Ravenna Raven, led the course with dedication, enthusiasm, expertise, and a terrific sense of emotional availability and vulnerability. She created a welcoming, nurturing, exciting space for learning. […]

We studied poetic techniques, listening skills, how to hold space, trauma-informed practices, crisis management skills, how to connect across difference, and more. We heard from guest speakers, all of them experienced listener poets, who inspired us with stories of healing and writing. We practiced listening to and writing poems for each other and for one remarkable guest, a neurologist with a love of poetry that he longed to share with his patients.

And then, during the course of July, we did a practicum: Each of us held six listening poetry sessions and wrote six poems for six different individuals. I had the honor of spending time with eight amazing “poemees” and writing poems for them (I did two extra because of scheduling complications). It gave me a window into the worlds of those I listened to, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be a therapist, a doctor, a nurse, a chaplain, or just a human being dealing with change, pain, and complexity. And they told me that the poems they received were moving, inspiring, and encouraging.

As for the course’s impact on me, reading Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry and Singing School and James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line sparked a personal renaissance in how I approach the music and meter of the mostly free verse I write. Learning how to distill interview notes into poems was the transformative practice I was looking for. I know how to hold a conversation, form a connection, and draw people out: I’ve practiced this for years. Now I can use those skills to write poems for them in addition to bylines.

As a listener poet, I can use my journalistic and poetic skills together in the service of helping people feel heard and helping them express deep emotions and experiences. Like other listener poets, I can bring gifts of presence and poetry to those who need them. 

Dylan Tweney, When listening and poetry collide

I go to the hospital, come back wired up.
They’re checking what my heart does if I pick up and carry a sack of pig feed,
haul dead branches to the boundary fence, what happens
if I become angry, disappointed, sad, ordinarily happy, ecstatically happy, calm, still.
If I shout. If I sing. In tune, out of tune. If I stay silent. Breathe normally. Hold my breath.
They already know my heart short-circuits and re-routes itself.
They want to check what I remember, what I forget.
They want to check who I’ve avoided, who I’ve embraced.
They want to know about love, faith, politics, education (self or formal).
They want to know how come I earned a living doing what I couldn’t understand.

Bob Mee, WIRED UP, AND OTHER POEMS

This week’s revisit started in the unlikely inspo of a Pinterest account. A user decided it would be amusing to create a stylish and bougie faux child to populate her pages of decor, fashion, and other pins. It was intriguing, the idea of an imaginary kid, let alone one with incredibly unrealistic and elite tastes. As someone who did not plan to have actual children, and who often thinks of writing projects as strange and wordy offspring of sorts, I started writing prose poems that addressed my own mythical daughter, with an eye toward exploring how it feels to be childless by choice in a world that (even more now) finds that unusual. The series of poems wound up being one of my shorter collage zines, first in print, but you can also read an e-version now. Later, it was also included in FEED, which is all about mothers and mothering. 

Kristy Bowen, throwback thursday | impossible objects

the booming of whale song
hooves across the savanna
the screech of a raptor
a breath at sunset
moonsong above
the crackle of a camp fire
the yes of locked eyes
yes
some words reverberate
homeless in the tome of the ear

Jim Young, a poem for Salem’s poem

We have a thing we call consciousness that we think nothing else has. This consciousness should make us “know better,” should make us able to monitor the results of our actions, and change them for the common “good,” to work against “evil,” for the benefit of our species, our environment, our future. But that is not how we, homo so-called sapiens, operate. We are a learning species, but we don’t grasp the lessons.

It feels like the virus also let loose an epidemic of evil. It started with small refusals: to mask, to distance, to take heed, to be careful. But has blown into a worldwide festering of hate and fear, and a glory of violence, of willful ignorance. It is breathtaking, the velocity and breadth of this epidemic, and how meager the efforts against it, we conscious species the world over.

We are the belching spew, cyclical in our disasters.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, they say in French. The more things change, the more they are the same damn thing. Here is a poem from the recent issue of Blackbird.

Marilyn McCabe, teasing out a future that wouldn’t be

An undocumented sun flees gestapo horizon before morning’s first light.

Secret police riddle it with bullets, and the sun falls, sharing its blood-red light.

It’s just past the honeysuckle hour, and the scent hangs like the death of innocence.

Rich Ferguson, Just Past the Honeysuckle Hour

Another piece of bad news (which has to be read through the filter of even worse news, of course) came through—people who applied for the NEA got the notice that their applications would not be read and NEA grants to writers and artists were cancelled. America just keeps getting greater, right?

I have never won an NEA grant—but it seems like another chip at the arts and academia and anyone that might not tow the party line from the Republicans. Writers and artists are notoriously not easy to control, and that’s not okay in Trump’s fascist government, as it hasn’t been with many dictators—Chairman Mao, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot. I had a friend post on Facebook that her lecture at an Air Force academy was cancelled after someone looked up her work online—although the people who invited her were apologetic, they were not in control. So, this government really is afraid of artists’ speech. Standing up to power has always been our job, but now there are more consequences. I posted on Facebook that Trump’s government is going to make all the talent with the means and energy to move leave the country, and someone commented that that was the point. Trump doesn’t want anyone here who dares to criticize.

Even though I’ve been fighting my health problems, I also feel like I’m fighting the anti-art forces as well, like a video game where you fight one boss, and six more appear. You know, writers and artists are already struggling to earn a living in a society that wants its art for free (or created by AI). Every little bit that’s taken away is a little bit of a chance for an artist to breathe easy, financially, for a little bit. I am struggling with how to earn a living as a writer and survive in a society that doesn’t value the sickly, or the disabled, and I am both. I mean, almost all of our writing heroes were sickly—not all, but a lot. I hope to keep writing, keep publishing, keep teaching and reading and mentoring. Maybe my body and my country throw up obstacles that sometimes feel insurmountable. As we head into a new season (though it’s still in the nineties here for some reason), I am looking for hope.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Parents Visit and Sibling Visit, Getting Sick Under Stress, and Writers and Artists Dumped by the NEA

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACHIEVE?

A gold medal pings into my mind as the question lands between us in the silence. But I can’t say gold medal because I don’t know exactly what I want it for. My mind pictures me standing there at the award ceremony, bowing my head forward a little in readiness for the presentation. The ribbon brushes my hair, and I feel the warmth of the fingers of the woman transferring the medal as her hands knock against my ears. My head is cumbersome. People with cumbersome heads shouldn’t be getting medals. The applause suddenly feels false, and I didn’t even hear the start of it. I need to hear the beginning of the congratulatory clap. I need to be in the moment. I change my wish. I want a gold medal that fits easily over my head. No, I know what I want… I want a head that fits through the gap in a medal ribbon without causing a kerfuffle for the person handling the ceremony. I want it all to look flawless so everyone remembers me standing on that podium being given a medal. Given, that’s an interesting word. Medals are won not given. Not in a tombola, one in a hundred chance kind of way. You earn a medal by setting a goal and working on it. Over and over again until you are the best you can be. There’s that question again, What would you like to achieve?

Sue Finch, NEW SHOES

My dog told me he had learned eighty-one languages on the internet.

They were Abkhaz, Acehnese, Acholi, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alur, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Avar, Awadhi, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Balinese, Baluchi, Bambara, Baoulé, Bashkir, Basque, Batak Belarusian, Bemba, Bengali, Betawi, Bhojpuri, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cantonese, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chechen, Chichewa, Chinese, Chuukese, Chuvash, Corsican, Crimean Tatar, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dhivehi, Dinka, Dogri, Dombe, Dutch, Dyula, Dzongkha, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Ewe, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, Fon, French, Frisian, Friulian, Fulani, Ga, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Guarani, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hakha Chin, Hausa, Hawaiian and Hebrew.

He admitted he still had much to learn. Still, it’s impressive, I said. What motived you? The desire, he said, to speak to all living things, whether creature or plant, chancellor or fern. Snails, rocks, tractors, clouds. Of course, what he really said was, Bark bark bark bark! because though I did high school French and a bit of Spanish in college, I never learned language beyond that of my own people, an insular and trepidatious tribe who cleaved to their tongue as if it were both a small fire and the inside of a tank.

Gary Barwin, My dog learned 81 languages on the Internet

Who are the grape poets? What are their grape poems? And is grape poetry possible any more? These are questions people often ask me — at least, I think that’s what they’re asking.

Grape poetry, of course, begins with the classical world. The opening lines of Virgil’s Georgics — here translated by John Dryden — promise us sound advice on growing our own:

What makes a plenteous Harvest, when to turn
The fruitful Soil, and when to sowe the Corn;
The Care of Sheep, of Oxen, and of Kine;
And how to raise on Elms the teeming Vine

[…]

By the Victorian era, the pleasure of eating a bunch of grapes in polite society had become a trial of decorum. Grape scissors were invented for snipping off fruit from a bunch at the table, and a book called The Manners and Tone of Good Society (1879) described how to eat them gracefully, by performing a kind of conjuring trick:

When eating grapes, the half closed hand should be placed to the lips and the stones and skins adroitly allowed to fall into the fingers and quickly placed on the side of the plate, the back of the hand concealing the manoeuvre from view.

It was in such a context of delicacy and restraint that our next grape poet, Christina Rossetti, allowed the young Laura, in Goblin Market (1862), to be led into sensuous temptation by “pellucid grapes without one seed”:

How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes.

Had “luscious” and “bushes” ever been rhymed before in the history of English verse? There’s something outrageous here about their casual pairing, which rewrites the more conventional rhyme associated with Laura’s more conventional sister, Lizzie, earlier in the same passage: “Among the brookside rushes, / […] /Lizzie veil’d her blushes”.

Where, though, can we find grape poetry in the modern era? J. Alfred Prufrock doesn’t dare to eat a peach, and there are no grapes to be had in The Waste Land (1922), although there is Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, with his “pocket full of currants” — one of Eliot’s many images of dryness, as well as one of his allusions to classical civilization (the etymology of “currants” takes us back to the ancient Greek city of Corinth).

This allusiveness is, I think, typical of the fate of grape poetry in the twentieth century. Like the plums in William Carlos Williams’ icebox, the grapes of the modern poet are both there and not there. So, Wallace Stevens calls a poem “In the Clear Season of Grapes” (1923), but the only fruit in it is “a platter of pears, / Vermilion smeared over green”. “The clear season of grapes” is, however, the poem’s subtly metonymic way of evoking a specific time and place: early autumn in north-east America (“This conjunction of mountains and sea and our lands”), where clear skies produce the “welter of frost” that sweetens the harvest of native grape varieties.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Who Are the Grape Poets?

Because sometimes our days don’t turn out as we planned. Because there are people who go to work every day to help the rest of us navigate the maladies of the body. Because modern pharmaceuticals not only reduce suffering but take us to a place we fondly remember from our youth. And because sometimes a poem is born in the unexpected places in which we find ourselves, I am thrilled to have my poem “Ode to the Emergency Room” published at The Poetry Lighthouse for the month of August. I hope you check it out here: The Poetry Lighthouse.

Carey Taylor, Ode to the Emergency Room

I was going to ask Sarah Corbett for permission to post her poem ‘View of a Badger on the Heights Road’ from her collection, A Perfect Mirror, but I didn’t get round to asking. However, here’s part of the first stanza.

It looks like a clean death, curled as you are
on the verge, almost relaxed, paws folded
over each other, head turned to the side.
Not a trace of earth on you, killed on a night
walk, perhaps, on this treacherous moor road.

++++
I wanted to post this poem because a week or so ago Rachael and I were driving down to Dungeness and I saw a badger on the side of the road (M20, I think) that looked like someone had just pushed over a taxidermied badger. It looked stiff, but untouched.

I was doing some quality Sunday driving, but still didn’t properly register it, so I sort of forgot about the badger until later that night when I picked out my copy of A Perfect Mirror from my TBR* pile. Well, blass me, thass a rumun‘ (Ask a person from Norfolk) I thought when I saw the aforementioned poem on page 15.

Mat Riches, Lodge (49) some dates in your memory

The memory of doing is the memory 
       of exactitude broken up by lapses
in space. I relearn patience folding
       pages into folios, making sure
the grain of paper runs in the same
       direction. I stack them and prepare 
to sew— concentrating as you push the needle
       shaped like a smile into holes I’ve
made with an awl. Between breaths, the noise
       of the world can seem to soften; 
its edges waxed and cut into lengths like
       linen thread. Someone filmed a rare 
golden cicada in the moment it shrugged
       itself loose from its shell, 
and I marveled at such precision. Clean
       seams, tiny beautiful ruffled wings.

Luisa A. Igloria, Memory of Doing

There are lyrical poems in James Fenton’s Out of Danger, and then there are poems that are very nearly song lyrics. Both give pleasure, though arguably pleasure of different kinds. The book has keen observation, social conscience, and musical intelligence in abundance. Are the rhymes worn-out in places, like tires losing their treads? Maybe, but the Philippines and other South Pacific islands provide new rhymes and treads.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a genial, acute, and personable guide to these 50 poems about a range of outward-looking subjects. It is a good snapshot of contemporary Anglo-American verse, with a few oldies thrown in. I did not think that all the poems were as good as Ó Tuama said, but it would be a big surprise if I did. 

Jee Leong Koh, James Fenton’s OUT OF DANGER and Pádraig Ó Tuama’s POETRY UNBOUND

Mary Mulholland has been steadily building up an impressive body of work over the last decade and more: her latest publication, the elimination game, published by Broken Sleep Books and available here, is her second solo pamphlet, following her 2022 Live Canon  debut What the sheep taught me, in addition to her two Nine Pens collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell. Mary is also the founder of the Red Door Poets (details here), of whom I was an original member; I can testify to Mary’s deep poetic intuition and generosity.

With intelligence, humour and carefully contained ire, the elimination game tackles the stereotypes, pitfalls and apparent invisibility of older women in contemporary British society. As a late-middle-aged man in the same society, I can’t, and don’t, pretend to know what it feels like to be an older woman in Britain today, but Mary’s poems provide a good idea.

The content contains a plethora of memorable lines and images, such as the eponymous hero of ‘The General’s Widow’ who, once ‘The funeral’s over’ finds ‘it’s such a relief, / she’ll spend the night making paper planes, / hurl them at his eyes, nose and brains’, and the title-poem in which a litany of misogynist and agist insulting terms for older women are rebuffed in no uncertain terms (‘kindly wait while i /find a bucket to list & puke in’) and then refuted by another, much more positive litany of achievements: ‘last year I swam in the / arctic    trekked the sahara     then / mastered roller-blading    next up / i’m   starting   classes   in   mandarin’.

Matthew Paul, On Mary Mulholland’s ‘Stilling Time’

I’m sure there will be many readers whose knowledge of Margaret of Anjou is derived largely from Shakespeare’s histories in which she is portrayed as a hateful, ruthless and unfeminine figure, ‘the she-wolf of France’. In Daughter of Fire (Yaffle, 2025) Lucy Heuschen seeks to rehabilitate Margaret’s image. However, this is more than a poetic biography of a maligned historical figure, by giving voice to a woman of the past Heuschen seeks to explore the nature of womanhood and our society’s treatment of women both then and now.

There is no doubt that this collection is the product of considerable historical knowledge and a prodigious poetic talent. Based on primary historical sources, Heuschen creates a character very different to Shakespeare’s female villain. In Rough Crossing we meet first-hand the fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou travelling to meet her prospective husband, Henry VI. Understandably she is a little bewildered, (‘how is it   I am here/ but not here’) and anxious (‘I tense’); she is in a new strange world (‘his accent makes me laugh’), and yet the poem ends with an assertion of an ambition surprising for one so young, when she says ‘I will/ tame you//my England.’  Note the possessive pronoun, this is a political marriage. She will be a wife and a queen. There is no hesitation: but rather acceptance and determination given emphasis here by the bluntness and simplicity of the statement. 

We see the same ambition in Margaret and Suffolk at the chess board. This is clearly early in her reign. The description of her in the opening stanza is significant: ‘She skulks in her chair/ scowling at the state of play.’ The alliteration gives the verbs here particular emphasis: ‘skulk’ and ‘scowl’. Skulking suggests that Margaret is yet to reveal her true self, and the reason for this and her ‘scowl’ is made clear subsequently. As in the chess game, currently she lacks stratagem. This game is a symbol of her status: at the moment she lacks political skills, understanding of ‘Patterns she should predict, / sacrifices she could make’ and as a consequence ‘She watches him take/ piece after piece.’  It is also the case that the political system is loaded against women: she remarks at the end of the poem ‘It is silly, n’est-ce pas, this rule/ that only the King can leap.’ However, she is not prepared to accept her current position: she wants to learn the rules of the game to become an effective player: ‘She wants to see every move/ laid out to the checkmate.’ In doing so, she will defy the conventions of the time.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Daughter of Fire’ by Lucy Heuschen

Even on a quick initial reading, The Strongbox by Sasha Dugdale will take the reader’s imagination in many different directions and offer immediate pleasures of many kinds.

First, it works on a remarkably broad canvas. Drawing on the myth of Troy and related ancient Greek material, it’s epic in scale and effect in a way that develops from the work of Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets. Fragmenting the ancient Troy story, Dugdale rewrites incidents from it in anachronistic ways and mashes them up with incidents from other stories in a range of scenarios. Already in the first section – ‘Anatomy of an Abduction’ – we see the special kind of breadth this gives: a rain of vivid glimpses of domestic life, domestic violence, war, flight, seduction, abduction, rape, sometimes in nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first century incarnations, sometimes in a Homeric one, sometimes hovering between, as when a soldier sent to collect a girl – perhaps  Helen of Troy, perhaps a modern trafficking victim – drives past bullet-holed road signs but carries a bow. Breadth, then, is partly a matter of historical range, partly a matter of emotional variety. The poet moves us from scene to scene with a speed that I would call dazzling except that the scenes we move between are so solidly and clearly established in themselves. This combination of speed and clarity depends on the vivid economy of Dugdale’s images and the sureness of her rhythms. What makes it moving is the quiet empathy with which she presents many of her characters, and the way humble lives, sometimes caught in devastating circumstances, are given weight by the epic context and style of various sections.

The impression of breadth and scale also comes from Dugdale’s virtuoso handling of different forms. There are fourteen numbered sections, varying in length from one to nineteen pages. Most are in verse, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, but II, IV and VII are short drama scripts in prose with stage directions. II – titled ‘In the Rehearsal Room’ – is a brilliantly comic dramatic monologue, spoken by a patronisingly self-satisfied theatre director presumably putting on a play about Troy. VII, a stage or screen passage in which Helen tells her dreams to a bored, then jealous Paris, is equally funny. It’s more haunting than II, though, because other tones are interwoven with the satire, glimmers of wistful yearning and (this being a dialogue, not a monologue) a frustrated desire for communication on Helen’s part. This section, in other words, is much more layered than the second. For readers of ancient Greek literature, there’s even an apparent allusion to one of the most poignant moments in Pindar’s victory odes.

Edmund Prestwich, Sasha Dugdale, The Strongbox – review

It is as a poet writing in Gaelic that [Aonghas] MacNeacail – who died in 2022 – is most well-known, though he would himself provide translations of his work into English, what, in the poem ‘last night’, he refers to as Gaelic’s ‘sister tongue’. There were also poems written in Scots and these variants give an insight into what Colin Bramwell here calls ‘the language situation in Scotland’ within which MacNeacail worked all his life. For a number of years, MacNeacail lived and wrote under the anglicised name Angus Nicolson, but always considered himself a tri-lingualist and antagonistic to the kind of divisiveness such a ‘situation’ might give rise to. His natural inclination was democratic, pacifist, anti-authoritarian, and modernist. Now, the collection, beyond (eds. Colin Bramwell with Gerda Stevenson (Shearsman Books, 2024)) gives readers a selection of poems written in English by Aonghas MacNeacail over the past 30 years. One of the implications of the book’s title is his deeply held wish to look ‘beyond’ division, not to anything transcendental (MacNeacail’s focus was always this world, not some other), but to the next term in an on-going dialectical process. One of the little gems from ‘the notebook’, included here, imagines a cup of knowledge, the liquor within, also knowledge, a grain is added and stirred, and the grain then consumes the liquor and continues to ‘grow, root, sprout / find elbows, crack the cup // find clay’.

MacNeacail’s modernism took its key lessons from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Olson, and Creeley and most of the poems here have that fluid, unpunctuated (hence pointed by the breath), often short lined, often indented formal shape we associate with the Black Mountain. He was a member of one of Phillip Hobsbaum’s fertile ‘groups’ (along with Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard) and the advice given was to go back to his roots, to ‘write about what you know’. In part, this took MacNeacail back to his childhood, growing up in Uig, on the Isle of Skye, speaking only Gaelic. It also made it clear what he wanted to escape from: Gerda Stevenson describes this as ‘the confines of the proscriptive Free Church of Scotland’. Several childhood poems, illustrate the stifling force of religion, on his mother, for example, ‘strapped down tightly / by a darkly warding book thick with orders that drove / and hedged her way’ (‘missing’). The church governed education too, the teacher little more than a ‘stern presence’, who demanded ‘psalms / from memory’ (‘crofter, not’).

Martyn Crucefix, Aonghas MacNeacail’s English Language Poems Reviewed

The collection “I Am Not Light” ends in “Openhanded” with a final phrase “at last, my heart is full.” A line that signals a closure. However there’s a further section labelled “Bonus Poems” – as if poetry books get to do an encore – among which is “Scorpions” inspired by a quote from Macbeth, “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.” and the scorpions,

They travel the weave of fine veins
padding cushions of shame
with vesicles of acute remembering:
predators of opportunity
inebriated by time ̶
dark and sweet and threatening.

The metaphorical scorpions roam into recesses of buried memory, bring shame to the surface but these are offerings of darker emotions and events to facilitate learning and understanding. It returns to the collection’s theme of meeting life full-on.

Louise Machen’s poems are full of life, positives, negatives and the need to experience. Decorum may be limiting and caution is not recommended. “I Am Not Light” is not light and cheerful, although there is some wry, observational humour, and it unapologetically explores the darker side of human life, the break-ups, a miscarriage, grief and bereavement while offering a torch so the end of the tunnel can be seen.

Emma Lee, “I Am Not Light” Louise Machen (Black Bough Press) – book review

The Madrid Review is out at the end of August. Excited to see some of my poetry translated into Spanish in this edition. At the heart of this edition are Poems for Palestine – a poignant, powerful series of poems written by poets from around the world, addressed directly to the people of Palestine and Ukraine. These poems speak with urgency and compassion, weaving together voices of solidarity, hope, grief, and resistance. Haia Mohammed, a 22-year-old poet from Gaza whose debut pamphlet, The Age of Olive Trees (Out-Spoken Press) has been lauded for its raw honesty and lyrical strength, helped co-edit the issue and there’s an interview with her too.

Salena Godden, New books

A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight, by Elisa Gabbert:

“But for him it was not an important failure” — this, I think, is the crux of [Auden’s “Musée Des Baux Arts] disaster’s in the eye of the beholder, and if the eye does not behold, it’s not disaster at all.

Gabbert does a deep dive into this poem, which is, nominally, a response to Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

A summary of the poem does not do it justice—it is about the significance of the fact that Icarus’s fall, which Auden uses to represent human suffering on a much larger scale, is a minor, insignificant part of the painting that you would easily miss if the title didn’t tell you to look for it in the lower right hand corner, the point being that the suffering of others is something we have to choose to pay attention to, that it is something we can look away from all too easily. Here are the first few lines:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

And here are the lines specifically referencing Breughel’s painting:

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure;

Gabbert’s digital tour through the poem is well worth paying close attention to. She makes the poem’s underlying mechanics visible and accessible and shows how Auden constructed them to arrive at the poem’s “meaning.” She also illuminates the poem’s ekphrastic nature by uncovering paintings it refers to in addition to the one Auden names. What struck me most, however, and made me want to include her article here is the way her analysis arrives at this:

“Musée des Beaux Arts”…offers no comforting slogans or rallying cries, no assurance that suffering comes to an end or happens for a reason…What the poem really does is ask questions. The truth, we might infer, cannot be told — the truth is always changing; the truth is an ongoing inquiry…It asks us to question our place in the world — to ask what we might be missing…Do we spare a thought for…suffering, or sail calmly on? Moral absolution is available, the poem seems to say. That doesn’t mean we deserve it.

We often ask what good poems can do in the face of the suffering inflicted by, for example, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the famine in Sudan—not to mention the Trump administration’s attacks on migrants, women, and people who are trans and queer. (That list could, obviously, go on.) Gabbert’s piece, it seems to me, embodies one answer to that question. Poems, good poems—in both the aesthetic and moral/ethical senses of good—offer us emotional and intellectual access to the complex interiority of what it means that we have a choice whether or not to bear witness to suffering, much less to take whatever action we can to end it. Gabbert’s essay is worth reading and talking about and I think it is especially worth teaching.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #45

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She lives in western Massachusetts. […]

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? 

One concern is with poetry’s rescue of discourse, where the poem, or the kind of thinking a poem is, can be a true statement, albeit one that we only very briefly inhabit or are allowed. Recently, I’m invested—to my surprise—in rehabilitating the old quarrel between Shelley and Wordsworth, via Mill, poems of the head vs poems of the heart, to ask: why choose? As in, why is that the choice we are asked to make again and again? There’s (always) questions of what reading is good for; in what ways does poetry do a kind of (moral) philosophizing; interest in humans, their behaviors and reasons (actual, believed), and the lives of creatures.

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 and artists and thinkers I admire tend to believe in some different or other reality, the pursuit and discovery of which language, image, aesthetic expression uniquely allow. Art is a bridge one walks on and toward—an earthy, clumsy substance and a spiritual, extravagant one. It often encodes a personal longing but it’s also social, environmental, historical, political. Who but writers and artists will honor these stubborn, modest, generous dreams?

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hannah Brooks-Motl

Winkles are small molluscs, around the size of a 5 pence coin, and you need to collect them by the hundreds for them to be worth even a small amount. My brother David and I, as the two eldest, took a handle each of the faded, red plastic bucket that served as a receptacle for coal, peat, potatoes – and that day, winkles. My mother would lead the way, holding the hand of a younger brother. When we stopped, it was always her hand that lifted the dark weeds from the face of the rock. I remember she always parted it neatly, up and over. It was graceful and methodical. How an islander might lift the veil of his bride. The action set sandhoppers skittering in the disturbed sand. Sometimes it would uncover green crabs with soft, young shells. But the rock exposed, the purpose was to pick the ten or so winkles from where they hidden beneath the weeds, wetly dark as black pearls.

On that day, approaching one especially large outpost stone, our bucket already half-full, my mother pulled back the seaweed and revealed the large surface of a rock covered completely, every inch, with winkles. Even decades later, they laugh about my reaction – I jumped around the beach proclaiming that we were rich. Of course, we were not.

All children are conscious of their situation. I knew our need not as something necessarily shameful but as a cloud over things. But still, I’d maintain that my reaction was less to do with the potential for being rich and having our problems alleviated, but more to do with that other thing that I have been thinking about, the idea of the world as a place that responds – a place that understands the want or the need of the person, and reacts. Back then, the world was alive – and in more than just the way of animals and plants, lapwings and bog cotton. It was a place that might listen. Now, returning to Uist, it is hard to feel that old belief. Once, it seemed the hard wind blew the body in a certain direction because it was serving as a guide. Now, mostly, the gale is just the gale. That old faith has all but elapsed.

Which brings me to John Ruskin’s definition of a poet as a person to whom things speak. I understand it is a less subscribed-to position. My contemporaries seem admirable as types who follow that idea of Shelley’s, where the poet is the setters of standards and rules, ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. I saw Alice Oswald recently and thought about the strength of such a stance. Praise difference, perhaps – I feel my own life lean more towards Ruskin’s definition than Shelley’s. For me – what the poem can be, now and then, rarely and seldomly, seems linked to this act of hearing the world speak back. It hears the whisper between things.

Niall Campbell, On the World That Calls Back

we have one chicken who cracks her own eggs.
i find them, not smashed but with tiny holes.
at first i thought they might be hatching
but i always found the eggs empty of creature.
runny gold yolk. the white, like a fresh halo.
the more i care for animals, the more i am certain
they all write poetry. this is hers, a little fracture
in the dark of the coop.

Robin Gow, a thousand fractures

Even in a world as calamitously greed-ravaged as ours, redeeming beauty may be found outside of our narrow, anthropocentric philosophies. 

But for how much longer? The world has already diminished from that which poets described only decades ago. The ice caps are rapidly shrinking, the soil is blighted and fatigued, and conservative estimates indicate that hundreds of species vanish annually. Meanwhile, those with the power to ameliorate the situation do nothing — unless they make it worse. They’d clearly rather incarcerate the vulnerable, criminalize our joyous differences, wage eternal wars, and weaken our already meager environmental protections. 

What should the nature poet do in times like these? I don’t think any single answer is equal to this question. The tragedy is too immense for an individual to fully grasp. But for what little it’s worth, here’s my answer: perpetually renew people’s love for whatever is left, even as it opens them up to the pain of loss. As we face the destruction of so many things that make life worth living, as we turn paradise into our own unmarked grave, I believe that cultivating an anguished love for the fading world lays the groundwork necessary for whatever change remains possible. 

If we’re to meaningfully reverse course in this eleventh hour, I think one of the first hurdles we have to overcome is the ubiquitous nihilism that breeds inaction. Upon learning of the profound threats to the environment, the power of those reaping short-term benefits, and our culpability in it all, many feel helpless and (understandably) give up, closing off their hearts and looking away. Despair is the thing with feathers, plucked. But loving the world through each loss keeps your skin in the game. It keeps you from letting it all pass undefended and unmourned. It keeps your eyes fixed on what’s happening. By loving the world even as we confront its dying, I believe we can conquer our paralyzing despondency that only serves the status quo.

Writing Nature Poetry as the Earth Dies Screaming – guest post by Joe Roberts (Trish Hopkinson)

Thanks to Devin Kelly’s Ordinary Plots, I have been reading The Inextinguishable, poems by Michael Lavers and it is exactly what I needed right now. There are in fact three poems in the book with the title “The Happiest Day of Your Life.” Right there, I’m delighted. Read Lavers for lines like “and since chaos so often wins / let’s demand what we can.” Another poem ends, “This is not an argument or an idea. / It’s just a feeling, and these days feelings / are all I have. Feelings are everything.” And they are, aren’t they?

I was reminded of a post from days gone by on the word “tenderness” and of Galway Kinnell’s line: “The secret title of every good poem might be ‘Tenderness.’” 

And maybe the secret title behind “The Happiest Day of Your Life” is “Tenderness.” This book felt very human to me at a time when I think we crave the very human more than ever. I would honestly love a book where every single poem is titled “The Happiest Day of Your Life.” Please feel free to write it for me.

Shawna Lemay, The Happiest Day of Your Life

Who can say anything definitive about the United States? It is chequered with the complexities of a self-governing people: one nation, perhaps, but not one set of rules or laws. From the condo board to the state legislature to the President there are dozens and dozens and hundreds and hundreds of Americas. Everyone knows this: it is foundational to American culture. And yet, the Americans never tire of telling you this. Every time I write about America, I am reminded of this fact by someone. Even the briefest note, a passing observation about my neighbourhood, elicits the response: “ah, but not everywhere in America.” Perhaps this is what the Americans fear most. It is not tyranny they scent on every breeze, but the fear of being mistaken for their neighbours. […]

On Sunday evening, children fed, wife in bed eating plain crackers, I walked up to the diner and read the paper. I came home through the woods reciting Robert Frost. I saw a rabbit and a series of unfamiliar birds: bright yellow, speckled grey, a flash of red. It was a brief outing, but a splendidly American one. The Washington Post had a good article about how George Washington became America’s first great leader. There is something perfect about the combination of reading the paper in the diner and walking home through some (brief, tame, with a path) woodland.

Henry Oliver, Cigarettes in the pharmacy

This is a good
place for walking. Getting from island to island
absorbs all your attention. Hop from a rounded stone
to a flat one without crushing an orchid or
twisting an ankle, move across a whole field
like this, away from the portal tomb, the sad bones.

“The Burren” was published more than ten years ago in Hampden-Sydney Review, then in my 2015 collection Radioland. I fell in love with the Burren, a karst landscape in the west of Ireland, not far from Galway, during my first trip to that country, and something about the stark beauty of the place helped me move from angry poems about my father’s death to a more peaceful one.

That was a gray, cold June day; on a brilliant August one, the last day of our recent, second trip to Ireland, we revisited the place. In 2025 certain locations, especially the Poulnabrone portal tomb, are much more heavily touristed (I can’t remember it being roped off before). Wildflowers bloomed everywhere, though, and there were lots of quiet places, too. We dodged and hopped through a field of cow poop, for instance, to climb down to the ruins of a twelfth-century church, where a couple of people had tied red rags on trees in hope of healing or some other magic: an ash, a hawthorn. I can’t take long hikes at the moment, between the sprained ankle and sciatica, but I was in good enough shape for short walks, and they were again restorative.

Lesley Wheeler, Hawthorns, bogs, & undersongs

As I rolled out the dough, in a way that I rarely do for just myself, I thought of that quote attributed to Martin Luther, about the world ending tomorrow.  I thought, if the world was ending tomorrow, I’d be making these kind of luxurious pumpkin cinnamon rolls.

I looked up the Martin Luther quote, ignored the debate over whether or not Luther actually said such a thing, and found a quote at an environmental stewardship website:  “As the story goes, when Martin Luther was asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, he answered, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’”

I thought, if the world were to end tomorrow, I would make a batch of cinnamon rolls–two batches, one for today, and one for tomorrow.

I decided to use extra pecans and sugar because my friend was coming over for coffee, and a poem started to sprout in my brain.  I wrote down these lines:
If the world was on schedule to end
tomorrow, some of us would plant
an apple tree. Others would spend
the evening phoning every friend.

I would make two pans
of cinnamon rolls, one for tonight,
and one for the morning of the day
the world was on schedule to end.

I wrote a few more stanzas and let the poem sit (or rise, perhaps) overnight.  This morning, I added another line here or there, and I’ll let it sit longer.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Cinnamon Roll at the End of the World

calendar
only now

wristwatch
only now

this moment
only now

drop of rain
only now

cat stretches
only now

Jason Crane, POEM: only now

It seems to me that one path forward for each of us is to examine our own innocence and the reasons and ways in which we shy away from being more inclusive, open, and generous. We can begin to take small steps toward an embrace of “radical hospitality” and to learn from those who are not like us. We should neither waste time mourning the loss of programs and protections, nor wait for the large systems to correct themselves; it is up to each one of us to do what we can to make a better world in the spaces closest to us, here and now.

Beth Adams, Radical Hospitality

I’ve been aghast these many months
the months bunch up, 
like a patient upon a table
anesthetized, 
on half-burned grass, 
aghast again, at August’s end

So many months with broken breath, 
now snot rags, ragweed,
wheezing; the peeved grass,
having lost what was naïve
also clotted in a sneeze

but think, the patient, I, anesthetized,
might salvage breath for what’s ahead
the ghast extending out in time 
to breathe, to lay a hand upon a head
to pay respect to a flattened bird
the breath to bike around its head
the rag we hold, so dear, to make it
last, to count no matter what

Jill Pearlman, Aghast

This week: killing words, the task of silence, skies of spit, what the soil has seen, and more. Enjoy.

My great-grandparents, my great-uncles and aunts, my many cousins woke up in their graves and dug their way to the surface. It had been so long that even their bullet holes had disappeared. They looked around the green earth—blossoms, unfurling leaves, birds. They looked at the poets.

—After what happened to us, surely writing poetry is impossible now.

—No, poetry continues because of poetry.

They looked at the soldiers.

—Then at least killing is impossible now?

—No, killing continues because of killing.

—And fear?

Then something like love or sorrow passed over their missing faces.

Gary Barwin, Somewhere in Lithuania, my Jewish ancestors consider the Modern World.

I’m Catholic and, today, Sunday 8 June, 2025, it’s Pentecost Sunday, when the first reading at Masses is from the Acts of the Apostles (2 : 1-11) which details the first time the Apostles are filled with the Holy Spirit and are gifted with the ability to be understood by people from different nations, speaking different languages. The Apostles are speaking Galilean but the “devout men from every nation” hear them in their own language, wherever they are from.

How amazing this would be, to be able to communicate to everyone without needing to learn other languages. Although this really would be the demise of university language departments, not to mention French GCSE. But I’ve been thinking not only of different languages today but of different ideas and viewpoints. One reason I’m particularly thinking about this is a poetry reading and Q&A event I went to last Friday by Palestinian American writer and translator Fady Joudah, who read poems from his 2024 book […] published by OutSpoken Press.

Many of the poems share the book’s title, […] which is best explained by the writer on OutSpoken’s website:

“I wrote the bulk of this collection between October and December of 2023. I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination. The text of the poems already says enough. The text also betrays a necessary silence. And yet the silence in the book is the silence that the reader, listener, recipient should practice. In some moments I share this silence with them, and they with me. In many moments, however, the silence is solely their task. The ellipsis in brackets highlight the space in which a Palestinian speaks and others listen.”

Therefore, on Friday, during an audience Q&A, it was more than excruciating when one audience member tried to correct Fady Joudah on his comment that the West is largely ignoring a genocide taking place in our time (“…but how can this be the case when me and all of my friends…”) and another wanted to hold him to account for the inaction of the Arab world (“…and what about…”).

I’m sure that both people, both white British, and many in the audience, would say the interjections were ‘well-meant’ and ‘not malicious’ – and I’m sure this is the case – but today I’m wondering if this is enough or is any kind of excuse for the words leaving their mouths. Is it enough to say we support a cause, and even to seemingly actively support a cause by attending events, donating to charities, marching, signing petitions, writing to our political representatives, making art in support – when we are nevertheless prepared to disagree, even gently, when someone, in this case a Palestinian, tells it like it is? Perhaps Jesus might say that what’s missing is the core message of the Gospels – love for our fellow humans. To love and respect someone is to be prepared to step back and listen – it might include the “task of silence” that Fady Joudah speaks about. But it’s clear that silence is hard for a culture used to doing all the talking.

Josephine Corcoran, Not speaking the same language

There is nothing left to say. Maybe that is the point. To render us speechless. Who does not feel paralyzed? And maybe, that too, is the point. To paralyze us. Who is not traumatized? And maybe that too was planned. Nothing we do, it seems, can halt the killing. We feel defenseless. We feel helpless. Genocide as spectacle.

I have stopped looking at the images. The rows of little shrouded bodies. The decapitated men and women. Families burned alive in their tents. The children who have lost limbs or are paralyzed. The chalky death masks of those pulled from under the rubble. The wails of grief. The emaciated faces. I can’t.

This genocide will haunt us. It will echo down history with the force of a tsunami. It will divide us forever. There is no going back.

Chris Hedges, The Last Days of Gaza

For seven minutes, write about an encounter with soil or dirt in which you were reminded of its power. This encounter could be ecstatic, educative, emotive, painful – watching seeds grow, for example, or a painful face-plant on a muddy path. […]

Finally, whilst we might acknowledge soil’s beauty and fascination in poetry and creative writing, it can also be contested, fought over. It can be site of horror, a witness to terrible atrocities: the mud of the Somme; the slave villages unrecorded on maps and present in shards and organic traces; the mass graves and slaughter.

What a Gazan should do during an Israeli air strike

By Mosab Abu Toha

Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear / get a child’s kindergarten backpack and stuff / tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is / and the ID cards / and photos of late grandparents, aunts, or uncles / and the grandparents’ wedding invitation that’s been kept for a long time / and if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other / and hold on tight / to whatever number there was / on the cake / from the last birthday.

And it can be witness to acts of kindness, as in Naomi Shihab Nye’s famous Gate A-4 For your final exercise, write for ten minutes about “What has the soil seen”. Let your language be alive; let it find its own way. The earth is witness to horror, and also to life and hope. If you feel able, then allow your language to hold the pain, but in Naomi’s words, in seeds which continue to grow, in the diversity of life forms flourishing beneath your feet, remind yourself that Not everything is lost.

Clare Shaw, Making the Invisible Visible

Cows in blue harnesses attached to helicopters rotate in midair.

They are being airlifted out of the valley because a glacier
has just collapsed on an entire village in the Alps.

There is logic to this, but what is the first point in
the syllogism? the last?

I wish I could say How funny or How strange or even Words
fail me.

In the yard, runways of mud. Evidence of tunneling. I suppose
it makes sense to try to live underground.

Luisa A. Igloria, Exits and Entrances

Our weekend was graced with warmer weather, at last, but few could enjoy it. People were advised to stay inside their homes because of the high levels of particulate matter from the wildfires in Manitoba. The air quality index got as high as the 170s here. On Saturday the sunset was apocalyptic — a blurry orange sun burning in a grim, murky sky. This morning the air quality index is down to 97 and the severe alert has been cancelled, but looking out from my north-facing studio window, the low-lying smoke persists even though I can see faint patches of pale blue high above.

American friends in the Northeast also experienced some of this pollution, though not yet to the levels of last summer. I’m always taken aback when people say things to me like, “Yes, we had some of your smoke,” or even, “Thanks a lot, Canada.” Like casually tossed-off racist, anti-feminist, or anti-LGBTQ+ remarks, I experience these nationalistic comments as micro-aggressions. (I’m sure it would be far worse if I lived in Mexico.) Wildfires caused by climate change are happening everywhere, including the US and Europe, mainly originating in huge tracts of northern forest — but no longer confined to those mostly-unpopulated areas, as we’ve seen recently in Los Angeles. This is not “Canadian smoke” – it is our smoke collectively, caused by global behavior and governments’ refusals to legislate fundamental change. Clearly there have to be major changes in forest management, but if you really think about the extent of the boreal and northern forests, you will quickly realize what a daunting task that is. Canada shares in that responsibility, and its own climate record is not good. But shall we start blaming the Arctic and Antarctic for the melting ice and rising sea levels? […]

I’ve come to see the smoky skies as a symbol of a much larger obscurity — the ongoing obscurity of the truth about just about everything, and the accompanying refusal to admit cause and effect. There’s a great desire right now to assign blame for all the ills of our world, and to shift it away from ourselves onto other groups — which conveniently often end up to be the victims themselves. The most egregious and tragic example of this has been the blaming of the Palestinians for the horrific genocide of their own people in Gaza — blame that goes all the way back to 1948 when their land was forcibly taken from them.

Beth Adams, Obscurity

The following words
are no longer permitted:
Accessible. Affirming.
Bias. Cultural differences.
Environmental quality.
Inclusive. Mental health.
Prejudice. Trauma.

The new head of FEMA
didn’t know America has
a hurricane sesason, but
I’m sure firing
a fifth of the staff
who launch weather balloons
won’t matter.

We are also forbidden
from saying anyone is
underserved or vulnerable.
No person in our nation
is vulnerable anymore.
Immigrants and refugees
don’t count.

Is hope still
at the bottom of the box
or was it erased
along with clean energy
and safe drinking water
and the history
of the Enola Gay?

*

These words are disappearing in the new Trump Administration, New York Times [gift link]

“David Richardson, the head of the agency, said he did not know the United States has a hurricane season.” Heather Cox Richardson, June 2, 2025. 

Federal Government’s Growing Banned Words List Is Chilling Act of Censorship, PEN.org. 

Enola Gay Aircraft — And Other Historic Items — Inaccurately Targeted Under Pentagon’s Anti-DEI Purge, Forbes.com. 

Rachel Barenblat, A partial list of losses

I am fairly sure that my understanding of Melanie Klein’s definition of humans as speaking beings is superficial, and I may well have taken it in a completely unwarranted direction, but the notion that humans are meant to communicate, that we derive our sense of purpose and direction and meaning from a dialogue with our fellow-creatures, and that we get our concept of identity by telling our story, and (crucially) hearing a response, is massively important to me.

There are times, of course, when silence, restraint, humility and compassion require that we don’t just blurt out what’s on our minds, but this too, can be a way of shaping a dialogue and building a story. What’s happening now is something else entirely. It is, of course, primarily about political control, and shutting down the kinds of conversation that unsettle power-bases. But it’s more fundamental than that. It is not just that corrupt powers want to control how the rest of us behave, or how we see the world. It is an attack on the very foundations of language itself, and therefore on what it means to be human.

The banning of specific words is mostly a device to enable computers to identify documents to delete quickly, without involving a human decision or understanding at any level. It leads to idiocy like the deletion of the account of Hiroshima, because the document referred to the name of the bomb, Inola Gay, and ‘gay’ is banned. But more than that, without awareness of nuance, context, emotion, humour, the development of language as a living thing, the way we often code our language to convey more than the dictionary can hold, AI destroys the very matrix of communication. The human is no longer able to exercise its power as a ‘speaking being’ and we are about as meaningless as a speak your weight machine.

Under the banner of language, I would also include art, music, and all forms of sensory learning, but as a poet, I find that words are really where this hurts. John Burnside, in his introduction to The Music of Time, points out how important poetry is. ‘Poetry refreshes the language, strengthening it against the abuses of the unscrupulous and the careless, and allowing it to retain its ability to enchant, to invoke and to particularise’ (p10). he talks a lot about precision of language preserving respect for truth, and the quest in poetry to widen our awareness of experience so as to name, understand and heal. For a poet, this attack on language is pretty drastic. We are your canaries in the mine.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Speaking Beings

Delighted to discover one of my favorite poems by James Schuyler in The Paris Review archives newsletter today. Sharing it because the “skies of spit” are real, as are the clouds between Frankfurt and Atlanta from the place where the wing meets the body of the airplane.

Speaking of wings, Schuyler’s line, “The sky is pitiless”, meets up later in the poem with those “skies of spit” and yes it seems quite likely that spit, pitted, and pity are consciously playing with each other at this point in the flight.

Alina Stefanescu, Schuyler’s dog.

But revelations are in short supply. As
if we have used up our quota of light.

The biggest things are clear enough.
Everything existential unravels when
we let time spiral or feel the moving
edge of the universe. But try to
square these: the abundance of evil,
the precarious shifting — truth,
sand, cloud, love — why language
evolved if so many are so silent for
so long, if somewhere faith is waiting
– if faith is all about waiting.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Signs

I arrive at Poetry by the Sea in time to moderate and speak on a panel on Poetry and Politics: the organizer, Clare Rossini, had done a bang-up job, then went down with the flu and had to skip it. The panelists present some amazing poems I hadn’t seen before, including “I Woke Up” by Jameson Fitzpatrick; “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)” by Muriel Rukeyser; and “Bioluminescence” by Paul Tran. For a while, though, our conversation dances around a hard question: does poetry matter now? A qualified “yes.” Julien Strong says that surely it’s good for us to write them; I comment that poems rarely change minds dramatically, but they can bring about small changes within us, and certainly they manifest us to each other. I wish I’d also said that they keep us tender, awake to feeling, when it’s easier to harden yourself. Someone in the audience raises his hand and declares himself a Trump voter. Afterward, I exit the room and rest my eyes on the steady blue of the Long Island Sound.

Lesley Wheeler, Itinerant Poet with Toadstools, Witches, & Shame

Fast on the heels of Parking Lot Horizon, I’ve got another book going on pre-order today. Travis is a collection of prose poems that “looks into the mirror of TAXI DRIVER’s Travis Bickle, presenting a montage of fact and fiction from inside the American nightmare.” Some excerpts recently appeared online at Blue Bag’s Resources, and you can find info about how to order on the bookstore page (you can also order by replying to this message). […]

In other news, on June 22^nd, I will be giving a reading and talk with fellow poet and publisher Thom Eichelberger-Young, of Blue Bag Press. The event will occur online at 6pm EST and will be hosted by Rachel Lauren Myers (poet and editor of MEMEZINE) who pitched the event to me and Thom. We will be talking about imagination, state containment, countercultural publishing, and writing with urgency in the present. For more info, please see the flyer and sign up here.

RM Haines, Travis Bickle’s American Idol

Today it got up to 90°F—record-breaking heat—and the last three days have been almost as hot. This means the hummingbirds and goldfinches have appeared, usually for water, and I have been hiding from the sun. My MS symptoms have been acting up (not unusual in the heat, but still aggravating—fatigue, headache foot drop, and trouble swallowing—have all been taxing). Another day for an MS patient in summer! I feel like that Frozen snowman during the other seasons—imagining summer but not realizing how dangerous it is. Then I’m like, “Oh right, this is why summer is so tough!”

But I can still enjoy the beautiful birds and I’ve been busy with work—working on an essay, sending out poems, and working on another tutorial for Writer’s Digest. Soon I’ll be doing a class on writing essays and judging a poetry contest. I also need to get back to writing new poems and working on my next book. I just wish my brain and energy levels would cooperate. Meanwhile, any glance at the news and social media (my heart is with you, LA) just produces stress and feelings of helplessness and worry about our democracy in a country that seems obsessed with AI and not at all concerned about our dwindling constitutional rights. Trying hard not to feel trapped inside and trying not to doomscroll. Am I succeeding? Sometimes…

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Record Heat, Goldfinches and Hummingbirds, Busy Bee (Me!) and Feeling Limitation

I’m thinking about the way that June bowls into the year with an unapologetic opening up of itself, and how much I wish I could open myself up to the world like the heavy, over blown head of a peony, or be as delicate and yet as full as a verge of cow parsley or a hawthorn white with blossom or a rambling rose that scents the air for ten feet all round while clambering over a broken fence. I need something to remind myself that I am capable of that sort of opening up to possibility, life, experience. […]

This is my common place book that I keep upon my person and by my bedside at all times. It’s not a notebook exactly, it’s more of an archive of words that mean something to me. The book was a gift from my husband, given to me after I came off stage at Edinburgh book festival on the first leg of promoting The Ghost Lake. Like May dew enriched with spring, the notebook feels enriched with something powerful just from being gifted in that moment of celebration.

The first quote I copied into the book is Georgia O’ Keeffe

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

It’s a well known quote, has been on the lips of many people, has been copied, no doubt, into many commonplace books and diaries and journals. It’s a statement of self, about herself, but i want to make it a statement about me, about my self. […]

That Georgia O’ Keeffe, an artist who lived very much against the grain, would be frightened of anything is surprising to me. But then, why should she not have been? She struggled with her mental health, she went through painful break ups, experienced break downs, had to fight to have her work recognised. Had to stand her ground and push back against what was seen as the right kind of art, just to create in the way that she wanted to create. Just to do her own thing.

Perhaps to live an unconventional life is to use fear as a ladder to reach higher, to use fear as a place from which to see what is important, more, to use fear as the fuel to get to where you want to be.

Fear is the place at which the body and mind collude to alert us to potential danger. But that doesn’t always mean that the dangerous thing should be avoided. What’s on the other side of the fear. What is worth pushing through the fear for?

Wendy Pratt, June Mantra: “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life…

June, the days still grow longer, for a bit. In the Place St Sulpice the antiques market will soon yield the space to the poetry market. I’ve been reading a lovely small book by Colm Toibin about Elizabeth Bishop. I actually finished it 2 or 3 weeks ago, and then began over. It makes it own special contribution to EB literature in its lovely clear simple prose. The chapter I read a couple days ago was about Bishop poem called ‘The Armadillo,’ and another poem not published in her lifetime with a line about touching the tip of a lightning rod on a steeple. I can’t find that line again, but my thought was, I think, about Marianne Moore’s Steeple poem and how I was sitting in my Ikea rocker looking across the street at the lightning rod on the church, and back to a year or so when I was walking past the back of the church, ‘the holy end’ as Larkin calls it, and lightning struck the rod and made a very scary boom.

Beverley Bie Brahic, 9 June 2025

This morning the birds have already sung in the new day. The air is still, and holds the scent of almonds.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a person standing in front of a sign. I say it is me behind the bannered and flagged railings of the bandstand at Oswestry Pride saying poems out loud.

I originally gave this post the same title as this time last year before realising I was repeating myself. Changing it to ‘That Bandstand’ instead of ‘The Bandstand’ reminds me of retitling one of my poems and how it brought the object closer. I feel I can bring Oswestry bandstand closer now because I have had the joy of standing on it to deliver poems twice. I have loved bandstands ever since watching Trumpton as a child many years ago. My local park didn’t have a bandstand and it seemed wonderful and slightly exotic to my younger self that some parks actually did!

When I first started sharing my poems at open mics I often used to choose the shortest poem possible so that I wouldn’t run out of breath before the end. I soon realised that my short poems often worked well on the page but didn’t always own their space out loud when read singularly – by the time the person had tuned in to my voice the poem could well be over. When it came to longer readings, I used to imagine that I didn’t have enough breath in me for a whole set of poems which I guess could actually be true if you don’t pause to inhale! It has been an interesting journey to outrun these thoughts and then reframe them.

Now when I am planning a set I have enough past experience to bolster me so that the process focuses on crafting the set not being distracted by thoughts of expiring through lack of oxygen. Last year at Pride I came in a bit short. I confess I might have had my head focused on completion rather than staying in the moment! There’s something rather nice about getting to repeat an experience. You can respond to your own what ifs. What if I had stayed in the moment a little more? What if I delivered the lines with slightly better pacing? What if I didn’t stand on tiptoe all the way through because I was too scared to alter the position of the mic at the start? So this week I planned my setlist on paper and then tested it out loud to make sure it lasted the required amount of time. It did, but it didn’t flow so I readjusted it and then invited Kath to Poetry Corner to hear the revised set. I had given myself the overarching theme of ‘Play’ which felt fun and is also a nod to this year’s National Poetry Day.

I am also very grateful to Caroline Bird for reminding me that no one expects a pianist to launch straight into their performance as soon as they arrive on stage so settling into the space and taking a breath before starting is a good and natural thing for poets to do. I had a few things to say to myself to ground me and I enjoyed adding to this the image of a pianist preparing to perform.

Sue Finch, THAT BANDSTAND

On the Wednesday of the writing retreat, the siren call of Wigtown lured me out of the garden. I’d tried to tell myself I didn’t need to go and buy more books – but how often do you get to go to go to Scotland’s national book town? I spent most of the afternoon in Wigtown poking around the bookshops, had some lovely conversations with friendly booksellers, and went back to the Galloway estate having supported the local economy (i.e bought loads of books). That evening, I finished another draft of a short story I’ve been working on and thinking about for a while.

The short story is based on a true story that someone else told me. It is a traumatic story, and I think I’m still trying to work out what I really want the story to say. I know that it has to do something more than just retell this story. In her essay “Kingfishers Catching Fire: Looking with Poetry’s Eyes” (taken from her book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World” Jane Hirshfield writes that “A work of art is not a piece of fruit lifted from a tree branch: it is a ripening collaboration of artist, receiver and world”.

This book is specifically about poetry, but it’s interesting that she doesn’t use the word ‘poem’ – instead she uses ‘A work of art’ because I think this statement is one that we can transpose onto any art form – something has to be transformed, and this something has to be done in the space between the writer, the reader and the world or context in which they encounter the piece of art.

Perhaps my story is not about the story, extraordinary and terrible though it is, but our relationship with the stories of our lives, the damage caused by violence, not just the direct damage to a victim, but to those caught in the aftershock of violence, the spreading rings of its effects and consequences? But this isn’t quite right either, so I will keep writing and re-writing the story until the river of language washes away a little bit more silt and I can see more clearly.

Kim Moore, What happens on a writing retreat (part 2)

The pollen count is dropping so I’ve been working in the garden, mowing the grass, cutting dead branches, planting at the plot. I’m trying to make my allotment easier for my joints, so I’ve built lots of raised beds and am putting down bark mulch on the paths to try and keep the weeding down. I usually dig up a meter or two of the path at a time, clear the weeds, place down the fabric and the mulch. It’s slow going, but I’m seeing the results. A lot of what I try to grow doesn’t work or the slugs eat more than the kids and I do, but every year I dig in and plant with hope. […]

My poetry is going in a similar way at the moment. I still write every day, but am producing less poems. Slow writing, slow editing and I’m barely submitting to magazines or publishers. Little or nothing to show for all my work.

I keep seeing memes about ‘would you write if no one ever read your work?’ That’s what it feels like just now. No one really cares about my allotment, my poems or how I spend my unstructured time, but I’ve done it anyway. Occasionally my son will enjoy eating some courgette bread from veg I’ve grown or a distant editor will accept a poem and say some kind things, but for the most part they bring only me happiness. 

I’d like to get one of my collections published of course, but after waiting over 5 years after my last acceptance that was never published, I’ve become mellow about it. It may never happen. I may leave a trickle of poems published in journals over my lifetime, hundreds of unloved poems and a humongous pile of notebooks behind when I die. So be it.

It doesn’t matter that no one is reading me, I will continue, filling my notebooks, writing my life. It gives me joy and purpose which is more than something.

Gerry Stewart, Lazy Days When No One is Watching

Here, I sat down and shared the palette of the present, all the brightest of my colours, my favourite flavours, some secrets and wishes and nightmares, the beat of this heart, the rhythm of this time. I revealed names of angels, then I drew faces of the demons fizzing inside this body, this space, this energy. Writing: It’s a generosity and a betrayal and a madness of sorts. It is so strange to share the intimate magic inside us. I do this for a living, I share the whispers I hear in the wind, in the water and the trees. Odd choice, to share the soul and empty the heart for your daily bread. But it is too late now, I have gone so far down this path that I made for myself that I cannot remember any other route, or way to be, and it was never about bread, not really. It was something I felt was necessary. This book is different from the others. I think that’s ok, but it scares me. I worry it will get bullied when it goes to school in a new shiny jacket. Mrs Death Misses Death gave me the same feelings, I think this fear is good.

Salena Godden, all barefoot and moss

Some years back I visited a writers’ group in Stratford (just the once) where people around the table gave updates on what they were doing or read out pieces of work. The woman sitting next to me said: ‘Nothing much new. Still writing the novel.’ In a break I asked her about the novel and was astonished to hear she’d been writing it for ten years. ‘Why don’t you take a break from it, write something completely different, or maybe throw it out and start again with something else?’ She looked at me in genuine horror. It occurred to me later that perhaps it was enough for her to be writing a novel, to be able to tell people ‘Oh, I’m writing a novel’ as if it were nothing more than a conversation piece. If she ever finished it, what would she do then? Alternatively, if she did genuinely want to finish it, would it be an accomplishment or a curse? Was she afraid to sit back from the keyboard and say ‘there, it’s done’ as if the completion would leave a scary hole in her life.

Anyway, once I’d cast Novel No.4 into the abyss, or wherever failed bits of writing go, I felt I needed some clarity on my poetry as well, so I set to work on assessing each and every poem. Consequently, a lot of stuff has been removed from this site.

The effect of this caught me by surprise. Suddenly, as the file of what I felt was good grew, another collection seemed as if it might be a sensible idea. I didn’t want to admit it but it continued to lurk in the back of the mind, hover on the shoulder. For years it has been enough to put poems on here. Emotionally, I didn’t need anything else from them. I haven’t done a collection since The Maker Of Glass Eyes in 2009 but that didn’t bother me at all. (I still have a few copies of that and Paradise Road from 2003 if anyone wants one – they’re long out of print.)

I’d always thought – ‘I can’t do the legwork any more that would do justice to the efforts of a publisher, therefore, even if anyone wanted to publish the poems, it wouldn’t be fair on them if I couldn’t work hard enough to sell the book’.

I think maybe the growth of the self-publication market has had an effect. Reading two books by an old friend, Peter Steward, to which I referred on a previous blog on here, and now a novel, Blue-Grey Island, by another old friend, Paula Burns, and talking to them both online about their experiences, has also caused a change of mind.

I’ve never shared the prejudice some poets have about reputations being forged by publication in a ‘major’ press. As in, you’re only a valid poet if a reputable press publishes your work. Well, it’s true if you self-publish, you aren’t eligible for the prizes the ‘establishment’ dish out, but I don’t give a damn about those anyway. In the end, how you get your stuff out there is your business and no one else’s. I’m happy enough to meet other poets here and there, would be happy to read poetry in performance in certain circumstances, but recoil from the flesh-pressing, ‘it’s not what you know it’s who you know’, world. I’ve seen it at work and feel it’s extremely unhealthy, as in bad for the soul. Clambering up the rungs of the poetry ladder isn’t for me.

Bob Mee, WHEN DESTRUCTION TURNS TO CREATION, or A HEALTHY CLEAR-OUT

When I write computer programs I use a free system (git with vscode) that with a click lets me save and recover versions. I can create branches – the diagram on the left shows how, from the bottom, a file evolved, splitting into branches then mostly merging. I can compare versions side-by-side, the differences colour-coded.

It’s possible (I haven’t done it, but I’ve seen it done) to analyse the development of a text, colour-coding the lines according to age or number-of-changes.

With a click I can back-up to the cloud (free – github). In my will I can leave the instructions to make the back-up visible to all. Nothing’s lost – even my mistakes.

I could use the same system for poems/stories too. Already I have long/short versions of a few poems. Because of the various word limits for prose, I have 3 versions of a few texts. One recent short piece had so many UK/US issues (gear-sticks, supermarket trolleys) that I keep 2 versions of it. But I’d be most interested in watching how a story develops – which paragraphs changed the most? which paragraphs never changed? when were the growth spurts? (I think there’s often an initial one, then I fiddle around, then I realise what the story’s about and quickly add many more words).

Tim Love, Text versioning

I read something about how the energy it takes for us to produce memories to preserve our rapidly changing lives creates heat that serves to hurry the entropy of the universe faster toward disorder. So as we seek to stay time, we just rush it onward. I may have seriously misunderstood the whole thing. But it gives me, but not time itself, pause. Stop stop, I say in my head, to time as it plummets as I whirl my mind around this idea, trying to do so coolly, so as not to further disturb the universe. Except some days I want things to hurry along so all the disasters I imagine will just arrive and I can just deal with them, and all the disasters that are currently playing out will have shifted on to different ones. Cuz these disasters are getting tedious.

Memories are strange things that get distorted as we stuff them into jars, their noses spread wide against the glass, lips squished like worms. Sometimes other things get shoved in, odd leaves, inexplicable insects. And then there’s the unseen — all we’ve forgotten, imagined, misremembered, things we’ve been told that get confused with things we experienced. Was I there? Did that happen? Who was that by my side? Or did I read it in a book?

I admire this poem [“Water Falling Down” by Christopher Citro] for its orderly disorder, its strange arrangements and inexplicable sidebars, how time is present and past and imagined. I fall down it like the water of the title, trickling one minute, cascading the next, to puddle in that lovely image from my own childhood: lost in a book sprawled across the bed.

Marilyn Mccabe, the fridge, don’t open it

I do like a sauna and I’ve been enjoying the new crop of seaside saunas that have popped up in the south west. I was sat in the Blackpool Sands sauna the other week and began to write this in my head.

The pop up sauna
is all varnished pine and dry heat
in truth it is a big barrel
laid on its side
near the tideline
I’m sat sweating inside
I look out the porthole
on what could be a moonscape
I think about Yuri
and Valentina
who circled the earth
in capsules the size
of a large washing machine
just to be the first

Paul Tobin, CIRCLED THE EARTH

Oh, a mere mortal; the hours I spent
on my couch, watching, not watching, 
pacing, cleaning, anything to trim 
the tension of watching the tennis gods

two bedraggled bodies wracking them-
selves senseless smacking the small ball
to new and giddy places.  Mother,
if I had five ounces of that resilience…

Five hours in, sports writers are sick
with praise. Even the clay, even the living dust
is whipped up, spent but glowing,
having witnessed magnificence.

Jill Pearlman, Grand Slam at the Brink

When the world seems slipping out from under my control, lately the writing seems to calm me (or at least give me something to look forward that is less an obligation or “work” in the usual sense and more a daily bout of play). So the past three days  I’ve been exploring this new project and I’m liking the results so far. 

While I have written about bird women before, most noticeably in IN THE BIRD MUSEUM and GIRL SHOW, this one feels a little spookier and more grotesque. I was actually using a poem from the latter, “the bird girl of jackson county” as inspiration when I started. There are many characters in my books that may deserve a similar revisit (esp. GIRL SHOW, though there is a little of that in EXOTICA.) People whose lives deserve a little more fleshing (or in this case, feathering out.) Why birds? I don’t exactly know. But then, really, why anything? Lately I’m of the opinion that well-trodden ground is still sometimes the most fruitful if you learn where to look. But where those projects felt more whimsical or fantasy-laden, I want these to be a little more violent and body-horror-ish.

Kristy Bowen, the bird girls return

Today I begin Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), a part of the training of everyone who hopes to be a ordained into ELCA Word and Sacrament ministry.  Think of it as an internship program for chaplains; some people do their training in prisons, but the vast majority of CPE training is done in hospitals.  I will do my training at the Asheville VA hospital, which is much less of a commute than other parts of my life.

I don’t have much information about what we’ll be doing or what our schedule will be.  I hope to get more details today when orientation begins.  I don’t know who will be doing the training.  I don’t have any information on fellow CPE students, although I assume there are some, because there were three other e-mail addresses on the e-mail that came last night giving us first day instructions.

I’ve packed a bag with notetaking supplies and paper for possible downtimes.  I wanted to take a book, something that didn’t weigh much, so I chose a book of poems.  I decided to go with one I’ve already read and loved, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Field Guide to the End of the World, which weighs less and takes up less space in the bag than her more recent Flare, Corona.  I have some colored pens and a few pieces of better paper for sketching.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Hour Before CPE Begins

1 – How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m not sure what you’d call my first book. Imistic Poems (2009), the chapbook of Nicanor Parra-inspired antipoems I printed one copy of when I was 23? O (2013) the concrete poetry “web book” released by Ugly Duckling Presse? The Nature Book (2023), my first supercut novel published by Coffee House? Everything always feels like the first time. This is in part because I keep starting from scratch in new genres. If my two books coming out this year–People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted & Unwanted Novels and Patchwork–feel any different, it’s because after writing one novel, I’m a bit more comfortable with the form.

2 – How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, non-fiction or poetry?
I started my writing life as a poet, never imagining I would write fiction–a high school English teacher turned me off for over a decade. And yet, the first novel idea came, then the next. Eventually my brain could only think in chapters.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tom Comitta

When and how were you introduced to haiku and Japanese poetry forms?

My dear friend and gifted poet Kristen Lindquist first inspired me to think about haiku. Years ago, I had enjoyed some of her haiku and haibun, and I knew she maintained a one-poem-a-day writing practice, which I also found quite impressive. Life busyness being what it is, I didn’t manage to find the time to invest in learning more about these fine forms until the pandemic erupted and I suddenly had the opportunity to plunge into anything and everything haiku-related. I joined Haiku San Diego and started writing in earnest in 2020. Two years later, Kristen was the first reader to take a look at my draft manuscript Upwelling, which was a deeply appreciated gift of her insight and support. She and Alan Summers very generously wrote blurbs for the book’s back cover when it was released in 2022, and Upwelling went on to make the shortlist for a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award.

What do you enjoy the most about haiku?

The enormous potential of less is more. Haiku practice invites us to create meaning through the subtle positioning of a few tangible reference points in a setting where words, symbols, and white space mingle voices. I’m fascinated by how this interplay of elements can yield deep and intangible resonance. There can be a whole world in a few simple words skillfully arranged.

I’ve heard fellow haiku poet Billie Dee use the word “velcro” to describe a poem that sticks with the reader, one that invites a pause, a second or even a third read—the poem becomes a contemplation that allows layers of meaning to emerge. Offering a reader that type of haiku moment is a marvelous challenge.

Jacob D. Salzer, Lorraine A Padden

The debut reading for Grieving Hope (ELJ Editions) is this Saturday, June 7 on Zoom. As I mentioned before, this volume is a collection of five mini chapbooks including mine, Offset Melodies. My chap is a hybrid mixture of memoir and fiction told in a young girl’s voice over the years between preschool and young adulthood. I’m in wonderful company with Kim Steutermann Rogers, Ronita Chattopadhyay, Kristina Tabor, and Janet Murie whose chaps are extraordinary.

Despite the fact that in my past working life I was an occasional public speaker, I seem to have lost my poise in my older age. The last reading I did was not fun as I was nervous as heck by the time they got to me. Afterward, I said never again! Welp, here I’ll be….again. I do so envy teachers who do this all day, every day and think nothing of it. Send me some good juju!

Charlotte Hamrick, Debut Reading of my Debut Chapbook

Yesterday saw the first launch event for the book, at Doncaster Brewery Tap. It went as swimmingly as I could possibly have hoped for. My thanks to Alison Blaylock at the Tap, Tim Fellows of Crooked Spire Press who made the book happen, to a lovely and enthusiastic audience and to my two guest readers, Ed Reiss and Victoria Gatehouse, who both read beautifully. Greg Freeman has very kindly written an account of the event on the Write Out Loud website, here.

Matthew Paul, Launches

Judging by the social media feeds of many significant poets and prominent publishers, there seems to be a tacit admission that they both believe a full collection’s commercial life pretty much comes to an end on the day it’s launched. Or at most, the book’s life is drawn out till the appearance of any reviews a few weeks or months down the line, never again to be mentioned in commercial terms.

This attitude is patently leading to a lack of medium-term sales. A full collection needs exposure over a period of time so as to enter into a potential reader’s consciousness. From my own experience, for instance, I’ve witnessed the gradual growth of a vibe around a book if a continued effort is made to explain and sample it. I’ve personally sold over forty copies of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance Press, 2023), my second full collection, so far this year, a major chunk of them via social media, even though the book is now eighteen months old. But the most striking thing is that this interest has also generated a synergy with my 2017 first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, which has also contributed a further twenty copies to my sales figures.

The above-mentioned story leads me to believe that a full collection’s commercial life is actually as long as the poet and/or publisher wish to make it. By immediately moving on to the next creative project, poets lose out on readers for their previous work. And by concentrating on driving a constant churn of new titles, publishers miss out on sales.

Matthew Stewart, The commercial life of a full collection

I’ve written a few times about the importance of anthologies, and the point is hardly confined to contemporary verse: think of the Greek Anthology; the Subhāsitaratnakosha in Sanskrit or the Therīgāthā in Pāli; or the Carmina Burana. Anthologies are useful places to start for the reader: but they can also come to define a literature. This is true in English as well. Modern English lyric is often taken to begin with Tottel’s Miscellany — another anthology — first printed in 1557, and an instant publishing success.

Tottel is generally known and read today, when it is, for its canonical authors: it contains a significant selection of the poetry of Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and of Thomas Wyatt, both of whom were writing in the 1530s and 1540s. Modern critical attention has focused especially on their sonnets and love lyrics. But a lot of the poems in the anthology are not love poems, but rather examples of that enduringly popular (if stubbornly unfashionable) genre of the ‘moralising lyric’. By this I mean poems like Kipling’s “If —”, constantly cited in surveys of people’s favourite poems, but generally beneath the notice of literary critics: the sort of poem that it’s easy to sneer at if you’re feeling sophisticated, but all the same tends to come to mind in a genuine tight spot. The poetry of the dentist’s chair, or an overcrowded A&E department in the middle of the night, or just an ordinary miserable day. The sixteenth century took it for granted that poetry was for just this sort of occasion.

Victoria Moul, Dazzled with the height of place

There’s not a lot of pattern to what paintings or poetry I like. I tend not to like high emotive lyric or chaotic visual poetry but then, sometimes it resonates.

I’m comfortable with things not fitting patterns, with ideologies in conflict held in parallel.

I don’t have to apply a matrix of meaning, shove things into significance, binary or otherwise. If I were to have a guiding principle it would be the buddhist parable of the farmer who received the wild horse on his property. Neighbours telling him, What good luck! And him non-committal. Much is contest and context changes. All things are all things.

This “wishy-washy” attitude of mine annoyed all the right people growing up who accused me of being so open minded as to be mistaken for someone with no mind at all. (Oh, bully uncles, I saw you as such then too. So afraid of so much, they wanted to be categorically superior. Who ground them down so hard?)

I get higher energy not just have tolerance for chaos as basic reflection of universe. Even Lauren Harris sort of excluding all but the primitive shapes, overly constrained, sits comfortably. I’ve thought of inserting into my novels in progress someone high on butting in chronically with IDIB (infinite diversity, infinite beauty) to riff off Gene Roddenberry. Perhaps it will make the cut.

The process though at its core is being alert, figuring out, curiosity, not the finite dimensions of book, as perishable as a conversation. Staying in the game. With people who also want to play the game. Books are sweet discrete outcomes, sure. Being present for each moment is valuable.

Pearl Pirie, Parallel Processes

I have been in a little funk—in my mind, not in my actions. Narrowing in on my shortcomings, all of them having to do with time or how I can’t do anything right. The futility of everything. What does a walk or insight matter? What does a poem matter? Very silly things that aren’t serious and are—in fact—against my grain. Because in my world, all those things matter immensely. But I am able to move my body—even though it sometimes moves a little funny—and so I do. Every wormhole into the woods. Every dark nook. Through the privet and briars.

Sarah Lada, Channels

I pick the local museum for a visit. The exhibits are in no chronological order, arranged according to fauna, flora, paintings, clothing, activities. There are mummies, the armour of a samurai, fossils, butterflies, paintings by Joseph Wright. I wander from room to room and decide on the spot whether to stay or move on, I don’t know how, what drives me. It all just happens, without a plan. I am glad I don’t have a plan. I’m branching out.

Lakes, old stone walls line
the narrow country road—
I watch the landscapes,
every thing,
pass.

We drive to a forest that blends into the fields outside Derby. In the car I struggle with what I want to say, it seems to be stuck in my throat. Why is it so hard, just why? As we take a walk, our words and the low sun between the rows of trees soften, soften, soften.

Kati Mohr, Forest of Arden

an order means nothing
to the cat birds & so it means nothing
to me. an order means nothing to the
dandelions & so it means nothing to me.
i do not know if this is a litany or
a spell i’m casting. i become less & less
sure about who knits the world
the older that i get. i know & believe
in water & spiders. in the brief feast
the wild raspberries offer on the ridge.
i want to believe that we are enough.
we were not meant to live like this.
crouching inside words until they bite down.
i have seen friends lose limbs to
a word. swallowed by a chasm between letters.

Robin Gow, executive order

In an old peat cutting nearby, the exposed face dried into rock hardness. The dry spell exaggerated the banded colours – from cappuccino to jet-black. Beyond simple descriptors of colour, scientific techniques can yield more information, chemical analyses can assess colour and composition in fine detail, while radiometric dating helps define timescales, and pollen analyses reveal the changing nature of vegetation communities over time. Yet even without advanced analytical testing, the story of our changing climate is there for all to see in exposed peat banks. The different coloured layers cover several thousand years of climate history. Lighter bands are indicative of cool wet periods, dark layers when climate was generally warm and dry. In warmer years, plant material is broken down more readily, becoming humified, more soil-like and dark. In colder, wetter years, bacterial breakdown is not as efficient so the peat is paler. It is even possible to match the bands of light and dark with periods of human history.

This year’s dry spell will add to climate stories held within peat bogs. In a distant future, scientists might investigate them and describe climate changes yet to come, changes only my grandchildren will experience, unless the peatlands themselves have vanished. Today, dry peatbogs and a barely-there Red River may be warnings, harbingers of a hotter future. They are certainly part of the topsy-turvy spring-into-summer weather of recent years here in the Highlands. […]

From my desk I can see the mountain ash in our garden. Like others around the valley, they are laden with flowers dying away; there are hints of the berries to come under browned petals and sepals. My maternal grandmother used to say that a rowan filled with flowers in summer and laden with berries in autumn meant a bad winter was coming. Degrees of severity predicted by the density of blossoms then fruit. Born into a farming life she had many such words of small poetry, pearls of wisdom. But in these days of strange weather patterns, how will the old sayings fare? We are going to need new rhymes, new poems, new tales and songs to tell our grandchildren.

Today, the peats are soaking up the rains. Sphagnum mounds are swelling with water and colour, and the meadows are beginning to bloom and flourish. The other day I found the rare white orchid again. It first appeared last year on a steep embankment and it is here again. Pseudorchis albida, the small white orchid, is classed as ‘vulnerable’. In many places across Britain, the small white has vanished completely, yet this year on our croft, it leads all the other orchids in the rush to greet the sun.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, Orchids in the sun

This week: the grey scale, a rain of earth, a detailed intimacy, a Tennysonian absence, and much more. Enjoy.

A walk in Parc Angrignon yesterday felt like a respite from the extremely difficult time in which we’re living. The world is screaming and yet so many are silenced, afraid of what will happen if they voice the truth or even simply say what they feel, as human beings. It’s a time when truth itself is under attack, as well as the institutions that teach people how to think critically, how to discern the truth for themselves, and express it in a coherent and rational way. A time when we are witnesses every single day to horrific violence perpetrated on the most innocent of victims, when sheer cruelty, corruption, utter disregard for the most vulnerable, and endless lies are becoming normalized. A time when being a journalist, a doctor, an aid worker, or a foreign student has never been more dangerous. A time when our own options for living with integrity seem smaller and smaller, and, as another Substack author writes, one longs for retreat from the madness:

Sometimes I fantasize about disappearing.

Not dying.

Just logging off.

Getting a job no one cares about.

Growing tomatoes.

Writing poems in the margins of a notebook no one reads.

Not as a failure.

But as a kind of freedom.

—Huy Nguyen

For those of us who do write, it becomes harder and harder to know what to say.

Beth Adams, A Letter from Canada, at the end of May

You said if we kept on, worked hard enough,
we’d feel warmth from the centre of the earth,
that we’d know by laying our hands flat
on the bottom of our freshly dug hole.
You told me Australia was right beneath us.
It all seemed so worth digging for.
I pictured us emerging in a different country,
staying there until teatime,
coming back to tell Mum.

Each time you pressed your palm to feel for heat
you looked hopeful
silently inviting me to copy.
But I only ever felt the cold damp
of earthworms.

Sue Finch, Turning the Calendars Over

My daughter asked to read some of my love poems recently. I tried to find some that were understandable and appropriate for an eleven-year-old. Not surprising that this was difficult, but what did surprise me was that they didn’t feel like love poems when I read them, though when I wrote them they felt so overly emotional. 

I struggled to find one that felt a good example of how I write love poems, but I guess they all are. I don’t gush or really even praise the other as there is no particular person in mind. I focus on the moment and the whirlwind of emotions I’m feeling. There is often a sense of sadness on the edges, that the flush will fade, that reality will set in. So they don’t always feel like the giddy heights of love poems, but maybe the more realistic confusion of love. 

I read a few of my poems out to my daughter and while she didn’t get most of them, they’re maybe a bit thick linguistically and not aimed at pre-teens so she was ok with that, but it did open a nice conversation for how love is such a big emotion that it’s confusing and often leaves us feeling very overwhelmed. How it’s important to express how we feel even if it doesn’t always make sense to others. It’s part of understanding how we fit into the world. If she walked away with that sense of it’s ok to express being overwhelmed however and whenever we need to, then I feel pretty good about my poems. 

Gerry Stewart, Expressing Big Emotions

I just found this piece and thought I’d share it today. It is a recording from a live performance at Spoken Beat Night, Bimhuis, Amsterdam, June 2016. The evening was totally improvised and LIVE, a beautiful combination of spoken word and poetry, art and drawings, and jazz performances with the always incredible Shabaka Hutchings and the Spoken Beat band.

This piece feels like a calm voice from another time to me. I love Amsterdam and love to go there, to visit friends and perform. Every time I go I feel rather nostalgic for the summers in 1990s inter-railing around Europe. This poem really captures that moment when you stop and feel it, time shifting, changes occurring, the moment passing and a new moment beginning. I feel it now, the tide turning, I feel a shift, this poem reminds me of that and a young and fearless hope.

This poem was published in my first collection ‘Fishing in The Aftermath’ by Burning Eye Books in 2014. I reckon the poem was written almost 20 years ago and I can picture the bar where I wrote it, it’s a glorious gay bar, overlooking the water, oh you know the one … ah how the years are flying by…

Salena Godden, All We Can Do Is Hope

Another memoir I’ve enjoyed very much recently is Authentic Embellishments, by poet Joshua Davis. Since I work as a book designer, I get the opportunity to read a lot of terribly good small press titles well before the general public, and this one hit my desk at just the right time, I feel, as I struggle with several kinds of interconnected grief—that I may lose my mother sooner rather than later, that our shared genetic condition could mean a similar journey for me or my sisters, and the regret and loss I feel over these pockets of time where I can’t live the way I wish to because I’m needed more urgently elsewhere. Some of this grief is current, and some of it is oddly anticipatory? And yet “grief” does feel like the best word.

I’ve wondered whether my attraction to found materials, both visuals and sound, has to do with these feelings of loss. I can say that collecting the sound effects I used in the collages was directly related to the experience of missing them in the world, so maybe?

Josh beautifully traces the paths of loss, absence, and abandonment in his relationships with his mother, father, stepmother, husband, and child. “A life saved by poetry,” the subtitle promises, and the moments where Lucille Clifton or Ruth Stone appear (or are found? he was definitely seeking!) in his life to guide him emphasize to me, again, how keen a tool art can be for comfort and survival. Yes. 

Shanna Compton, INKY 2: Room Tone in June + On Loss & Found Materials

My mother is disappearing. Diagnosed with dementia six years ago, in recent months her confusion has redoubled, her memories leaving and arriving as unpredictably as fish to the surface of a pond. If she goes out of her house for a walk, she can’t always find her way back. If she wakes up after a nap, she might think a new day has started and begin making breakfast. She knows there’s a number you call in an emergency, but usually can’t recall what that number is. She has forgotten much of our family and most of her friends. She has only once forgotten me, her only child, and then only briefly—but it’s a sign of what’s to come.

I should be precise: my mother’s conscious mind is disappearing, not her body or her unconscious mind—the mind of dreams and reflexes; the mind our conscious mind tries futilely to claim dominion over. For now her body is very much present, and for her age, thriving. When I take walks with her, I hardly have to slow my pace. When she accompanies my two year old daughter to story time at the local library, she sits on the library carpet with the kids and young parents, then pulls herself up to standing at the end, to the amazement of all present. This is not how I have come to understand death’s arrival, especially here in our death-averse society, where we whisk away bodies and scrub rooms clean, buffeting ourselves from the reality of what’s happened with expressions like “passed away” or “gone to a better place.”  My father died of cancer when I was eleven, his mind sharp up until the final weeks. The day he died, surrounded by family in our living room, I stood by his body and held his hand, still not quite cold. Soon after, the paramedics took him away and I never saw my father’s body again. My mother has been dying for years but her body is, for now, undiminished.

And my body, too, persists, though my conscious mind doesn’t understand quite how. While it worries over prescriptions and home healthcare workers and nursing homes, my subconscious is drumming up lines of poems, or the sentences that I’ve cobbled into this essay. I sometimes find myself with a pen in my hand, with no memory of picking it up. And my conscious mind asks the obvious questions: Why? And why now? Why persist with poems and stories and all this fancy language in the face of unavoidable loss? They’re questions I’ve asked myself often over the years, with no final answer arriving beyond the knowledge that not once in my life has my devotion to writing been a conscious choice. All I did was read, innocently at first, oblivious to what I was getting myself into.

Rob Taylor, “Why? And Why Now?”: On Poetry and Companionship

Storyteller Poetry Review has just published 5 of my poems about my wonderful mother-in-law. Some have been published before; some are first-timers. My thanks to editor Sharon Knutson for this opportunity to share an extraordinary life.

Sarah Russell, My Mother-in-Law Boby Clariana

I had been revising som old poems of late, and after some feedback on one it dawned on me that I am pissing about, and that I need to focus on newer stuff. So I am. A new draft emerged this week, and two very recent things are shaping up nicely. I need to go back to the piles of notes I have and perhaps, just perhaps a collection might have started to take shape by the end of the year. A long way to go yet, so no getting ahead of myself, but there feels like light at the end of the torch I intend to take into the tunnel for the first time in a while.

Mat Riches, A jumping off point

How do you build a poetry community? Is it a bit like gardening, in that you have to work at it slowly over time and then all of the sudden, blooms everywhere, and hummingbirds? One thing I want to do is to prioritize time with poets online and in-person, catching up over coffee or the phone, or having people over. Sometimes, it takes a lot of energy, but I think it’s worth it. Even this blog, or social media, can be part of building community. I think we writers work better when we have community. We need to support each other and recognize each other and shout “good job” when someone gets good news and “so sorry” when they get bad news.

Despite setbacks, I did write a poem this week, and I started submitting again. I’m editing my book for sending out again. But there has been a tick-tock in my ear lately (and not just because of the ear infection). It’s how fast time passes these days, and losses that come with getting older, and the feeling that my time is limited.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Ups and Downs, Birds and Blooms, and Building Poetry Community

Now is the time to ask ourselves what we love. I love books. I always have. I love reading them, and holding them, and I love the hope and the dreams and the stories they contain. The facts! The worlds. The perspectives from people that I wouldn’t otherwise meet or places I will never go. Thoughts, philosophies. Lives lived. Lives! Life!

I love holding books. I love re-reading the books I love. I love taking photographs of books! Books, I love you. I love watching a movie based on a book I love and then going back to the book and loving it all over again in new ways. I love talking about a book with someone and they saw something I didn’t. I love taking a single sentence from a book and typing it out and saying it and sharing it. I love being regularly astonished by how words spark one against the other and how sentences somehow contain a style that you have never until then come across. I love how a sentence by one author will resound and then take you to another author and you will learn to hear echoes and rhythms.

I love words. I love sentences.

In an epigraph to a chapter titled “What is a Sentence” in Jan Mieszkowski’s book Crises of the Sentence, John Banville says, “The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization.”

The greatest invention is still the sentence. The book, another great invention. Best technology. Poems, another great invention.

Fernando Pessoa:

“I broke with the sun and stars. I let the world go.
I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know.”

Pessoa, my soul to your soul.

Shawna Lemay, The Greatest Invention

This week, I learned that the estate of Mary Oliver has launched an online shop selling clothing decorated with popular quotations from the late American poet, such as

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves

— and what soft animal wouldn’t love a Suddenly and Unexpectedly sweatshirt topped with a hat that will have strangers asking if your name is Mary Oliver?

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks#32: Try a Poem Staple Gun

As a fairly regular reviewer of collections, I’ve often read books which don’t have an overtly coherent sense of what the poet is trying to say, other than within individual poems. That’s not to say that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, but most poets write poems which speak to, or echo, one another – either directly or indirectly – thus it seems appropriate to make that at least partially explicit through the poems’ ordering. In my case, I gradually took care to carve my manuscript into thematic sections. The drawback with that was that some previously published poems which I think are still not bad didn’t make the cut, because I couldn’t make them fit with the collection’s overall arc.

I was also at pains, as I was with my first collection, to ensure that there were notes at the back. I know that many poets prefer not to do this, in the spirit of ‘never explain’; I, though, don’t see notes as being explanatory but, rather, as helpful to the reader: as a White English, middle-aged male, I can’t expect every reader either to know or understand, at first glance, all of my cultural references; neither do I expect them to look them up online (or even in an encyclopædia!). Assembling notes at the back of the book seems to me to be a sensible thing. There is, of course, a fine balance to be struck between stating who a particular person, painting, TV programme or whatever is, or was, and (in my case) mansplaining in a manner which tells the reader what the poem is about – I like to think that my book, its three sections and the individual poems by and large speak for themselves. I’m not the kind of person who likes to write, or read, cryptic poems. Again, though, I would add the disclaimer that neither would I want to write poems which could be so easily understood at face value that they had no resonance.

As an inveterate tinkerer with poems, some – perhaps as many as half of them – took at least a year, and in some cases more than five years, to be settled. You might therefore not be surprised to hear that the title of the book has also changed lots of times in the last decade. In fact, I only plumped for The Last Corinthians less than two months before the manuscript went to the printer. I should say here that I’m very glad that Crooked Spire Press used a local printer, because supporting the local economy sits squarely with the book’s values. I should also say how grateful I am to work with a publisher who ‘gets’ my poems and what I have tried to achieve with the book.

Matthew Paul, On The Last Corinthians

Thanks to being published by a small press with an open attitude, I persuaded them to use a photo I’d created myself.

I took this photo in my living room (the colour on the wall is French Grey from Farrow and Ball, in case you’re interested!) My idea was to assemble a ‘still life’ in the Dutch tradition of ‘vanitas’ paintings. ‘Vanitas’ being the genre of still life that is supposed to suggest the brevity of one’s time on this planet, and the futility of everything we strive for, since it has to end in death.

This isn’t as gloomy as it sounds, trust me! What I gathered together were pieces of memorabilia, items referenced in the poems, signifiiers… all arranged in such a way that I hope engenders a feeling of a life lived, in all its messiness, chaos, mistakes, serendipity, quirkiness and yes, beauty.

If you look closely you’ll see a Korean Coca-Cola bottle (I used to collect Coca-Cola cans and bottles from all the countries I visited through work!), burnt-out candles and a half-drunk glass of wine (I’ll leave you to decide on the significance of these), rotting fruit (=decay) and a fox’s skull (mostly in pieces). Skulls, and timepieces, are very common ‘vanitas’ tropes. There’s no clock or watch here, but I have included pages from work diaries, a (laminated) production timeline (we had a new product range every quarter), my old Filofax from the 1990s, even some pages from one of my teenage diaries. There are also photos of me as a Brownie and later as a jaded employee posing for yet another visa application. And let’s not gloss over the blister pack of paracetamol. Pills, childhood terrors, stupid work schedules and endless long-haul trips are well represented in the poems. As well as the internet, computers, magnolia flowers (artificial in this case) and ‘burning the candle at both ends’.

Robin Houghton, The Mayday Diaries cover art: what’s it all about?

Many thanks to Arts ATL for selecting Wonder & Wreckage as one of its 13 must-read poetry collections for National Poetry Month. I was in fine company with Beth Gylys, Andred Jurjevic, and Elly Bookman. See the list here.

And also many thanks to friend and fine poet Steven Reigns, who recommended Wonder & Wreckage in his selections for National Poetry Month that appeared on The Poetry Foundation website. See the list here.

Wonder & Wreckage is also a nominee for the annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards, which will be announced in June. I’m among a very crowded field, so not hopeful about my chances, especially since the great Alice Friman is in the running. 

Collin Kelley, Wrapping up May

On the very first day of June five years ago, this little book dropped into the world in the form of a box of copies left downstairs. Chicago was literally on fire from protests (which I still think were outside agitators, rather than the Chicagoans who had been protesting Friday and most of Saturday without incidence.) What would follow was curfews that lasted a couple of weeks and increased policing on Michigan Ave for a couple more years. In the thick of Covid lockdowns, that morning, I sat in a zoom meeting, in which a bunch of librarians fretted over return protocols coming a month later despite not a single one of them actually returning to the office during the remaining year and a half I still worked there after. I wound up texting my boss to say I was taking the day off and depression napping, but later I went to fetch the cat litter downstairs and found my newest book. It was a moment that should have been one of celebration, but I wasn’t feeling it. In the coming months I did my best to market the book, making my first video poems and web content, but it was hard to get traction. In retrospect, it was [the] last traditionally published book I published before moving on to issuing titles myself a year later (after what I like to call now the “Poetry Mid-Life Crises of 2020” ).

This bones of SEX & VIOLENCE started in early 2015 with the blond joke poems, and through 2016 with the Plath centos gleaned from lines in ARIEL. It continued through slasher movie fragments and what was initially J’s Valentine’s love poem series from 2017, but which broadened over the next few months and took on a life of its own. Right after I lost my mom, I sat down to send it in time for the end of the month deadline BLP had for new submissions. When the acceptance came during the early spring, I sat and cried at my desk over not being able to tell her first thing. 

The time since that first spring without her and lockdowns/riots to now, five years later, always feels like it is collapsing in on itself.

Kristy Bowen, book birthday | sex & violence

“Fierce” and “fearsome” offer the perfect segue to the Taylor Swift component of how I’m channeling my rage this spring. Ever since hearing “Look What You Made Me Do” in the opening scene of the penultimate episode of The Handmaid’s Tale series, I’ve had it on repeat. I’ve been loud about it. Very loud. (Sorry not sorry!)

I’ve declared it my twisted summer anthem of 2025. Or my anthem of twisted summer. Or the summer of twisted me. Let it be a season of retribution. A season of reclamation. Let it be a season of taking back our power. A season of kingdoms crumbling and artists rising. […]

I’m happy to say I’ve also reached the defiance stage in what has been a season (or seasons) of rejection for my poetry manuscript. Over the last three years or so, my Gertie manuscript has been rejected dozens of times, while also receiving a handful of finalist nods.

The most recent rejection — which came with a lovely note from the editor about making the final round of consideration — arrived in early May, a couple days after I returned from a writing retreat at Mass MoCA. The press that had it was not only one of my dream presses. It was also the last one to respond from a big submission push I did last spring and summer. And since I had paused submitting and revising after that, it meant that Gertie was no longer a contender for any reading period or contest anywhere.

It also meant that if Gertie was to get published, I’d need to jump back into the whole process, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I spent some time entertaining the fear that the last and latest rejection signaled that book publishing wasn’t ever going to be for me.

I indulged the idea that there simply wasn’t a place in the world for my work, but I took lots of deep breaths, gave myself a good talking to, and consulted my writing community. And … wait for it…

I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time
Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time …

Defiance has always been one of my strengths, and I plan to keep fighting for Gertie. It’s partly because I believe in the book. It’s also because, despite constantly wasting energy entertaining negative self talk, somewhere deep down I believe in myself.

Carolee Bennett, Artmaking as Pleasure: “Uncontainable, Unmanageable”

I had a student who is now a Very
Famous and Important Poet; I don’t
think she remembers me much
anymore, if at all. I had a teacher
who said, It’s really about who you know.
But I still believe in the poems I want
to write, believe in the air I breathe,
the tiny electric pulse which begins
as a prickle somewhere in the brain
or sensorium, informing me I need
to sink into the shag carpet of that
moment and stop asking only the logical
questions; because then a trapdoor
might open and who knows what bright,
surprising universe I might fall into?

Luisa A. Igloria, Partial Self-portrait as Poet, with Novelty Cakes

My husband and I recently visited David Austin Roses in Shropshire. It set me thinking about why I love roses: the scent, the sweet-shop colours and the silkiness of the petals. But they also have thorns and are beloved by insects such as earwigs. This links to my latest poetry collection, Earwig Country (Valley Press 2024), where the main theme is ‘beautiful things have inner horrors’.

We do have a small Tudor style rose garden within our back garden, with box hedges and some David Austen roses, and others that need a little work, pruning etc. We also have a few which were standard roses but have reverted to wild roses, and are far too large for this miniature parterre. So our visit was partly scoping out replacements. I liked the Olivia rose, and hope to order bare rooted in the correct season. I can’t see a rose without sniffing it for its scent, and will only buy scented ones. Everywhere I go I see roses and apply my nose to them, and have done since I was a small child. They are indeed ‘olfactory delights’ (quoting one of my own lines there). […]

Your parents’ tangled minds
are clogged with memories, resurfacing
as they approach their nineties.
We have assumed control.

Safe in their new apartment, they cling
to routine, repeat old stories, laugh,
are mostly thankful for our care: roses
late flowering against the dark of winter.

Angela Topping, David Austin Roses

[E]astern Pennsylvania finally moderated its weather enough that I got the weeds and the seeds and transplants more or less under control this past week–“control” being a general term subject to, well, Nature. The peonies bloomed gorgeously on schedule, as did the nefarious multiflora roses and Russian olives that plague the hedgerow. The catbirds and Eastern kingbirds are back; the robins’ first brood has hatched; the orioles are insistent in the walnut trees and brilliant in the garden, chasing the barn swallows. I’m not doing much writing, though I drafted one or two beginnings of poems. Outdoors takes precedence–not that I can’t write out of doors, I often do so. But poems can wait in a way the garden cannot.

And, speaking of poems (and Pennsylvania), I returned from my trip to find this Keystone Poetry anthology awaiting: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09990-3.html–the followup to 2005’s Common Wealth anthology, also edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple.

The new anthology, 20 years after the initial one, has poems by about 180 poets–yes, I am one of them–covering the corners and the center of the Keystone State. I like it even better than the first collection, and it is clear the editors learned much from the experience of curating poems and creating a cohesive “experience” of the regions. Granted, since I know both of the editors personally and appreciate their poetry and their visions, I may be biased. But that’s okay. Objectively, I truly get how huge an undertaking this was and how well it has turned out. For educators, there is a section at the close of the anthology full of suggestions for reading, writing critically, and writing creatively based on this anthology, and even in comparison with the previous one. As both editors are college professors who teach creative writing and critical writing, these appendices are well-thought out and worthwhile.

I miss the aridity of New Mexico, which seems to benefit my overall health. And I miss my daughter immensely. But springtime in eastern PA has many compensations, not the least of which are blooming even as I write.

Ann E. Michael, Back in PA

I think Palgrave’s decision to exclude contemporary work – he would not ‘anticipate the verdict of the future on our contemporaries’ – was an excellent one. Absolutely no one can ever assess its merit, because it hasn’t had time to accrue any yet. Not that this stops us doing it. Young poets are always certain they live in a golden age; if it were left to them, they would include few poets beyond their brilliantly relevant coevals. But what they imagine the intrinsic value of their poetry is often just its extrinsic attitude, which is half the point of young poets in the first place: to take a stand, and demand a corrective to the inequities and distortions of the establishment. Today, ‘identity’ is still the main game in town, just as ‘class’ and gay visibility were in my day; in my mentors’ day, it was feminist corrective, and in their mentors’, anti-metropolitanism and fighting for the representation of the regions and the Celtic fringe. While one’s day passes quickly enough – the identity-obsession will eventually find its level, like everything before it – it always leaves the year ahead looking different in prospect. In time, I believe things tend to be changed for the better and the fairer.

Old poets, on the other hand, know that poetry has never been in worse shape, and would exclude everybody, bar themselves and their one remaining friend. I’m not even too sure about him, to be honest. But for those reasons, the young and the old can make poor anthologists. The young are too short-sighted and the old too long. Those who enjoy the brief, bifocal wisdom of the mid-river perspective (a mixed metaphor which seems to have conjured a specky fly fisher in waders; my apologies) know that the truth always lies in balance. You want a book which looks both forwards and backwards, because those are the books truest to their own time.

Tennyson, Palgrave’s great friend and advisor, wisely insisted that his own poetry be left out of the Treasury – a stroke of genius, because he knew would put the kibosh on Palgrave using any other contemporary work. Had he done so, it would have done nothing but draw attention to Tennyson’s absence. In vetoing his own inclusion, Tennyson underwrote the Treasury’s own longevity and success. […]

My favourite version of the do-I-put-me-in dilemma is actually a Tennysonian absence: The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry was edited by my favourite living poet, Paul Muldoon, a choice Faber must have instantly regretted. In it, Paul more or less explored the set theory complexities of self-absence. He had already made the most insanely Palgravian choice – a mere ten poets were included in the book; but Muldoon then doubled down on his honourable self-omission by not just leaving himself out, but annihilating his own existence altogether. Instead of an introduction, there was an excerpt from an interview with Louis MacNeice. Given that even back then Muldoon was, by common consent, one of the most important living Irish poets, the book was now rendered self-evidently and gratingly incomplete. The cleverness of this almost situationist piece of publishing is so Muldoonian I could spend an essay unpacking it. But it remains a brilliant anthology, in the true sense, I think – provided you read it with a copy of Muldoon’s Selected in the other hand.

Don Paterson, ‘Here by effacement the poem is restored to unity’: The Genius of Francis Palgrave and the Golden Treasury – Part II

If you enjoy reading poetry and are, at least in principle, interested in reading contemporary poetry and responses to it in “real time” — following poets as they publish new material, getting a sense of new directions and experiments as they evolve — then the obvious thing to do is to subscribe to a handful of poetry magazines. There are several splendid online poetry magazines now, but I still much prefer to read both poetry and criticism in print. This is partly because I just don’t remember poems I read on a screen in the same way. I don’t believe you have really read a poem at all if you’ve only read it once — and certainly, from a poet’s perspective, you haven’t really “succeeded” unless your reader comes back to your poem time and again. Online venues are quick and convenient ways of getting a taste of many writers, but it’s hard to revisit things. You can’t annotate or turn down pages as you can with a physical book or magazine, even saved links often go dead, and the lack of manual interaction I think also impedes memory.

So for me, at least, printed poetry magazines still matter. But if you’re new to reading poetry magazines, or even if you’re quite experienced at it but fancy a change, it can be hard to know where to start. Most print magazines, unsurprisingly, only offer a very small amount of their content for free online, and very few libraries and bookshops now carry them so the opportunities for browsing are limited. (At least in the UK; I see them more often in France.) And it’s hard to find “reviews” of magazines that aren’t aimed primarily at people thinking of submitting, rather than those who are potential readers.

I’ve written reviews of three of the magazines I receive regularly before (Poetry Review, Interpret and the French rbl), and I’ve put the links to those pieces at the end of this post. But today I thought I’d take a look at three very good magazines, all of which I value and read loyally, and all of which print a good deal of prose as well as poetry, with an eye for their differences — what might attract you to one of these over the others if you are a potential new subscriber. These are the spring (i.e. most recent) issues of the long-running PN Review; Poetry London (also well established, but with a recent change of poetry editor); and the quite new, and still evolving, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. All three print poetry, literary essays and reviews (of poetry) in broadly similar proportions.

Victoria Moul, Poetry magazines: three spring issues

I’m always on the look out for books that deepen my understanding of creating poetry and am eternally grateful to writers such as Ted Kooser (The Poetry Repair Manual) and Steve Kowit (In the Palm of Your Hand), who supported my early attempts at writing myself. Last year I was moved to congratulate Isabelle Kenyon of Fly on the Wall Press for the publication of a truly inspirational book (The Process of Poetry) in which British poets of the stature of Don Paterson, Sean O’Brien, Liz Lochhead and Gillian Clarke reflected on the development of one of their poems through discussion with editor Rosanna McGlone. I was, therefore, particularly excited by the news that McGlone was working on a sequel, an Australian version, called The Making of a Poem (5 Islands Press, 2025) and wanted to review it. […]

Whilst there is some commonality in the different poets’ approaches, such as in their shared view of the importance of reading others’ work and in their willingness to experiment, there is diversity  too and, at times, contradictions. John Kinsella, for example, does not believe in giving up on poems, even if they are not working.

‘I’ve never abandoned a poem. If a poem doesn’t work, it gets rewritten and reworked. If I’m doubtful about what I’ve said, the piece then becomes a questioning and an investigation of that doubt.’

Whereas Sarah Holland-Batt, admits to giving up on poems that she feels aren’t progressing

‘All the time I have poems that I feel won’t work and I just let them go.’

Such contradictions are inevitable in a book that seeks to provide insights into the highly individualistic practice of writing poetry. As The Making of a Poem is not a simplistic handbook on the dos and don’ts of poetry writing, the reader must use the poet’s different accounts to reflect critically upon their own practice. Some insights will confirm and some will challenge their approaches and through that challenge produce the potential for its development.

Three of the insights that have led me to reflect on my own practice are: Jaya Savige’s statement that: ‘If I feel I’m getting too confessional, I try to rebalance things by banning myself from the first-person pronoun for the next few poems;’ Mark Tredinnick’s advice  to his students that  ‘ the poem you’re writing isn’t about yourself; it’s about ourselves;’ and Bella Li encouragement to ’trust in your particularity: the subjects you’re interested in, the forms that you want to use…don’t try to change what you’re doing to suit some sense of an audience.’  I have no doubt the lessons other readers will take away  from engaging with such poets will be different. That is the beauty of this book: there will be something for everyone!

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Making of a Poem’ edited by Rosanna McGlone

The latest from Birmingham, Alabama-based poet, fiction writer and editor Alina Stefanescu, and the first collection I’ve properly gone through of hers, is the remarkable My Heresies (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2025), a lyric exploration of being and becoming, of family histories and geographic shifts. “The first word wasn’t love, was it?” she writes, within the first poem of the two-part “Cosmologies,” “It was this once that sat upon a time we can’t locate / in physics. It was the science of bread / being broken and eaten. // I am still terrible at division.” My Heresies is a collection of big, complicated emotions, cultural collision and a fierce intelligence, composed with such a delicate and careful ease of the line. “I, too, would appreciate / being courted at the leveling / of the sacred.” she writes, as part of the short poem “Little Things: A Ring,” “If I can’t partake of the trifecta, / I will settle for that flaming / thing in the angel’s right hand.” The poems are expansive and intimate, containing the whole world and the author’s entire life in the smallest moment, the most contained set of sentences. […]

With opening poem and five carved, numbered sections, there is an element of My Heresies of being constructed as a long sentence, a book-length suite of poems seamlessly stitched into a single, ongoing conversational thread. The poems are propelled by hush and halt, a tempo of thoughtful measure, articulation, excavation and archaeological play, but one that loops and reels and revels in repetition, managing to find new elements across familiar stories, familiar lines and phrases. “Failure to absorb the verb / and modify the actor accordingly.” begins the poem “Indictment for Failure to Conjugate,” “To sit and / play dumb.” There is also an interesting thread contained within this collection of the moments and lyrics of the late German-speaking Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), a poet with whom Stefanescu feels both cultural and poetic affinity. “Paul Celan begins with an act of self-naming.” begins the poem “Sonnet at the Ghost Commune,” “The poem claims the invention of self / on a Bucharest windowsill. Poets put // the moon in its place / at the horn of the table / on the shoe of the satyr folding laundry into bohemian ballet.”

There is such a detailed intimacy to this collection, and a sharp and open intelligence at play, one that invites the reader in as an equal, unafraid of what these lines might reveal.

rob mclennan, Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies

The second section of Thomas Meyer’s Fisher King, ‘Adages Agenda’ begins with these words:

Have I said more than I meant. Or mean to? I mean have I said too much, shy of either revelation or burden. Not so much said as wrote. Letter. Poem.

It’s a significant question for a writer who’s launching into a book a significant part of which consists of the relation of memories of personal relationships from teen romances through his 40-year-long partnership with Jonathan Williams to his current marriage to Michael Watt. It also bears on the idea that people as written have their own reality as compared to their ‘real’ one, as in this poem, poem ‘x’ from the short first section, which shares the book’s title:

I am Merlin.
I only exist in books.

An empty place.

For us, as readers, Meyer’s cast of characters also exist in the empty space of the book but are none the less as real as Merlin; ‘memoirs are inventions, fictions autobiography’. […]

Much earlier in the book, thinking of Bunting and Pound’s ‘Dichten = Condensare’, Meyer writes:

Could it be that an aesthetic invented at the beginning of the twentieth century in reaction to the nineteenth might lack application at the beginning of the twenty-first? We don’t need to compress, we need to expand. Slow poetry? Take time, make time?

It strikes me that in these closing pages, Meyer achieves a kind of slow poetry, a poetry with time and room to think, without succumbing to prolixity:

Something about a peony.
Full blown on the table in a jar.
The whole room filled

with that pink light
coming from

it having us in mind.

Fisher King is a book to inhabit, to move around in, slowly. Inevitably in a review of this nature, I’ve only skated over a few of its surfaces. As a reader, I’ll be back for more.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading May 2025: A Review

There’s no getting around the fact that everyone’s future involves some form of disability. As we age, our bodies show the results of living, i.e., aches, stretch marks, and memory lapses, to name just a few. Poets, it appears, intuit this reality more readily than others, even embrace it. As Loveday puts it, poets, “though not necessarily identifying as disabled themselves, turn to language in order to speak to those instruments of human greed and violence that disable us.” As I read those lines, I thought of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” which includes these familiar lines:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poised between kindness and sorrow, poetry beckons us towards what Loveday calls “connection, mutuality and simultaneous recognition.” How often have you read a poem and felt a deep gratitude, something far beyond the words on the page? This is poetry’s gift. It delves into our shared humanity, reminding us that the world of poems includes all of us. “What poetry embodies, deliberately or inadvertently, fiercely or with great subtlety, is a kind of seismic registry of the zeitgeist, what’s coming and what’s possible.”

The article goes on to connect poetry and disability: “Contemporary poetry, increasingly, registers our proximity to disability…Poetry, like disability, is charged with response in real time.” You could say that poetry takes a stand against ableism, which the American Psychological Association defines as “prejudice and discrimination aimed at disabled people, often with a patronizing desire to ‘cure’ their disability and make them ‘normal.’” 

But is, as the title asserts, poetry disabled? Or is it “differently-abled,” a term sometimes used as a kinder-sounding alternative? I don’t have the answers to those questions. What I do know is that this article made me think hard about my assumptions regarding both poetry and disability.

Eric Goss, “Is poetry disabled?”

“Put it down
on the page” – a writing
teacher says,
“…metaphorically speaking”

Meaning the page pales,
letters on paper have been eaten
and digested (as metaphors do), 
transmuted into light and hovering figures

On a backlit screen, the page
a wink in language, a vestige 
holding its head aloft in a 
restless, churning language. 

Jill Pearlman, The Page, the Page!

Our stories are sighs. They are corporal. Even reading the writing on a page, in a book, we don’t experience the fullness of the words without our lips moving, our tongue only partially restrained, our breath carrying the story into the world with intimate, involuntary utterances.

I once saw the exhibition Body Worlds in New York City. I was fascinated by the plastinate network of blood vessels in the torso. It was as delicate and beautiful as any lace. It made me wonder if the very first artist to make lace knew, subconsciously, of the pattern within us all.

I imagine stories are like this, too. Invisible to us, but like delicate lacework that begins in the brain and traces its way down our spine, into our solar plexus, wrapping our heart. The stories that I’ve heard from the women in my life, the stories that have warped like meaning in a game of whispers, from one mouth, to one ear, to the incidental bumping of other, foreign stories, flattening or rising like a relief in time—these stories are part and parcel of the body with which I move through the world.

Estranged is not the same thing as extricated.

I am a consolidation.
I am a dust devil in the desert,
coming into being
of the dirt
and the spores and the heat

writing a love letter
from and to my mother’s cursive language
from and to her mother, mother’s mother

And in the dark
I will end it all
in a rain of earth
between the yellow lines
of the highway

Ren Powell, A Score of Sorrows

In early spring a book arrived that I had been eagerly anticipating. Atomic Masquerade by Clara Etherin did not disappoint. Witty, exuberant, layered and innovative, this visual poetry collection is full of delights, from brooding palimpsest portrayals of Dracula and Frankenstein to the vivid pair of asemic sonnets “Heaven & Hell” – written in collaboration with AI – with which the book concludes.

Each piece has a distinctive energy, generating an impression of rising out of the page into some intangible third dimension. […]

I have read and reread Atomic Masquerade with great enjoyment; but the enjoyment has been bittersweet, for the book represents the final publication from Penteract Press.

Founded by Anthony Etherin in 2016, Penteract Press has been a leading independent publisher of innovative constrained and visual poetry for almost a decade. The press has given a platform not only to established avant-garde and experimental writers but also to new, previously unknown voices (my own among them). You can read my interview with Anthony about the press, its ethos, and the reasons behind the decision to close here.

Penteract Press books are unique: often sumptuous, always elegant, and characterised by verbal and visual delights and surprises. Moreover, like all good books their intrinsic value to the reader extends beyond the simple pleasure of reading. Diving into a Penteract book is an adventure, an exploration into the art and craft of poetry, an opportunity to investigate the possibilities of language and the space in which letter, word and image coexist.

I have learnt so much from Penteract poets. Luke Bradford’s lyrical Zoolalia, for example, has taught me the beauty of lipograms and how we can tune in to their potential for music and rhythm and energy. The magic of palindromes is revealed through Merlina Acevedo’s Mirrors. Visualising the formal structures in Shakespeare’s sonnets with BardCode by Gregory Betts has suggested new and interesting ways in which I might use rhyme and metrical patterns in my own work.

Marian Christie, A Paean to Penteract Press

I am not a therapist, and the framing of this workshop comes from being a writer and approaching difficult narratives from a writer’s perspective: how do we give shape to trauma narratives, to unwieldy family stories, to personal accounts? How do we deal with memory gaps, empty spaces, lack of documents, family silences, linguistic disruption and failure? Conversely, how do we approach an abundance of material, an overwhelm of information? A box of letters we can barely stand to look at? Confederate roll calls? Court documents? I’ll be walking us through some practical, formal approaches to writing these narratives that have aided me, and also drawing from the community of books I’ve read in my own healing and processing journey (always ongoing), such as What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing by Jen Soriano, but also documentary poetic work such as Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World.

Han VanderHart, Finding Shape in the Dark (on writing difficult narratives) – Two Online, Generative Writing Workshops, July 5 & 19

One of the things I’m looking forward to exploring in my upcoming workshop Rumination as Route is a practice I call ruminative reading: a way of engaging with texts that invites lingering, layering, and the kind of close attention that reveals deeper textures over time.

I’ll be sharing how I approach reading as a writer, and how I tease out unexpected meaning through methods that mirror the digressive and associative structures I write in. This kind of reading isn’t about decoding a text once and for all, it’s about returning to it, turning it over, letting it shift in your hands and your memory.

My ideas around ruminative reading were shaped by my time writing creative reviews for The Bind, a review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors. Though currently on hiatus, The Bind remains a rich and inspiring archive, a space where reviews take many forms: lesson plans, maps, quizzes, writing prompts. It honors writing at important intersections, and I encourage you to spend time on the site if you haven’t already.

José Angel Araguz, on ruminative reading

Daily I am perplexed by, well, the day, what is transpiring, what has happened in the world since I last checked, what the day will bring and how I’m supposed to respond, what I want and what I have and how to reconcile the differences and align the two, who I am, who I was, what I’ll be, how I’ll manage, what it all means, when I know meaning is a made thing. There are other questions. How do birds fly in the rain? Don’t they feel the pelt of drops like bullets on their backs? The rabbits in the backyard are racing around and leaping over each other in play. Does everything play? Are bacteria on my skin doing their own version of Miss Mary Mack with their flagella? There is so much we don’t know.

I used to be a strict believer in the black-and-whiteness of things. With age I’ve settled into a certain comfort with the gray scale. Nevertheless I’m often an impatient reader of poetry that does not show itself to me right away. I won’t name names at the moment. Too much gray and I’m just wandering in the fog, and really, I’d rather not. This little poem, however, has pleased me over some weeks as I’ve turned it over and over in my mind’s hands like a pretty rock.

Marilyn McCabe, a moment

i ask my friends,
“how have you been keeping yourself
together?” i do not actually want
advice but i want to hear if/how
we are surviving. i look up designs
for a plague doctor uniform.
needle in my teeth, i get to work.
sew together old jackets.
i stop sleeping. sleep is for a different time
with less fire & less windows.

Robin Gow, plague doctor

I struggle for language in a murky space. Must I write an ode to this insistent despair? Be thankful for its amorphous presence, its angled ambiguity, its sightless eyes that berate me in silence? The music obfuscates the light. Separates word from meaning. What is the edge of gratitude? What birds listen in the trees beyond it?

talk to me
broken moon:
dark side to dark side

There is the crescendo. Then the quiet. Then the flapping of wings. Then the jacarandas straightening. Then the echo. Then the hum. The tune running in my head.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Purple song