This week: yellowing pears, oleander petals, the rattle of swans’ wings, the engines of our envy, and much more. Enjoy.

Last weekend at Lumb Bank a butterfly came into the cottage after dark and settled on my skirt, refused to fly away even as I walked around. Finally, it startled into a corner of my bedroom where it spent the night.

Next day I found it in the window above my writing desk. By the evening there was no sign of it.

I first came to Lumb Bank in 1998. I was in the dining room when it was announced that Ted Hughes had died. All morning, the door to the outside world kept blowing open and shut. This house has been far out at sea all night, I thought.

At Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in the early 2000s, I heard Christopher Reid perform extracts from the book of Hughes’ letters he had just edited. It was a chilly November morning, sober skies. Reid was reading a piece (from memory, I think it was a letter from Hughes to Ben Sonnerberg about the composition of Hughes’ The Jaguar) and as he got to the point in the letter where Hughes describes a bluebottle irritating him mid-poem in his room, those of us sitting close to the stage noticed a black butterfly circling Reid’s head. Very lightly, very deftly, it settled on the page of the book. A collective murmur rose from the crowd.

A black butterfly is thought to symbolise transformation, endings, and – in some traditions – a message from someone who has died. Readings vary slightly by culture: ominous in parts of Europe and Central America, auspicious in Japan, China, and the Philippines. Most modern interpretations read it as a phase closing rather than a warning (much like my understanding of the ‘death’ card in a tarot deck).

The night the Lumb Bank butterfly stayed in my room it rained with peculiar gravitas and I couldn’t sleep. It seemed as if the whole valley had been struck by something and it was ringing. The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills / Winds stampeding the fields under the window….

As I waited for morning, I thought about Hughes’ ‘blade-light…. Flexing like the lens of a mad eye’.

Helen Mort, A house at sea all night

i.m rachel blau duplessis (1941-2026)

/ i cannot face it: the diligent and scheduled day.
/ between endeavour and divide.
/ my cup runneth over. my cup becomes accustomed, is an eye.
/ what fresh hell is this? inside of which we recognise and formulate, traverse entrapment sadly.
/ a poem, aye. envoi of exhaustions. envoi of extremes.
/ to strive inside the limit and the light of it.
/ to swallow it, horoscope and gospel, down in one.
/ what is it – the necessary defect in our nature, a mercy owed to ignorance.
/ that keeps us here, softly espousing? […]

Fran Lock, AGLÆCA #2

At the Museo Nazionale Romano at Palazzo Altemps, we spend an entire slow afternoon with the Gods. There are sun-drenched terraces adorned with saffron murals of birds and plants; the sculpted stone limbs of Demeter and Apollo lounging in the high noon sun; amphorae and funerary reliefs and bones.

I am particularly drawn to Dionysus/Bacchus—always have been, with his pinecones and staff and grapes. I linger in rooms with him, wishing the sculpture would talk back to me. Like a child I covet his attention.

I have always longed for and feared the ecstatic. As a Scorpio, as a writer, I am always tugging at the precipice of ruin, peering behind its delicious curtain. I want the rush of abandon, and then I run from it. An erotic push-pull, where the threshhold is my kink.

Dionysus is the embodiment of The Me that Stretches Beyond Fear, into an erotic expanse that verges on the divine. It is the part of me that eats to excess and drinks and dances and gets lost in beauty and uses my sensuality as currency and lets go of expectation and order. Dionysus tells me to write poems, to lose my fucking mind. But it’s less about the wildness itself and more about what it takes to get there.

In Rome, the closest I get to bacchanalia is staying up late, laughing with my friend and the ghosts, drinking dark, thick wine and smoking a dozen slim Vogue cigarettes. My friend called our last night a “loopy giddy fever dream.” Dionysus would approve.

And then when things feel too heavy, I pull back on the ecstatic, march down the hill, pass through the scrim, and become good again.

Lisa Marie Basile, Missives from beautiful, bloated Rome

The academic whirlwind yanked me up into its funnel cloud this August with extra force, or so it seemed, after a sabbatical’s saner pace. Struggling with the workload, I thought with surprise, I do not want this. I definitely do not want to go to these endless workshops on how AI can help improve faculty efficiency. I want to take slow, inefficient walks in the woods, looking at mushrooms.

I was relieved, after that rush of meetings and paperwork, to settle into teaching. Preparing for class–reading, reconsidering old lesson plans (recently Rukeyser, O’Hara, Ginsberg, Plath)–I lose track of time. Running a discussion about literature or writing is all about giving texts and other humans the respect of unhurried attention.

Yet administrivia keeps pouring in, with deadlines that put firm boundaries on how much time I can give my students or my creative life. The latter involves its own administrative tasks, too: slipping a few submissions in before the windows close, checking proofs, booking a hotel for that writing festival, etc. When you get to the events, they’re often great. I LOVED the thoughtful conversation at the ecopoetry panel and reading I was a part of recently at Stone Soup Books. Blockage on the interstate, though, meant I broke speed limits getting there.

The unhurry-able process of writing, revising, and working to get poems in front of audiences has fruited lately, as a reminder of where rumination can lead.

Lesley Wheeler, Snailing along in the moonlight

If you ask me, I’ll probably say I’m not writing much. Because even I forget about the poor little thing. “My blog.” I periodically slip into sentences in conversations with friends mention of “my blog,” knowing none of them read it. There is invariably no reaction, or a furtive look away. “Blog,” I think, has come to mean long-winded all-about-me blather that no one wants to read, although if you put it up as a video on TickyTacky I guess it might be a viral Thing. I wonder if I called it “my Substack” if I’d get a different reaction, as that seems to be where the cool kids blog, at the moment. I had a podcast for a while, and a friend actually jokes about NOT listening to the podcast, as if I’d think that was funny, and I do fake-laugh just to make it okay. (But you know what, it’s not really okay.) In spite of this particular long-winded all-about-me blather of a post, some of my best works comes out on this blog: mini-essays, some, or prose poems, others. Not all of them, by any means. But as it turns out, this is my writing practice, this blog. Much to my surprise. And it won’t make me known to the world and has not garnered me many readers and will not turn into a published book, and I can’t turn around and try to publish these mini-essays/prose poems in lit mags because this blog is considered a published thing, and therefore no longer shiny new for most lit mags. I’m just pausing here to give myself credit for this practice. Turns out practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes purpose. It makes sanity. It makes a small grace. And I pause to thank you for reading.

Marilyn McCabe, It may be that when we no longer know what to do

A fortnight today I’ll be 60, which seems ridiculous but such is life. Half a lifetime ago I wrote this (not especially brilliant) haiku, which was published in Blithe Spirit in 1997:

thirtieth birthday
yellowing pears
in a porcelain bowl

In Stepping Stones (British Haiku Society, 2007), a book of commentaries on English-language haiku by British poets, based on his doctoral work, Martin Lucas wrote of that haiku:

The internal comparison is rather obvious, but [. . .] there is a secondary appeal: the intrinsic beauty of the sill life, which we can dwell on for its own value.

As an introduction to the possibilities of haiku in English, it’s yet to be bettered, because Martin had such a gift for analysing haiku simply and concisely, in the spirit of the haiku themselves.

[…]

I’ve not written any new poems for a while now, and have just been tinkering revising, and often adding to, poems originally drafted way back when, in some cases yonks ago. That suits me fine. I find revisiting old poems, i.e. ones that have hitherto not quite worked for whatever reason in order, to see if they’re salvageable almost as enjoyable as editing newly drafted poems. Some poems of mine have been as reworked and battered about as sculpture maquettes, in attempts to elicit their true heart and point. Poems without heart and point aren’t worth persevering with, yet I’m a terrible one for hoarding drafts of poems that I know are never going anywhere, usually because there’s some line or phrase that I think might be recyclable. That said, I’ve inadvertently managed to delete many drafts over the years. For every poem I’ve written that I’m happy with, I would think there’s another 10 or 20 that didn’t cut the mustard – an eyewatering total, I should think. I may be older, with forty-four years of writing poems behind me, but dragging them into the light doesn’t necessarily get any easier.

Matthew Paul, September

As I was reading blog posts from past Septembers, I came across this fascinating poem possibility in this post from September 18, 2024:  “As I’ve been puttering this morning, I thought, I should write a poem with the title “Hildegarde of Bingen Forgets Her Feast Day.” The poem could go in several possible directions: she forgets because she is busy, she forgets because it no longer matters, she forgets because she has dementia.”  I went back to my files, and if I composed this poem, I didn’t do it on the computer.

Chances are good that I did nothing with this idea because a few days later, I was dealing with the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which left us without power for roughly 9 days, without internet for roughly a month, and boiling water until early December.  Again and again, I am a bit whipsawed when I think about all we have managed to survive.

Deep breaths–let me do something with poetry before it’s time to get ready for church–or just sit here and breathe deeply.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Guardians of Lesser Galaxies

At the beginning of 2023, I had my gallbladder taken out due to the presence of a stone so impressive that a someone from the surgical team came to find me afterwards to tell me she’d never seen anything like it. Naturally, I asked to keep it. They said no, but left it in a tube within my reach for a suspiciously long time. That same week, I discovered the poetry of Irish poet Eavan Boland. What a pair of gifts that week gave me. One of them looks better on the shelf, though. [photo]

The poem I came across first was The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me, and it stopped me in my tracks. For context, I read a lot of poems. Like, a lot. I’m also relatively easy to please, poetically speaking, which means that I read a lot of poems I like, like, a lot. It’s lovely. But very occasionally, I read a poem I can’t get out of my head, that I am compelled to play on repeat for weeks or months like I did in 1992 with my cassette of the Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat soundtrack (Jason Donovan version, obvs). I assume this happens to everyone (the poetry thing, not Joseph). I can never figure out exactly what the magic is that makes a poem shoot into my favourites like this, but maybe it’s more poetic that I don’t know. Either way, I fell hard for this one. […]

It’s possible that, in 2023, having had a small object recently removed, I was more than usually open to the idea of the enormity of tiny things. But I’m no less enchanted by this poem now than I was then. This collection, by 1990 already something like Boland’s seventh, is teeming with objects and specifics – her mother’s stockpot, a mug with a hunting scene, the ‘sugar-barley iron of a garden chair’ – which ground and colour the broad profundities and classical allusions that lie in seams in these poems. You won’t mistake this for cosy, domestic poetry. It uses those themes to tell us about women, and writing, and Ireland, and love, and the past, and the now. It’s remarkable writing, and I’m so happy to have spent time with it this week.

Eavan Boland only died in 2020, after a stellar career. I wish I’d found her earlier. But I’ve been making up for it and she’ll be making more appearances on this Substack. The gallstone, thankfully, will not.

Nia Broomhall, Week 27: Outside History

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borrow books that are new to me for excitement or inspiration; this month, I’ve decided to do some re-reading. Since I’m not writing much myself these days, and not too thrilled with what little I have been drafting, it seems time to re-examine poetry that I really admire. Maybe I can learn a few things.

I’ve long been a fan of Elaine Terranova, whom I met many years ago in Philadelphia. I have all of her books but the latest (and will get to that one soon), but the one I’m re-reading is Not To, New and Selected Poems, which came out in 2006 and which contains selections from The Dog’s Heart, Damages, The Cult of the Right Hand, and from her early chapbook called Toward Morning/Swimmers –as well as about 80 pages of what were then new poems.

I don’t want to do a book review here, nor am I interested in poetry analysis right now. The reason I’m re-reading these poems with care and interest is to endeavor to understand why I appreciate her work so deeply. For one thing, Terranova consistently surprises me, but with quiet surprises. The turns in her poems are seldom the powerful, swift changes of mood, direction, or language that I like in many writers’ work…but they are there, and their subtleties and reflective twists engage me in ways perhaps more lasting. Because I have to think about where the poem chose to go, and how it got there. It’s not merely ambiguity, though sometimes the closure’s ambiguous, it’s because the last lines of Terranova’s poems feel so right to me. They don’t always circle back to an image or idea in the opening–sometimes, they travel quite a distance away.

Ann E. Michael, Re-reading, re-learning

For Rachel Blau Duplessis,

Blue, legion. Drafts. A polyvocal entry. One’s ear, to lend. A visual, daily practice. Days and works and days. Cartographic, the position of collage. This vanishing point. A sure cure, applied. Categories. So necessary, membrane. How big a threat? What, temporality. How grand, this arrangement of stars. Encompassed. The onset, journey. Heart, and blood, and facts. An ocean. The structural divisions of trees, thin lines of fence. How redundant the aesthetic. Leaves tarnish, fall, and then. Thus, exegesis. These scraps of humanity, assembled. Chorus.

rob mclennan, seven poems from a new project,

“Up//Roar” is the follow up to “Joy//Us Poems of Queer Joy” also published by Arachne. Whereas the latter celebrated, the new anthology encompasses poems for bleaker times, although that’s not to say the poems are bleak or full of doom and gloom, there is a celebration of allyship and resistance. As the introduction points out even in 2026 some families still cannot welcome the spouse/partner of departed loved ones because they’d prefer to erase the departed’s love life. […]

“Up//Roar” brings together a wide range of queer voices, all celebrating resistance and strength gained from being true to oneself however that may to look to other people. It’s a timely reminder that currently there is still discrimination and exclusion faced by LGBTQ+ communities. But here are also glimmers of light within the darkness that come from shared experiences and ways of owning being the outcast. Humans should not be forced to pretend to be something they are not or suppress major parts of themselves to “fit-in”. Let the hyenas not change their spots, “Up//Roar” is a necessary demonstration that hyenas should find their pack and not shiver in isolation.

Emma Lee, “Up//Roar Poems of Queer Resistance” edited by Cherry Potts and Jeremy Dixon (Arachne Press) – book review

The publication of Path means that, at last, the entire body of [Chris] Torrance’s 50-year engagement with The Magic Door is now available. Sort of. Unfortunately, the Test Centre volume is out of print with the occasional copy being sold online at funny-money prices, and the original individual volumes are collectors’ items, rarely surfacing at any price. And even the Test Centre edition excluded The Book of Heat, as it was originally written for performance. The inclusion of performance pieces here (RORI and Frinite) in Path would seem to indicate a change of heart on that front.

The Magic Door/Path is one of the most important long poems in British poetry of the last 50 years, and needs to be available to readers in its entirety. Now that we have the conclusion, we really need a reprint of the full pre-Path text, including The Book of Heat. Meanwhile, I urge you to read this book, whether you are familiar with the earlier parts or not. Torrance is quite simply a vital, important, dare I say major poet. We owe a debt of gratitude to Phil Maillard for keeping his work alive and to Aquifer for publishing this book.

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

In an excellent prefatory essay to the Clay Sanskrit Library edition of the Gitagovinda (translated and also introduced by Lee Seigel), Sudipta Kaviraj very neatly summarises what Jayadeva achieves in these songs:

Jayadeva composed in an astonishing form of Sanskrit in which the visible marks of its complex grammar are so minimally used that it became intelligible, almost without residue, to a much wider audience of vernacular readers. Literary skill obliterates the formal boundaries between different natural languages. It is an ironically democratised Sanskrit which can be read and enjoyed by those who do not know it. It is a strange bridge language and it is a text that lies at the crossing and therefore joins the literary world of Sanskrit and of several vernaculars.

I think it’s fair to say that none of the translations I’ve quoted so far really come anywhere close to suggesting this extraordinary blend of tradition and innovation: a newly transparent and accessible style which nevertheless draws upon the long history of kāvya. Recently I received a review copy of Inderjeet Mani’s new version of the Gitagovinda. This is a very different approach to the text, which draws in particular upon a long-standing tradition of understanding the Gitagovinda as a kind of drama. Mani’s version isn’t a close translation at all but I admire the way it incorporates elements from the long tradition of commentary on and performance of the poem into the English text. 

Victoria Moul, Translating and re-translating the Gitagovinda

(Translating Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa)
The three peaks stand like flags piercing the sky.
Forested landscapes hide ponds, and streams
breathe a mist of autumnal clouds.
In the dense undergrowth, oleander petals
sequester light. He pauses, wondering how different
the smell of the earth is—the wild fragrance of long pepper
from coiled creepers. Purple Chironji berries
crunch under his feet, squishy pulp
yeilds crisp kernels his family cherishes.

(From Sarga 2)

I am writing poems in response to a close reading of Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana. I allow each sarga to become the seed for a meditative poem, entering its unwritten interior—the spaces between what is narrated and what the text leaves open to the imagination.

Uma Gowrishankar, What the Land Unfolds

Readers familiar with these reviews will be aware that Indigo Dreams Publishing has established a strong reputation for poetry collections of consistently high quality. Zoe Brooks’s Something in Nothing (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2026) is a particularly compelling addition to its list, and one that is likely to stand among the most significant collections of the year. In this highly original volume, Brooks recontextualises figures from traditional fairy tales within contemporary social and political landscapes, using their familiar narratives to examine brutality, misogyny and the forms of violence that remain embedded within modern society.

One of the central figures in this reworking is Bluebeard, whom Brooks presents as a serial predator targeting vulnerable women. In Bluebeard’s Girls, she writes: ‘The first was a stepdaughter/ that nobody wanted. The second was a girl/ who knew how to give but not to take./ The third was a girl/ arms as wide as Clapham Junction. /The fourth was a girl/ you would step over quickly.’ The women are characterised as isolated and socially marginal, their vulnerability rendering them susceptible to exploitation. Brooks’s use of the phrasing and rhythms of nursery counting rhymes is especially significant: a form conventionally associated with childhood innocence and play is placed in tension with Bluebeard’s predatory violence, producing a chilling effect. At the same time, Brooks resists any tendency to blame the victims. Instead, she exposes the social attitudes that enable their erasure. In Bluebeard Likes to Entertain, these women are described as ‘like puppies/ that need drowning./ The sort of women/ that no one will miss.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Something in Nothing’ by Zoe Brooks

Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival is compulsively readable, if overly speculative. I’m glad to learn more about Marlowe’s love life and spy activities. Some of the comparisons between him and Shakespeare are telling. One was so reckless by temperament, the other so cautious. One became a gentleman via university education though from the working class; the other never went to university but managed to buy a title from his theater earnings. Because so little is really known about Marlowe, the book is as much about his contemporaries as him.

In The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England, Nicholas Jenkins makes a convincing case for how the early Auden was preoccupied by the place of national belonging in modern identities. The impact of WWI and its aftermath on young Auden is nicely documented, as is his complicated desire to heal and restore English culture and tradition (Edward Thomas, Hardy, Graves, Owen). Jenkins’s writing is somewhat repetitive. The 537 pages could usefully have been reduced to 400, but the book is a hoard of striking details and insightful criticism of Auden’s major early poems.

Jee Leong Koh, Two Biographies

[Walter Savage] Landor was an interesting figure — a man as definitively out of time as any in English literature: an 18th-century Augustan, come too late to be a peer of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784); a 19th-century political firebrand, come too soon to foment the revolutions he desired. He never quite fit in, and his work was unreinforced by poetic followers and underappreciated by the public. He could not be a Romantic like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and he could not be a Victorian like Tennyson and Browning. The age kept his talent constrained.

One sign of the genuineness of the talent is the fact that other poets have always appreciated his work. Landor preached violence in his political prose, unable to stomach the emerging industrial age. Or, in truth, unable even to understand the new order, which left him flailing in political writings that have not aged well. In his poetry, however, he responded to the industrial remaking of England by finding refuge in a deeply classical verse: typically, short poems on grief and the old virtues, written with a classically serene tone. “Rose Aylmer” is a good example, or “Mild is the Parting Year.”

And then there are the two verses by Landor we look at today: “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher” and “Dirce.” A strict cataloger might argue that these are not precisely epigrams but simply brief poems, lacking the teaching element of an adage. Our sense of poetic brevity, however, has been shaped by centuries of epigrams. We read these verses from Landor in an epigrammatical way, and rightly so, as both have the power to stick in memory, which is the first quality necessary for a well-made epigram. And they have the second necessary quality for a satisfying epigram, which snaps closed like a well-made box.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The English Epigram

For Persuasion, I wrote about the recent brouhaha over the Princeton English syllabus. Yes, the syllabus has a lot of socialism, but the real problem, to my rather antiquated mind, is what it doesn’t have. The trend in so many places now is to require English majors to take only a single course pre-1700. So almost everything from Beowulf to Absalom and Achitophel becomes optional.

The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.

You will see that I am not making the “classics should be on the syllabus” argument but the slightly more grouchy claim that “the long stretch of English literature should be required.” One counterargument is that the real problem is to do with the administrative structure of the university. Sure. But if it changes, it needs to be changed with an aim in mind. I am arguing for an aim.

My piece is explicitly addressed to students, since the colleges won’t always make the case for the requirements to run from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. So many pieces about the English syllabus don’t address them directly.

You are only young once, and you should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books, the best writing, the work that is going to be most strongly felt in the blood and the heart. You should not meekly accept the patronizing and ideological manner in which a vast and ancient tradition has been condensed into a series of courses about gender, race, and Theory with no requirement for you to do battle with many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

And I use Woolf and Derrida to make my case.

There was a time when this was so obvious it didn’t need saying. There was a time when everyone who read Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essays (she was the best critic of the twentieth century, bar none: you can keep your Empsons, your Trillings, your Vendlers—Woolf is the one) knew that the access she so rightfully demanded was access to the tradition. The author of A Room of One’s Own was a great reader of the tradition: as a teenager she was knocking on her father’s study to borrow Gibbon and Cowper. She wrote for the future, but she read from the past. It would have been unthinkable to her not to have read Chaucer and Browne and Defoe and Keats. To follow her example would be to read with abandon in the old ways.

This is what I want to tell young people now—don’t listen to the discourse, don’t pay attention to the think pieces and the debates. That will all be gone with the wind tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If you really want to read English, read the way Virginia Woolf read. Read, for that matter, the way Derrida read—as deeply as possible in the great works of the past from Plato to Rousseau to Conrad. Don’t accept courses in literary criticism that begin—begin!—with Hegel and pass through Marx and Judith Butler.

This is not just a piece on on side of the debate about “woke” departments or whatever. I also make the case that the scholarship of English departments is better than the critics will admit. No, it is not all Marxist waffle. There’s a great deal of excellent work being produced, but the critics don’t read it, so they don’t know.

Henry Oliver, My plea to English students.

Before I made the long, agonising (!) move into academia I worked as a court transcript editor in London for nine years. I actually trained as a stenographer, on a Kombu-green antique steno machine which stamped letters onto a roll of paper, like a silent miniature typewriter. Stenotype is machine shorthand; each keystroke completes one syllable of a word. Your left fingers, in combination, produce the beginning consonant, your thumbs the middle vowel sound and the fingers of your right hand the ending consonant. So ‘crossfire’ would be two strokes: ‘K R O S’, then, on the line blow, ‘T P AO EU R’. There aren’t enough keys for one per letter, so ‘tp’ represents the ‘f’ sound, whole ‘AO EU’ is a long ‘i’.

Anyway, I switched to editing transcripts because it meant more money in the short term (far less in the long term, but I hadn’t planned to stay on the job quite as long as I did). As an editor, I worked alongside some of the best stenographers in the world — that is, I literally sat next to them in court — and cleaned up the transcript as it emerged on my computer screen, typing in sections that had been missed due to mumbling or over-speaking (of which there is a lot in UK trials and tribunals), sorting out the spellings of names and specialist terms, and keeping a log of anything we would need to ask about or research in order for the transcript to be as accurate as possible. It was surprisingly gruelling work — often upwards of 200 pages a day — and I permanently damaged the nerves in my arms doing it, because most of the courts and rooms we worked in were not designed with ergonomic seating in mind.

I collected dozens of poems about or inspired by aspects of the cases we covered, and published hardly any of them. There’s one about the usefulness of the en-dash that appeared in Asterism: An Anthology of Poems Inspired by Punctuation, edited by Tiffany Anne Tondut and published by Laudanum Books. And then there’s this, which was published in the first (and, thus far, only) issue of Cambridge Poetry, edited by Dan Leighton — which, by the way, is as comprehensive a snapshot of the current Cambridge poetry scene as you’re likely to find in print.

Like many other poems from that era, it’s about 96% collage. All of the questions are questions which were asked in various court cases, and all of the answers are taken from newspaper reports on accidental fires, with the word ‘witness’ or ‘witnesses’ substituted in for ‘fire’ and ‘fires’. ‘Cross’ is short for ‘cross-examination’ in lawyer parlance, so ‘Crossfire’ (with an implied colon between the two parts of the word) would mean cross-examination of fire. The plan is to collect these and other court poems up into a little zine at some point. That zine will be part of a series of zines that collect and organise work from the unpublished book I mentioned back in this post from October.

Jon Stone, POEM / Crossfire

Dear poets and friends. Most of you know that I am still “young” by some standards. Last February I turned 42. My husband and I live together with 2 cats, but no kids. We are childless by choice and this has given us a certain level of freedom that some people give up as they age. For example, a few years ago, we sort of spontaneously left our apartment in Los Angeles to go live in Costa Rica for 3 years.

Still, time and family obligations have caught up with us. Lately I’ve spent a lot of time care-taking for my aging parents, helping them make and keep dr. appointments, do their laundry, and trim back some of the trees in their beautifully overgrown front yard.

This has all gotten me thinking about both my relationship with my parents (naturally) and also my own mortality. I always knew that I was going to get older, in theory. . . but now it’s starting to feel real. I could go on about that (and I will in my own poetry-writing), but for now I just want to say that the 2 poems below really hit me where I live lately. I’m extremely grateful to each poet, Amy Small McKinney and Susan Michele Coronel for giving me a kind of language to use to start addressing these issues.

Tresha Faye Haefner, 2 Poems I Needed To Read Today

To be found as a shiny coordinate in the star-chart for lightning bugs on summer nights.

To be found and saved from the searing screech of sirens.

To be found as an escapee from an oracle hushed into tremble.

To be found sleeping in a calm so deep you can hear the trees breathe.

Rich Ferguson, To be found

[T]his week has been somewhat knocked off kilter by having my phone stolen in Shoreditch on Monday night. It’s partially my own fault for being too trusting, but some cheeky fucker ran off with my phone…And I couldn’t catch them. I don’t know what I’d have been able to do even if I’d caught them, so it was perhaps a pointless pursuit.

Not much more i can do, remind me to take out the phone insurance next time, yeah.

Anyhoo, this week has also been buoyed up by reading my copy of Andrew Jamison’s Swans We Cannot See  (You have sighed up for his newsletter, yeah? Go on. I’ll wait, etc). If I had a phone I’d take a picture of the folded over corners of pages for all the poems to come back to..And look, I’ve rattled through the book a bit quicker than usual this week without my phone being present, so perhaps a digital detox is on the cards, but take my word for it..I’ve turned over a lot of corners in this book. […]

Andrew writes movingly about being a parent, a husband, he writes beautifully about place, and to my mind a bit about being/feeling out of place back where you originate from…perhaps it’s displacement??? Perhaps it’s just me. NB You should also check out his epic potato poem in the book.

Mat Riches, A Drunk Octopus Behind The Pink Doors of Perception

[James] Dickey makes two big choices in the title and the first line. As titles go, “Adultery” is anything but subtle, regardless of where you feel it lands in the pantheon of sins. It’s jarring because it’s unexpected as the subject of a poem, especially if you’re not a wide reader. When I’ve taught this poem in the past, students have occasionally asked why write about this. They’re used to less messy love poems, or at least they think those other poems are less messy, but that’s another conversation.

The second big choice Dickey makes is to implicate the reader in the first lines. “We have all been in rooms / We cannot die in, and they are odd places, and sad.” My first thought when reading those lines, even now, is no we haven’t all been in those rooms. It’s the way he’s so casual about assuming that which carries the force for me, the way he reduces this sin of betrayal to something everyone has done, how he’s so matter-of-fact about it before going into this description of the bland, unchallenging cheap hotel room art that’s there mostly to fill space on the walls.

But it’s in that description where we first get to see some sense of guilt, which is the emotion that will drive the rest of this poem.

Brian Spears, “Adultery” by James Dickey

Do you know the long poems of David W. McFadden? I’ve always loved how they ramble, surprised at how they unfold and where they go. How strange, ironic, intelligent, tongue-in-cheek yet profoundly moving they are. They understand affect and composing with connotation, sentiment, form, narrative, beauty, and surprise. Over the last few days, I somehow felt compelled to write this sad poem about two brothers in a horse costume and I was thinking of David’s long poems.

Gary Barwin, Lament for Horse Costume: Tragic Novel in Two Parts

The Ancient Futures issue of Sage Magazine, a print publication from Yale’s School of the Environment, recently arrived in the mail as a beautiful, stitched book containing my poem, ‘The Woolly Kind,’ following an open call last autumn. The unique formatting in the pages below was done by the graduate students on the magazine’s design team. It’s a bit hard to read on screen, so I’ll include a plain text version at the end.

I wrote this persona poem several years ago after Colossal Biosciences announced it was planning to bring the Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), back from extinction by 2028. In August, the company revised its timeframe, stating it might take until the 2030s. My poem imagines life from the perspective of this future creature.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Ancient Futures, Recent News

My bottle of ‘Glimmers’ pills came the other day and I was truly filled with joy at the sight of this little prescription with its contents of glimmering moments. What an honour to be one of the 26 poets selected to feature in this small but powerful collection.

Each morning for the past week I’ve been tipping out one at random and every single one has been a gorgeous gem (and a super way to start the day!). You can get hold of a bottle of ‘Glimmers’ through The Poetry Pharmacy’s website Here.

And if you’d like to have a little peak at some of the poems you can find out more about the project and read some editors picks in The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press’ Newsletter.

Here’s my Glimmer

Branches raise fingers to sky—ask for a blessing of leaves;
ground is still wet with winter, sun rests her hands on my
shoulders, and a warbler hymns from the silver birch. Dear
Spring: eat me, swallow me whole, a seed into moist earth.

Rachael Hill, A Glimmer

The poems in “The Basement Stacks” have been about memory from the beginning of the series. An image or phrasing or action from one poem leads to the next piece, and so on. Part 10 helped me as a writer make some discoveries about myself, or at least remember things I’d forgotten. Writing, in any form, can have that wonderful outcome.

This new poem grew from my thoughts about the boxes in the stairwell in part 10. In the new piece I was following the imagery as I’ve done with all the pieces. There are many possibilites with each poem that could lead to any number of new pieces, but my process is to follow the first moment in a poem that speaks to me in a direct way, and the next poem find its own way.

“The Basement Stacks” is projected as one section of a manuscript in progress, tentatively titled “Portraits”. That’s an extremely uncreative title, but it does, in its own way, reveal clearly the subject matter of its pages. In the series and ms, most imagery and action originate in reality, but some have worked their way into the pieces by necessity, by a kinship to or a reflection of the truth. Even those few parts that are fictional are connected to the truth in some way. And here I’m thinking of Albert Camus: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 11”

Tradition offers explanations for why this piece of Torah is written in this way. To me what’s striking is the visual prosody — the way the shape of the poem sings a particular kind of song in my consciousness. The open space gives each line a caesura, a pause. I read the words differently, and feel them differently, because of the space between them. So that’s how I wrote this week’s poem: with pauses in each line. More white space / white fire, imbued with silent meaning, holding the words’ black fire.

This one’s kind of in the same vein as the poems in Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda). When I shared my new year’s poem just before Rosh Hashanah, my friend Mary Ann — who has known me since we were in seventh grade — said, “You always could write a hell of a love poem.” The older we get, the more (I think) we become ourselves. It’s funny, and sweet, and a little poignant, for me to see reflected in her eyes the fact that this isn’t new. This is how I am, maybe even more so in my 50s than I was before.

Rachel Barenblat, For Ha’azinu

‘John Rae and the Northern Telegraph’ was part visitation, part rethinking of his expedition. Music was commissioned from Scottish composers Stuart MacRae and Ailie Robertson, Eli Tausen á Lava from the Faroe Islands, and Arnanguaq Gerstrøm from Greenland. We worked independently and were given an open brief. Stuart MacRae considered the conflicting thoughts that might have filled Rae’s mind, a bit older now, leaving his new wife. ‘I imagine the form of the music as a line of communication,’ he said; ‘one idea suggesting another, passing on its energy to a different musical expression, in one direction, always transforming but never returning to the source.’ Ailie Robertson intertwined the ends of the route in a back-and-forth of laments and melodies based on Greenlandic beaded yokes. Arnanguaq Gerstrøm structured her piece around the breathing patterns and ornamented tones of traditional singers, with the mechanical pulse of the telegraph’s clicks and codes rising and fading like static. To prepare to compose, Eli Tausen á Lava walked the Faroese section of the proposed route, south to north. John Rae walked many thousands of miles on foot and in snow shoes : ‘Through this cold, unromantic labour, there comes some kind of understanding of the world’. Eli’s piece became a contemporary meditation on pilgrimage, of undergoing a hard physical journey in order to bring on an inner transformation.

In his substack last week, Don [Paterson] talked about the process of collaboration, in all its nitty gritties: ‘Whatever you may have been told, the music is more important, and your text is going to be used primarily as a way of shaping the air’. On the night of the performance, yes: the poems, at a practical level, created distance, carrying the audience from one deep auditory reverie into the next. In these beautiful pieces I heard skeins of geese and the rattle of swans’ wings, foot crunch, threads of singing, odd strings of Morse. All art aspires to the condition of music, said Walter Pater: there is an immediate intuition of (some kind of) meaning, an immediate impact on the emotions. In between, the words, gleaned from real people and real places, pinned us back to our place on the planet : here, in these north islands, in this old kirk, watching the weather coming. ‘It seems to me,’ said Mann’s Dr Faustus, ‘that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits … I am devoted to it with all my heart’.

But something else happened too. In the St Magnus Cathedral, this continual transformation that Stuart described was vivid, almost tactile. Music in a mediaeval Romanesque/Gothic cathedral was intended to overwhelm, in the best sense of the word. The building’s internal proportions – the high, tiny windows, the placing of its columns, galleries and vaults – were intended to amplify unaccompanied voices, and create a rolling sound that would wash through its spaces like waves in the sea. Standing in the transept below the high central tower, it was as if we were placing the words and music into the air, letting them swell and breathe on their own.

Lesley Harrison, The Northern Telegraph

As part of the UEA Welcome activities last week, I led a “Word Walk” around campus, where we stopped to consider the roots and history of nouns we encountered, guided by Emerson’s observation that “Language is fossil poetry”. The walk zig-zagged interdisciplinarily between architecture (“concrete”), natural history (“butterfly”, “birch”), maths (“extrapolation”), and chemistry (“gas”, “helium”), before ending up at art history, with an Ancient Egyptian carved figurine of a frog in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

Looking up the etymology of “frog” in the Oxford English Dictionary, I learned a new word: “hypocoristic”.

Ultimately related to Old English frosc and its cognates in other Germanic languages, although the nature of the relationship is uncertain; the present word was probably originally an alteration of frosc as a result of association with docga dog n.1 […] in which the geminate consonant perhaps originally had a hypocoristic motivation (< Greek ὑποκόρισμα, ‑κορισμός pet-name, < ὑποκορίζεσθαι to play the child, use terms of endearment)

The OED entry on the mysterious origins of “dog” is a lesson in philology itself. What I understand from the above, though, is that the written words “frogge” and “dogge” (the vowel-shortening double “g” is the “geminate consonant”) began as spoken terms, for which the “hypocoristic motivation” was that of the pet name: the playful diminutive applied to the familiar creature. And “frog” perhaps — though this is my own speculation — was an association formed through the rhyme it makes with “dog”.

For Gertrude Stein, this is the felt life of language and naming that eventually becomes formalised as poetry. In her essay “Poetry and Grammar”, she writes:

Think of how you talk to anything whose name is new to you a lover a baby or a dog or a new land or any part of it. Do you not inevitably repeat what you call out and is that calling out not of necessity in short lines. Think about it and you will see what I mean by what you feel.

So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything.

That’s not exactly how I put it below, in 2005. But it arrives at the same idea via a different route: that to read poetry, you start with the words, and listen for the feeling. To quote the epigraph from Nijinsky’s diary that begins “Friends”, the John Ashbery poem that I discuss here: “I like to speak in rhymes, because I am a rhyme myself.”

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Frog and Dog

I’m editing, editing. What could I do for break? I know…word games. There’s re-w-or-d-a-ble. (Not a sponsorship endorsement but word geek fun.) What else?

What do I like? Let’s see, poetry, remixing, chance operations, corpus studies, Good Omens and making stuff.

I have 5 sets of magnetic poetry. What if I made a Good Omens one? Which words are keyword bingo troped? I brainstormed some.

I have a base set, a gardening set, a CanLit set, a French base set, and some yellowed ones that I’m not sure what they were from. One of the sets came with blanks. And I have a labelmaker. We have a plan. 

So I made a thing. 

Pearl Pirie, Good Omens Magnetic Poetry

On the evening of the day we move I have to teach a step class and Nick has to take a choir rehearsal. So no putting our feet up that evening!  Then waking up the next day, clambering over boxes and hoping the boiler/shower/hob are all working…. wish us luck!

Obviously I don’t have a lot of time to noodle around on the blog. But I did want to mention these literary hoaxes that are doing the rounds. Maybe I’ve come late to this particular party. A few months ago I got an email from someone claiming to have read ‘The Golden Rules of Blogging’ and asking if I was up for any other projects with the publishing house she claimed to represent. I confess I fell for it rather stupidly – I looked up the sender on LinkedIn and she appeared to have a legitimate profile there, but I did think it very odd for her to pick up on a book that’s over ten years old. So I replied, albeit in a cagey manner. That’s when the penny dropped – another gushy email came back right away, and I recognised the purple prose of a crude AI bot. I’m happy to say I’m not the first to fall for it – for example here’s Julie Broad of Book Launchers telling her story. 

A week or so later came another similar email, this time allegedly from a professor at a West Country university who claimed he ran a literary festival and would be honoured to have me featured there! Woohoo! Except the ‘festival’ was starting the very next week, and the professor turned out to be a real person, but actually a professor of engineering. Since then the emails have arrived on a regular basis. It’s the present-day version of those misspelt email scams from twenty years ago. 

Robin Houghton, New beginnings and literary hoaxes

For the uninitiated, here is a quick overview of how publishing a book of poetry works:

Most poets don’t have agents (unless you are Billy Collins or James Franco and already important OR independently wealthy). The vast majority of poetry books are published via Book-Length Contests or Open Reading Periods, and even the biggest poetry press is typically a small indie or university press with only a few people running it and even less money keeping it afloat. Sending in your manuscript may happen in April, with nothing but crickets until Christmas, and the contests aren’t free – most charge $25, with the most expensive running around $35.

What do you get if you win? Maybe a $1000 prize, a few poetry readings, or free copies of the book, distribution to some indie bookstores, some universities inviting you to come give a reading.

No one will stop you on the street for an autograph – even the most famous living poet is not famous outside of poetry circles, and likely your book will be forgotten in a month or, worse, never even heard of. Ever.

Yet, the competition is steep – which makes me love Poets all the more. We are such a ridiculous, starry-eyed set! […]

The numbers can seem daunting, but, as I let my fourth-collection drift around the contest circuit, what all this tells me is that one rejection means basically nothing, that I need to be sending more places, and that I must persist.

Those numbers also remind me that every poetry book I adore came from the efforts of a poet who kept sending out their work despite the tiny odds and minuscule rewards because they believed their poems needed to find their readers.

Renee Emerson, Poetry Manuscript Contests

I remain the sort of poet who doesn’t get asked to do paid gigs, has never been published in reputable literary journals and has no book deal, but now I am the sort of poet who is resigned to that fate, and is enjoying a presence on the internet, and occasional publication in fabulous mags and websites that admittedly might not be quite as reputable as the New Yorker or the London Review of Books. As a consequence of that resignation, I am a lot less worried about reading at open mics. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to get up from time to time, and I still want to make an impact on the occasions when I do. But I have developed some strategies to avoid getting my knickers in a twist about it. Sometimes they actually work. I am not suggesting that they would work for anyone else. But they help me. Here they are.

One. I try hard not to care about how my reading will be received. I’m not going to put myself into that position of worry. When it’s my turn to read, I’m going to get up, say a few words, read my piece and get off.

Two. I’m going to do one, and only one poem, no haggling over a second, third or (God forbid) a forth one. I’ll save those for the rare occasions when I am actually asked to do a set. People haven’t come to see me at an open mic – I should have a bit of humility.

Three. When I am done, I should sit down, still my beating heart and do my best to forget about it. I can save the in depth analysis with Gary Lineker and Ian Wright for when I get home.

Four. I try to listen properly to the other readers. Not using them as yardsticks to compare myself to, but for who they are.

If you are a poet who regularly attends open mics, perhaps you do all of these things naturally. Perhaps you have always approached open mic in this manner. If so, I salute you. It’s hard work for a big headed egotist like myself to cultivate such an attitude. There is also the attendant worry of appearing arrogant, as if open mics are “beneath me” if I don’t get up, or appear too flippant when I do. Perhaps I overthink everything, but I don’t think that I am alone in such mental struggles.

Mike O’Brien, How to Enjoy a Poetry Open Mic

We read our work at the open mics, and this past Saturday I shared “Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan” for the first time. I didn’t realize how well it would play to a live audience, and I think it may become part of my memorized rotation for readings. After the event, Midge Goldberg and I were trying to describe to Tom the Aussie the tradition of singing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” in the middle of 8th innings at Fenway Park.

I remember workshopping this poem during my residency, and someone complained about how many baseball references there were. Now that I’ve read it out loud I think I have regrets about not mentioning something about my mother bringing us home. I see a revision in the future! Good idea? Bad idea? Please be opinionated in comments.

I’ve pulled the poem out of the drawer every so often for over the past year, but 2026 is the 20th anniversary of my father’s death and September would have been my parents’ 53rd wedding anniversary. I decided that it was a good time to fly it out to journals, and it landed on the very first try.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan

The bookshops that impress me have “Short stories” sections. They’re mostly in Dublin, though the Amnesty International shop in Cambridge and Saffron Walden’s Oxfam shop have story sections. The Oxfam bookshop in Islington doesn’t have one, though it has a section for “Literary Magazines” – Acumen, Pennine Platform, etc.

Blackwells in Oxford has a “poetry pamphlets” section.

“Poetry” shelves often have an “Anthologies” section. The Islington bookshop has that, and also has a section I’ve never seen before – “Contemporary Poetry” – which includes pamphlets and many slim volumes. It makes sense to display the spineless pamphlets in boxes – it makes browsing easier, like fingering through LPs in the olden days.

Tim Love, Bookshops – specialist shelves

The CBe edition of Testimony by Charles Reznikoff, all 608 pages of it, has gone to print. A longish piece by me on Reznikoff will be in the imminent new issue of The Little Review (£5 for 176 pages: ridiculously good value). For a reading of the whole of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London next spring I applied last June for funding (for costs including gallery hire, video-recording, etc.), and I learned this week I didn’t get it. I spent a long time over that application; it was a beautiful application. But the reading will happen.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter September 2026

The neighborhood paper, which has little to report beyond the struggles of the city council, school board, and high school sports teams, informs us of an upcoming event: a tour of the city’s fanciest houses, built by men of wealth and ambition at the turn of the previous century. Why we tour such places—to gawk, to lust, to covet—is a mystery I’ve contemplated more than once. Here is one such contemplation.

[…]

Guidebooks lapse into silence on the sins
that undergird their granite disciplines:

the dark red sandstone brooding on the hill
over the history of a steel-spiked will
that built and built and never had enough—
a public treasure now, it rules the bluff
and makes us marvel at our rush to own
the memory of the men it turned to stone.

Which we preserve, the robber baron’s guilt
being gilded by the loveliness he built.
As for a feast day, every year we come
to hear the engines of our envy hum,
sighing for beauties, knowing what they meant.
Not quite complicit. Not quite innocent.

Maryann Corbett, “to hear the engines of our envy hum . . .”

Had you heard of “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” when you were eleven? I had not. I’m not even sure I had heard of Keats. My main poetry experience was Pam Ayres’ “I wish I’d looked after my teeth” (which I still think is wonderful, whatever the poetry overlords say) and a smattering of Patience Strong. My old and very posh art teacher was astonished at my ignorance. The memory of her astonishment pops into my head as autumn tiptoes in. Light recedes day by day, the air I breathe when I let the cat out (and in and out and in) in the morning has a faint chill, the smells change from sun warmed jasmine and barbecues to damp leaves and bonfires. Mists begin to wrap the morning, and supermarkets proclaim the arrival of “British season apples” which implies mellow fruitfulness exists somewhere. I’ll miss the light of summer but autumn brings the gift of time. The garden takes less attention, people stop having barbecues and other social excitements, trips out are replaced by staying in and watching Ludwig. More than anything, it brings me the time and energy to write. If you’re familiar with Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory you’ll know exactly what I mean. […]

Poetry has slipped to one side for a while. I’ve a new Poetry School course starting soon which I know will spark the poetic light again, but overall I’ve found I’m just not as excited as I was. I’ve reached a point of stasis. The giddy excitement of being selected to be one of Nine Arches Press Dynamo poets, learning that I could have work published and actually seeing my words and name in print has moved to one side. I’ve reached all the goals I set myself way back in 2018. I’m published in magazines including my goal of goals which was to be in Under the Radar. I’ve published two books, entered and been shortlisted for various prizes and I’m not sure where poetry will take me next. I’m not putting poetry aside forever; notes are still being made, the mysteries of the sestina still thrill and baffle me and I’m still writing poetry for wedding readings, which brings a joy all of its own.

As well as travel writing I’m dipping back into short fiction. I love creating worlds inspired by a photograph or picture (old postcards are especially exciting) and am acutely aware of the place all those poetry skills have in creating them. It’s a genre I haven’t worked in since my first forays (back) into creative writing and I’m hoping the quiet months of autumn and winter mean I’ll have time and energy to rejuvenate my skills.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Shine the sun and rain the rain

When I have seen jays before I have often caught of a glimpse of them as they have flown across short spaces within forest areas and I have always felt lucky to catch this rare flash of their distinct feathers. The one this week, in my own garden, caught my attention as I was settling to work at my laptop. On being observed it flew from the wall and thudded to a stop on the roof above me. I went outside to take a closer look, but it had already moved on by the time I got outside. The ginger cat had been watching me one night as I was unloading the tumble dryer in the back porch. I felt that wonderful sense of being lifted from my own world because I was being observed in a kind and curious way. And there studying me was the lovely solid looking cat that has recently been sleeping in a sheltered spot in our garden. We blinked at each other and then, as I smiled at the thought of being noticed whilst doing a boring but necessary job, off he went.

I am sort of making a note to self to notice more things on my daily walk and this brings to mind the fact that it feels like a solid fitness thing to do at this time of year when compared to the lightness of taking the same walk in spring when the daffodils are emerging. Photos at this time of year also seem to be of solid things like tree trunks against the sky or cows so maybe I will look for the light as I stroll out and see where it is that I find it in this new Autumn. I know it was in the sunrise and sunset of Saturday into Sunday, and I know those two studied views gladdened my heart.

Sue Finch, GLANCES, GLIMPSES AND OBSERVATIONS

This is our life, made of small
moments. Hearing the call

of a bird, resonant
as a bell, longing

and desire become
indistinguishable.

Luisa A. Igloria, Occasional

“I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.” This was Annie Dillard quoting Vincent Van Gogh. Even though VVG said it, I’ll always connect the quotation to her. The way that a person looking at the intricate beauty of the world and interpreting it in the way only they can, is also an act of heartbreak. And for credibility’s sake, there is always bad news right beside the news of the beauty of the world. Thus heartbreak. Thus utterly.

Shawna Lemay, Because it is September

I had just been talking to a friend about how our social habits changed during the pandemic, and how I was so much less social than I used to be. Well not this week! Besides visiting with my farmer friends at the various pumpkin farms, we also had our Bookwalter’s Wine and Book Club, where we discussed Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars. People were really taken by it, and I noticed this time around (I hadn’t re-read in a little while) the huge Bowie connection in the poems, and listened to the songs that were referenced. I was aware of Bowie as a kid but I think I mostly remember a couple of his later songs, but of course my main crush was Prince, who wasn’t quite as interested in space. Then the next day we had our poetry group, which was wonderful as usual and we talked about submission opportunities and shared poems and Glenn’s gluten-free red pepper and goat cheese pizza, and pumpkin cheesecake, and I ate more than my share of Witch’s Finger grapes (another seasonal favorite! And we’re even coordinating a pumpkin farm visit and maybe movie get-together. After being so sick back in 2016-17 and then the pandemic, this feels more like my life used to be. Did I mention I have updated my resume and will be job hunting as well?

Good News to Share…Soon

Do you hate when people in the writing world tease good news they can’t share? Me too. That’s why I’m definitely not saying that I got good news that I can share soon, and I have to say that after a period of discouragement with the poetry world, it’s nice to have a little good news in a while, right?

I’ve also been writing more poems and sending out more work. That’s September’s magic – unwrapping new pens, setting up new spreadsheets, a little more motivation to keep going, especially on the days when it’s in the sixties and sunny and the hummingbirds are still busy at the last burst of September blooms.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! And How Many Pumpkin Farms, Social Week, and Good News to Come!

糸瓜忌の紅茶に消ゆる角砂糖　秋元不死男

hechima-ki no kōcha ni kiyuru kakuzatō

            Shiki’s Death Day
            a lump of sugar disappears
            into tea

                                    Fujio Akimoto

from Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006

Fay’s Note: Fujio Akimoto (1901-1977). Shiki Masaoka (b 1867) died on September 19, 1902.  Because his death haiku was about ‘hechima (gourd),” his death anniversary is called “hechima-ki.”

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 19, 2026)

The poet called this morning. My electricity had just gone out and I was plotting my next move in the dark. “Is it a good time to speak?” he said. I ran through a quick itinerary of pressing issues in my head with a rotating leaderboard of the top three items that consisted of: crippling existential loneliness, Chelsea Football Club’s current defensive frailty, whether rhyming ‘apothecary’ with ‘apology’ in a poem I’ve made about Keats was absolutely necessary or just plain clunky.

The poet was waiting for an answer.

“Sure,” I said as my phone pinged a notification from my bank. I’d exceeded my overdraft limit. Again. “It’s a great time,” I said.

I put the poet on loudspeaker and used my phone’s screen to light up the electric meter, to see if I had any emergency credit left. I didn’t. I gave the junction box a gentle tap, the analogue approach, hopeful I may nudge the circuitry back into action. Short of resorting to a hammer or a high kick, blending a lightness of touch with a belief in magic has never yet produced satisfactory results in terms of getting the power back on but this is not to say it wouldn’t work this time. I am not conducting the same experiment expecting different results, I am manifesting forces known only to the practitioners of poetry where subtle fluctuations are at play, creative oscillations that can produce unusual conclusions. We may sit at our desks at the same time of day, open the same note book, use the same pen, the same ink, the same laptop and software but different poems will appear. The outcome is always unique.

I reach out, focus, make a connection, I might, just might, channel enough energy to transfer some Wattage through my fingers and feed the supply. I feel alive. I summon my inner electricity. The spirit of Walt Whitman is here, with me, in a damp subterranean flat in Hackney. But I am all volt and no current. The lights do not come back on. I remain in the dark.

“What’s happening?” I ask the poet, “Talk to me.”

Jan Noble, N°82 How Swan made it to San Francisco

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

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

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

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

Adam Cairns, The ground has begun to brood

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

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

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

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

Ren Powell, Summer, after its fullness

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

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

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

Maryann Corbett, On the power of open windows

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

Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Midway Points: Inspirations and Revelations

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

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

Sue Finch, A BANDSTAND HAT TRICK FOR A SKYLARKER

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

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

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

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

Charles Boyle, Newsletter July 2026: Reznikoff

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

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

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

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

The London Economic

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

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

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

Wendy Pratt, I am sick of being enraged.

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Aiming vs. wandering

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

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

James Baldwin

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

Jan Noble, Nº71 Is it suitable for children?

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

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, Revision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helen Mort, ‘Smile’, says the photographer

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

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

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

rob mclennan, edgeless

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

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

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

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

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Hello Again!

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

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Where you’ll find me…

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

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

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

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

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

RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 1)

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Gann, A new era?

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

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

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

Eileen Tabios, MARK MELNICK ON BRILLIANT AND EFFECTIVE BOOK COVERS

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

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

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

Bob Mee, NO WAY HOME – RAJANI RADHAKRISHNAN

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

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

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

Henry Gould, On the Forth of July

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Dark news on the breeze

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

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

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

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

Sharon Brogan, LINKS & reading

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

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

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

at the synthesiser pulse
of fledgling jackdaws.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, Nightwithstanding

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

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

Jee Leong Koh, Zhang Zao’s MIRROR

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

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

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

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

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

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I’m not sure what the role of the writer is in larger culture.  I think the way we may have looked at the public intellectual a generation ago has shifted, and I’m less interested in what it might mean for my work to ascend and speak to truth to power, than to echo horizontally from below.  

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

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

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

Shel Silverstein was my introduction to poetry. To this day, I can remember how sad I was in kindergarten when I smeared my peanut butter sandwich on my favorite book, The Giving Tree. Most of my early experiences with poetry were through Silverstein’s books or school. My first experience with haiku was a lesson about syllable counting in second grade. I don’t recall them mentioning seasons or a cut (kireji). It was a lesson to learn syllable counting with a rigid 5-7-5 structure. Unfortunately, this view of haiku overshadowed my view of this form for years.

Of course, I learned to write and analyze poetry in school, but my creativity towards poetry started with an audition. In high school, I reimagined Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 as a marriage counselor discussing what love is to her patients. This was the first time I deeply analyzed and dissected a poem. In high school, I was focused on various theater productions, bands (I played clarinet), and a robotics team. I loved working with the metalworking machinery. Perhaps this was a precursor hint of my fondness towards sculpture. I also sketched often in my notebooks. After my high school art history teacher introduced me to scratchboard, I was hooked. I was mainly focused on theatre, sciences, and dabbling with my visual art in high school and college.

However, in high school, I was introduced to non-5-7-5 haiku by my mother, Deborah P Kolodji, whose interest in haiku began around that time. We would often play a back-and-forth haiku game. Although I enjoyed playing those haiku games and writing collaborative haiku forms with her and haiku friends, I didn’t take my haiku seriously back then. I would often mention how wonderful haiku was at perfecting long form poetry, since it showed me the weight of each word. One day, I came across this haiku by Kaisanjin, which had a profound impact on me:

one umbrella—
the person more in love
gets wet

Kaisanjin

Until this day, this poem is my favorite haiku. In college, I went to a Haiku Poets of Northern California (HPNC) Two Autumn’s reading and stopped by the Yuki Teikei Society’s Asilomar conference. It was not until after college when I started going to the Southern California Haiku Study Group meetings, readings, and assisted in the bookfair at the 2013 Haiku North America conference. I knew I was hooked on haiku when I started dreaming haiku. It began percolating into everyday life. I composed haiku as I drove. I composed haiku when I walked. It would keep me up at night. Haiku seeped into my essence. After I created a haibun for my sculptural floats, I began to create more haiga. Around this time, I started seriously focusing on my visual arts. I began working with more unconventional materials and created sculptures. I expanded my artistic practice to many different mediums and my writing practice to other haiku-related forms and styles of poetry.

Jacob D. Salzer, Yvette Nicole Kolodji

If the conclusion doesn’t seem to provide us with an epiphany — “I pass,” as a last line, feels at first glance obvious and unsurprising; was “the sentinel of space” really going to stop him? — still, the way the poem gets there is full of interest. Its form, abab quatrains of three pentameter lines that drop to dimeter (and to monometer in that final line), enacts a sonic drama, in which momentum juxtaposes itself with stillness. Everything about the poem’s atmosphere is like the image of those ships in the first stanza: riding at anchor, yet somehow, even in their stasis, “Home-bound.”

The progression of images throughout the poem, in fact, makes its own level of drama. Every particular manages to be simultaneously impressionistic, if not actually self-contradicting, and precise. It’s the reflection of the moon in the water, not the literal moon itself, that wavers and contains the slipping fish. Via metonymy, the thing and its image become imaginatively conjoined, providing a setup for the imagistic paradox that follows, in which the water “makes a quietness of sound.”

“Quietness” and “sound” are seeming opposites, yet we know the true thing the phrase implies. What we know as quiet is not the same as silence, which connotes emptiness and absence or, as in those spider webs on which the second stanza ends, entrapment. A quiet night may be full of small sounds and movements — “strange tunnelers in the dark and whirs / Of wings” — that don’t disrupt the quiet, but are part of its enormous, mysterious fabric. A silent night, by contrast, is the night of your padded cell, the night of the grave.

This imagistic progression, then, after all, earns the poem’s abrupt and initially unsatisfying ending.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Home-Bound

The error that Richard Dawkins made in The Selfish Gene and has continued to make over the 50 years since it was first published, is an error of poetry.  

It’s a poetic error in the sense that poetry is the art form of the metaphor and the mistake that Dawkins makes is one of metaphorical choice. 

The problem is with the book’s central metaphor of humans as survival machines. The idea that we are nothing but automaton shells, vessels for our genes, who are the real survivors. […]

As I said earlier, this error of metaphor has been made by a multitude of scientists and philosophers (from Hobbes and de la Mettrie to Skinner and Turing, and more recently Daniel Dennett and Dawkins himself). But to my knowledge it has not been made by any whose field of expertise the use of metaphor is: poets. 

They, by contrast, have tended over the years to emphasise the dissimilarities between humans and machines, and warned of the dehumanising effects of an over-mechanistic world.  

And in the famous case of John Keats, his argument – taken on in full throat by Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow, was against the rationalist, scientific explorations that came with the Enlightenment, and the way they deadened, as he saw it, the joy to be found in the mysteries of the universe. 

His conception of negative capability was a profoundly wise expression of why trying to pin everything down (to box it in) cuts off at the root a sense of wonder in the unknown and the mysterious. And in some cases, the truths hidden but inherent in the illusory. 

His most famous poetic expression of this comes towards the end of Lamia, when the cold, rational, surface-truth of Old Apollonius, reveals Lamia’s identity and thereby destroys both her and her lover Lycias: 

                                               Do not all charms fly 
At the mere touch of cold philosophy? 
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: 
We know her woof, her texture; she is given 
In the dull catalogue of common things. 
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, 
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— 
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made 
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade. 

Dawkins was able to argue against this view very successfully in Unweaving the Rainbow because he focused on the wonder that is engendered by scientific discoveries in the natural world. But in making this argument, he was missing a central point of negative capability: that there are truths which science is not capable of getting at. There is no reason not to feel a sense of wonder at the truths science can reveal (my view, Keats may have disagreed) and Dawkins’s description of what is happening in the realm of physics and biology when an individual sees a rainbow is a point well made. He considered Keats to be advocating for self-deception when bewailing the gaze of science on natural beauty, but he ignored the possibility that there are truths in the human experience of natural beauty that science can impede. Keats was receptive, and unusually sensitive perhaps, to such truths, and he found the strict rationality of a scientific worldview restricting in his search for them. Poetry, which allows language to dance around its own limitations, enables rather than restricts this search.

Chris Edgoose, Richard Dawkins’s Big Poetic Mistake

Rhetorical
question: why do I find the foods of my first
colonizer delicious? Ordinary fare: steamed
swamp spinach, fried scad, rice. Delicious,
especially eaten without silverware, but not
served to guests or at parties. Our tongues,
taught to swerve from the language of our
origins. Taught to soften the trills
that might remind us of birds.

Luisa A. Igloria, Tapas

Written in the late 11^th or early 12th century, Le Chanson de Roland (‘The Song of Roland’) is the story of an 8th-century Frankish knight, nephew of Charlemagne, who died in 778 C.E. while leading the army’s rear-guard through a narrow pass in the Pyrenees on the way home to France, following a military campaign on the Iberian peninsula.

Considered the oldest known surviving work of French literature, the poem is a chanson de geste (‘song of deeds’), a legendary account of the ‘heroic’ actions and martyrdom of Charlemagne’s knights. The form emerged around the time of the first Crusade, when Christians sought to retake control of the Holy Land, and it continued to flourish throughout the 16^th century.

In contrast with actual events, the poem describes an epic battle against paien (pagans) and ‘Saracens,’ a broad term used by medieval Christians to refer to Muslims. In reality, the Battle at Roncevaux Pass involved an ambush by the Basques, a people indigenous to the Pyrenees, who were retaliating after Charlemagne’s army ransacked their villages and destroyed their capital at Pamplona.

According to the poem, however, the ambush was part of a plot against Roland, orchestrated by his stepfather in league with the enemy. Roland is slain, but his pious devotion to god and king, and his willingness to martyr himself in battle, earns him a place among the angels.

Adam Miyashiro, Professor of Medieval Literature at Stockton University, has described Le Chanson de Roland as “a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations.” In his translation, Roland’s war-cry during the battle is full of religious zeal and alarming certitude:

“Paien unt tort, e chrestiens unt dreit!”
(‘Pagans are wrong, Christians are in the right!’)

Roland the crusading evangelist may have been proud to die a martyr for his faith and for his king, but was he merely a pawn in the game? A paladin, or a puppet?

In the 19^th century, Sicilian Opera de Pupi began reinventing these medieval epic poems to explore powerful themes of honor, justice, loyalty, oppression, and resistance, as shaped by Sicily’s own struggle against invasions by foreign armies and imperial powers. Their version of the stories reflected a blend of linguistic and cultural influences, including Byzantine, Norman-French, Spanish, Arabic, and Italian.

Opera de Pupi transformed and subverted the old epic poems into stories of everyday heroes and unexpected victories, in which women could be knights, noble bandits prevailed, and clever peasants became advisors to kings. ‘Pagans’ and ‘Saracens’ were no longer the enemy, and Christians and Muslims both faced obstacles to overcome. Just as the handcrafted puppets reflected a distinctive Sicilian identity, the puppeteers also became artisans of their craft of storytelling and performance.

Jenevieve Carlyn, In the House of Puppets

What makes Marston Moor the best of [Payne] Fisher’s poems […] is its unresolved ambiguity. Fisher fought himself at Marston Moor, on the losing royalist side, and was imprisoned afterwards. The earliest drafts of the poem are straightforwardly royalist laments for the horror of the siege and the disaster of the defeat, in which Oliver Cromwell, who was Manchester’s second-in-command, takes the role of the devil. The revised and massively expanded poem published in 1650, which won such success with Cromwell that it secured Fisher a paid job as his poet for the next eight years, shifted momentum to acknowledge the glory and power of the Parliamentarian success, but Fisher by no means forgot about the suffering of the other side. Long passages describe the miserable conditions of the besieged people in York, their joy at being relieved, and the terrible royalist losses on the battlefield.

It is interesting that Cromwell was so impressed by a poem that is essentially so even-handed.

Victoria Moul, Like a patient Angler e’re he strook

I recently wrote a review of the book Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War.

Here’s a short excerpt:

It’s significant that as I began writing this review about Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, a collection of poems reacting to the devastating ecological consequence of war, that our nation was again engaged in a new one. Rockets and drones were taking thousands of human lives, but also leaving lasting damage to land, water, and atmosphere. It will likely be decades until we understand the full extent of this war’s human, political, and environmental cost on our world.

You can read the whole review at Consequence Forum Substack here.

Grant Clauser, Review of Ecopoetics War Anthology: Convergence

Thinking of John Berger and his thoughts on the male gaze (I’m sure he thought we’d be well past bringing him up on this subject by now), I took And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, off the shelf. What a lovely thoughtful book that has been. Poems are nearer to prayers, he says. And, “Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.” He says, “The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.”

Shawna Lemay, Art’s Power to Change You

Stars curl
and spiral

this night

O the sight
of all that

blue
and red
and white

all that
bursting

all that
fire

all that
might

Maureen Doallas, The Flag on the Fourth of July

A couple of weeks ago I encountered this poem by “Alabama-born, Appalachian and Palestinian” poet Mandy Shunnarah thanks to a Facebook group called Read A Little Poetry. The poem has stayed with me, and I’ve been thinking about why that is and why it speaks to me. […]

“It’s not Palestine / like old buddy, old pal” is a great line. The choice to end two lines with “Palestine” and “Falastin” — almost the same word but not, which is the point. I’ve had Mo Husseini’s extraordinary essay A letter from the margins on my mind since I read it, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the name Palestine and the diaspora experience he describes.

The second stanza is where the poem really tugs at my heart. My grandparents were immigrants too, and I remember my grandfather’s struggle with certain English words that never emerged the way he wanted. (“Sheet” was a particular bugbear.) My grandfather spoke seven languages, which was amazing! but he knew his English was accented.

I think of how my mother, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Prague in 1936, chose short, simple, all-American names for her kids, especially for the three sons who were born to her first. I think about the tensions between assimilation and remembrance, about the old-fashioned or “foreign” Jewish names that I see now mostly in cemeteries.

The poem asserts that “only an American” would choose an aspirational name, one they themselves can’t easily say. I recognize that sense of leaning toward the future even at the cost of generational disconnect. My family’s immigrant story is different than this one, but they rhyme, as it were. There’s something tender for me about that. […]

Against all of these backdrops this week I encountered this beautiful essay by Jennifer Elise Foerester, a member of the Mvskoke people, shared on FB via the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

She begins:

What if we listened to each other in the language of poetry?
Poetry is a language of deep listening.
Listening to each other in this way would be a listening that does not demand an answer, a translation, or defense; it would be a listening that acknowledges not knowing, that does not preclude the possibility of new perspectives.

Jennifer Elise Foerester, Beyond The Obvious

I love the idea that when we listen to each other as to a poem, we cultivate a spirit of radical welcome. I love the idea of poetry as a language of deep listening — an increasingly lost art in these polarized and angry times. The FB conversation I saw about Shunnarah’s poem was pretty polarized and angry. I didn’t experience much readiness to listen there.

I get the anger. (I really do. I’ve shared a few very angry poems of my own, of late.) But I want us to be able to listen in a way that both upholds our own truths and keeps us open to the truths of others. I don’t want to respond to poems with defensiveness; I want to cultivate openness. In poetry, as in spiritual life, multiple things can be true at the same time.

Rachel Barenblat, Two poems and a dream of America

You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against probability, belongs to that region of the universe where the wildest bet may be the winning bet.

When she met Alice Methfessel, Elizabeth Bishop had served as Poet Laureate of the United States, had won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, had spent the better part of her youth in solitude and the better part of her middle age in South America with the woman she loved for seventeen years, who had taken her own life three years earlier.

Across their stations, across their age difference, across the abyss of possibility between their era’s parameters of permission, Elizabeth and Alice fell deeply and enduringly in love — a love that comes abloom on the pages of Megan Marshall’s delicious biography Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (public library).

Soon, they were beginning each day with a ritual refrain: “Good-morning I love you.” The “blue blue blue” of Alice’s eyes became the sky of a new world shimmering with new life. More poems poured out in a spring than had in a decade. They swam together in the Galápagos, admiring the flamboyance of flamingos, and in the Greek Isles, admiring the poppies and their thousand shades of red. Whenever they were separated by Elizabeth’s itinerant life as a public poet, she sent Alice “love — housefulls, churchfulls, airportsfull” and carried her photograph in her breast pocket. She revised her will to leave everything except her books to Alice.

After five years together — years of extraordinary creative vitality for the poet, but also years of savage struggle with alcohol — Alice, exhausted by Elizabeth’s increasingly out-of-control drinking to the point of collapse, met a young man who soon proposed.

“I want you to be happy and good and loved,” Elizabeth told her in a touching reminder that the deepest measure of love is wanting the best possible life for the other person. But she was heartbroken.

She coped the way all artists do.

What began as mostly prose became, seventeen drafts and several titles later — “How to Lose Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things,” “The Art of Losing Things” — one of the greatest poems ever written […]

When she learned that Alice had decided to accept the proposal, Elizabeth was devastated. With the helpless vulnerability of love laid bare, which neither pride nor prejudice can touch, she wrote to her:

I DO want you to be free, darling — that wouldn’t ever make me stop loving you… You can always have me back if ever you should want me… truly.

And then she sent her the poem.

Nobody knows what beckoned Alice back — the poem, the way a badly sprained ankle signaled Elizabeth’s fragility and made Alice shudder at the thought of losing her, or simply the inexplicable gravitational pull of love that eludes, always eludes, theory.

“I like being with you more than anyone else in the world,” Alice wrote to Elizabeth that summer.

They remained together until death did them part — one awful October evening, a cerebral aneurysm left Elizabeth’s body for Alice to find on their bedroom floor.

Maria Popova, The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written

Whatever else we might do in our lives, death is the thing we all will do. Most of us would rather not think about that. Here, then, is where the poets step in. Our readers may recall, for example, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which takes death’s inevitability as its subject. Tennyson, the laureate, speaking for a country and a culture, asks the very question nobody wants to ask: “How will we die?” For her own part, Emily Dickinson takes the question closer to the bone. She considers not how a culture, a generalized entity, might think about mortality, but instead, how she herself, an unrepeatable human I, will die. What, she repeatedly wonders, will that actually be like? […]

In sequence she describes the “Funeral in my Brain” as an entirely auditory experience, nightmarish perhaps particularly for the claustrophobic among us whose recurring bad dream of live burial the poem encapsulates. The speaker, confined in her viewless coffin but entirely awake, hears the tramping feet of mourners, the monotone drumroll of the church service, the creaking of boots as her coffin is lifted and carried to some solitary place, where she finds herself abandoned — “Wrecked, solitary, here” — for eternity. “Here” all sound stops; here ends the poem, presumably.

But at this point we should stop and remind ourselves that the public-domain version of the poem we’re reading is the one that appears in Poems: Third Series, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and published in 1896, ten years after Dickinson’s death. Todd and Higginson clearly agreed that dear Emily could not possibly have meant all those em-dashes, but also that she could not possibly have meant the poem as it appears in her manuscripts, with a final stanza beyond the one given here — a stanza that changes everything:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down —
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing — then —

In this original and necessary final stanza, the speaker, like a person being hanged, feels the “Plank in Reason” break beneath her. As the poem ends, on an inconclusive em-dash, its thoughts cut short, its speaker drops utterly out of “knowing” into the unimaginable, timeless, silent mystery beyond. It’s a terrifying prospect, that moment when “knowing” ends: the moment when the self stops being the self, or at least stops being sure of being the self, or of anything at all.

Yet as a restoration of the poem in its wholeness, this true ending offers a corrective to the nightmarish sense of being buried alive, on which the expurgated version of the poem ends. Death in Dickinson’s vision is not a desert island, a solitary shipwrecking, but something far stranger, outside the bounds of human knowing. If it’s a terror, it’s also a liberation and a darker, wilder hope, for which human language, in all its knowing, has no word.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: I Felt a Funeral in My Brain

if you whisper your truths,

they’ll disappear, he’d say, so he never whispers them –
and when he does speak, his voice is the wild thud
of trees falling oceans from here in cool shimmers

of rain, in the hot curl of asphalt, in all the time needed
though there’s so little now to do, and he’s prayed deep
into the hole of his aching, but that’s not how it ends –

Sam Rasnake, Some Last Things

This week: a piebald crow, seven bloodroot blossoms, the agèd state of words, the fine grain of life, and much more. Enjoy.

When I forget for a moment that he is about to blow the world up

I chop vegetables, make kefir, do laundry, sow seeds

as if tomorrow, next week, harvest time were not in doubt.

Ama Bolton, When I forget

Tell me, how are you surviving this April day?

These times call for finding ways to not only survive, but also to persist. Some days this might mean staying under the covers with a good novel; other days it could mean volunteering your time for a cause you care about — which might take a myriad of different forms. Maybe you’re going outdoors more.

Recently, I’ve been on a local book tour for Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds. One lonely July weekend, less than two years ago, I had this crazy idea. What if I created a bird guide that matched poets and birds? What if I cajoled my friend Stephanie Delaney to write the bird notes? What if I went on a hunt for an artist that specialized in birds? Those two little words, “what if” hold so much power.

Fast forward to this past weekend. Birdbrains celebrated its nearly five month anniversary at the Seward Park Audubon Center in Seattle, WA. Poets, writers, and bird lovers gathered together in a space designated as an international flyway for the great bird migration now going on.

When I collaborated with Dr. Stephanie Delaney and Hiroko Seki, I never imagined the incredible reception this book has had so far—and it is barely five months old. What I love the most, however, are the personal stories that emerge when I talk to both audience members and contributors alike.

Recently, one new friend told me that she reads a bird poem and bird note each night before going to sleep (much better than doomscrolling); a local poet told me that her daughter’s art teach has invited her into the classroom to talk about her contribution to the book, and another contributor gave a copy to her mother, the woman who first taught her about the birds.

Now when I see the common pigeon, I wonder how Jane Hirshfield is doing as this is “her” bird and the Stellar’s jay always reminds me of Harold Taw—whose flash fiction piece invents a language for the jay. Then there’s the chukar that lives in Eastern Washington, Texas, and in Palestine; this is Naomi Shihab Nye’s bird. The oddly named killdeer belongs to Kelli Russell Agodon, the cedar waxwing to Washington State native, Catherine Barnett. The Northern flicker is the bird that I claimed as my own. My gateway drug to the world of birding.

I know that filling the feeders with hot pepper suet and watching a piebald crow along the Puget Sound will not solve the global apocalypse it seems we are experiencing daily. However, without the birds I can’t look at the news from Gaza, Iran, Lebanon without being locked in despair. Birdbrains is the antidote.

Susan Rich, And Now for Something a Little Bit ~ Practical?

Water is trapped in mudflats, but there is also

shimmer in shades of purple. This is the time
before fruit ripens from flower, before
the bruise of summer. In a hurt world,

you try to understand these ongoing
lessons in wonder. Rain, when it returns,
remembers every surface it’s ever met.

Luisa A. Igloria, Living in the In-between

The poem’s most sustained suspension of pentameter follows line 10: “Not only under ground are the brains of men / Eaten by maggots. / Life in itself / Is nothing.” The pentameter line drops off into unsparing dimeter, then monometer, before expanding again into pentameter. The poem’s trajectory reflects not only the temperamental April weather, but the way that the beauty of spring presents itself as “enough.”

Enough to do what? To appear to vanquish death. This is the season’s cruel April Fool’s prank, and the poem’s speaker sees through it. Still, insistent in its utter insufficiency, that prankster and fool, April — given its own penultimate monometer line — arrives, “babbling like an idiot and strewing flowers.” There’s nothing small and clean about this April. It’s a mess. Yet even in the incontrovertible face of death, here it comes again: quixotic and possibly insane, but alive.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Spring

The oak being “unwired” in the second stanza is a wonderful image. I might be taking it too far to think of it as water in the electrics causing a failure, but the cables of the tree roots coming unstuck is a powerful one for me. It’s ironic that in a time like we are in now we will almost certainly be seeing the hosepipe ban news articles coming soon, but Jemma [Borg] paints a picture that is a mixture of beauty: ‘the flood that makes a mirror / on the lawn’ is a beautiful image, as is ‘Venus’s bright eye’, but these are counter-balanced or cancelled out (saying drowned out would be pushing it, Mat) by the “suffering cherry tree” and the lovely imagine and sounds conjured up by “the grass is tutting / with its many wet tongues”. Is nature judging us? No, but it should be.

Mat Riches, Here’s mud in your eye..

To think about trees is to think about generations before you, those who planted the trees that accompany us now, and the generations to follow. I suppose no poet writes about trees alongside men without remembering how Homer says men are like the leaves upon the trees. (Indeed, Larkin’s poem is, viewed from one perspective, really just a kind of riff upon these lines.)

οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ’ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ’ ἐπιγίνεται ὥρη:
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ’ ἀπολήγει.
(Iliad 6.146-149)

Like the generations of leaves are those of men.
Leaves the wind pours upon the ground, but the wood
thickens and births, as spring comes round again:
so the generations of men — one born, one gone.

These lines have been quoted, imitated and alluded to since antiquity. Horace himself writes a version of them in his Ars Poetica, but there he makes the leaves not men, but words — the language of men. My favourite translation of this passage is Jonson’s:

As woods whose change appeares
Still in their leaves, throughout the sliding yeares,
The first-borne dying; so the agèd state
Of words decay, and phrases borne but late
Like tender buds shoot up, and freshly grow.
Our selves, and all that’s ours, to death we owe.

The language changes, but the trees live on. Homer is dead, they seem to say; begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Victoria Moul, Still in their leaves, throughout the sliding years

It’s been too long since the last post. In late March, I posted an article on writing blurbs, which is still waiting for its Part 2. But true to our usual form, both Kim and I have been taken up with this year’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) – which involves writing a poem a day throughout the month of April. Many sensible people write these in the privacy of their own homes, perhaps sharing them with a few trusted friends, before eventually – after careful consideration and thorough editing – publishing a handful of their 30 poems.

But Kim and I publish them every single day on social media, often within minutes of writing the final lines. It’s incredibly exposing, exhausting – and beautifully compelling. And by mid-April, it tends to become all-consuming. By the end of the month, I’m exhausted and slightly crazed, but I do have a stock of 30 first, second or third drafts to sustain me through the subsequent months. Out of the 30 poems, there’s often a small selection of good poems which might make it into a collection. But perhaps most importantly, NaPoWriMo, and its crazy discipline, reminds me that I am a writer. That whatever else I’m doing or feelings in my life, the practice of writing is at my core. Like my therapist said – “whenever you talk about writing, your face lights up”. I’m still struggling with cyclical depression, and the practice of daily writing is a powerful reminder that on those days when I feel like I really don’t want to write a single word, I sometimes produce my best work.

Clare Shaw, A beautiful compulsion

April is National Poetry Month AND National Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month — and here in this blog we continue to celebrate poetry-math connections.  Below I offer the opening stanzas of an old poem of mine entitled “Time”.

The clock goes round —
making time a circle
rather than a line.
Each year’s return to spring
layers time on time. 

Circle or line — 
no difference.  Wrap
the line around a rim,
tuck the loose ends in,
or cut the circle, stretch it thin —

breaking an appointment,
or separating bites of lunch.
If the slit is not at midnight,
visit darkness by going back
or skip from light to light.

A second part of “Time” is available here.  The entire poem is available in Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press, 2010).

JoAnne Growney, April — Celebrate BOTH Mathematics and Poetry

This past Sunday would have been my mother’s 79th birthday, a birthday she never quite made it to, and in a world that would have distressed her to no end. There are times when I wonder how both my parents would have navigated this world, and though my mother saw less of it, dying only a year into the madness, but my father witnessed much more. Both would be extremely vulnerable–to cuts to things like social security and medicare, despite my dad being pretty organized in terms of pensions and savings (this is not a trait he passed down to me.) And while I like to joke that I have unofficially retired to do freelance design/writing /editing work for others and run the press& shop, I know full well I will be working and hopefully still earning income up til my death bed. That is, if I survive–or even if we all survive this current dystopia. In a calmer, saner world of a couple years ago, it was a little freeing to accept that and just make that the plan. I have a tiny amount of savings that is really nothing, but serves as an emergency fund at the least. With J earning money and his business doing well, we are less strapped in general from month to month, but as prices rise on gas and groceries, plus healthcare premiums that are now much higher than they were the past several years, it becomes more challenging.   I still try to fit in smaller pleasures, like theater tickets and occasional new dresses, as well as things like art supplies and books, but it gets harder and probably will even more so. 

Much is afoot in the dgp world, with me still figuring out work flows and logistics on the new books. I’ve been sampling a few different POD operations, including Amazon and Ingram, and am finding there are benefits and drawbacks to both. The books are quite beautiful nevertheless, and I appreciate the easiness of filling orders with books I do not have to print and fold and bind and trim all on my own. I am still looking for the sweet spot in pricing that does not send us into the red.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/8/2026

There was candlewax in my hair for seven days and seven nights the clouds were old testament we watched the sky which plane would fall first which soldier would fall first which angel would descend shocked by a neutral wire you might be shocked at how many people are already dead inside which astronaut will touch ground first which child will fall first small and crumpled my mouth and hands inside this numb poem words didn’t disappear me they boiled away inside 

Rebecca Loudon, Jupiter at rest

I wonder if there has ever been a study of how poets’ work alters as they age. I don’t mean in terms of life experience or a switch of political interpretation or subject matter but the structure of the writing itself.

It’s a subject that’s been troubling me for some time. In day-to-day life I function well at 73. OK, I forget where I’ve put my phone, or go upstairs to fetch something and then forget what it is I’ve gone to fetch, but that seems to be because my head is full of thoughts and responses to whatever’s going on. I can do all the things I’ve done for years, maybe a little slower, but they get done and life works well enough. Physically I’ve survived heart attacks, can still lift and carry bags of feed and bedding, can spend hours on jobs at our smallholding, can still look after pigs, ducks, hens, travel to watch football.

My point is that when I sit to write the process is different. My brain is still capable of energetic concentration but I look at some of the ‘old’ poems from twenty years ago and know I cannot write like that any more. An example:

THE WATER DIVINER

The thirsty people pay
and crowd to watch, but
for now the trick is in
the drama, in the measure

of the stride, the heavy
dance of the methodical
tread, and in the way
water rises at full moon

to break the boundaries
of grief. My reward is in
coins, a place to rest,
quiet nods of respect.

Sometimes, too, after dark
women will seek me out
for more elusive miracles.
But that is not my craft.

There is a tightness and control here, a rhythm that I no longer possess – no longer feel. I could no longer write like this any more than I could write anything sensible in rhyming iambic pentameters. My writing sprawls, jerks about, voices talk to each other within it, it responds to the world, to itself, is restless and reactive. This morning I sat down to write and came up with something that made absolute sense to me, which for now feels right, yet on reflection might be very difficult for others to fathom out.

Bob Mee, HOW THE BRAIN CHANGES THE WAY WE WRITE AS WE AGE

My son and I took my ordinary walk today, along Woods Creek, and I pointed out things he could pull from the ground and eat. Weirdly, he seems to like this, and thought deadnettle was tasty. I never knew what that little purplish plant was until this year, although it grows everywhere—all part of the very long process of learning where I live.

Last year I read selections of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s work for one of those anonymous evaluations I’m not supposed to admit to doing. I admired it so much, I put in an advance order for her collection with snow pouring southward past the window, just out from Pitt. Funny how I keep reading books about foraging, but I especially wanted to taste this one before heading to Alaska in a few days. As her bio describes, Kane is “Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo), Alaska… She’s raised her children as a single mother in Alaska and Massachusetts, but now lives with them in Oregon, where she is currently an Associate Professor at Reed College.” Stephanie Adams-Santos writes in her back-cover endorsement that the poems are “marked by an insistent naming of plants, people, places—an act of preservation against all that slips away.” Many poems in with snow have a quality of litany (although there’s also one called “No Litanies, No,” so maybe don’t trust my impression). In “Without Anchorage,” she writes about trying to “harvest the tops of onions flash-frozen with approximate winter’s sudden onset, haul the tenderest medicines inside losing only the laurel: hyssop, arnica, basketgrass sagrit.” The lovely precision, though, is framed again and again by the pain of displacement. To some extent art can conjure possible worlds and preserve in them what has been or will be lost. It’s never a fully adequate answer to grief, but I’m moved when artists try.

I’m at least as struck by how these poems witness and answer violence on many scales, including brutality in Kane’s childhood and massive cultural violence. There are also a host of poems about men being assholes. “Letters from Learned Men,” an erasure poem, documents a contemporary priest writing in a condescending way to someone who seems to be Kane herself (the name is blacked out)—and concludes with a hundred-year-old letter in which a priest condemns a Native woman in an overtly vicious way. I love how this poem levels a devastating argument by mere juxtaposition: historical racism and sexism are continuous with their lightly disguised contemporary versions. In fact, I love all of the many angry poems here—as well as the book’s lack of a Notes section. “The first thing I will do: make / myself indecipherable / to you,” she writes in “Elixirs for Words to Come.” So you don’t know my language or landscape or cultural context or even why I’m mad? If you want to navigate this poetic world, it’s on you to figure it out.

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemerals pt. 2 (spirals, drafts, wildflowers)

the warehouse always wants more warehouse.
more places to hoard boxes of plastic beads
& plastic teeth & plastic gods. they want
everyone to go & work in the warehouse.
to have babies who know nothing
but warehouse. to turn our blood
into warehouse guts. to warehouse our houses
until we are nothing but their tightening machine.

Robin Gow, warehouse

The breakthrough moment came in summer of 2017, three years into submitting the manuscript.

I woke up that morning with the head of a smart stranger, having forgotten that I had ever wrote the book.

I laid out the manuscript, and what happened next felt like the best mix of expertise and instinct, discernment and intuition.

I began culling poems without anxiety or remorse, and I listened more clearly than I ever had before to what I’d actually written. The title changed without fuss as a result. I could feel when I had finally arrived at the manuscript that would be the runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton prize judged by Ocean Vuong. I read the book over with the title American Faith—the title of one of the strongest poems in the book—and thought: yes, this is the book I’d been trying to write.

It was here, in this slab of marble (stack of printouts) waiting to be aerated, chiseled released. I felt a singular mix of relief and quiet confidence. It was a lovely,

Maya C. Popa, The Head of a Smart Stranger

You can stick two contact mics on a Singer
and go to town, letting the feedback wail
as the crunchy needle sounds distort
through one of the many barefoot pedals.
One light bulb shines
through the holes in the paper
as it travels, threadless, through the machine.

Fievel Crane, POEM: You Can Play A Shoestring If You’re Sincere

The best thing about finding fellowship with dead poets is that they don’t contradict you, don’t correct you, don’t talk over you. Thankfully they don’t talk at all. They are mercifully silent. I find this makes for a better connection. When I walked from Keats’ birthplace to Blake’s grave last week the commentary I gave was broadcast unscripted, unchecked, unedited. “You sounded quite posh” said Sue from Essex who’d tuned in to the live-stream. I thought about the voice that I’d adopted, the one I think I’d put on to lend authority if not authenticity to my report. Out of a kind of nervousness I suppose, an insecurity even, I’d acquired a voice that wasn’t entirely my own.

And I thought about that voice that poets put on. If you’re a poet you probably do it. And if you don’t, you’ll know what I’m talking about. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about tune your dials to the next poet up on the open mic or to any of them broadcast on BBC’s Radio 4. They’re all at it. Listen carefully.

It’s come to be known as “poetry voice.” It’s rooted in a bluesy, jazz scat blended with a dash of watered down Dylan and a measure of white-Beatnik inflection. It can be subtle, barely detectable, an occasional raised tone at the end of each phrase, a single word in emphasis pronounced from the diaphragm. It is a strange example of diluted, cultural appropriation without any specifically identifiable origin. It is designed, I think, to add “feeling” to a poem when spoken, to show that you really “mean it.” You can sound like a poet even if what you’ve written barely resembles poetry.

Perhaps it’s just a way of disguising vulnerability or simply a means of elevating speech to ‘not quite song’ but a cut above straight ‘saying stuff.’ It is a middle ground that poetry can claim as its own safe space. But with such richness and range available to the voice why such conformity? The poet Auden was a notoriously poor performer. But it was deliberate. Appalled by the manner in which populations were enthralled by the exuberant but empty oratory of political fanatics he dropped his cadence to a near mumble to avoid any sensationalism. The poem lived elsewhere, the reading a gesture toward it, a mere suggestion of it.

Jan Noble, Nº59 Dead networking (with Keats and Blake)

I woke at 4 a.m. thinking about Milton, and about all the times I have woken at 4 a.m. thinking about Milton, and specifically about these fourteen lines of Milton, the attempt to recall and silently recite less variety of counting sheep than of slowing the woolly urge to go on leaping the mind’s endless fences and instead settle down in the wet green grass. It was no different today, until I stopped bobbing along on iambs long enough to realize the reasons I’ve been quiet here overlap reasons I haven’t yet shared this poem.

The question of how to be strikes me as the obvious one for a person in my present condition to be asking, though the longer I’ve sat with it, the clearer it is that it’s been the central question of my life. It’s why this poem bewitched and baffled me at twenty-two, and has alternately vexed and consoled me since. And yet I’ve been . . . afraid? To write about it here. I’ve forgotten more about my formal education in poetry than feels prudent to acknowledge in a publication wherein I purport to bring you some insight about the craft, though writing this out longhand—in an emerald green Moleskine cahier with at stub-nib Eco TWSBI; it’s now 7:15 a.m. and there’s a bird I can’t name chiming outside the open window—I am reminded, once again, of what I set out to do here, how I set out to be.

It has been a struggle, recapturing what I want to call the simplicity of being with poems. I have found it difficult to stop myself from slipping out of it and into the assorted personas, assorted ways of being, I have tried on over the years—academic, educator, editor, critic—each of which comes with its own set of professional and social obligations, or perhaps simply expectations, internal and external alike. Some of the resulting reservations about staking any claim to insight are fairly obvious. I have forgotten more about Milton and his poems and the vast ecosystem of scholarship surrounding both than I can remember ever having known. If a doctorate could be revoked, I don’t think I’d argue overmuch if some diploma-removal goons came knocking.

Some of the reservations are far weirder: things like the persistent sense that I have forgotten some lousy thing that Milton said or did or is reported to have said or done, something unsavoury to our twenty-first century sense of moral perfectionism, and has been summarily dismissed by the loudest of internet users. That the Aeropagitica fails to fully account for some local complexity or other and must thus be chucked wholesale.

Or something even worse, like that he believed in meaning, in the soul, in God.

The point of all of this is that Sonnet XIX is a poem that I love, and it has lived with me, and I with it, for many years, and lately it has been essential to me as I relearn, each day, how to live, how to be, something I have done perhaps all my life, and not just at what lately sometimes feels its nadir.

Vanessa Stauffer, Sonnet XIX: ‘When I consider how my light is spent’ by John Milton

As much as the first cuckoo ever was, the (almost) annual brouhaha over the choice of winner of the UK’s National Poetry Competition (NPC) is a sure indicator that spring has sprung.

The week before last, Hilary Menos, poet and editor of The Friday Poem, and Victoria Moul, poet–critic, chewed over and pretty much spat out the poem by the splendidly-named winner, Partridge Boswell, here; as did many poets, both good and not-so-good, on social media. I found the poem to be neither as bad as has largely been made out nor especially deserving of being plucked out as the best of 21,000 poems. However, I wasn’t privy to reading the rest of them, so what do I know? I can only surmise that it’s a thankless task which somebody has to do.

This Friday just gone, Hilary and Victoria, discussed more generally, here, the challenges of judging competitions. Victoria acknowledged the truth that, ‘Everyone knows competitions of any kind and in any sphere are a blunt tool.’ They are indeed; but really, as we all know, a poetry competition is principally a money-making exercise upon which the financial health of the organising outfit usually depends, so they are intrinsically vital for the flourishing of high-quality published poetry.

The issue, if it is one, that none of the top three poems was written by a British poet, is, for me, wholly unimportant. I’m not at all convinced by Victoria’s insistence that she, ‘would like to see the National Poetry Competition restrict its entry criteria to British citizens and/or those living in the UK and make a serious attempt to help readers see and appreciate what is distinctive about British poetry’, given that the globe has never been as closely linked as it is now. Using the UK’s most prestigious poem competition as a means to discern some sort of set of British poetic values seems to me as futile as the coalition government’s witless introduction just over a decade ago of the requirement that ‘British values’ in general – as itemised in guidance here – be taught in schools. Aside from the fact that many serious and good poets rarely or never enter competitions, it would be rather ‘Little Britain’, wouldn’t it? Has the Man Booker Prize been devalued or enhanced by the widening of its eligibility from novels in English by British and Commonwealth writers to novels in English by writers of any nationality as long as they have been published in the UK or Ireland? Surely the more internationalist readers become, the better that is for their general outlook on life and for the health of a diverse, tolerant and culturally-enriched society?

Matthew Paul, On poetry competitions and personal taste

One does not attempt to write a poem about foremothers. One is compelled to write it. In fact, it writes itself. You are simply the last hand in a chain of clasped arms, the last daughter in a lineage of daughters, the last mouth from which the song, fully formed, emerges.

I see Daughter of Sindh as a bridge poem – my ancestral mothers gaze towards me, I look back to them, and the legacy of colonial rule, the pain of India’s partition hangs between us.

In the great gamble of map-drawing, Sindh (and half of Punjab) ended up on the Pakistani side of the border; the wrong side for my Hindu grandparents (maternal and paternal) who crossed amidst carnage, rebuilding their lives from refugee camps on what politicians declared in 1947 was now their homeland. They never crossed that border again. Their ache never ceased.

Far from their slowly reconstructed lives in India, I was born and raised in West Asia (UAE), by a Sindhi mother and a Punjabi father who spoke with each other in English and were themselves raised in the shadows of unspoken wounds of their parents’ displacement. My childhood was a surreal split between Indian mythological universes and the moody landscapes of Austen and Bronte; I memorized Shakespeare and Sanskrit verses for their rhythm, learnt ballet and Bharatanatyam.

Like Daughter of Sindh, I have existed on bridges since I can remember – at the intersection of cultures, of worlds, of times. For a long while, when I lost my mother at 19, existence felt like one foot in the realm of life, the other in the realm of death.

For me, writing poetry is standing on thresholds in their purest, most luminous warmth, and allowing the words to remake me. It is to drench oneself in their light, in their fire, and taste honey. Much of my collection ‘Drench Me in Silver’ (Black Bough, 2025) is the gathering of such moments.

Drop-in by Saraswati Nagpal (Nigel Kent)

In my yard, hands on my hips, I look down at the collage of green foliage at my feet. I look for the familiar whorls and hues of ephemeral leaves. I count seven Bloodroot blossoms, little yellow faces with their manes of white. My favorite stage of their growth is just before the bloom when the lobed leaf is wrapped around the stem like a cloak. The flower appears to be holding its face in despair. Staring down at them, I feel my arms begin to wrap around my body. […]

Bloodroot’s whorl of leaf encases the delicate stem, protecting the flower until it finally blooms. Anyone who has started seeds in the still-aired confines of their homes quickly learns that the leggy stems are susceptible to wind as soon as they’re taken outside to adjust to life in the real world. The Bloodroot eventually sheds the cloak of itself and as it opens its face to the sunlight, its root nodules foster bacteria, nitrogen, and a gossamer intimacy with mycelia to nourish itself on the earth. Every green of stem. Every brown and gray of bark. Every green and red and yellow of leaf. Every pinnacle of thorn. All of it is miraculously rendered from the soil, and light.

Today is one of those days. Despite the universe in a seed, despite the success of transplant, the seven Bloodroot blossoms are just that: seven flowers. We all have days like these where the magic isn’t magic, but simply is what is. We experience the doldrums, all of us sitting on the edge of our beds, dragging a sock over the foot of another day. Opening a door and closing it in that repetitive muscle memory. Of course the seed bursts open; what is needed is there. The plant has sap. That’s what plants do. The sap has color and it happens to be red. I stand here and stare at the ground, though, and somehow I’m still entranced. Sometimes all the looking inward is just a sign that one needs to spend more time looking outward.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem “I Go Down to the Shore” where she is humbled by the work and mechanism of what is […]

Sarah Lada, Finding the World

I hope to get together another manuscript out this spring (1 circulating, 1 bounced, 1 accepted to tbc), but I looked at 60 pages of this one, and said, nope and yanked that bit of viscera and will rebuild.

I spent 7 hours on a poem yesterday and look askance at it today. Hm, maybe it needs to sit and steep a while.

Recently I got a couple poems accepted at online places. Another going up April 9. Poetry coming out at +doc too. So that’s exciting.

Meanwhile I’ve continued to read at my usual voracious rate. I’m at 75 titles, varying from a dozen pages to over 700 pages. I’ve realized how inadequate even to myself to note a good one is. Or locate again given my current state of books.

Pearl Pirie, On our small marble

Much of my writing life is about waiting, for the ideas to form, for the stories to knit together. But today: writing, tidying, note making. Toying with flash fiction, bending and breaking rules, watching how tone and structure affect a story. I’m trying to write super short flash today – nothing more than 100 words a story. It’s challenging, but I need the hard edges of a challenge, as opposed to the loose, wandering path of the novel. I like the constraint. I like the fierce cutting and chipping and chiseling of words. When I look up it’s been an hour and a half. I take a break from writing and instead search online for writing opportunities and update a spreadsheet, begin yet another grant application then give up on it.

Suddenly, around me is a shifting and dragging of tables and chairs. A group of cancer hospital volunteers have arrived for a meeting. There are about fifteen people crowding into my corner. They keep asking if it’s ok for them to be around me like this, and it is because I’m not going anywhere. One of them has two therapy dogs with her, and I reach down and stroke the nearest one, who has a surprisingly wet beard.

They start by having a right old bitch about all sorts of work based stuff. I enjoy listening to it. It reminds me of my old job as a microbiologist. Oh, strange days to remember when I was a person who got up and went to a laboratory and looked down a microscope. Strange to think I was a person who worked with people. The gossip. The bitching. And let me tell you, no one can bitch like an NHS worker. The group move on from bitching to sharing their own experiences. Each and every one a cancer survivor. Then they are done, coffee drank, plans made, they move out, apologising to me for crowding me.

‘It’s ok, I wasn’t going anywhere, I’m supposed to be working’ I say, smiling.

‘Are you here with someone?’

‘My mum, she’s having chemo’.

‘Well, we’re all survivors ourselves, you’ll have heard, don’t give up hope…’

‘Stage four.’

‘Oh, well I hope the chemo gives her some more time.’

‘Thanks’

There is an awkward silence. Even here, in the middle of a cancer hospital, death is a place we can’t quite cross into. I think about that often, that I have been crossing into and out of places of death, that for long periods of my life I have lived in the doorway of both worlds, the liminal space of waiting and watching. They have all been there too, or at least to the edges, to view from some platform what is coming to us all. The moment passes.

We talk a little more, about what I’m working on. I say I’m a writer. She says I should write about them. I say I’ll put them in a short story, but I don’t, I put them in this blog instead.

Wendy Pratt, Much of what happens here is about waiting

In the context of a review culture in which hot takes, pseudo blurbs and cod-academic posturing are rife, it’s a huge breath of fresh air to encounter a critic who engages with a poet and their poetry, who gets to grips with the nuts and bolts of every line, who reaches far beyond a mere description of thematic concerns, all without lapsing into jargon or self-aggrandisement.

This is why I’m thoroughly recommending Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s The Deeper Read today. It’s a regular Substack where she delves deeply into one collection at a time. Her writing and insights are terrific in their clarity, worthy of a wider audience and way more interesting than most reviews that can be found in major journals, even the essay-length ones, so I’m not taking restricted words counts as an excuse here. In fact, Fitzpatrick’s showing up a fair few bigger names in The Deeper Read. I suggest you explore its archive via this link, but with one warning: it’s likely to provoke you into purchases of poetry books that you’d never heard of and suddenly need…!

Matthew Stewart, Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s The Deeper Read

I was struck recently by the pathetic persistence of my ego needs, that little creature inside who is constantly wanting to be seen, heard, applauded. “My god, creature, will you never stop?” I scold it. “Surely we’re of or approaching an age when we can be beyond all this,” I suggest to it. “Oh yes,” it says, “of course,” it assures. But next thing I know it’s having another little fit over a rejection, a perceived slight. Recently it was in a small tizzy over a competition we lost, even though we really didn’t expect to win in the first place. “But still,” it declares stoutly. I bemuse myself with all the ways I try to be seen — my poetry, art, opinions, and all the conversations I insert myself-talking-about-myself into. “Can you just shut up,” I demand of the ego. It makes that locking-the-lips motion. I don’t believe it for a minute. Can I blame society’s focus on productivity, success, competition — does every freaking thing have to be a competition? Competition means winners, yes, but it also, by definition, means losers. It occurs to me that I identify always with the losers. Does that doom me to self-fulfilling prophecy? “No, no, it’s not my fault!” declares ego. I think about how early trauma informs lifelong twists of thinking. “Yes,” cries ego, “it’s my parents’ fault!” Oh shut up. Just keep doing the creative acts, I tell myself, and ignore the ego beast. It blinks at me, unreadable.

Anyway, then I found this amusing poem by Matthew Olzmann (“so much better known, better published, a real success story in the poetry world, not like…,” mutters ego) and felt momentary kindred, as a poem can do. And then the ending! That’s what poetry is all about.

Marilyn McCabe, the savant who believes mustard stains

Comingling bodies brewed of holy water and borrowed time. Insomnia and 5 a.m. coffee atoms. Dog-tired highways and ragged folk-songs. Starched shirts and worn jeans atoms. Counterfeit and heaven-forged. A medicine bottle with hope listed as a side effect.

Rich Ferguson, Swirling through the universe, all the atoms of us

THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE, Christopher Howell, Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press, 2019.

On the back cover, Kathy Fagan writes: “Howell has been for many years my go-to poet of choice when I need to be reminded of what a poem can do, what a poetry collection can do…”

I can say the same. Howell asks, in “The Giant Causes the Apocalypse,” “[W]hat will comfort us / as we hear our singing stop?” This sometimes strange, sometimes disconcerting collection of poems is an exploration of that question.

The grief in the title permeates the book, without weighing it down, like these lines from “Turnpike and Flow”:

We say it is a long road
but it is only
a life
slipping past, dark and bright, abandoning
a few broken tools and shoes, once
in a while something beautiful but too big
to carry.

Howell is truly a gem in the Washington State poetry world. He has 20 books. He teaches in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University, and is an editor/director for both Lynx House Press and Willow Spring Books. Let us say he has a large and interested following. So it’s odd to find, bracketed in the middle of a long poem, these words: “[Sometimes I want you to stop / reading so I can / go on alone into the dark sublingual light…” (“Cloud of Unknowing”). I love the juxtaposition of dark with light. It’s a sentence (it’s a whole book) that takes chances.

Maybe Howell isn’t so much exploring the big questions, as urging his readers to explore them.

Bethany Reid, Christopher Howell, THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE

‘A Comet Passing’ is an urgent, taut collection of 18 poems inspired by the events surrounding the Heaven’s Gate religious group during the approach of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997. As we readers already know (or can easily find out) what happened during these febrile, fervid last days, Vanessa [Napolitano]’s job as the poet is to keep our attention on each part of the sequence as it unfolds. Through a kind of poetic speculation, we experience the build-up of events as though we were one of the Heaven’s Gate members – believing when they believe, doubting when they doubt. Vanessa sustains the tension through a careful layering of moments of high intensity with moments of calm, even boredom, as the group prepares meticulously for what is to come.

I’ve loved Vanessa’s poetry since I first laid eyes on it, and it’s especially pleasing to see the emotional intelligence and subtlety of her writing brought to bear here, on a subject outside of her usual range of themes. This is a pamphlet doing what pamphlets do really well – operating as a vehicle for a set of concerns at somewhat of a tangent to the writer’s main body of work.

That said, Vanessa’s attention to detail, to the fine grain of life, is all over these poems, from the “newspaper bags full of literature” in the opening poem Recruitment, to the pin-sharp character studies of Nobodyody, to the last frivolities enjoyed and documented in Levity – “chicken pot pie, cold lemonade”.

Victoria Spires, A mystery of bodies

Frank Stanford is surely one of the most important undervalued American poets. Few have read him, but his writing of a dark and fallen South is on par with the novels of William Faulkner and the stories of Flannery O’Connor. In writing ability and scope, Stanford is their equal. The subject matter, tone, and language are quite similar. He died at twenty-nine by his own hand in 1978, yet he’d already published seven volumes of poetry. Two more posthumous collections would appear within one year. His most mysterious work, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, is an epic poem of more than 15,000 lines narrated by a twelve-year old boy, growing up in Mississippi.

A volume of selected poems, The Light the Dead See, published in 1991, serves as a solid introduction to Stanford’s work. For those who want to experience the poet in-depth, I’d recommend What About Water: Collected Poems and Hidden Water, unpublished works, fragments, and letters – both books published in 2015. A writer of enormous possibility. Readers can only guess what might have been.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Frank Stanford, “Their Names Are Spoken”

Several years ago, I came across Nicole Gulotta’s Wild Words, a book about letting creativity meet you where you are. As a new mom, in the midst of nap-trapped days and sleepless nights, I devoured that book. We’re talking highlights, underlines, notes spilling into the margins.

After I finished Wild Words, I moved on to Nicole’s podcast. I have distinct memories of walking around my neighborhood, pushing a stroller, headphones on, and Nicole’s voice in my ear. At the time, I had no plans of publishing a book. I only knew that I wanted to keep writing. So I did—over several slow, mostly unremarkable years.

In 2025, I published my first poetry collection, A History of Holding. A month or two after its release, an order arrived in my inbox.

From Nicole Gulotta.

I was shocked, confused, elated. How did she know I existed? Where did she come across the book? I reached out to thank her and tell her how much Wild Words meant to me, and she was as kind and gracious as I’d imagined.

A few weeks later, she sent me an email.

She’d finished my book. She liked it. She wanted to have me on her podcast!

Allison Mei-Li, Slow Writing

It’s good that CBe doesn’t have shareholders, because the figures for the financial year just ended wouldn’t make them happy. The only people CBe is accountable to are readers. Thank you very much to those who pressed the ‘Donate’ link on the website home page: still there, and anyone who presses it gets a copy of a limited-edition 32-page full-colour booklet called Vedute a colori.

Early next year – which, if we get there, will be CBe’s 20th birthday – CBe will publish its largest and longest book to date. Testimony by the poet Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) happens to be – and I’m not entirely alone in thinking this – one of the major English-language works of the past century, and has never been published in the UK. It was originally published piecemeal between 1934 and 1978; in 2015 in the US Black Sparrow, now an imprint of David Godine, gathered the whole thing (including the original prose version, out of print for decades) into a single edition, and this is the edition – large format, 608 pages! – that CBe will publish in the UK.

The poems in Testimony are derived from court records from across the US between 1885 and 1915. Other poetry titles from CBe based on documentary records of the lives of others (interviews, photographs, emails …) are Sarah Hesketh’s 2016, Caroline Clark’s Sovetica, J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical and Long Cuts, and Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter and New Life, and Testimony may be the mother and father of them all.

Reznikoff is little known in the UK (the US too). But some people know him, and I’d be very happy if any of those who do get in touch. Publishing this book is a statement: about small presses (much of Reznikoff’s work was self-published and printed by himself), but it’s also about why write, why publish. Any history of Modernism in literature that doesn’t include this book needs kicking.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter April 2026: new book, and news of another

Claire Taylor is a writer for both adult and youth audiences. Her poetry collection, April and Back Again is available now from Publishing Genius. Claire is the founding editor of Little Thoughts Press, a literary magazine for young readers. She lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, in an old stone house where birds love to roost. You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com.

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 wrote and self-published my first chapbook, Mother Nature, during the pandemic. It’s a hybrid collection of poetry and essays about pregnancy, the postpartum period, and early parenting. I don’t know that it changed my life per se, but being able to find readers who connected with the themes and emotional vulnerability at play in that book helped solidify my desire to keep writing, to remain open to the experience of sharing my life and my feelings in this way. 

My new collection, April and Back Again, focuses on a single year in my life from the period of April 2024 when I turned 39, to April 2025 when I turned 40. It’s a sort of time capsule for that period, a point in time when when both my life and the US were on the cusp of significant changes. I think the themes of family life, aging, and obviously politics and trying to parent through a fog of existential dread are universal and extend beyond the single year in which I wrote these poems, but this book feels especially like a snapshot of a particular moment in time for me.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poetry as a kid. I had my first poem published at age 10 in Highlights Magazine. It was about what it might feel like to be a leaf. Then I wrote a bunch of angsty and lusty poems in high school, your typical teenage stuff. After that, though, I mostly shifted away from poetry and only came back to it after becoming a mother. I needed to write about that new experience but had very little free time to sit down and do any long-form writing. I would write poems in my phone’s Notes app while I was nursing my baby or when I was up in the middle of the night trying to rock him back to sleep. Poetry is a good outlet if you need to express your emotions but only have five minutes and one hand free. […]

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think the main concern behind my writing is how to make sense of being human. I think about writing poetry the same way I think about parenting: It’s my job to illuminate the complexity of being human, to say, here is what is hard and here is what is beautiful about being alive and now you have to decide what to do with that information.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Claire Taylor

I’m grateful to share that my poem “Dear Judy” was just published in Solstice Literary Magazine, a long-standing, mission-driven journal dedicated to diverse voices and socially engaged work. Solstice consistently publishes writing that leans into nuance, justice, and the complicated ways we move through the world, and I’m honored to have a poem included in their Spring 2026 issue.

This poem is part of a series I’ve been writing since my mother passed unexpectedly in January 2024—epistolary duplex poems addressed to her. Some are shaped by what’s happening around us; others turn inward, tracing the parts of my life and my mother’s life that continue to intersect. These poems have become a way for me to keep talking to her, to say what I still need to say, to stay close.

“Dear Judy” is the second poem from this series to be published. The first, “Dear Judy,” appeared in New Verse News  on September 16, 2025. I also wrote a short post about that publication and the project as a whole:
“My Duplex Poem ‘Dear Judy’ Published in New Verse News”.

Formally, this new piece is an extended duplex, a variation on the poetic form invented by Jericho Brown. A traditional duplex is a 14-line hybrid that braids the sonnet, ghazal, and blues through repetition and transformation. You can read more about the form on Poets.org in their entry on the duplex.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Dear Judy” and extended duplex published in Solstice

Like many others, I get the occasional e-mail that tells me that the sender can help me find new readers for my brilliant books, millions and millions of readers.  Yesterday I got a different e-mail, an old-fashioned fan letter of sorts.  

The e-mail writer told me that she had selected my poem for a specific reason:  “This is to let you know that as a member of a Lectio Poetry group that met this morning, I chose your poem ‘The Moon Remembers’ for our session. Because of the recent NASA mission to send humans farther into space than ever before, and to study the dark side of the moon, I felt fortunate to find your poem to share.”

The e-mail concluded this way, “In this world of chaos, ‘The Moon Remembers’ gave us an hour of peace, of joy, of hope.”

Wow–what writer could hope for more than that?  I mean that sincerely.  It is one of the reasons I write, in the hopes of bringing something positive to people.

I don’t get many fan letters anymore, and the ones that I get are usually about “Heaven on Earth,” perhaps my most famous poem, read on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.  Yesterday’s e-mail referenced “The Moon Remembers.”  It’s a poem I barely remember writing, and at first, I wondered if she was writing to the wrong poet.

Happily, my blog answers many a question for me.  I posted it in this blog post, and I’m guessing that’s how the group leader found my poem.  Even though it’s not one of the poems I remember, I’m still happy with it.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Fan Letter for Forgotten Poem, “The Moon Remembers”

I had one of those moments last week where I thought I would put off doing something until next time I had the opportunity. Luckily my thoughts stopped me in my tracks and nudged me into thinking how good it would feel to do the thing and know I had done it. I liked the fact that my thoughts were giving me the nod that I could just get on and do the thing. And when I stood in the moment to think about it, I realised it would be the same feeling of being a little bit scary whether I did it this time or next, and therefore it made sense just to crack on and do it. My mission? To pop into a book shop and ask if they would be willing to stock my poetry books. Three things also spurred me on:

• Helen O’Neill asking, “Where can people find your poetry?”
• My commitment to being 10% braver (thank you Jaz Ampaw Farr).
• This lovely feedback from someone who messaged me recently after buying a copy of one of my books… “I picked up ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ today after reading two poems standing in the bookshop! I couldn’t put it down…. The Telford Warehouse poem stopped me completely…”

So this week I am celebrating seizing the moment, the positive role of self-talk and the things and people that spur us on.

Sue Finch, A ROAD TRIP TO NEVERN

My poetry calendar is getting crowded, and I don’t know about you, but I could definitely use the distraction.

This Wednesday at J. Bookwalter’s in Woodinville, at 6:30 PM we’ll be meeting at our monthly book club to discuss Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest book, Accidental Devotions, just out from Copper Canyon Press. (Well, technically its launch date is in May, but we’re celebrating early, because Poetry Month!) Here are my cats jealously guarding their early copy. I have already read the book and know it’s fantastic. I recommend it.

And on April 23rd, J. Bookwalter’s Tasting Studio in Woodinville is re-starting its Wine and Poetry Night with Kelli Russell Agodon reading from her new book. I’ll be hosting and doing an introduction. […]

And just in case this isn’t enough poetry for you, I’ll be reading at the Poetry Book Party for Catherine Broadwall’s new book Aftermath from Girl Noise Press on May 5th at Vermillion in Capital Hill, as part of the opening act at 7 PM. Catherine is the poet on the right in this picture with a Rainier cherry tree.

In between all this poetry month (and early May) excitement, I’ll be welcoming my nephew Dustin Hall’s move to the area, celebrating my birthday, and probably snapping pictures of tulips, daffodils and cherry blossoms along the way.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, It’s National Poetry Month! Poetry Book Clubs and Poetry Readings, Poet Friends and Book Parties, and More

Now that we’re one week into April, I thought it might be fun to think about the aftermath of a 30/30. All those drafts, in various stages of newness and disarray. How do you begin to approach deciding what to keep, what to abandon, what to revise? I always approach a first draft the same way after letting it cool on the sill for a while. I ask questions in my head:

• What’s working, both at the language level and/or in serving the poem’s purpose?
• What’s extraneous and should be removed?
• What’s necessary/working as connective tissue but poorly executed?
• Where’s the turn/volta toward purpose or layers of meaning?

Though I am not officially doing a 30/30 (see last post), I am trying to write something every day this month. So I started on April 1 with a prompt from Bluesky from Todd Dillard:

“Deconstructed Fable”
Write a poem in which every day you receive some fragment of a fable. A red cloak, the huntsman’s ax, a grandmother’s spectacles, etc. Write the poem in such a way that “solving” this fable directs you to return to your childhood home.

As it always is with prompts, I did not follow its instructions exactly. I only used one fragment/item and stuck with one fable throughout a return to the childhood home. (Surprise! It was a grief poem…oops.) Although the draft is okay, it’s certainly not what it could be.

Donna Vorreyer, What’cha Gonna Do With All That Junk?

Walk horizonless, gaze curiously,
recognize, understand the birds,
the trees, the entire sky.
It no longer feels impossible,

something peaks and it feels
like forever, where a song
is not rain, but
a delicate wing.

Charlotte Hamrick, Beyond & Within

Dear Friends, March was a fast month for me. With all of the preparation going up to Baltimore for AWP and coming back again, I hardly had any time to review and post the recent interviews I did. One is with Donna Spruijt-Metz and the other with Heidi Seaborn. (Both are below.)

I woke up this morning excited to finally get to re-listen to these interviews and post them on The Poetry Salon’s YouTube channel.

Before I could get the raw material of these interviews downloaded, I got on Facebook to mindlessly scroll for a bit, while drinking my coffee and waking up. Instead of getting my mindless scroll, I saw pictures of John Brantingham, being shared all over my feed. John, my friend, and founder of The Journal of Radical Wonder was scheduled to feature at Poets Inspiring Poets on May 18th at The Poetry Salon. At first I thought, “Good. People are promoting the event with John.” But then I read the notes under the photo and saw, as I so often do, that people were announcing our mutual friend’s passing.

I was so not ready for this; I was getting ready to see him again on zoom. People who have events scheduled with you can’t possibly die! I thought.

I turned off the background noise. I starred at the screen. I scrolled more mindfully now. […]

I spent a chunk of today working on an essay about John and what he taught me and inspired for me in the brief time I knew him. It connects quite a bit with my discussions with Donna and Heidi – personal grief and collective grief, the environmental crisis, and the resilience of the planet. It’s about using poetry to share and process complex feelings. It’s about what we can do for one another and for the planet.

It is also about acorns and making cookies.

I will share that essay soon. For now I want to say that we will open our April 18th event, Poets Inspiring Poets, to everyone who wants to celebrate John. Please bring a poem of his to read, or bring a poem of your own that connects with John’s work in some way. If you had work published by him in The Journal of Radical Wonder, bring that. Mostly, bring yourself!

Tresha Faye Haefner, Finding Radical Wonder in Difficult Times: Honoring John Brantingham

It’s not so much the lifeboats
studding dark water like stars,
as what lies beneath the boats,
free swimming, with hearts beating,
then ferociously attached
(armor and weapon), hungry
for the funk of horizons

PF Anderson, Barnacles (#NaPoWriMo 11)

It is surreal that war is raging while my surroundings are so serene. I think of rocket fire, explosions, thick clouds of toxic smoke. I think of people I love in Israel who are protesting the war with Iran. I think of a pregnant friend making sure she can get to the nearest bomb shelter. I think of all the people across the region who have no bomb shelters.

I wonder how any of us made it through last Tuesday (the day we all woke to “a whole civilization will die tonight”) without a nervous breakdown. My cat naps peacefully on the couch. The tree frogs sing their spring song. I’m not sure we’re out of the woods. Maybe we’re still on the brink of global disaster. And yet laundry needs doing, the groceries must be put away.

Rachel Barenblat, We made it

The news. The girl switches the channel to Chopin’s Berceuse.

They have been sending drones. Only half of the house is still standing, wires protruding from the walls.

The boy, dizzy, asks his mother if it’s time for strawberries—soon.

Spiders. The woman shies away from touching their cocoons as she clears the furniture out from the shed.

Naming a crater after their commander’s late wife, the Artemis crew falls into each other’s arms.

Kati Mohr, Beads

I’m scared. I’m guessing we’re all scared. I stop scrolling, I stop reading, I stop listening. I feel guilt. I feel shame I should be informed, I should be aware I should not bask in the privilege of being able to turn away. More than anything I should be changing things, I should be using writing to change things.

I am not. Take this morning for example – I have finished the first draft of a wedding poem for a couple who are looking forward to building their life together in a beautiful country cottage. I’ve written a slightly dark poem about a blackbird’s song for my Poem Whisperer’s group. I’ve checked my seedlings, wandered sunshine and tamped down the fear that grasped me yesterday. I have turned my mind away, I have basked in my privilege. I am able to choose the place that Marwan Marhoul talks about

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.

– Marwan Makhoul

I have no lived experience, no first-hand knowledge of this. I am write outrage, devastation, fear, from a place where I can hear the birds. Will it not be hollow, even insulting to write about things I know of but can never understand? I can write about my own response, but what do I really have to say that is different than all the other sorrow and regret that’s out there? I look up the point of writing in terrifying times and read about poetry being a balm, a soothing presence. I read about poetry being a means to rail against injustice, to call for solidarity. I read about poetry being a way to connect and to empathise. I read that poetry captures the essence of what it means to be human. I read this wisdom and feel empty. I don’t know if I believe it anymore. I don’t know if art is powerful enough to overcome and rebuild.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Do the words of a person who can still hear the birds have any value in times of terror?

The image of the H above is from a series entitled the Scaffolding for the Alphabet. Is the alphabet all scaffolding? Is old writing scaffolding for the old? Or the other way around.

And here’s a poem that I wrote “after” A.R. Ammon’s “Poem.” I took his poem and ran it through a bunch of translation tools and then a wisp of something emerged which I made into this poem.

AFTER

lunch I
put
on my shoes
and stand just
above
the earth

Gary Barwin, Scaffolding for the Alphabet

This week: bearing witness to old rhythms, the laptop singing to life, a postcolonial flâneuse, the slow harvest of mindfulness, and much more. Enjoy.

I often cannot see the night sky, here in the mountains of North Carolina.  There’s usually too many trees that obscure the view, which seems a fair trade most nights.  But in the winter months of no leaves on the trees, I get unexpected treats as I glimpse a star here and there.

This morning there was the delight of the setting moon.  I was working on a poem that I was writing, a poem inspired by an in-class writing experiment that led to some good student writing (see this blog post for details).  I thought I might write from the point of view of the saw mill blade, but instead, I focused on the door frame, the door frame that was once a tree, that sacrificed essential parts of itself to become a door frame.  Was it worth it?  The door frame feels sorrow, much like many adults I know who feel sorrow about the sacrifices made along the way.

As I was writing it, the poem seemed tired and trite to me.  Writing about it now, I think it has potential.  I’ll put it away for a bit and see if anything new comes to me.

As I was writing, the setting moon caught my eye, and I thought, I’d probably see this beautiful moon better if I turned off the lights in this room.  And so, I did, and it was amazing, watching the moon set beyond the bare branches of the trees.  The moon was shrouded in haze, so it had more of a Halloween vibe than a December vibe.  I tried to summon a December feeling by thinking about the haunting Christmas hymn, “In the Deep Midwinter.”  I thought about Christina Rossetti, author of the words.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Moonset and Midwinters

In studying prosody, how it informs a poem’s argument or intonation, we tend to look for ruptures, dissonance, places where the music breaks down: the meter falters or the rhyme abruptly strikes a minor chord. But with Frost, as often as not, the deviation is a doubling down instead of a stepping away. “Stopping by Woods” is no exception to the exception, and while the last stanza is linked by rhyme to the penultimate, it is in fact linked more tightly, all four lines, rather than just three, rhyming with sweep:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

While the poem ends, famously, in what may be read as an avowal to continue, to push onwards, the repeated line as an assertion of determination, I hear in the music a hypnotic quality, a trailing off instead of a striking out, a settling down, as if instead of resuming his forward momentum, the speaker has decided he might linger a little while longer. The mind may know the story it’s been telling itself—things to do, places to be, don’t let anything distract you from the behest your mind is bent on—but some more ancient sense knows the thing to do when the snow begins to pile is to hunker down someplace warm and rest a while.

Solstice derives from the Latin solstitium: sol, meaning sun, plus sistere, “stand still”—the solstice is the point at which the sun stands still. In this, ahem, light, the third line of Frost’s quatrain, its wayward rhyme, is an accounting, an observing: a bearing witness to the old rhythms against which all our human machinations beat and bleat and strive. But it only takes a moment’s work to decide that you can linger there a while, and let the easy music of the wind, the sharp smell of snow, enchant you. The thing to remember about keeping promises is: they will keep.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

As you might imagine, independent bookstores really depend on holiday sales, and this is a great time of year to shop independently instead of at the enormous online retailers (who don’t need your money, frankly). You can even use that site that won’t be named to find titles and make a wish list, and then take that list of books to your local indie and buy from them instead. If you don’t have an indie or a brick-and-mortar chain bookstore near you, check out Bookshop.org, which gives a portion of its profits to independent bookstores.

To get you started, in case you’re looking for recommendations, here are some of my favorite books from 2025, plus a couple of books coming out in 2026, including a new collection of poems by yours truly, my first book of poems in five years. I love preordering books as holiday gifts, and giving a card that tells the recipient what title(s) they’ll be receiving and when. That with some dark chocolate, coffee, or tea? Instant holiday hero.

Lion by Sonya Walger
Startlement: New and Selected Poems by Ada Limón
Paper Crown: Poems by Heather Christle
Terminal Surreal: Poems by Martha Silano
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis
Scorched Earth: Poems by Tiana Clark
The New Economy: Poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
A Silent Treatment: A Memoir by Jeannie Vanasco
Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly, coedited by David Baker and Michael Collier
The End of Childhood: Poems by Wayne Miller
Transit: Poems by David Baker (preorder)
A Suit or a Suitcase: Poems by…me (preorder)*

*My neighborhood bookstore, Gramercy Books, allows you to order signed and personalized copies of my books, and they’ll ship to you anywhere in the continental US. I love walking down to Gramercy to sign books and make them out to the people you care about most: friends, kids and grandkids, teachers, neighbors. So please know that’s an option this holiday season! The folks at Gramercy—and I—appreciate your support.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

The second poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Sarah al Bohassi.

Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi [Instagram login required].

Sarah al Bohassi is a 13-year-old poet from Gaza. She has composed her poem in English. As Robert Macfarlane has written on Instagram: ‘Her mother has multiple sclerosis so Sarah looks after the whole household. They can’t get medication for her mother and can’t evacuate her. Sarah has not stopped writing.’

Sarah’s poem has been letterpress-printed by @theohersey. You can buy an A4 print of her poem here. Each purchase also comes with an A5 print of ‘Repeating Ourselves III’ by Alice Oswald, Zaffar Kunial, Max Porter and Robert Macfarlane. All proceeds will be shared directly with Sarah and her family, and with @doctorswithoutborders.

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 2: Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi

It’s been a good year for my memoir, and I am thrilled to have been reviewed and interviewed a few times . Today I heard I made the Lit Hub list of notable titles. The reviewer wrote: Nin Andrews’ memoir in prose poems chronicles her feral childhood among farm animals, miscellaneous siblings, and eccentric parents. As the “last daughter of a gay man and an autistic woman,” she is raised mostly by a Black nanny (the memorable Miss Mary, who nicknames her “Son of a Bird”), along with cranky farmhands and the land itself. I was swept up in the poet’s exhilaration, confusion, and awe as she digs up and lyrically configures her past. Heart-breaking, revelatory, and devastatingly funny, these are brilliant vignettes. (Charles Goodrich)

Nin Andrews, A Good Year for Son of a Bird

With no access to slots at major festivals, no wholesaler, no chance to get copies on shelves at physical bookshops, no distribution in the U.S. or Canada, no realistic retail prices on Amazon, no reviews in broadsheets or major print-based journals, Nell (at HappenStance) and I have now shifted going on for 250 copies of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t. And I’m determined to ensure there will be plenty more sales of it to come over the next few years.

In this context, I’m inevitably left wondering just how many I’d have sold with any of the external commercial support network I’ve mentioned above. And, given that many significantly funded poetry publishers (who do have that sort of backing) have stated their average sales of full collections barely reach three figures, why aren’t they flogging far more copies than me instead of far fewer…?

Matthew Stewart, My personal experience of selling poetry collections in the current climate

My new poetry collection. The Artist’s House is a cultural autobiography, honoring the literature, art, and artists that have shaped my writing, with illustrations and interactive features. It will include Art Nouveau style drawings and links to music, dance, and poetry online. Listen to a song by Jacob Collier while reading a poem about Emily Dickinson’s lines dueling with Taylor Swift’s. Watch a performance of Twyla Tharp’s “In The Upper Rooms” ballet after reading the poem it inspired.

This has been a passion project, poems contemplating the world of art and the creative process. I’ve been drawn to contemplate this since childhood, as I grew up with the arts — a father who was a painter and a mother who was a musician. They enriched my childhood with reading, visual art, music, and dance—taking us to see concerts and plays, to visit museum and art exhibitions.

Rachel Dacus, Why I’m Inspired by Art and Artists

“The Instagram astrologers says big positive changes are coming for me this week!” I yelled from my reading chair to my spouse at his laptop, although the cats seemed interested, too. He said something like “that’s nice, honey,” or maybe just a neutral “mmm” because he was concentrating on the hundredth book of comics scholarship he’s found himself writing for fun, because his brain grooves on producing scholarship. I sighed, shut off the social media algorithms that were mesmerizing me into a stupor, and pulled Phillip Pullman’s massive new novel onto my lap.

Hence my delay in spotting what a few FB friends had just posted to my timeline, that Mycocosmic has been named to Literary Hub’s list of 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025. (I turned off all social media notifications years ago–I’m distractible enough, thank you.) My mycelially themed poetry collection even appears in Lit Hub’s graphic, in the understory, appropriately enough. I had just woken up and searched for the local outdoors farmer’s market page on FB to make sure they’re still opening at a very chilly 8 a.m. Instead I sat on the wooden stairs in my pajamas to read and process. I’ve never had a book appear on one of these year-end lists before. It’s a multi-genre list including eight poetry collections. That’s pretty good, right?

Lest I get TOO cheerful about it: after the article throws out disheartening stats about how seldom small press books appear on “best of” lists, it states, “This is not a best of list.” Ahem. I don’t think lists intended to be “best of” actually qualify for that label, either, as it happens. It’s not like even the most diligent poetry reviewers know about every good collection published that year, much less have given each one a fair shake. The U.S. poetry scene is big, messy, and wildly various in ways the highest-profile review outlets don’t reflect. “Best” is more like “my favorites among the books that floated across my attention this year, with an emphasis on buzzy authors and prestige presses and fellow Brooklynites who already got a lot of media because c’mon, I’ve been doomscrolling more often than reading poems, just like you.” (I do get it, Imaginary Poetry Reviewer–reading everything is impossible–I’m just perpetually irked by how NYC-centric the poetry world can seem.)

Lesley Wheeler, Stars, luck, and revelations

One day during a challenging season of being, longing for something that would turn my spiraling mind outward, knowing that a daily creative practice has always been my best medicine and that constraint is the mightiest catalyst of creativity, I decided to try applying my bird divination process to the Little Free Library, trusting the lovely way our imagination has of surprising us and, in doing so, reminding us that even in the bleakest moments it is worth turning the page of experience because the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.

Every day for thirty days, I took a random book from the Little Free Library, opened to a random page, and worked with the text on it, making no aesthetic judgments about the literary value of the books — self-help, airport romance novels, finance textbooks, breastfeeding guides, Lemony Snicket, Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and the Bible were all raw material on equal par.

As every creative person knows, and as Lewis Carroll so perfectly articulated in his advice on working through difficulty in math and in life, our most original and unexpected ideas arrive not when we strain the mind at the problem, but when we relax it and shift the beam of attention to something else entirely; it is then that the unconscious shines its sidewise gleam on an unexpected solution no deliberate effort could have produced.

After reading over the page, I would take a long walk to let the words float in my mind as I knelt to look at small things — pebbles, petals, leaves, feathers, and a whole lot of that great teacher in resilience, lichen — picking one thing up to take home. The words invariably arranged themselves unconsciously into the day’s… divination? koan? poem?… that always surprised me, always revealed what I myself needed to hear that some part of me already knew.

Upon returning home, I would place the found object under my microscope and take a photograph — cellular and planetary at the same time, itself an invitation to a shift in perspective — then begin laying out the text over the image.

Here they all are — perhaps uncommon gifts for the book-lover in your life, perhaps simply inspiration to try the practice yourself — available as translucent 4×4 blocks with proceeds supporting my endeavor to put up Little Free Libraries in book deserts throughout the five boroughs of New York City — communities more than a mile from a public library or bookstore.

Maria Popova, Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects

We are in this together. The dream of the lens
has led us to an abandoned treatment plant, a cold
and vacant warehouse. Shacks, trails. Underground.
Mines and secrets whisper in the grasses, telling
of nations, angelic invasions, the terror of inhaling
eternity’s parasites. Just so, the children here
grow vast libraries of psychic error.

R.M. Haines, “The Other Century”

Whenever I feel trapped or stalled, I sit in a space (pub, coffeeshop, whatever) with a stack of reading to flip through (poetry books, fiction, non-fiction whatever, as I’m always behind on my reading), with notebook + pen + nowhere to be for a couple of hours and no expectation, beyond flipping through reading; it always triggers even a sentence or a thought or a something into the notebook. From a spark, one can build, certainly.

Also: attempting to write to a particular prompt might also force an idea, beyond one’s usual structure or comfort zone. I know Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen composed a novel based on taking words-as-prompts for each section; one hundred short sections from one hundred short words. If you can imagine, she wrote a whole novel out of that.

I’m currently working a poetry manuscript from weekly prompts that Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany has been offering since January, but I’m using less as forced-prompt than simply a structure to stretch my boundaries; he’s only doing this year, so I’m hoping I can get a manuscript of something somehow coherent and publishable out of it.

Denver poet Julie Carr said she was feeling stalled during early Covid, so I suggested a call-and-response; I wrote a poem and sent it to her; she wrote a poem in response; I wrote a poem to her response poem; and so on; we each manage a dozen poems over a year and a half (I produced our immediate results into a chapbook, but she later rewrote hers into three poems, which landed in her 2024 collection, whereas I’d initially hoped we could get a full collaborative book out of it; my side of our conversation, thus, appears in my spring 2026 book with Caitlin Press).

rob mclennan, How to break through a writing block:

winter wind
the voice of one tree
after another

three of a kind by tom clausen

The evening in York was a memorable one: Janet Dean and Ian Parks, whose new collection we were celebrating, read beautifully, and Jane Stockdale’s songs and tunes were delightful. I stuck to my usual set of poems from The Last Corinthians, tempting though it was to read different ones and even some from my previous collection and/or some new ones.

Five days after York, having been invited by Katie Griffiths to read in Walton-on-Thames alongside Sophie Herxheimer, I skedaddled down south for what was perhaps the most enjoyable gig for me since the one in Nottingham in September. Sophie is a force of nature, an artist as well as a poet, whom I could’ve listened to all evening. She got everyone making zines during the interval. Katie herself read a poem; it’s excellent news that Nine Arches will be publishing her second collection next year. There was also a short open mic, the readers including marvellous Jill Abram.

As Walton is only a few miles west of Kingston, I tailored my set accordingly, with more locally-set poems than I would normally read, though I decided – wisely, I think – against reading one, ‘The Blue Bridge’, which features Sham 69, who came from the neighbouring town of Hersham. In all, it was a joyful evening, and a good way to end this year of readings, which has seen me appear in eight cities and towns in England within the space of six months. It’s been more of a meander than a tour, and two of them were serendipitous invitations at fairly short notice; nonetheless, it’s been lovely to read my poems out loud in front of attentive listeners, not all of whom are poets themselves. I’m thankful to everyone who’s come along, whether because of me, my co-readers or both.

Matthew Paul, Recent readings and reading

On 7th Dec I attended a CB1 poetry event at yet another new venue – the Brew House. About 40 people attended. I hadn’t heard of either of the headline poets. Leo Boix read from his book of 100 sonnets. Stav Poleg lives in Cambridge and has been in The New Yorker among other places. Her work sounded more substantial – rather heavy going for a reading, but a name worth adding to my reading list. Her “Memory and Geography” poem was excellent.

The open-mic readers took up over half the evening and were more varied than ever. A few of them had never performed poetry before. One person read a piece that they hadn’t looked at since they wrote it in 5 minutes. Another read his piece that has just won 2nd prize in the Bridport (£1000). I read an old piece that I think I’ve read before. It’s about time I read something new.

Tim Love, CB1 – Stav Poleg and Leo Boix

This past week I facilitated a workshop called “The Gift of Poetry.” In it I and some of my poet friends, Jon Pearson, Kim Malinowsky, John Brantingham, and Robbi Nester all shared prompts they use to write poems for special people. Some of these ideas incorporate visual elements, making the poems more like art pieces. Some of these prompts involve writing to a specific person, incorporating telling details about them in the poem. To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure how things would work out. I find it really difficult to write poems to people I love without getting too squishy. I have to say though, I was truly blown away by the fun, funny, tender, beautiful things people shared in our workshop. Everyone walked away with great material to make into poetic gifts for loved-ones.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Poems and Prompts from Our Community

Many thanks to Kathleen Mcphilemy for including three of my poems in episode 37 of Poetry Worth Hearing or you can listen on Youtube, Audible and Spotify. […]

The theme was hiding and/or seeking. The episode is 60 minutes. The first half hour or so is an interesting interview with poet Nancy Campbell who talks about her residency on Greenland among other things. The interview and Nancy’s poems bookend poems by Guy Jones, Zelda Cahill-Patten, Lesley Saunders, Pat Winslow, Richard Lister, Dinah Livingstone, and Sarah Mnatzaganian.

Fokkina McDonnell, Poetry Worth Hearing

Home across the Wolds again, the sky now is a winter-dusk sky of pink with a moon as fine as lace. Mum is feeling better after a terrifying couple of weeks. She chats all the way back. My siblings and her friends take over her care now. I can come home.

The next day I try and write but instead I catch up on sleep; deep, dark sleep, the kind without dreams. It is recovery from days of ambulances and terrifying illness and wards and worry. Today I have a meeting about the Arts Council application which is so close to being finished, but for which I have done absolutely nothing except open it up and listen to my brain trying to run away from it. The application is a priority, but so is listening to what my strange brain needs. It needs to sink into writing the book, have a few hours disappearing into the world I have created there, connecting to something that is primal: the urge to create, to write, to transform and today I shall do this. Tomorrow is for questions about impact and audience, numbers and timelines, today is for me. I can feel my protagonist like a ghost at my shoulder, waiting for me to draw her path for her. This has nothing to do with grinding towards a word count and everything to do with the creative brain enjoying its work.

But how do I fight the fear? How do I stop feeding the roots that cause me to worry about being left behind? What will I do when I can’t rely on my work ethic, when the sacrifice of time needs to be made to people, not pages? I fight it with the secret, shy knowledge that it is not the grind that has led me to this point in my career. That is a factor, but the other, more important factor is ability. I have crossed out ‘talent’ so many times in this sentence, it is just too cringe. I will settle with ability. The ability to create in a unique way, unique to my odd brain and way of thinking. No one can write this book but me, not because they wouldn’t know how to write it, or because they wouldn’t get there first, or aren’t as dedicated, but because they are not me. The root that I need to feed is the one that values my own ability, my own differences. Difference is uniqueness. The work, the book, will wait for me. It can’t be written without me.

I’m sitting in my writing room watching the seagulls crossing a lavender sky. Early morning. Good coffee, the laptop singing to life, the work ready to be done.

Wendy Pratt, The Fear is on Me

Weather continues dizzy
with fatigue, slowly floating
drifts forming of white dust: snow,
ash, the evaporation
of poison rain, something else?

PF Anderson, On Resilience

I love art for its embrace of the not-knowing. That sense sometimes of sliding one foot forward slowly in the dark, then the other; or of feeling along the wall for a light switch. I know it’s here somewhere. I like that the advice offered in poems can be both wise and suspect, both silly and true. Can be understood by the body, but not necessarily by the brain. Yes, something in me says. Yes, that’s true, even as the rational brain may say, Now, wait a minute, hold on here, what’s this now? And I appreciate artists who speak out of the not-knowing, the I’m-not-sure. The artists who say, Let me show you what I saw, tell you what I heard, and you decide: what does it mean?

Marilyn McCabe, the eloquent purple, those heart shaped leaves

The final few lines reference an interview and performance John Cage gave on television in January, 1960 which has always stayed with me—his way of being seems so gentle and loving—and remains an endless source of inspiration to me in my own approach to poetry and life: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”

Dick Whyte, Maude Uschold – 2 Short Poems (1926-1935)

I wonder about the vacuum
that grows inside me
like an ancient bonsai.
Pruned and constrained.
Yet sometimes daring to offer a miniature flower.
Or to break through skin —
as wound
as weapon
as poem.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Honeycomb

For the video below, I took the first twenty or so sections of Oppen’s poem “Of Being Numerous” and transformed them into this new text (a process involved alphabetizing, and multiple Google translations and then editing) which is haunted and speaks to the spirit of the times, somehow. Then I made this video which is all about absence and haunting. I recorded myself playing alto recorder and then tranformed that into MIDI harp and ceramic bowl sounds which I transformed through delay, reverb and displacement.

Gary Barwin, On “Forgetting”: Turning One’s Back on Turning One’s Back to the Future

Something you may not know about me is that I sometimes wander onto eBay to hunt for things I’m convinced belong in the Poetry Museum I curate in my mind. Some people binge-watch Stranger Things, some people look for lost ephemera.

In my searches, I found this letter written by Anne Sexton, which I found charming. Not because I am a fan of cucumber soup, but because of the P.S. at the very end. [image]

Here’s my cucumber soup recipe AND I won the Pulitzer Prize—all things being equal.

I’ve always loved letters and postcards (you may have noticed I’ve renamed this Substack Postcards from a Poet, because for me, this feels less like a “newsletter” and more like a small check-in from me to you: Hey, how are you holding up? Here are a few things bringing me joy.)

And here’s something that delighted me this week: I did not know that people (and kids!) write postcards to Emily Dickinson via the Emily Dickinson Museum. While many were mailed, this one, I’m guessing this one was penned in the moment and handed over to museum staff. And well, it warmed my heart: [image]

“Thank you for writing a soft sea washed around the house”—Come on! What a way to say thank you! It reminded me of William Stafford’s quote: Everyone is born a poet. . .I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

Kelli Russell Agodon, Anne Sexton’s Recipe for Cucumber Soup…

I stopped writing poetry at a certain point, good party though it was. Coulda been the whiskey mighta been the gin, coulda been the humiliation coulda been the freeze-out. I kept moving toward where the love was. Maybe poetry left me, and maybe it’ll come back some day. What has always seemed perverse to me though is that poets could form inhospitable communities. But in the end I’ve found my own small community of hospitable and openhearted writers and that has made all the difference. […]

I think most of us stopped imagining that the creative life would ever get easier, but suddenly it seems like it will be getting harder than ever. And it’s still hard for me, 13 or so books in, 35 years or so in. But I worry about the young writers, all of them. The ones who haven’t even begun to imagine a writing life for themselves. The ones who live in a world with drugs that affect your appetite, making you feel hungry when you’re not, and others that make you feel sated when you might need nourishment. And it makes sense to take drugs for depression, anxiety, diabetes. It does. It makes sense to be afraid right now. It makes sense that many are in a recurring flight or fight response mode which elevates cortisol levels and which according to Harvard Health could in a chronic case cause, “brain changes that may contribute to anxiety, depression, and addiction” and weight gain.

One must continue to ask as Woolf did, “Now what food do we feed women as artists upon?” What new considerations are there? As a white woman writer in my 50s in the mid 2020s, of what use can I be? Is it helpful to tell my story? Or is it better just to get out of the way to make space for others to articulate theirs? How do we make meaning of our own ongoing stories at this particular historical moment? How do we balance the needs of our stomachs so that our small eyes can imagine an enormous and nourishing future?

Shawna Lemay, Artemisa Gold – an Essay

Ramisha Kafique updates the role of flâneuse to today’s world, taking in streets and cafés both local and distant. In the process, she also subverts the original role of a white male strolling city streets and recording what he observed to that of a Muslim woman, recording what she sees and how people observing her react. As the title poem, “Postcolonial Flâneuse” observes,

“Neutral positions clash with colourful scarves and turbans, veils, bands, and bracelets. You can’t tell them what not to wear, here. Is it my faith that is silencing me or your gaze? Is there a lack of me in the spaces I inhabit?

“Give space. deep breaths, sighs, long strides, fingers fiddling in laps, chins resting in hands. Alhamdulillah. I can walk where I like.”

England’s bland, grey streets where everyone was in business uniforms or a casual uniform of sweatshirts and jeans, are being opened up to colour and signifiers of different religions. There’s a challenge too as the speaker asks if those observers who see her as different are assuming her faith doesn’t allow her to walk alone or visit a café without a chaperone or their attempts at intimidation, even unintentional, are trying to push her out. The poem’s speaker, however, is not deterred. She records in “Book in Hand”, “She has become part of/ the mass. She is him, and her,/ and them.”

Emma Lee, “The Postcolonial Flâneuse” Ramisha Kafique (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

One of the funniest episodes of last month was a friend telling me that, coming on the Tube, he’d read one of the Poems on the Underground and hadn’t been impressed. More than unimpressed: he had actively taken agin it, he had wanted to stand in the middle of the carriage and say in a very loud voice: ‘Read that – does anyone think it’s good?? That’s the kind of poem that can put people off poetry for life.’ He sat down next to me and googled the poem on his phone and insisted on reading it aloud, exasperated by every line, and this was funny because I know his exasperation. My encounter with two recent, widely praised novels followed a similar trajectory: I began reading slowly, respectfully; I became impatient; I did some skim-reading; I placed them on my pile of books-to-take-to-the-Oxfam-shop.

The chorus of approval surrounding many new books begins pre-publication with puff quotes for the cover from other writers, with ‘books to look out for’ features in the Guardian, and with excited freelance reviewers posting pictures of their advance copies; post-publication, if there are good reviews and author interviews and ‘profiles’, the chorus can feel wraparound. Stifling. Airless. In this context, negative reviews have a thrilling whiff of iconoclasm, of smashing a statue in a church. Not negative reviews of books (and films, TV shows, restaurants) that are widely agreed to be pretty terrible, because their target is low-hanging fruit and the reviewers are saying little more than see how witty I am, but well-argued negative reviews of books that been praised elsewhere and get ‘likes’ all over the place and have won prizes. These are different; they feel personal.

Charles Boyle, Teeth: On negative reviews

I admit to personal bias here: Andy Fletcher and I go back more than forty years, could be nearing fifty, if numbers matter. And in my view he’s one of the best poets I’ve read in all that time. Like so many others, he should have had more recognition, but thankfully – as his new collection the uncorked banshee rebellion bottle demonstrates – he’s still hard at work, crafting his tight, lively, profound, sometimes mysterious, sometimes tender and always entertaining poems.

He tends to take an image or circumstance, explore it, twist it, find the life in it and then pare it to its essence. He’s rarely if ever wasteful with words, or loose in his construction. With each poem, there is a sense that here is a poet who knows what he wants from the piece – and knows how best to achieve it. This is a skill not easily learned.

Take the poem my work, which is typically absurd in its expansion of an image, yet holds a darkness, a feeling of being overpowered or controlled, as so many do. It begins the teacher examines my work/and says it’s the worst she’s seen// she picks me up bodily/ pushes me into her pencil sharpener/ and turns me until my head’s pointed

In another poem, time, there is an echo of childhood scraps when the narrator’s jumped and knocked over by the grandfather clock in the hall. He fights back but in the end admits defeat – ‘you win’ i gasp. And as we know, time always will. the clock stands upright again/ and chimes loudly

Some poems are very short, just two or three lines, some are blocks set out as prose without punctuation, most are tight and fit into one side, which makes them deceptive. On one level you can take them at face value, enjoy the fun in their ideas, read them quickly. On another you can re-read and consider the depths of understanding of the human condition they contain. 

Bob Mee, ANDY FLETCHER

Bodies of water with a menace of teeth
beneath the surface.

Silvered arms of trees, unleafed, suggest
a longing for taxonomy—

How to remember origins,
where we began.

Luisa A. Igloria, Long Night Moon

It’s December and I have enjoyed reviewing many excellent collections and pamphlets during the course of this year, but the subject of today’s review, Katrina Moinet’s State of the Nations (Atomic Bohemian, 2025), must rank as one of the best. I have a penchant for poetry that pushes the boundaries of language and form and that engages with the challenges of contemporary society. State of the Nations does this and much, much more.  

The collection begins with poems that reflect upon the state of government in our country and perhaps internationally. Demockracy as the title suggests paints a picture of a system of government that makes a mockery of the ideals of democracy. The poem takes the form of a list, each line describing the actions of government often in apparently contradictory statements. For example, Moinet writes ‘Demockracy/ …is arresting/ arrests no one/ rises in solidarity with no one (for fear of arrest).’ This is government that has lost its way: it represents no one, the exact opposite of what a democracy should do! The notion of ‘arresting’ makes the system sound more totalitarian than democratic, and in order to resolve the contradiction in the line that follows (‘arrests no one’), the reader imagines the non-arrest of corrupt political leaders and their friends so characteristic of such states. Perhaps unsurprisingly earlier in the poem we are told ‘Demockracy…is going for a walk…is taking a hike,’ suggesting an abdication of responsibility. As a result, it ‘will find itself on the police national computer/ may one day appear in court.’ The idea of a democratic institution being guilty of illegal acts is frightening.   No wonder the poem ends with an appeal: ‘incites people to read/ incites people to read/ incites people to read it for themselves.’ Moinet is asking us to exercise our sense of individual responsibility: to take note of what is happening, because only through the aggregation of  individual action can we protect democracy.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘State of the Nations’ by Katrina Moinet

In the mid-1980s, when I was a graduate student in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MA program, a common topic of debate was what it meant to write “political poetry.” I’m sure my memory has reduced the positions people took in this debate to their lowest common denominators, but there were, as I recall, two basic lines of reasoning. One argued that poets had an inherent obligation to write about the political and cultural concerns of the day—that the vocation of poet, essentially, demanded it. The other asserted that the debate itself was a red herring, because poems were political by definition. The linguistic, formal, and expressive choices a poet made were inescapably and ineluctably already embedded in the poet’s politics. I was just beginning back then to figure out what I had to say as a poet, but my sympathies were with the first group from the start. I knew I wanted—that I needed, actually—to write about my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence, but I wanted to do so by locating that experience within a larger cultural and political context.

My touchstone for this desire was June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights,” in which she connected the fear of sexual violence that kept her from walking alone whenever and wherever she wanted not only to the systemic nature of sexual violence itself, but also to other systems of oppression like racism and colonialism. I don’t know if I could have said it this way then, but making those kinds of connections seemed to hold out the possibility of healing in a way that nothing else did. The sexual abuse of boys was barely recognized as a phenomenon at that time. No one was talking about it because it was assumed to be so rare that it didn’t merit much attention at all; even the therapeutic wisdom in those years was grounded in how uncommon this kind of abuse was believed to be. I didn’t learn this until decades later, but therapists were trained back then to assume that when a boy or man revealed he’d been sexually abused he might very well be reporting a fantasy of some sort, not something that had actually been done to him.

The feminist strategy of making the personal political, in other words—which is fundamentally an ethical stance rooted in the assumption that people do not lie when they relate their own experience, and which “Poem About My Rights” embodied—offered me a way to give meaning to what the men who violated me had done to me beyond the simple fact that I had been their victim. Still, it took me a long time to figure out how to do in my own work what June Jordan did in that poem, primarily because bearing witness to violence and trauma in poetry inevitably confronts the poet with an ethical paradox. A poem, by definition, is a beautiful thing made of words; trauma, on the other hand—in my case the trauma of sexual violence—is anything but beautiful. How can you ethically use the former to represent the latter without in some way falsifying what the person who experienced the trauma went through?

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Poetry to Violence and Trauma

For the last 13 days, Kim and I – mostly Kim – have shown how poetry can help us to survive and speak out against gendered violence; how it can help us to make sense of shattering experiences, to comfort and heal ourselves, to reach out, to offer help, to create communities of recovery and activism. Poetry can invite us to walk in another shoes, to inhabit our own experiences more deeply, more clearly, to find new depths of understanding, empathy, and strength within ourselves. Poetry can deconstruct social systems, old patterns of thought and behaviour, it can highlight injustice; it can demand reparation and inspire action. It can expand and reshape our sense of possibility, it can change the world.

In “Writing about Trauma/ Writing Saved My Life”, I draw from my faith in poetry to examine why writing about trauma is a powerful experience, which can hurt as well as help us. There’s plenty of evidence to support the therapeutic potential of creative writing – but without the right support and structures, writing directly from the experience of trauma can be upsetting, triggering, even retraumatising. Catharsis, in itself, is not therapeutic. Instead, I look at some of the poetic devices we can use to maximise safety and control in the process of writing – metaphor and imagery, rhythm and form – and how these devices can help us to sing in the darkness, about the darkness. This chapter was first published Nine Arches Press in 2021, in “Why I Write Poetry”, a collection of essays edited by Ian Humphreys. It ends with a short writing exercise – and on Day 16, I’ll share a link to a more comprehensive writing resource for those wanting to write about trauma.

Clare Shaw, Day 14: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

The distinctive scientific curiosity and optimism of Cowley, Ewens and Grove, reflected also in Dryden, is one of the most attractive features of the literary culture of the 1660s. These are unignorably political poets, all written by royalists, but their scientific curiosity is never reducible to politics, and, if anything, the extraordinary freshness of their style — in both Latin and English — seems to have been shaped or facilitated as much by the civil war and interregnum as by the Restoration.

No-one reads any of this stuff now, but if you look across Europe there is plenty of Latin didactic verse from the 1660s: these projects were not in themselves unusual. The most obvious comparison for Cowley’s poem is René Rapin’s Hortorum Libri IV (‘Four Books of Gardens’), for instance, published in Paris in 1665 — but Rapin’s staidly elegant Virgilian pastiche has nothing at all of the urgency or oddness of either Cowley or Ewens. Rapin’s beautiful but ultimately slightly tedious Virgilian imitation is typical of the wider genre, and of the kind of description often offered for ‘neo-Latin’ poetry as a whole. But it’s very far indeed from what you find in English scientific poetry of the 1660s, the urgency of which seems to emerge directly from the ravages of civil war and the hope of a lasting peace.

Victoria Moul, The heart of man, what Art can e’re reveal?

A whistling that freezes more deeply
the spines of icicles
goes on and on like a siren.

Out of the fog and the thunder
and the smoke and my shadow
a figure as pale as milk comes tottering, sloshing
staggering.

[…]

This is part of a sequence called ‘Second-Hand Kite Feathers’, all but one of which is genuinely derived from the Japanese.

I can’t speak or write Japanese, but using a combination of Google Translate, Wiktionary and existing English versions (in this case Robert Pulvers’ translation from Strong in the Rain: Selected Poems of Kenji Miyazawa), I sometimes write down versions of Japanese poems in English. I published a few in School of Forgery because the underlying theme of the book was ‘the volatile relationship between fakery and invention’.

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” goes the well-worn Eliot quote. It continues: “Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” But isn’t the defaced object automatically made different? Did he mean that it should no longer bear any resemblance to what it once was? That is has to have been pointed to a new purpose? One thing I like about remakes and readjustments — the principle of them (something which seems to occupy film-makers more than poets) — is how they make it seem as if the paint is not yet dry, as if nothing is really finished.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Icy Advent Calendar #5: Shadow from a Future Zone

In her July 2022 essay “On Erasure” for the Poetry Foundation, Leigh Sugar claims the “erasure poem may be defined by inclusion and/or exclusion—both actions will produce an effect. So, rather than define erasure poetry as a form that solely reveals what may be hidden, we might well understand it as a form and action that, when engaged consciously, can illuminate, for the purpose of celebrating, condemning, revealing, or interrogating, that which is otherwise invisibled.…”

We agree with Sugar’s definition since the poems included in Oversight: Erasure Poetry are, in effect, translations of the original texts. In some cases, they are translations of translations. And with each translation—whether it is the English adaptation of Veronica Franco’s Venetian capitolos or Marie-Sophie Germain’s theory of elasticity published in a French academic journal—the collaborator is effectively creating a variant of the original. Each new translation, each new variant, offers new insight, our purpose, as Sugar says, to illuminate, celebrate, condemn, reveal, or interrogate, that which is otherwise invisible, to lift women’s stories from obscurity.

Oversight: Erasure Poetry – guest post by Carina Bissett & Lee Murray (Trish Hopkinson)

Seeing the End-of-Year lists of fellow writers can make a person feel…all kinds of ways. Yes, it can be inspiring. Yes, we can be happy for our fellow terrestrials as they achieve their intergalactic goals. Yes, it is great to see hard work, hustle and talent get rewarded, especially in a cultural climate that every day seems to squeeze artists into a vice-grip of ever-higher hurdles. (Yes, that was a bizarre mixed metaphor. Blame the vice-grip! And the hurdles!)

Also, though, seeing what other writers have achieved can lead to us looking inward, feeling like what we did, what we got done, what we accomplished simply doesn’t measure up. The happiness we feel for others may invariably lead to a diminished feeling about ourselves.

In therapy-speak, this is often referred to as comparing one’s own insides to others’ outsides. When someone lists their accomplishments in a neat bullet-point list, that’s all you see. The awards. The recognition. The bullets.

What you don’t see is that person’s insides. You don’t see the doubt, the self-recriminations, the anxiety. I once met a writer who got a six-figure book contract for her first collection of short stories. A huge deal, by any measure. This writer was known as an “It Girl” for a good while in the literary sphere.

In a private conversation with this writer, she told me she found writing so hard that she wept in agony through almost all of her revisions. She sat at her desk for hours, typing and crying.

This is not a judgement on that writer’s process. No doubt that writer was working through some serious issues. And she got the work done, which is extraordinary. But are those tears of agony visible to anyone reading about her “It Girl” status? Did the Publishers Marketplace announcement of the book deal include the fact of this writer’s pain?

Of course not. End-of-Year lists rarely mention such things.

Becky Tuch, Q: What are your (intangible) end-of-year accomplishments?

My desk at the synagogue is cluttered: books, binders, folders, piles of sheet music, one of my son’s tallitot, siddurim, printouts from a recent text study session. After Hebrew school the other day (which means: after early nightfall) my eye lingered on this corner of the desk. I love the small framed print, especially at this season of the year.

The print is by Beth Adams of The Cassandra Pages, who I first met in the early days of both of our blogs, probably in 2004. Beth published two of my books of poetry. I think she gave this print to all of us who had work in Annunciation, an anthology of poetic and artistic work exploring the figure of Mary, which Phoenicia published… wow, ten years ago now.

The jade rosary was a gift from Seon Joon, who I first met when they were blogging about Buddhism and preparing to move to South Korea to ordain as a Buddhist nun. We met in person for the first time at a blogger meet-up in 2005. They wrote about their ordination back in 2012, and I posted about getting to meet up then, too — A rabbi and a nun walk into a bar.

Both of these friendships began via our blogs. We read each others’ posts, we commented, we emailed each other. For a time there was a list-serv for literary, artistic, oddball bloggers who felt akin to each other; some of us met up in Montréal in 2006. I miss those days of the internet. The vibe was entirely different from today’s outrage-driven social media sphere. […]

Today’s internet rewards quick takes and clickbait. But all of these objects link me with a slower speed. Relationships built over time. Sacred items that are familiar to my fingertips — the jade rosary, the wooden coin emblazoned with a quote from a second-century text (Pirkei Avot 2:16.) Even the photo of my son, evoking the slow shifts of parenthood.

Maybe it is the poet in me, the contemplative in me, the artist in me. Maybe it is a function of being in my fifties. Maybe it is the impact of my strokes and heart attack. I am far more interested in the slow harvest of mindfulness than in heated social media arguments. I want to be reflective and steady. Not a blaze, but the lingering warmth of coals.

Rachel Barenblat, Still life

I learned to avoid planning anything the next day or two after our annual amusement park visit. It wasn’t just me. The kids needed time to chill out too. They’d lie on the couch reading or play in the backyard or draw pictures while listening to audiobooks. They didn’t want to go anywhere, didn’t want friends over, they just needed to BE. We were like those creatures from Dr. Seuss’ Sleep Book, the Collapsible Frinks.

That’s what this year has felt like to me. Like post amusement park visit syndrome. Every day’s news packed with atrocities committed in our names against people around the world and people down the street. Gut-punch news about this administration’s war against the environment, healthcare, education, civil rights, even civility. Nearly everyone I know is beyond overwhelm, no matter if they voted for or against. I’ve barely been able to write this year— no essays published and only a few poems. Here’s one of those poems, this one published in One Art: a journal of poetry:

[…]

My sister and father are at the table, all of us
unaware we’re in my dreamworld,
unaware we are inexorably moving away
from each other the way stars grow more distant.
Stand still she says as she fastens a tiny rubber band
at the bottom of each braid so I don’t turn around
to hug her as I long to in my dream. I want to hang on
for dear life as galaxies move apart ever faster
in a universe widening toward absolute zero.

Laura Grace Weldon, Post Amusement Park Visit Syndrome

I dreamed of wolves and the moon they howl at, and now, everything takes me back to understanding the world through stories. My life is a myth. America is a myth. We are bringing the wolves to Yellowstone. We are bringing them back to life. We are finding new stories, changing our outcomes.

In the spring, I plan to visit Yellowstone and see those wolves in all their glory. In 2026, I want to get out more, engage with the world to face my own fears of shame, darkness, failure. In the darkness that has become America, in the desperation of keeping a nonprofit arts organization afloat, it’s easy to feel like you are wandering through a forest of hungry creatures. But they, too, are finding their way through their own stories. They, too, might be seeking miracles.

Shooting stars. The wolves are coming back. We live mythic lives. In 2026, we will do big things. This was our egg year. Next year is our comeback, our hatch year—our flight to the moon.

Kate Gale, The Myth of the Wolf: Surviving One’s Story

This winter, the back door won’t swing open just for the dogs or to catch a few snowflakes on my fingertips. No, this year, the yard will not be cordoned off by frost locks or lattices of ice. I will resume relishing in the real estate. Tour the garden of grays. Shake off the pelt of snow. My body will follow me for the rounds. Snow is but a measurement of time and frequency just like summer’s trumpet vine. I will arrange snowflakes into a poem to read to you. You will watch my voice carry off into the sky without me.

Sarah Lada, Old Bone

This week: birds of omen, feral feminine energy, climbing a mountain in the dark, the father of the tar sands, and much more. Enjoy.

September began with odd signs: red moons, smoke-smothered skies. Are we done with the apocalypse yet? I stayed inside the house most of the week, asthma and itchy eyes keeping me from my beloved garden. It is now said that we have three seasons instead of two in the Pacific Northwest, instead of Rain and Summer we have Rain, Summer, and Smoke. It definitely has been the case the last few years. September is usually a hopeful time for me, but it was hard to get into a better mood trapped in the house and feeling overwhelmed by the heat and heaviness of the air, not to mention the news. […]

September 2nd was the book launch for our friend Martha Silano’s Terminal Surreal, which was online, and at which many people read Martha’s poems from the book since Marty is no longer with us. It was also Martha’s birthday. A reminder to celebrate your friends as much as you can while they are alive. I also thought about the fact that so many people talked about how much they loved Marty’s work—after she was dead. It would have been much appreciated while she was alive, I am sure. Writers rarely hear from their fans, until they are very famous, and often can’t tell if their work is reaching anyone or not. The last Best American Poetry was published that day as well, after announcing the series was ending. NEA grants and BAP going away? I don’t know if fewer accolades make for fewer readers or not. How do you find the poets and authors you love? Bookstore strolls? Reading reviews? Reading anthologies? Another thing to think about. […]

In happier news, my poet friend Kelli Russell Agodon and her husband Rose came out for a visit and after brunch we made a field trip to McMurtrey’s where we saw gigantic pumpkins, tons of dahlias and sunflowers, and cut bouquets to bring home. It was nice to be outside right as the smoke started to subside, and the rain came back – which hopefully will help all the wildfires. I got to talk about poetry and enjoy fall blooms and, you know, try to do that thing where you celebrate the good things in life: friends, flowers, etc.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poet Friend Visits, Flower and Pumpkin Farms, and Red Moons with Wildfire Smoke

---

Oh, little self in a big chair.  One day in this glorious phase of book publishing, the brain got tired, the energy dried up and I got stuck in a weird paralysis about the simplest of announcements.

Child’s play to some, it had to be done, it couldn’t be done.  The swirling began.  Cloudy, impenetrable thoughts hovered for hours (in retrospect, like a poem) before a figure came from the shadows: a younger self.  Of course she would show up!  Self-conscious, defiantly private.  Mortally conflicted about bragging and showing off.  I’d thought the anxieties of that introvert had been talked through ad nauseum.  Placate her and give the girl a lollipop!

But of course, selves don’t disappear, they crouch and get layered and hang behind other selves.  This shouldn’t have been strange to me as “Diaspora of Things” revolves around these very themes. Narratively the book is about the dismantling of a family home and negotiating of relationships, it also understands the self as one of those things which is unfixed, wavering as it undergoes experiences, part of a larger ecosystem of things possessed and dispossessed.  As the speaker assesses, she is re-assessed; as she feels, she is felt.    

Liberations happen; worlds open and flutter and evolve, carrying along their traces.  So the book continues to evolve past its fixed state.  Fresh voices arise.

Jill Pearlman, Diaspora of Things

Perhaps not coincidentally, feral feminine energy is central to the journey of the speaker in my manuscript. Let’s light some candles literally and figuratively to bring it into the world — the energy AND a manuscript that celebrates it.

Now back to why I bring it up in the first place… I can get really good at the “doing things” part of writing. (Exhibit A: the recaps that end these monthly posts.) I tend toward auto-pilot, and the making of lists and checking off items on lists can easily crowd out the heart and soul of writing. Of what I do. Of what’s at stake.

The ferocity in me — the witch, the feminist, the hippie, the one who feels, the one who loves — sometimes loses oxygen. This isn’t due to logistics like time or space but to comfort. I’m gooooood at organizing. I know what I’m doing. It’s a space I’m confident in.

It’s harder to step into other spaces sometime, including those that evoke and reveal the wildness I love.

Carolee Bennett, We Don’t Have to Be Quiet

Somewhere along the way, we started turning our passions into side hustles, placing them under microscopes, or attaching metrics or challenges—X number of submissions or Y number of books read in a year. We’ve learned to infuse discipline into our hobbies.

That’s fine, I guess. But discipline has never been my problem. If anything, my drive can be the enemy. I love writing so much that I tend to overwork myself. I’ll keep going even when my creative muscles need rest, chasing the dopamine of a perfect line break or the high of landing the right metaphor.

I tend to ignore my body’s signals—the ache of staring at small letters, the mental depletion that comes from staying in flow for too long. Since writing isn’t my job, I don’t have clear hours when I “clock out.” The lines are fuzzy, and I can set myself up for burn out if I don’t keep myself in check.

So, I vowed to approach this book in a sustainable way. No pushing. No forcing. […]

Back when I got married in 2016, I wrote a personalized letter for every single guest (~105 people). Each note sat in a chest at the entrance, waiting to be found by its recipient, and read before the ceremony began. I wanted every person attending to feel seen. Yes, it added logistics to an already full plate, but it mattered to me.

I’m carrying that same energy into publishing my book: the intention, the care, the sense of something sacred. I have a couple surprises up my sleeve, a few details that will take extra time and will make this book feel as personal as a handwritten note.

I have never set a deadline for this book. I don’t want to take shortcuts or rush through something that means so much to me. I move with momentum; I am always working toward the next step, but I don’t force the timing. When the work starts to feel heavy, I step back—even if every part of me wants to push through.

When this collection arrives, it will carry every ounce of love and intention I’ve put into it. I’m excited to look back and know that the the process was as special as the outcome.

Allison Mei-Li, My Slow Art Manifesto

I ran across Notes on Complexity [by Neil Theise] right after finishing Sleights of Mind, a book about the neuroscience behind the sort of illusion we call entertainment magic: sleight of hand, sawing people in two, mentalist “mind-reading,” and other performances; the authors, Susana Martinez-Conde, Stephen Macknik, and Sandra Blakeslee, are trying to discover more about how brains work (or filter, and sometimes don’t work so well) by studying how we get fooled by illusionists. This is a fun book, even more fun for me because one of my Best Beloveds has long been an enthusiast of magic shows and magicians. Martinez-Conde and Macknik are neurologists, so–unlike Theise’s text–this book is very body-mechanics in its basis. Their work reminded me of how amazing the human physiological system is. And it’s entertaining.

Before these non-fiction reads, I was finishing up with Proust who, in his own creative way, was exploring the interiority of the human self and carefully observing human interactions, behaviors, assumptions, prejudices, and aesthetics. Not neuroscience, because there is no science to it, but definitely related to how our brains and bodies process experience. My sense is that poetry works that that way for me: it’s not an abstract stream of thought but something inextricable from bodily experience, maybe even, through the environment in which we exist, something deeply connected to everything, a global being-there.

The way we process experience (and is this consciousness?) is largely what leads us to the arts, to make art or to appreciate it, and to decide what feels compelling, important, beautiful. And it’s not all in our heads.

Ann E. Michael, Illusions, connections

I am not done. I am not real:
of course not. An orange seed
is not an orange tree, let alone
an orange grove, where the girls
do their washing and hear the mill wheel turn.
But there are glancing lights everywhere.
Dilations and contractions.

Dale Favier, September Comes Anyway

Poets. Instead of cherishing the openness of creativity and the exciting boundaries of form as a starting point, we say “It’s already done.” We give it a name with an expectation, but the thing itself flickers in and out of sight. Like a moth in the light of a street lamp.

Look at us, we give us names, but Peter is always more than Peter, Peter changes over time, and carries a world of thoughts and emotions we will never know about. A rose is a rose, but it might not be the rose we expect to be.

Names make life easier. As a shorthand. Names can make life complicated too, when we forget they aren’t the thing itself, pulsing with changing expectations attached over time.

Communication is always a ‘getting close but truly struggling with getting there’.

We need to have that in mind.

Kati Mohr, Things, Names, Expectations

Next there is a passage in Rilke’s Letters on Life I’d like to share:

“Look: I also do not wish to tear art and life apart violently: I know that sometime and somewhere, they are of one mind. But I am awkward in life, and for that reason, whenever life tightens around me, it often results in a moment of stasis, a delay that causes me to lose quite a lot.”

He says, “for art is a thing that is much too great and difficult and long for a life, and those of very advanced age are nothing but beginners in it.”

And: “This is why I long so impatiently to get to work, to begin my workday, because life can become art only once it has become work.”

And I am impatient these days, to get to my work. And when I’m living out there in the world, lord, I’m awkward. Yet, I’m not letting my awkwardness stop me from doing things. From saying yes. I had meant to take a month and say no to everything and be a hermit tbh. I’m trying to get to the second draft stage of my current manuscript. Today, I did a manuscript exchange with my good friend Kimmy Beach and my goal is to get it through a couple of more drafts by end of September. Originally this deadline was the beginning of September. Our exchange will be good to spur me on in my edits.

Instead of ignoring the world though, I’ve said yes to invitations of all sorts, lately. Some social, some photography gigs, some work related. The manuscript will get finished — it’s at that point of no return.

There is no balance, we writers and artists know that. Just an attempt. Life will get tangled with art, and sometimes that can be a very good thing. What is one without the other?

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Awkward in Life

A poem is a distortion. Spacetime
Bends and even the poem, powerless,
Curves away. I write knowing that
Direction is an excuse. In what
Earthly way can I align a word, a
Full moon and your eyes? Imagine a
God that whispers the words, that
Holds the sky till the pole star speaks?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Birth of a poem

The dream is balance. Balance as we walk forward.

I am part of publishing and writing and myth-making, and right now, I walk on a tightrope every day to see if the press I run will survive another day. But I persist. We persist. It is how we will survive the next three years, the next crisis, the next moment.

One of my favorite books is The Buried Giant by Ishiguro. In it, an old, devoted couple live in a country which has done great harm but has managed to collectively forget the harm they have done. There has been a legacy of violence that they cannot move beyond without addressing it, but in their collective fog, they aren’t sure what was done and to whom. Still, the couple is on a journey to find their son, to find their memories.

I live The Buried Giant. I will travel to the island of souls, where the ferryman will take me across. Through the press, I work to wake up our collective memories and uplift those stories through literature. I am trying to unbury the giant. I live in a country with a history of violence, much of which has been erased and suppressed. I live in a country of fog, of a history that did not happen and is not happening.

Through habits and fears and dreams, I walk the rope to make sure the stories survive. But while I walk, I breathe. Find joy. Aim for hope. Sometimes, I have honey in my tea.

Kate Gale, Bad Habits, Guilty Pleasures, Joie De Vivre

Two reasons why there has been little news of late. One, CBe isn’t publishing many books – except this month, September, Patrick McGuinness, Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines, see here. Subtle, sensible, surprising, immensely intelligent essays by a man who publishes in more forms and speaks more languages than I have fingers on one hand. Second reason, which is in fact the first reason: in the context of the very bad shit that is happening in the world right now, and the complicit refusal of the UK’s media and government to acknowledge the scale and horror of it, promoting a few good books can feel beside the point. I don’t think I’m alone here.

Anyway. The soil is toxic but I cultivate a little garden. Last week a very good review of Caroline Clark’s Sovetica appeared in Tears in the Fence; excerpts are on the book’s website page. I am very excited about two books that are almost ready to send to print and that CBe will publish early next year: Farah Ali, Telegraphy, and Erin Vincent, Fourteen Ways of Looking.

Charles Boyle, CBe newsletter September 2025: In bad times

It was great fun, creating this way.  I usually start with an idea, which makes revision harder for me.  But with this process, I had no commitment to the lines and images.  I had no sure feeling that I was even creating viable lines or headed to a poem.

Yesterday my first thought, as I stared at the lines, was to call it an interesting failed experiment and move along.  But I pushed through, and now I have a fairly decent poem.  

Will I do it again?  Probably.  But even if I don’t, it’s good to remember that there are many poetry processes.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Paint Patch Poetry Process

赤蜻蛉少し飛んでは考える　根岸敏三

akatonbo sukoshi tondewa kangaeru

red dragonfly

            each time it flies a little

            it stops to think

                                                Keizo Negishi

from Gendai Haiku, #720, June 2025 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 8, 2025)

I was hunting through files to make work-in-progress postcards I like to share on Instagram and realized I have a lot going on. There are numerous projects in various stages of completion that litter the folder in my Dropbox labeled “WRITING.” […]

On one hand, having many projects means perhaps they take shape slower, which is mostly fine since I am a pretty dogged and persistent writer these days. But on the other hand, working on one project at a time might make me feel trapped, especially if things are not going as wanted or expected. I can always bail if I’m stuck and work on something else. The problem is sometimes I wind up stuck for years. 

Last summer, I listened to the audio book of Elizabeth Gilbert’s BIG MAGIC, in which she talked about abandoning projects and how there is a danger in sitting on and sitting with creative ideas too long. Sometimes, the muse goes looking for other vessels. Your ingenious idea gets snatched from the swirling air by someone else before you bring it fully into the world. This happens and I am not sure its a bad thing. Perhaps only because I think creation is totally about your spin and your style, which has nothing to do with an idea or concept that might find itself frustrated with your slowness.

Sometimes it feels overwhelming having too much happening though. Those books get weighty in my writing folder. I occasionally forget they exist. Or like to pretend they don’t exist as I move onto something else. As I contemplate half finished manuscripts and random notes and research for things I haven’t even started, I will probably just close the windows and get on with whatever it is I feel the need to work on right now as we wander into September and the fall months..

Kristy Bowen, magpie brain and the next new shiny

It has been well over a year since I decided it would be a good challenge to climb Snowdon. I needed a long lead in period to enable me to work on my fitness levels, and I am very glad I did because it was definitely a challenge! It was one of those experiences that had me digging deep for reserves of energy and determination, and my legs are telling me they know I have climbed a mountain. It felt exciting to walk up in the dark and to tackle Snowdon in a way I have never done before, and there were times when not seeing how much further there was to go was very helpful. […]

It was good to share the experience with my sister, Katie. She said quite a lot on the way up the mountain at times including some swear words and now she says: “Although I found some of the journey slightly terrifying and at one point did cry thinking ‘Oh my God what the hell am I doing?’ I now feel a great sense of achievement and actually am contemplating climbing a mountain again.”

We celebrated meeting our challenge by having a lovely meal out, and then zonked out shortly afterwards. We even got a medal and were presented with these when we arrived back at the community centre for our breakfast. The group we went with raised more than 31K for Macmillan and as well as our donations for taking part in the walk we raised an additional three hundred and fifty pounds.

It feels good to be writing about a medal for this one hundredth blog, and it would also be lovely to know what the air smells like where you are today to mark this occasion. Do let me know!

Here’s a poem for the full moon because it was full and bright above us as we took out trek.

STOP EATING THE LOVE HEARTS

We scatter snow warmth,
swell soft gifts.
Thank you, thank you.
Near wayside evening birds, 
more bread.
Thank you.
Then all our food gifts –
love hearts.
Refrain.

(N.B., this poem was found in the traditional hymn ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’ and after it was found it was gifted its title.)

Sue Finch, SNOWDON

I know I keep saying it but … I’d love to have more time to review books and write critically. Writing critically about something is a way of wading into it, thinking your way through it, adding something to it. I’ve got pages of notes towards reviews that never materialise. The beating heart of poetry criticism in the UK, meanwhile, is blogs and small-circulation journals —outside of this, it isn’t encouraged very widely or enthusiastically. Even among those who speak passionately of reinvigorating it, too many seem to approach criticism as part sorting machine (a way of ordering books into a hierarchy of quality), part ritualistic act of obeisance, whereby critics contribute to the aura of respectability enjoyed by a heroic figure.

And yes, I complain about this too often as well, but it disturbs me to see people of my own age talking, almost vindictively, about ‘sorting the wheat from chaff’ or lamenting a failure to recognise ‘great poets’ in this, an age of untold poetic abundance. They’ve benefited from a rich vein of work they value … but seemingly won’t be satisfied until their personal choices and tastes are allowed to supersede others’. I’m tempted to say that a golden rule of reading poetry should be that if you don’t sometimes come round to liking something you initially felt cool towards, or wind up disappointed in something you expected to knock your socks off, then you need to rethink your angle of attack.

Jon Stone, “I goon-march and glide”, Part 2

When e-mail replaced paper mail as the way to submit, the volume of submissions soared. One way the magazines coped was to use facilities like Submittable to deal with masses of submissions, passing the cost onto the submitting authors.

Writers started automating their simultaneous submissions. They found AI useful for content enhancement too. Most magazines said they didn’t want AI work – though if authors do use AI, magazine editors won’t be able to find out. A few magazines asked that authors should say if their work used AI.

Magazine editors are now using AI to fight back. Becky Tuch, who runs the ever-interesting litmagnews site on substack, mentions Dapple, a new rival to Submittable, Duosoma, Oleada, Moksha, Fillout, etc. Dapple lets editors add tags like “serial submitter” to authors (so watch out!). More interestingly, editors can outsource tasks to Ash, an AI assistant. It can generate forms. Maybe it could send out automated rejections for pieces that exceed the wordcount or use the wrong font, or have a low-quality list of previous publications. The Dapple site has videos to show you what might be possible.

Where will all this end? I suppose eventually AIs will submit material to AIs. But paper hasn’t completely died out. I know of at least one magazine that still insists on printed submissions through the post.

Tim Love, AI vs AI

The very first recording of a poem being recited, if you discount Edison’s ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ of 1877, is Robert Browning in 1889 on a hand-cranked Edison cylinder. He’s rollicking out ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ in a digestive biscuity voice. The clatter of the rotating cylinder sounds just like galloping horses.

There’s also a fair bit of background noise to Tennyson declaiming the Charge of the Light Brigade in his disconcertingly upper-class register, pitched so that we can’t forget that in those days poetry came down to us from a higher plane. Likewise, I suspect it would be hard for most modern audiences to tolerate Yeats intoning The Lake Isle of Innisfree, intent on avoiding speaking poetry as if it were prose. This is the man who spent his life ‘clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax, that is for ear alone.’

My very first public reading was at the Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse, in 1984 or 1985, their Diamond Jubilee Poetry Competition. I’d written a very mediocre poem in Scots which I had to read out at the presentation. Fortunately, I remember little of the event other than mumbling the lines quietly and very quickly into the trembling lectern while the audience fidgeted and coughed. The presentation was made by the formidable Norman MacCaig, who introduced the awards: ‘I’ve been told to say there were many fine entries in this competition. There weren’t. I’ve been told to say it was difficult choosing a winner. It wasn’t.’

I’ve worked on my technique since then by trying to remember there’s an audience out there, and rather than being myself, I pretend to be myself. The myself that is comfortable speaking in public.

John Glenday, A Bit of a Performance

I loved this issue of Poetry London to the point where I started to wonder if I have exactly the same taste as the editor Niall Campbell. There are two new poems by Carl Philips to start the issue off which I really enjoyed, featuring Philips trademark winding, restless use of syntax and long sentences in the second poem in particular. I also loved the ‘Sestina for Elizabeth Bishop’ by Clare Pollard which has made me look forward to her forthcoming Bloodaxe collection even more, and a new poem Mona Arshi which made me want to order her new collection ‘Mouth’ straight away (sadly need to wait until I get paid!). There’s a brilliant poem by Padraig Regan ‘The Leafy Sea Dragon’ which is a close and meticulous observation of the sea dragon, where we learn all kinds of interesting things about this creature I hadn’t heard of in scientific and lyrical details. We are told that he ‘fibrillates his cellophane /neck-fins’ and later that ‘He is his own autumn’. I love the leaping that the poem does between these two registers and then the poem pivots – here are the last four lines:

      One in twenty, maybe
will survive their quickening. 
       I am tired 
of my petty envies. 

I love poems that do this – leap from one subject to another, leap from observation to epiphany. My favourite poem that does this is of course Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ followed by ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island Minnesota’ by James Wright. I can’t wax on about every poem in the magazine however, but I would urge you to take out a subscription if you can.

I should also declare an interest in that I had a poem published in the previous issue and took out a subscription instead of payment – and have been working on an essay which should be appearing in the next issue so I’m not completely partisan!

Kim Moore, August Reading

The Arabic Alphabet: A Guided Tour, by Michael Beard, with illustrations by Houman Mortazavi:

Before I learned to read it, I confess that the Arabic alphabet seemed to me mysterious, amorphous, drifting, cloudlike, and a little sinister. Eventually, I came to feel that I wasn’t the only one. Eventually, as I learned it, letter by letter, it looked like any other alphabet, but a bit more beautiful. Eventually, this seemed a good reason to write a book about it.

Unlike most of the readings I recommend, which are either books or essays, this one is a website. I met Michael Beard, the site’s creator, when I was invited in 2012 to offer some brief comments on my translations of classical Persian poetry at an event honoring Professor Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani, which was, for me, a real honor. At the time, Beard and I discussed my writing an essay exploring what Iran would look like to an American, English-speaking reader if all they had access to were the translations available on the poetry bookshelves of, say, Barnes & Noble. I still think that essay, or some version of it, might be worth writing, though it would require altering the underlying motivation. At the time, there was precious little Iranian literature being published in translation, certainly not much that most general readers would know about, and so the view of Iran provided by the likes of Coleman Barks’ Rumi or Daniel Ladinsky’s Hafez was the dominant one out there. I mention that discussion because Beard’s impulse in suggesting that essay to me seems akin to the impulse behind this website: to interrogate the lens through which we know the Other and, in this case, to make that Other less alien. Here, for example, are two paragraphs in which he compares the Arabic and Roman alphabets in his introduction to the letter Alif:

The letters of the Roman alphabet are designed to seem physical objects of substance and weight. At the bottom of our letters, serifs have evolved to help us imagine them on little pedestals. We visualize our own alphabetic characters, the ones I’m using now, as objects taking up space, standing on a surface. The Roman alphabet’s simple upright, our capital I, takes up space assertively. The Capital I song in Sesame Street, which dates back to the days of Crosby, Stills and Nash (who sang it), makes our “I” a narrow house on a hill, inhabited, obviously, by the self.

The Arabic alphabet evolved from the same Phoenician characters as ours, but the Arabic letters do not feel like houses or towers with solid foundations. Alif ignores the ground and seems to float in air. Otherwise it would seem balanced precariously on its point. You can trace that sharp edge, taking shape slowly under the hands of countless scribes, shaped by the implement which creates it, the track of the reed pen. Even when shaped by typographic font or composed on a computer screen, Alif preserves a memory of the reed, with its chisel-shaped nib. The result tapers at the bottom and carries a little barb at the top. It’s this balanced, blade-like form that western calligraphers imitate when they attempt to make Roman letters look Aladdinesque.

Beard’s ability to see the letters as more than letters, to give them—however intuitively, poetically, subjectively—their full cultural weight makes this (as yet incomplete) website well worth reading through.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #46

From my collection, Sorry I forgot to pack my ears, I have chosen to look at Losing It, not because I think it the best poem in the book, but because it’s the most frightening poem.

From my twenties I have always been hard of hearing; a sound loss, small at first, did not bother me although I noticed the loss of theatre and radio.  But at forty-nine I failed the medical for teaching and so lost my income.

After writing this poem I understood my anxiety a little better:

            My brain dulls a little

            with each lost phrase.

Deafness in middle life can lead to severe memory loss and all that means.  I think this is the strongest influence on the writing of this poem.

The other influences I experienced that helped were:

            a friend who not only made suggestions about order and content, but patiently helped each poem achieve its best –  

            another friend who read the completed work and gave me a new perspective on it –

             Lynne Wycherley, who writes the most beautiful line in North Flight – something to work towards, even though she remains out of reach.

My last influence is, perhaps, the strongest.  Unable to join in with groups, lectures or parties, even a poetry reading is beyond me now, I have turned to walking.  The wonderful thing about the natural world is that I can see it and hear a little, but it does not expect a reply, so I don’t become as exhausted as I do with people.

Drop-in by Jenny Hamlett (Nigel Kent)

Despite being awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 2016, Gillian Allnutt remains beneath the radar even of many well informed readers. This is odd because there’s no better poet alive in England, and no better poet of England either. Her poetry is full of English plants and places and it inhabits, too, the full historical landscape of the English language, from Anglo-Saxon onwards: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Julian of Norwich; Blake and Wordsworth; Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot. That risks making her sound learned and difficult, a sort of female Geoffrey Hill. But Allnutt’s poetry has the smooth, rich patina of old furniture (one of her favourite words): shaped by time, but lovely to handle and apt for use.

Last year I, along with various other writers, was asked by the editor of Porlock Poems if I could name any contemporary poets who in my view fulfilled Emily Dickinson’s criteria and “made you so cold no fire could warm you and took off the top of your head”. We were allowed to name up to three poets and propose a single specific poem (by one of the three, or someone else). After thinking about it at some length, Allnutt’s was the only name I gave, and it was one of her poems (‘healing’, from the 2018 collection Wake) that I sent. In the final list, which you can read here, almost everyone else has named three so perhaps I took the question a bit too literally. There are plenty of other poets writing today I admire; but I do think that Allnutt is in a class of her own.

The typical Allnutt poem is very short, resting easily on a single page but sinking quickly into the memory, like ‘summertime’, from Lode:

mute or musical as morning rain
and you as always gone
how I listen to your absence to my own
to the now and then of wood pigeon
its dear inconsequential circumlocution

The stripped back syntax, skipped articles and suggestive elisions link her style to modernism, and perhaps especially to the work of Basil Bunting, another poet of Northumberland.2 But they point, too, to a specifically linguistic awareness. Her acute sense of what makes English what it is is shaped by other languages and other versions of the language: for all her powerful sense of place, it is the opposite of parochial.

Even in the collection under review — which, being set partly in lockdown, doesn’t travel as much as usual — we find versions of Mandelstam and Laforgue.

Victoria Moul, Gillian Allnutt, “lode”

“Debris” collects poems from Daniel Huws’ first two books, Noth (Secker, 1972) and The Quarry (Faber, 1999), alongside a substantial selection of new poems and translations. As a whole, the collection spans 70 years (including breaks from writing when life got in the way). Huws claims poetry was “never a vocation” and the poems were written free from the trend of artificial deadlines created by a writer who wants to keep publishing and worries about staying relevant. […]

[Ted] Hughes’ view of Huws’ poems was, “there is nothing fashionable about Huws’ poems. The all-inclusive, wholly human, wholly musical, final simplicity of the oldest folk-rhymes and songs was the ultimate aim of such a poet as Yeats… Anyone with an ear to hear will recognise the genuine substance and accent of that poetry in Daniel Huws.”

It’s a verdict that still stands. “Debris” shows Huws as a precise, lyrical poet, alive to sounds and definition of words deliberately chosen. They have a quiet substantialness, like a welcome rock on a mountain hike which offers chance to sit, take in the scenery, let other concerns drift and inhabit the space offered. That’s not to say the poems merge into the scenery, they don’t, because their effects linger after reading. “Debris” will be welcome to both readers new to and familiar with Huws’ poems.

Emma Lee, “Debris” Daniel Huws (Carcanet) – book review

Been on a bit of hiatus recently. Had some other projects to get done, including a new book of my own poetry, my first full-length book of haiku translations, and a new website. More news soon! Hope everyone is well, and we’ll return to our usual programming next week.

              —: Fragment :—
                          by Dick Whyte

       whatever's been forgiven gives
       four gifts, all wrapped in linen—

       an earthen jug—
       a wooden bowl—
       a sack & a map to a river—

       [ . . . ]

Dick Whyte, Fragments Vol. 1: Golding, Dunning, Fuller et al. (1928-1929)

From Winnipeg poet, editor and scholar Melanie Dennis Unrau comes the debut full-length poetry title, Goose (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2025), a book-length visual poem project (an excerpt of which also appeared as a chapbook through above/ground press a while back, as well as through the Spotlight series) of simultaneous excavation and erasure that emerges from the work of “Canadian Development of Mines expert and Word War I veteran” Sidney Clarke Ells (1878-1971), the self-declared “father of the tar sands,” specifically his 1938 collection of poems, short stories and essays, Northland Trails (1938). Through an expansive visual sequence, Unrau works her project as one of critical response, working to engage with and, specifically, against the original intent of Ell’s language back into itself, and the implications of what those original intents have wrought. The book is set with an afterword by the author, and an opening “FOREWORD” by McMurray Métis, that opens: “There is a long history in Canada and indeed across the world of European ‘explorers’ appropriating the knowledge, skills, and labour of Indigenous peoples for their personal and collective gain, only to tur around and declare the territories of Indigenous peoples ‘terra nullius,’ and their cultures and ways of live inferior and unworthy of respect. This dialectic of appropriation-negation is familiar to Indigenous people across the globe. And so it is with Fort McMurray, its oil sands, and their ‘father,’ Sidley Ells. Through research, community and public awareness, and the construction of our cultural centre, McMurray Métis hope to correct these self-serving and distorted narratives, and assert our historic and continued presence, way of life, and self-determination. Let this foreword be one small step in that direction.”

Visually expansive, with a delightful use of image and space, Unrau moves through the language, sketches and, seemingly, the typeface, of Ells’ 1938 collection to unravel an acknowledgment of the Indigenous peoples within that space, and the environment and landscape of those pilfered, poisoned lands, showcasing the illusion of self that Ells presumed upon that landscape, flipping a script of belonging that was never his to take. “Inspired by books like Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps, M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong!, Syd Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia, Shane Rhodes’s Dead White Men, and Lesley Battler’s Endangers Hydrocarbons,” Unrau writes, as part of the book’s “AFTERWORD,” “I started to make visual poetry out of found text and images from Northland Trails. After some experimentation, I developed a method of building poems and critical arguments about Northland Trails by tracing words and illustrations from its pages.”

rob mclennan, Melanie Dennis Unrau, Goose

Everyday I wake up and step into the history unfolding. My head is awhirl. My eyes are darting around to try to anticipate what will happen next. Who it will happen to, and by whose hand. I keep waiting for some “impulsive miracle.” Here is a poem about a historical figure I don’t hear much about. He was a struck match. Or he did the striking. Or he was tinder for the fire. History is not sure. I’m thankful for Sean Singer for clueing me into this wonderful poet, Jay Wright.

Marilyn McCabe, shifting uneasily under

Song of trance states, altered states, a united states of grace.

Song of aim, a trigger in the brain, the shot heard ‘round the world that is more a sound of peace, battlefields dreaming in shades of technicolor tranquility.

Song of calligraphy, hand-written love notes, smoke signals whispering, come closer.

Rich Ferguson, When I Grow Up I Wanna Be a Song

they’re not coming for us
they’re already here
that warmth you feel

is the breath of the enemy
uniformed like a dark patch of night
light glinting off a truncheon

Jason Crane, POEM: the rainbow I want to see

when i say
“us” i mean myself & the wrens who are
trying to get fat before winter. if only i were
smaller & hollow boned. then i could
join them in building nests along
the eaves of the neighbors’ houses. instead,
i linger on the street outside
while taking an afternoon walk. note
the details of the porch posts & window edges.

Robin Gow, nesting

When I go home, my house is still there. And when I look out its windows, the glass is smudged with fingerprints from pointing at the jays and deer. And outside this window over here, Black Eyed Susan and Partridge Pea. Cars drive by outside and don’t shoot bullets at me and mine. And it’s 5:01 pm and the evening light hits the colored glass of the lantern just so. Because my mother bought me that lantern when I was in my twenties and living alone. I sit down at this dining room table, the lantern in my peripherals and I am grateful. Because when I go home, my house is still there.

Because when I look through the windows at the sky, there is no trailing ball of fire besides the sun and the unfathomable amount of invisible stars. I am not witnessing dead, decaying humans all around me, a hand here, a bloated belly there, a smashed-in head over there. I am not okay with other humans starving as I feed the birds. I am not okay with other humans being pummeled to the ground for existing beyond a boundary as I gently carry a moth back outside without touching their wings.

Sarah Lada, Because When I Go Home, My House Is Still There

Most of the time, we don’t know
the extent of what we can do until
we do it. Until the hair wound around
the throat of the instrument tightens
and has no recourse but to break,
until the sentries open the metal
gates themselves to let in the rioting
crowd. Someone says look at the trees
now afire with the songs of omen birds—
look at the light that slants across
house roofs and knights them as
cathedrals.

Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for an Uprising

seedling of an exhausted species, whose language can i speak.

word is wind. and sky, windless.

leaves give tongue until their skin burns green.

Grant Hackett [untitled]

This week: the church of heart and hurt, beachcombing for the broken bits, children marching in the street, and much more. Enjoy.

As a water droplet cut with a knife
as the Red Sea parts, closes, makes us cross again. 

Everything that brought me to this moment

is carried inside, written in salt water and suffering
amidst nihilism and terror,

moistening my lips as I stand on the plain women’s balcony
near the rooftops, t-shirts and sweats blowing.

Jill Pearlman, Salt Water & Suffering

I’ve become an easy traveler in my old age. I’ll do everything and nothing. I need my daily pill regimen, good morning coffee, an afternoon IPA, a pack of smokes, and a camera. Taking a vacation from work is guilt-free for me. What could happen in a week or two? But it’s impossible for us to take a vacation from this administration. It’s everywhere. We’re like pieces of pumice, with a new hole in our skin for each atrocity that pecks away at us.

I still wake up every day to news from my new besties, Heather, Jessica, Rebecca, Robert H., Robert R., and Adam, and I read it all in lieu of leisurely puzzle-doing. Trying to pick through the bad news for something good is like combing the beach for a single shell that isn’t broken.

Artist’s Statement: I break things and put them back together in a random,
yet tasteful, order. I make the big small and the small big—
in words, photographs, and visual art.

But I’m not the typical beachcomber. I go looking for the broken bits. My shells are not destined for a Southern Living spread. I’m on the hunt for patterns, colors, textures. I choose weather-worn whelks, oysters with barnacles, tile-flat bits. My biggest prizes are moon shells and periwinkles, the ones that look most like they once housed a snail, their centers looking back at me like eyes or perky, non-protruding nipples. I found a piece of a helmet shell that looks like an evil, toothy grimace. With two periwinkles, I have created “The Face of the Resistance.”

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Woosah!

What was so exciting about Seville was that it felt ambitious. Perhaps a city that’s so vulnerable to heat and flooding can be brave. I don’t know anything about urban planning, but I loved the easy access to the great river that runs through it, loved what’s been done with older buildings. And this picture shows the contemporary art museum – not easy to find but that’s another story, perhaps it was me. It’s in an old monastery that became a ceramics factory, and is now a place to show contemporary art. Gorgeous, big, rambling almost empty when I went, and with so many different unexpected spaces. In a little courtyard, this business with the vines. I don’t know what they are, perhaps jasmine, perhaps passion flower but these are growing, live, curtains you can part and walk through and I imagine when they flower they’re probably scented and will sound of insects. It was the first museum I went to and arguably the best. I think I’m spoiled having a daughter in Utrecht because the Dutch are brilliant at museums so I have impossible standards. As for the prose project, it’s interesting and challenging to go back more than five decades and try to make sense of who I was then. The key seems to be in stone and trees. At least for starters. I went through the printout sometimes to the sound of flamenco from the flamenco school opposite my Airbnb studio, sometimes to the sound of rain gushing from a broken downpipe. And I understood how much I had to allow myself to fail over and over again as I attempted to put anything in my notebook. I dreaded trying. 

Jackie Wills, Living curtains of vines

But what exactly is this moment? Well, for one thing, it’s really two moments – which presumably are so consecutive as to be all but conflated: the realisation that the (unseen) poet-persona’s day has got off to a gentle, and presumably good, start by way of, perhaps, a woodland walk, and then the noticing of the flowers.

Or, in fact, it could be that the noticing of the flowers preceded the thought and, moreover, triggered it; that the sight of the flowers has slowed the poet down, made him more fully in tune with time and place for a fraction of this spring morning (assuming that he hasn’t been abed until noon or gone!) and enabled him to ease himself into the day.

Either way, this is a poem brimming with optimism.

Matthew Paul, On another haiku by Simon Chard

i am the cutting board god. i eat the carrot
unpeeled with dirt still dusting wrinkled skin.
scoop hummus from the plastic container.
every little morsel. lick the spoons’ head
& shoulders. i think it’s ancestral. a hunger
like a lightning bolt through me & all
the not-girls, mouths open in the dark. the desire
to be full always escaping us. just another handful
of wings. just one more lemon taste.
the shadow of an iris tree.

Robin Gow, girl dinner

I just dipped into Victoria Moul’s wonderful substack, ‘Horace & Friends, and got a shock, because it’s about women-in-childbirth-in-poems. I’d never thought how rare a subject this was, but the reason I was startled is that I’ve had a poem in the works for most of two years that goes from (well, I can’t even remembered where it started), let’s say, from my father at the Battle of the Bulge to a group of men and women comparing their military service and the throes of childbirth. It was to have been a long-lined conversational poem with surprising turns, something on the order of Ciaran Carson’s poems in his last book Still Life (not that I could match it) with its dailiness, chemotherapy and paintings.

The weather turned rainy and grey yesterday evening while I was walking the Rue Monge in the 5th arrondissement from bottom to top, noticing the entry to the Arènes de Lutèce, the little garden under the old premises of the École Normale Superièure, the hardware stores, the florists, the market place… . It was a good choice of a street, not being on any tourist’s list, and yet has a fine flavour of ordinary Paris, and because you don’t feel like elbowing people aside.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Sunday 13 April 2025

First World War poetry does not have the same particular identity in France, and the war itself carries a different valency here, where men fought and died — in much greater numbers than in Britain — on their own land, amid the ruins of their own towns and villages. There isn’t, I don’t think, the same edge of romanticism or slightly-enjoyable sadness about it here, and ‘First World War poetry’ does not have the same quasi-generic identity. I did, however, find an excellent French anthology, Poèmes de Poilus, edited by Guillaume Picon. (The poilus, ‘hairy men’, are the soldiers who grew beards because they couldn’t shave.) […]

[O]ne thing that’s noticeable […] is how many of the best-known names are — unlike the English equivalents — not known primarily as ‘war-poets’, but rather as leading poets of the avant garde. In England, even those poets who, like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, survived the war, remain known as poets mainly as and by their war poetry. The French collection, by contrast, contains poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Pierre Reverdy and Paul Valéry — all very high-profile French literary figures, none of whom (I think) would be considered “first world war poets” in the way that Owen, Sassoon, Brooke and Gibson are.

Perhaps this is partly just because most of the French poets survived the war (Apollinaire was killed in 1918), whereas the best-known English war poets, almost by definition, are those who died in it. (This is true of the second world war too — Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes all died in active service.) This must be linked, too, to another marked difference between the collections: the range of types of verse in Poèmes de Poilus is much larger, and much more obviously influenced by what — in England a decade later — we’d recognised as the first stirrings of modernism. To a small degree, this is perhaps influenced by the fact that Anne Harvey was intentionally choosing poems accessible to a youthful reader; but I don’t think any collection of British First World War verse would be very different. As anyone knows who has taught ‘modernism’ from a comparative perspective — as I did last year for a course here at Sciences Po — the idea that “modernism” emerged as a defined movement quite suddenly in the immediate post-war period is an Anglophone perspective. French literary history looks quite different. Pretty much all the things we associate with ‘modernism’ in poetry were well-established in French poetry already before the war.

Reading these two anthologies one after another this week made me think how interesting a mixed French and English (and even German and Russian) anthology would be.

Victoria Moul, In Time of War

Because in a perfect world, no word rhymes with war.
Because for a perfect verse, there can be no bar.
It is not day that ends night, nor night that ends day.
Where then will a poem end, when will its light fray?

***

Imayo: Of Japanese origin, this form has four 12-syllable lines (48 syllables) with a caesura between the first 7 and the next 5 syllables of each line.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, So can silence

The next panel I attended was titled “Anti-Racist Pedagogy: Creative Writing Workshops at Community Colleges” (Shinelle L. Espaillat, Rashaun Allen, Keith O’Neill, Gail Upchurch-Mills). Here I learned about the efforts of humanities professors to “fight the commodification of higher education,” as well as the process of students being turned into “clients.” All of us are inherent writers, the panelists told us, and should be allowed to “dream on the page” without anyone’s permission. We write ourselves into existence, and communities only function when everyone participates. One of the problems all the panelists shared was how to instill a love of reading in students whose attention was being diverted, constantly and shamelessly, from exploring their potential as writers.

My third panel on the first day was the extremely enjoyable “Craft for Crafters: How Fiber Arts, Book Arts, and More Shape Our Writing” (Meg Cass, Felicia Rose Chavez, Emrys Donaldson, Genevieve Kaplan, Sarah Minor, Doug Van Gundy). As a person who enjoys sewing and crafting as hobbies, I was intrigued to learn how the panel would connect those activities to writing. It was an unexpected pleasure to see poet Genevieve Kaplan, whose book Aviary I reviewed in the December 6, 2021 issue of Sticks & Stones. Some takeaways from this panel: sewing is like writing—cropping, darning and weaving; crafting is like poetry—language is “bits of things” we move around to create other things; crafts connect to writing, playing, revisioning, re-seeing. I enjoyed Doug Van Gundy’s story of how his sewing practice began by making pencil cases because he couldn’t find any decent ones. That grew into journal covers and messenger bags. He also revealed that sewing calms him down, allowing him some much-needed relief from an over-active brain. Doug is also the MFA director at West Virginia Wesleyan College and a 7^th-generation West Virginian.

Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025

Subtitled a magpie’s pilgrimage through the psalms, my erasure project is finished. 160 handwritten pages. This week I have made a cushion on which to display it in Wells Museum next month. The top of the cushion cover is a remnant of embroidered furnishing fabric that I bought years ago in a rather posh shop in Saxmundham. I loved the bird and her nestlings. I knew I would find a use for it some day. The underside is made from a much older fabric, a coarse unbleached linen 40cm/16 inches wide, handwoven in the Soviet Union. It probably came to me from my mother. The one-and-fourpenny predecimal zip fastener is from Bourne and Hollingsworth, a London department store that closed in 1983. I think this too was bought by my mother. The inner cushion (which contains 3 kilos of rice) is made from a sleeve from an unfinished cotton lawn nightdress trimmed with hand-crocheted lace I recognise as my grandmother’s work. The fine white cotton thread I used for stitching it also dates from my grandmother’s lace-making days.

Ama Bolton, “The Soul as a Bird”

I’m behind on reviews, I’m behind on a couple of editing gigs, I’m behind on a few other thousand things. I hide in our wee house either at my desk, or downstairs, folding and stapling chapbooks. […]

Otherwise, I was recently podcast-interviewed by Hollay Ghadery, which was plenty fun. The podcast has been posted over this way, if you wish to hear our conversation, which was focused on my recent On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). Kitchener poet and reviewer Chris Banks interviewed me recently, posted over at The Woodlot: Canadian Poetry Reviews and Essays. Michael Greenstein was good enough to review the collection over at The Seaboard Review, and Salma Hussain managed this absolutely stellar and breathtaking review of same over at The Temz Review; she gets me. She really gets me. It is a rare thing, I will tell you, to be read so well. […]

Oh, and my fall poetry title, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press), a direct follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), already has a pre-order page! (but I might have mentioned that already; did I mention that already?). I should probably be thinking about fall events, possibly. Where should I go?

rob mclennan, an update, an update, my kingdom for an update

As a rule, I find it difficult to pick a poem from my books because I think in larger structures, sequences or books, not individual poems. However, this piece is something of an exception. It’s the coda from my a book of sounds, but it started out as a response to a call for submissions for Stride magazine’s 2020 TALKING TO THE DEAD project, which asked for poems addressed to a dead poet.

Now, I don’t often respond to such calls, but this one intrigued me as I was rereading, again, Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems, a book I’ve owned for almost 50 years now and read more often than I can remember, and thought I’d like to try to inhabit her formal methods to some degree. It’s not the first time I’ve acknowledged my debt to her work; a previous book was titles Imaginary Gardens, but this time I wanted to do something much more direct.

The stanza form I invented for the occasion is, like so many of hers, syllabic rather than metrical, and there are numerous words and phrases of hers woven into it. Unusually for me, there’s an overt rhyme scheme, while my normal practice is to create patterns of assonance. In fact, this poem is, on the surface, so different to how I usually write that I considered it as a one-off and unlikely to be something I collected in a book, as my books tend to be organic wholes, units of composition in themselves.

But when I put the original typescript of the book together it was clear to me that something was missing. The book is, on one level, a collection of songs (hence the title), songs that focus on the small things that make a world and on our attempts to map that world, those things, in words. But the ending as it stood seemed to me to call for a coda, a kind of final restatement of the (aural) themes that run through the book, and it slowly dawned on me that Ms Moore’s Menagerie was just what the book needed to close with a kid of half-echo of the opening lines, a translation of an early Irish nature poem that deploys a semi-syllabic four-line stanza and intermittent rhyme. The book is a cycle, and this poem is a kind of recapitulation, closing the circle while leaving the idea of song, of sound, wide open.

Drop-in by Billy Mills (Nigel Kent)

This poem feels like a curse or malediction (meaning, literally, bad words). Like prayer or chant, a malediction relies on the power of words to change things. It is a kind of incantation, an act which brings language close to divinity by risking profanation. 

Notice the punctuation. It is a poem that declares itself with an apostrophe at the beginning, and then avoids any punctuation until the period at the end. But the apostrophe doesn’t close the first line – this poem is all one line. Desnos uses an archaic word – begotten – in order to make the curse feel ancient, biblical, solemn, and yes, a little dressed up for church.

“Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears,” wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, “The I-Singer of the Universong.” To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle. I love images which alter the nature of ordinary grieving gestures. 

A ‘twig of tears’ is an anachronism. Anachronisms strike like that lightning I mentioned at the outset. Officially, an anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Anachronisms defy the most demonic god of all, namely, Chronos, or time, by refusing his reign within the sentence. They maledict a bit; they speak badly, or out-of-time.

Alina Stefanescu, “Short talk on whatever.”

When the brochure for next month’s Stratford’s Literary Festival dropped on to the doormat yesterday, I was, naturally, interested to see what’s going on.

We’ve lived here for almost forty years and I’ve lived in Warwickshire for almost all of my adult life, so I know the score. Stratford’s a posh(ish) place – well, some bits are – where literary types and tourists mostly gather to see what’s on at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Occasionally, but not more than anywhere else, poetry events pop up.

As to literary festivals, we know that in order to attract sponsorship they have to make money, or be seen to provide events in which ‘big names’ or at least people who are blessed with a dose of temporary fame appear. Some, like the Stratford one next month, also have charitable status. It’s good that they exist.

We also know that poetry is still, whatever those of us who write and read it might like to think, viewed as a somewhat embarrassing literary sideline, like an odd, eccentric, ancient aunt at a family party.

Except that this time that old aunt hasn’t been invited.

I read all 42 pages of the brochure scouring the listings. Nothing. I read it again to make sure I’d not turned over two pages at one. Not a single poetry reading. Not even an actor reciting a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Not even the conventional sop to the poetry world, the open mic. […]

Whatever mad ideas the Criminal President is dreaming up today will have far more impact than a literary festival in Middle England, but I’d have thought that at least one of the ‘festival team’, as they describe themselves, would have pushed for, perhaps, at least the inclusion of the Poet Laureate. Or maybe he was busy. Or maybe the only poets they thought of turned out to be dead.

Or perhaps they were a bit frightened that poets might be a bit unpredictable and rowdy. (When I used to read to an audience, if, as did sometimes happen, I’d forgotten my reading glasses, I tended to shout and rave a bit in case of the need for improvisation.)

To cite an even less controlled, less egocentric example, I’ve just received a critical appreciation by Andrew Taylor of the poetry of that old rogue Peter Finch, who once, it is said, ate his own poems after he had read them to his audience.

Bob Mee, POETRY DOESN’T MATTER IN STRATFORD-UPON-AVON – OFFICIAL

National Poetry Month has brought with it a sad bit of poetry news: Harry Humes has died. If you are unfamiliar with his work, you might want to check Penn State’s PA Book site’s biography of him, and then find one of his books:

https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/humes__harry

He was an excellent poet, influential for many folks–especially for Pennsylvania writers–and while I never knew him well, our lives intersected in some surprising ways over the years… […]

When I was hired at DeSales University around 2005, I learned that DSU held an annual poetry event for high school students. I attended/participated often, and Harry Humes–who was a good friend of the program’s administrator (Steve Myers)–was always involved in the workshops and events. Humes had retired from Kutztown by then, and was writing more poems, fishing, and enjoying family life. He always greeted me with a big smile and asked about my writing. That sums up for me what kind of person he was: generous; possessed of a self-effacing, even self-deprecating humor; kind and encouraging to people just starting out in poetry.

Here’s a poem of his that I like a lot, which I clearly recall him reading that day at Godfrey’s so long ago: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=154&issue=3&page=13

Ann E. Michael, Rest in poetry

[Isabelle] Baafi’s “Chaotic Good” demonstrates an understanding of craft and poetic forms, knowing that form can enhance and underline meaning, guiding the reader through the poem. Baafi explores a personal journey from childhood to adulthood, through marriage to a single life, but broadens that journey to include family ties, inheritances, cultural heritage and the struggle to find self among the pressures of societal and familial expectations. The poems eschew self-pity and sentiment, preferring compassionate reflection into love, threat, suspicions, the inertia of staying in a relationship an individual is not yet ready to admit has failed and become toxic, using different forms to drawn attention to different aspects, until the traveller arrives, surefooted and redeemed. It’s a journey that includes the reader and rewards re-reading. “Chaotic Good” is as thought-provoking as it is liberating, acknowledging the work that went into building a sense of self-worth through a library of precise, crafted, lyrical poems.

Emma Lee, “Chaotic Good” Isabelle Baafi (Faber and Faber) – book review

Gilonis’ poem marking ‘the 3^rd Thatcher election’ fits with the overarching impact of Tory politics mentioned in the introduction. It’s there fairly explicitly in Duncan’s own work, and in poets like Simon Smith:

     The sun floats about the meadow crazy as Whitman.
Codeine does the job good. Make a note to myself. Can’t bear
    to look. ‘Codeine’. Debts bite hard. More jobs
will have to go. Lines crackle like a telephone call in danger.

But it’s there, too, in Khaled Hakim’s idiolectic talk poems of identity and confusion or in Andrew Lawson’s ‘We are enjoined as good consumers to juxtapose and meld appearance’. And it’s there gloriously in Elizabeth James’ satires on culture as consumer object, as meaningless status fetish or decor:

I am concerned with the interior as a “walk-in” still life.
I was always thought of as the “artistic child”.
The salon, in beige, was designed around my own painting,
entitled Landscape–

I’m going to make it like a country road
with trompe-d’œil dirt and leaves, my garden and courtyard
being so perfect that they don’t seem real.

While this political dimension was something I expected to find here, there were some real surprises, including writing that shows a move towards psychogeography in Frances Presley’s map-driven walking poems or David Rees’s semi-doggerel London pieces that link the influence of Iain Sinclair with the city’s long association with nursery rhymes.

Billy Mills, Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, Andrew Duncan, John Goodby (eds): A Review

We’re excited to feature Marcy Rae Henry at our upcoming virtual reading. Their work is full of sharp turns and soft landings, moving through memory, family, and fleeting conversations with a voice that’s equal parts tender, irreverent, and quietly profound.

In their poem “this poem appears in,” what begins as a casual walk home unspools into a meditation on growing up, ancestral survival, and the strange, aching limits of language. Capturing how life’s most private and public moments often blur, they write:

“If only we had more than 1–10 to describe / happiness, sex, last night’s Thai food…”

This is poetry that drifts and returns, that wonders more than it explains. It’s emotionally precise while formally restless—rooted in stillness and always on the move. I knew right away this was the energy I wanted to start the latest issue with.

José Angel Araguz, Salamander virtual event next week (Spotlight: Marcy Rae Henry)

The sun sets before we reach the mountains. There are three men from Turkey in the row of seats behind me. They’re having an animated conversation in their mother tongue about something that keeps switching gears from playful to contentious. In front of me are three Romanians. The woman in the middle is speaking non-stop. Her voice is a strange aria. Romanian is a quick and seamless rise and fall in my ear.

Memories seep slowly into my consciousness. Lying in the backseat of a car—in those days before seat belts were the law—staring out the window at the stars in the black sky, and listening to my mother and my stepfather—to their voices only, not bothering to work out words, or even tone. Utterly uninvested, but enveloped by the mysterious business of grown-ups. […]

But another of our hosts keeps telling people that I’m “really” an American. It’s strange perhaps that I’m so offended that she’s taking control of my narrative. Maybe I’m especially sensitive since memories of my childhood seem to be coming more often and more vividly now, and I want to put a wall between who I am now and those years when I had no agency.

All the years that I traveled often were a way for me to figure out who I am. Not in a linear way, and not in a pretty way—but eventually. Strip away the trappings of your national identity, of your habits, and your preferences for food and drink and music, and you feel naked and new. You eat trout with capers and tangerines and wonder what on earth you really ever liked best to eat.

Ren Powell, Traveling in Transylvania

Always crouching down, looking the same all over.
To men he tries to show those great big, endless eyes.
If you really want to know if you yourself are small,
Try seeing your reflection in a filled hoof-print.

咏虾蟆
坐卧兼行总一般，
向人努眼太无端。
欲知自己形骸小，
试就蹄涔照影看。

Another from the bantering poems of Complete Tang Poems books 869-872. Jiang Yigong was a Five-Dynasties guy from Suzhou who made a name for himself for righteous satires, finding much material in his troubled times. Unlike a lot of the other comic poets from this section, he also has poems in the main part of CTP. 虾蟆, háma is used for both frogs and toads—to keep it snappy, I picked one. That really is, I’m ashamed to admit, only there to fill out the meter.

Larry Hammer, In Praise of the Toad, Jiang Yigong

The Palm/Passion story also reminds us of the fleeting nature of fame. Don’t get me wrong: if I’m chosen to be Poet Laureate, I’ll do as good a job as I’m capable of doing. But I’ll start every day by reminding myself that the fame is likely temporary. The important thing remains: the work.

The Palm/Passion story reminds us that we’re characters in a larger narrative (as does the Passover story, which people across the world have heard/will hear this week too, both in Jewish traditions and some Christian traditions). We will find ourselves in great danger if we start to believe it’s all about us, personally. No, there are larger forces at work. 

To put it in poetry and Scouting terms: I’m put here to do my best writing, but also, to leave the poetry campsite better than I found it. How do I do that? I work to promote not only myself, but other worthy poets, I work to make sure that the next generations know about the rewards of poetry, I envision the kind of world we would have if poetry was valued, and I work/play to make that possible. I also work to have a balanced, integrated life: my work in poetry cannot be allowed to eclipse other important work: the social justice work, the care of my family and friends, my relationship with the Divine, the other creative work I do, the self-care that must be the foundation of it all.

I find many values to being part of a religious tradition, but the constant reminder of the larger vision, the larger mission, is one of the most valuable to me. The world tells me that many things are important: fame, money, famous/rich people, a big house, a swell car, loads of stuff. My religious tradition reminds me of the moth-eaten nature of these things that the world would have me believe is important. My religious tradition reminds me of the importance of the larger vision. And happily, my religious tradition is expansive enough that my creative work can be part of that larger vision.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Lessons from Palm/Passion Sunday for Poets and Other Creative Types

Wondering whose turn it is
to sacrifice this time, what
to give up, what bitterness
to ingest, accept. Arms full
of plush youth, wriggling, resting.
Arms emptied from work that came
before, that follows. Fatigue.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 407: The Second Lamb #NaPoWriMo

But what about the Instagram and LinkedIn and tumblr icons at the head of this page, I hear you ask. Good question. I think they may be about to go as well. Maybe. Perhaps. I’m just no good at them, you see. The Instagram I set up so I could feast on the photos and art of my friends R–, R–, and D–. But of course it is more complex than that. In an ideal world, I would follow only them. Once the cat is out of the bag, you have to follow everyone else you know who knows them, even the ones posting about their jam making. LinkedIn is harder. And I’ve been using it much longer. But it is useful. For example, it is the only platform of anything that my activist friend W– uses, and the only way I can see what she’s been up to around the world. So it has its uses.

But as Martin Stannard once said about picking up a copy of a very well-known poetry magazine, I can sort of feel the depression rising up through my fingertips and my arms as soon as I start using them. I’m back where I started, with that edge-of-the-playground-feeling of marvelling at the utter confidence with which everyone shares the minutae of their lives. Five minutes, tops, that’s all I can manage. Then the double-maths-feeling hits even harder. Everyone else has the answers: why not me? I have nothing to say. And who on earth would listen?

Anthony Wilson, On being useless at social media

My small creative life hadn’t looked or felt the way I thought and hoped it would, and so I hadn’t seen it for what it was.

I had imagined days filled with making of various kinds—writing, cooking, crafting, gardening. When I wasn’t making, I’d be caring—for my health, for my beloveds, for the world outside of my personal one. I would have clear purposes, and I would progress steadily toward them. There would be an ease in my days that comes with having balance. There would be joy and calm. Lots of joy and calm.

It is hard for me to admit, but I had some creative life fantasies akin to other lifestyle fantasies I’ve scoffed at. Why was it so easy for me to see how unrealistic and dangerous trad wife narratives are, for example, but not the one I had developed about what my small, creative life might be? I know farm women do not dress in billowy dresses to collect eggs while their cunningly-dressed babes frolic around them, but I somehow imagined myself spending long mornings writing (or sewing or designing things) in a clean, pleasing home, sitting in front of my window at a table covered with books, papers, plants, and a candle or two. I’d snack on apple slices from a charming thrift-store plate and sip from a steaming mug of tea while I worked, cozy in a pair of wooly socks and my grandpa’s old cashmere sweater.

Yeah, that would be great, but it’s so 2014 Pinterest/Instagram talking, you know? […]

Earlier this week genre novelist Chuck Wendig shared a blog post about how hard and weird and wrong it can feel to be a writer now. It is, he says, “Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down.” He talked about wanting readers to feel good, but that “feeling good right now also feels somehow bad,” and says that it is maybe “one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange.”

I know just what he means, and it has had everything to do with why I have felt blocked here. All kinds of things can and have stolen joy from me over the past year, but I read his words and thought: I’m damned if I’m going to give up the joy of feeling joy. The essay acceptance I got is a small win, and it brought me joy, and I’m going to enjoy it, just as I enjoy the brief blooms of our spring flowers and the joy of those who enjoy them.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Finally, in a real way, warts and all

In my life, I have chosen risk over and over. We risked everything to start a publishing company. Keeping it going was wildly stressful, but we kept at it.

I cannot keep my kids safe. I want them to be strong. Independent. Compassionate community builders who know when to be fighters. But in my inclination for risk, there are limits. I wouldn’t suggest that my daughter and her wife move to Texas right now. The three billionaires who fund and control Texas politics have drawn a line comparing being gay to incest. To them, the two are one and the same. They want to outlaw gay rights.

I think the 1.7 million queer people in Texas are less safe than the 2.8 million queer people in California; hopefully, they make it through.

Several times, I have been to the Sharjah Book Fair. There are people who have told me that Tobi, our queer marketing director, could go there. Before I got on the plane, I researched the laws. I usually do before I go to a new country. I had the proper clothing. Tobi presents as a man. Tobi is a walking violation of Shariah law. As such, Tobi could go to prison for ten years or be sentenced to death. Not a risk worth taking. No reason ever to go to the Emirates or any country with Sharia law. Not necessary. I can go for Red Hen. Being in prison isn’t an adventure.

Kate Gale, Do You Feel Safe in America?

I really would like to post 30 times about 30 different poets during National Poetry Month, but — let me admit up front — I’m lowering thresholds all over the place. Soon I’ll be lying inert in the doorway and you’ll have to step over me. But not today! Today, we get a poem from Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Susan Rich.

It’s a book that needs to come with a trigger warning — a young woman, a forced abortion. In the words of Diane Seuss the poems of Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024), “chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss,” and transform “anger into amber.” […]

It’s a book and a life “cracked open” (“Once Mother and Father Were Buried”), and the poems crack open the subject matter — Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop make appearances, as do images from pop culture, and the world of music. My introduction to Blue Atlas arrived via a Zoom with Olympia Poetry Network (OPN), and hearing Rich’s remarkable, memorable presentation made the book stick in my mind. I had to get my hands on it and read the poems for myself. Given the recent attack on Roe vs. Wade, I kept thinking of that oft-quoted passage from William Carlos Williams:

It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men [women! people!] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

These are honest, difficult, and necessary poems. To paraphrase what Rich wrote about June Jordan in a recent Substack Post, These are poems we need right now.

Bethany Reid, Susan Rich: Blue Atlas

Do I lose myself over consequences and weird linkages I wish this story were different but here I am in my kitchen baking bread honey dripping into my sink not my honey not this honey I bake for children in the street children marching in the street am I property am I pleasure or a pretend god feeding pretend children maybe we could go into the mysterious history of god’s sisters I have given myself over to the hands of strangers mayday mayday here we are another war song another war another where was I when the bells last rang what was the song 

Rebecca Loudon, April 12

Above is a screenshot from a reading of the stage adaptation of The Other Jack, directed by James Dacre, with Jack (played by Nathaniel Parker) on the left and Robyn (played by Jasmine Blackborow) on the right. The script is by the US playwright and poet Dan O’Brien (CBe has published his poetry and essays). It’s based on the book of the same name by myself, published by CBe in 2021, with some material also coming from 99 Interruptions. […]

The original book is loosely constructed around a series of conversations in cafés between a man (a writer, ageing) and a woman (a waitress, much younger). They talk ‘about books, mostly’, according to the cover, but also about ‘bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas’. The man is me, or is me as much as Jack Robinson is me, and here I am being evasive again, something that Robyn picks me up on. The play is not the book and I could say that the Jack in the play is not me but Dan O’Brien’s script is self-effacingly faithful to the book so it is me, whether I like it or not. On the left, smug ageing writer; on the right, young woman concocted to demonstrate writer’s self-awareness of his smugness – so that’s all right then. There’s something monstrous here.

Charles Boyle, The Other Other Jack

Black Saint Billy Harper is wailing 40-something years ago in some other city but tonight he’s filling the air in our bedroom in Charlottesville because earlier today at Melody supreme his record was on the wall and I remembered that time I interviewed him and his voice was so rich and resonant that it put mine to shame and that was already so long ago that I recall only impressions (not the Coltrane tune) and wow! this band is killing.

five decades
collapsed in an instant
black metaltail hummingbird

Jason Crane, haibun: 12 April 2025

The full Pink Moon was actually pink this weekend, so I tried to get a picture of it in its true color which is always challenging but this one got pretty close.

My birthday is coming up soon which is always a time of introspection, as is tax time (how is it possible I did so much freelance work for so little money? I ask every year.) I am hoping to find a new home for my next book, maybe a chance to do more lucrative work teaching or publishing, and of course, balancing the joys of life and the stress plus health stuff. I am trying to find more disabled and chronically ill women’s books to review (so definitely comment if you have a new book coming out), and besides the book club and open mic, trying to get together more regularly with other writers. AWP (and maybe the art gallery and protest, too) reminded me of the strengths of feeling like part of a community, rather than just a lone eccentric trying to live your lone eccentric writer life. Helping others, speaking up, these things are also part of feeding the soul, not to get too cheesy.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spring is Here with Cherry Blossoms and Art Shows, Tulip Fields, Pink Moons, and Visits with Family

the night is still / as April’s pink moon rises / lying / in his hot and fevered bed / the billionaire will meet an angel / walking in the soft shoes of a nurse / moonlight washes the city / as the hungry cry and shiver […]

‘Pink Moon’ is published in ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights – 30 pieces of Courage and Resistance’ out now with Rough Trade Books. April’s full moon reminds me of this poem, I think it was written around 2020 in lockdown and commissioned by BBC‘sThe Verb, to me this feels like a poem from another version of time, but some feelings still ringing true in 2025.

Salena Godden, Pink Moon

An artist once told me that every person has a pose, and it is rarely what we think it is. A person, their body, will fall into a kind of muscle memory of posture. There is no replicating it or forcing it, it is unique. It is beautiful, but not in the way that bright smiles and a tilted head makes a good photograph, but rather in the way that nature is beautiful, the way that beauty is everywhere. This, she said, is what she looks for when she sketches people.

I’ve thought about that a lot. I’m imagining my body, observing images of myself at different points in my life, trying to pin down my unique pose. There is the head in hand of the writer who reads her computer screen in a curled question mark of spine and chair. There is the hands on hips of observing garden, shopping, practical tasks that need a certain type of robust physicality and household organisation – this is the pose that my sister and my mum all share. And then there are the poses my body falls into when exploring, when my senses are alert to the outside world and the time points poking through, the places that connect the past and the future. I’m thinking about it now as I think about what it was that made me want to include Seamer Beacon, and the bronze age burial complex around the mound, in the series of pilgrimages that would make up my memoir, The Ghost Lake.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Pilgrimage to Seamer Beacon

                Sometimes the moon 
       looks like the flap of a creased 

envelope— whatever message or instruction
       it bore has slipped into its dark 

pocket. Now it is swimming so far out 
       at sea, to a country not yet discovered. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Missing

When I’m asked a question I’m not totally sure on or not prepared for, I just start talking and then find my brain running behind going, ‘What the hell is she on about? Somebody stop her!’ Luckily, it was interviewing for the job I’ve been doing for the past two years on a temp contract, so they know I am not an idiot, though maybe also know I’m prone to babbling. 

This is why I feel comfortable as an editor, especially of my own writing. In writing my poems, I often don’t know what I’m saying until I have the meandering mess of it down on paper or screen and can sort it out, clean it up, take out the waffling that isn’t needed, the details that are just too off the wall or unclear. 

I do the same thing with emails, write it all out then edit it appropriately. I have, in the past, sent out those in the moment, emotional, unfocussed, unedited emails and it never ends well, so I always try to pull back and look a second time. 

I may have mentioned on this blog before that idea as my best piece of advice every given me, ‘Look at everything twice’. It was said to me by a Holocaust survivor I met when I was working in a bookshop in my small university town. She came in some Sundays to buy the big papers and chat. One day as she was leaving, she grasped my arm and said this and it’s always stuck with me. 

I’ve never considered the phrase in terms of my love of editing. I’ve always just thought of it as take a moment to appreciate what’s around you, the small things we overlook. By looking twice at anything, we understand it better and our place in it. We should spend that extra time to consider what we’re seeing, doing and saying. 

This applies to our writing as well. Slow down and consider. I need to do that when I speak as well it seems. 

Gerry Stewart, Look at Everything Twice – Editing

I asked myself a question last week. Could I write with the same joy as I have when I garden? It turns out I can. Perhaps by putting these thoughts on paper I understood what I needed to do to help me fall back in love with my creativity or perhaps it’s being part of NaPoWriMo courtesy of Notesfromthemargin April write-a-thon that has made the difference. […]

If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ll know that my relationship with my work goes through huge peaks and troughs (I suspect part of this may be down to having Bipolar) so I won’t be surprised if this joy ebbs away a little. For now though I’m going to write as though I’m writing for fun, for myself and enjoy the responses from my lovely Notes from the Margin group. I’m writing in a way I haven’t for a long time – I look forward to the prompts each morning and write with instinct and enthusiasm rather than fear and self-doubt. It’s a wonderful feeling – almost like when I returned to poetry after almost thirty years away from writing but with better results.

I’m also going to revisit the dozens of poems in my files, see what’s good, what sings to me and try to get some order. I’m terrible at keeping track of everything and feel so sad that work I’ve been proud of is languishing in a forgotten file, or misplaced entirely. I’m not looking forward to this bit quite as much.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, I have taken my own advice

TPS: Tell me about the genesis of this book. How did you start and when did you know it was finished?

MS: Terminal Surreal began with my diagnosis—late 2023. It was a way for me to process what was and would happen to my body, but to be honest a good chunk of my brain didn’t quite believe I really had ALS – I think that’s how I managed to write poems like “When I Learn Catastrophically,” “Is this My Last Ferry Trip?,” “Self-Elegies,” and “Abecedarian with ALS.” A few poems were written before I knew I had ALS but was experiencing—muscle spasms and these things Inow know are fasciculations (when a nerve twitches).

I was hoping all my mysterious symptoms were anything but ALS. I did the Grind (where you are grouped with others via email and post a new poem draft or revision daily) in January, February, and March 2024, and the drafts and revisions from those three months gave me about half the book. In May, I sent it out as a chapbook, then pushed to get it to around fifty pages. I then sent it to Acre Books during their open reading period in May 2024, and heard a month later it had been accepted. I had never put a book together so quickly, and by then I was already in bad enough shape that the amazing editor, Lisa Ampleman, put the book into sections and did the arrangement for me (I was having trouble looking at screens).

I guess Terminal Surreal was officially finished about a month ago, when my partner Langdon Cook and Lisa did the final edits, and sent Lisa one last poem I asked to be added, and she said yes!

Tresha Faye Haefner, Terminal Surreal: An Interview with Martha Silano

The prompt today from NaPoWriMo.net is to write a villanelle that includes a song lyric. I’ve never written a villanelle and it reminded me of solving a puzzle. I kept referring to the pattern described in poets.org and this poem by Elizabeth Bishop for guidance. At first, my mind couldn’t translate the pattern into lines or stanzas but when I began really dissecting Elizabeth’s poem, it began making sense. So, thank you, Elizabeth! To be honest, I’m not sure the poem is technically correct but I had a hell of a time trying! […]

Initially, I had this scheduled to post this morning but I got cold feet and unscheduled it late last night. I thought, this villanelle is cheesy. This morning I thought, Who cares? I’m doing something creative every day and other artists (my readers & friends) know we can’t be perfect every time!

Charlotte Hamrick, Tom Petty & a Villanelle

How we remember the past isn’t always how the past remembers itself. As for what happens next, who knows? 

Tower, Star, Nine of Wands. Ace of Cups, Two of Swords, Lovers. 

In this mysterious church of heart and hurt, pleasure and pain are swallowed as communion. Inevitably, some preach hate louder than love.

It’s tarot weather.

Rich Ferguson, Tarot Weather

This week: purple dreaming, invisible strings, the lives of strangers, every bloodstained stone, and more. Enjoy.

The red light seems like it will last forever. My eyes drift up to the camera mounted above the intersection. I imagine a lonely surveillant glasseyed staring at the city’s intersections on a bank of dim monitors. I perform “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from Macbeth, wondering if my invisible audience is surprised by this sudden bit of theater, entranced by my flawless and impassioned performance. Is there even actually a person on the other side? I suspect I’m simply training an AI bot and hope it will learn to appreciate unexpected encounters with art and culture. I grip the wheel worrying about whether it’s even legal to jack around with the system like this. A few pigeons nod when I finish just as the light turns green. Good show, they say, clapping their grey wings. Beautiful. I drive through the city like a suspect in a slow motion car chase from the days when TV was square.

James Brush, Street Theater

I read once that one of the hallmarks of maturity is understanding that you can’t fix anything in time. Everything will change. And not according to your will. I don’t think “understanding” is an accurate verb here. Not even “accepting”, but actively incorporating that understanding into our decisions. Into our emotional responses.

I cry for the blackbirds. I cry for the hedgehog who no longer overwinters in our holly. I cry for the poisoned lake, for the corpse of a stranger, for my missing breast. For my mother, Linda, and the mother she couldn’t be. For my children, and the mother I never was. I cry for the stories that haven’t been told.

It is so damned inappropriate, and completely out of context but, as I write now, I hear Death of a Salesman’s Linda say, “Attention must be paid.” I don’t know. Orbits within orbits. Imperfections are literally the way our DNA changes, the way we evolve, and yet: we cling to our expectation that we are entitled to perfection. We are impatient that our sick lakes heal slowly. We fear that crows will—that they can—carry a grudge. Everything, like the death of a salesman, deserves attention, and we are reluctant to give it. Afraid to see ourselves?

Ren Powell, New Life within An Old Life

When I wrote the essay for my book of winter drawings, Snowy Fields, back in 2023-24, I spoke about why I sometimes work in series. It’s exploratory, I wrote, but often it’s not until later that I’m able to see deeper reasons why I was doing a particular body of work.

The initial reason I began these watercolors this week was actually quite mundane. We are going to Mexico City in a week, and I was considering taking a new watercolor sketchbook, in a more rectangular format than an older, landscape sketchbook by the same manufacturer that I used on a previous trip, more than five years ago. I wanted to test the paper remaining in the old sketchbook to see if it still suited my technique, so I started the painting at the top of this post.

That one painting showed me what I wanted to know; the paper would be OK. But a day or two later, when it snowed, I decided to make another sketch. And yesterday afternoon, I did another.

When I stepped back from the absorbing time spent painting, I realized that I’ve been thinking about how the familiar landscape of my life, of all our lives, has suddenly and radically changed. We’re facing realities and potential outcomes that shake the foundations of everything we’ve taken for granted. It’s frightening, consuming, and unpredictable. Instead of running away from that, I want to see it clearly. I want to go deeper into it and know what we’re facing — not in order to be paralyzed with dread; or to cower despairingly while praying for some savior, human or divine, to fix it; or, worst of all, capitulating in advance — but so that I can make choices and act responsibly and with integrity, whether as an individual, a friend to others, or a member of society.

Beth Adams, The Changing Landscape

I am the superior
officer who loses the paperwork
or makes up the statistics.
I am the one who ignores
your e-mails, who cannot be reached
by text or phone, the one
with a full inbox.

When the wise ones
come, as they do, full of dreams,
babbling about the stars
that lead them or messages
from gods or angels,
I open the gates. I don’t alert
the authorities up the road.
Let the kings and emperors
pay for their own intelligence.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Genocidal Despots and Poems

Money shouts and literature whispers, so the conversation is always going to be difficult, but especially so in a country that has not just a capitalist economy, society, culture, but mindset. There are Premier League footballers earning £500,000 a week; there are closures and redundancies in the Humanities departments and Creative Writing courses at universities; in the private sector, there are people paying thousands for week-long writing courses on Greek islands with good food and wine. Meanwhile, the Arts Council is scatter-gun but necessary: as well as propping up the big guns (the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, etc.), it gives cash to people without traditional privilege. It’s a Band-Aid plastered over deep political failure. The countries in Europe – two hours by Eurostar or Ryanair – that offer tax breaks to independent bookshops and restrictions on discounting by online retailers, or where the government buys copies of all new books and distributes them to libraries, seem very far away.

My tribe: writers, artists, gallerists, small-press publishers, booksellers. Not exclusively, far from it; some of the people I love have no interest in books at all. But if any of them is making more than the ALCS 2022 median income of £7,000 from their writing, painting, showing, publishing, they are rare exceptions. My point here is not to counter arguments that we are not ‘professional’ because we don’t make money (we are professional); and not to suggest that we don’t need paying because we are ‘incentivised’ by ‘love of creating’ (we also like a roof over our heads, and food); and not to claim that we are especially resilient or somehow ‘heroic’ (no). This is simply how it is, though you wouldn’t know it from how writing is reported in the news. And not from the ads for writing courses that promise to ‘take your writing to a new level’ or ‘progress your career’, with advice from ‘industry experts’.

Like most writers, like many small presses, CB editions makes a loss, every year; a sustainable loss, to date; a healthy loss, because it keeps me on my toes. CBe has never had Arts Council funding for any of its books but of course it is subsidised – by my state pension, by my bus pass, by my having picked up design and typesetting know-how in previous work so I don’t have to pay for these, by my freelance work for others, by my living in a country in which there are people who have ‘disposable income’. This isn’t news.

Charles Boyle, Writing and money (and death and sex)

In the further framing commercial scarcity model vs. abundance model, people who share haiku online, knowing it will make those poems ineligible for contests and magazines, win my admiration. Like, Charlotte. What does hoarding a poem until a reward with publication do? A publication is laminating a marginalia jotting on a newspaper clipping. Poems if shared are broadcast, exchanged, but pinning to a submission window of small paywalled patrons limits the ideas, corrals them when they could be free to bounce against other ideas. […]

Movies, shows, writing with hooks all can exacerbate the priority of crisis, the one inevitable outcome, awfulized emoting instead of creative various directions of solutions and de-escalations. Like anything so long as we remember it is silliness and play but we train the brain by every act, yes? Filtering in a reductionist way is funny unless you believe it’s getting at the underlying binary real vs. lie.

an emotion
is a thought the body has—
branch broken by wind

Pearl Pirie, Links, Thinks

I feel that learning to move around your artistic intentions, and by this I mean a wider view of what you want to do as a writer in the long term, is as important as making those publication milestones. How you move on to new projects, and the way you build the skills around finding new projects is something we don’t talk about a great deal in the creative community. There is immense pressure to ‘succeed’ in a traditional sense. Good art, good writing is success. Of course, partly what I have just said is privileged bullshit too, because art needs an audience and artists need paying for their work. But what I’m talking about here is allowing yourself space to not be entirely invested in one single project and having the courage and confidence to use that place for growth, to explore, to create, when you don’t have the much easier to acknowledge jumping off point of publication. This skill is a necessary part of developing as a writer. If you learn it early, it is easier than learning it later in your career.

There are different ways of moving forward. If you’re like me you might have a whole range of eclectic interests. You do not lose anything by playing with the ideas around them. If you’re too stuck to write what you want, just write. Bring something, anything into existence. Make notes, listen to the things that spark your interest, your joy and just write about them, describe them, journal on them. Be careful not to rush into a new idea feeling it is definitely the one, and applying for funding grants and planning out project timelines etc. I find that, after moving forward from a project there is a tendency to grasp for the high you got when you were in the flow of your original project, the sensation of really getting somewhere. In reality you will probably have to play in the fallow fields, let yourself explore, let yourself come to your work with the beginner’s mind – looking for the feelings of joy that you began your writing journey with before it begins to feel more natural to be turning your focus away from your original project.

Wendy Pratt, What if you are not the one?

i have lived my life one tablespoon at a time.
this is about how much you’re allowed
to swallow. the birds that come & make nests
in the smallest of places. voles who carve songs
through dark. i would put the sky
on my tongue just to feel a star flicker.
i buy more tablespoons.

Robin Gow, tablespoon poem

The latest from Tennessee-based poet Erin Hoover [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the full-length collection No Spare People (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Barnburner (Elixir Press, 2018). Hoover offers short, carved narratives in a sequence of compact lyric, articulating sharp images on and around domestic patters and patterns in the author’s American south, and the complexity of writing through experiences that often feel far away from the possibilities of writing. “I was trying to explain that transportation / between having thoughts and doing for others,” she writes, in the opening poem “On the metaphor, for women, of birthing to / creative activity,” “because in every household the metaphor is clear: / the caretaker is a woman, and so / when I began / writing, I listed out my mornings, the preparations / and cleaning up of spills and toys, taking down / and fetching, the driving and carrying of people / that no one wants to know about / if we believe in the reality of book contracts / and job offers.” She writes of income inequality, misogyny, motherhood and family, as the poems circle around the locus of home and family, and the conflict between a weight of domestic expectation set against the desire for something else, also, beyond (such as writing). “You’d have to understand the home / as a unified construct,” the poem “Homewrecker” begins, “as a guarded entity, / locked up like a bank vault, a virgin / or like a rarified set of collectable dolls / with no inherent value but worth agreed / upon.” The density of her lyrics are quite striking, moving through prose poems and more traditional lyric shapes, moving through frustration, love, motherhood, helplessness, politics and rage, offering cutting moments, phrases and lines I’m tempted to endlessly quote. That line from “Death parade,” for example—“It is tempting to want always to reduce the thing to its detail. To make it small.”—or further moments, thoughtfully carved. “I drove to the border // of my dry county and bought a handle of vodka,” she writes, as part of “My generation is not lost but we are losing,” “drank to blur my vision. I wanted to be as useless // as a governor.” She tells stories with lyric punches, where the mind can’t help but catch, consider.

rob mclennan, Erin Hoover, No Spare People

Current politics has made me take more notice of several politicians’ imaginary numbers — far from fact and human needs.  And, after a while — to relax — my mind moved on to the imaginary numbers of mathematics, and I found (at the PoetrySoup website) this poem which I’d like to share.

Imaginary Numbers  by Robert Pettit

Anybody can consider this statement as moot:
Negative real numbers cannot have a square root.
When working with real numbers with values less than zero,
the squared product will be positive; so where do you go?
In a parabola, all points except zero lie above the x-axis.
Many students get confused because of this.
This placed mathematicians in a bit of a quandary.
That was until numbers were invented that are imaginary.

I did not find online biographical information about poet Pettit but I did find this link to his many many poems available at PoetrySoup — a list going back all the way to 2010.  AND here is a link to his 2010 limerick, “Seventeen.”

JoAnne Growney, Imaginary Numbers

I have a confession: I can’t remember the last time I felt Joyful. Sorrow, yes, that’s easy: I felt profound sorrow after my brother died. There have been times I’ve felt so down, it seemed like up to me (to paraphrase Richard Farina). Failing to find a relevant recent experience, I felt like an imposter writing about joy. That’s why it’s been so hard to write, and to finish, this essay.

But Joy was prominent in the news the summer of 2024. I’m referring to Sunday afternoon, July 21. What’s significant about this time of joy is that you might say it happened within minutes: one minute, President Biden announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy; a few minutes later, he endorsed the candidacy of Kamala Harris, his Vice President. Immediately, donations in the millions were raised for Ms. Harris. This groundswell of support felt like a moment of wide-spread civic joy.

So, the sorrow of our limited electoral choices planted seeds, which drew forth a change. And that joy was shared and spread. “Joys impregnate,” as Blake puts it. In other words, joy is increased through sharing. A joy shared is a joy more than doubled.

As I say, financial support was a means to express joy. And a means to support joy. To prolong and preserve the joy. It’s a human symptom: we want joy to be everlasting, but joy is briefer than happiness, which is all too often contingent on outside circumstances. Fundamentally, joy is an expression of awe — which can only be expressed in finite moments. No human, it is said, can look upon the fullness of divinity (or joy) and live.

Or, as Blake put it:

He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

So, this understandable desire to cling to joy will kill it. We cannot buy joy. We cannot cause joy to be everlasting.

As Ingrid Fetell Lee has noted, psychologists describe joy as an “intense, momentary experience of positive emotion — one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down.” goes further:

Joy is not happiness, even though the two are related. Joy is delight, gladness, and pleasure — a deep inner wellspring of contentment and comfort. It is a disposition, an outlook, and maybe even a purposeful practice. Happiness is what we feel in relation to external conditions; joy is experienced regardless of circumstances. A wise maxim says, ‘We pursue happiness, we choose joy.’

But that moment of elation was quickly overcome by November’s election result, which disappointed about 51% of the voting public. Again, sorrow was brought forth. Like some cyclothemic disorder, we swung from joy back to sorrow.

In fact, the emotion was more than sorrow — it was depression. If, as it is said, depression is anger directed inwards, this depression encompassed anger toward one’s fellow citizens, and mourning for the dream of America. We experienced emotional whiplash.

This real-life moment illustrates Blake’s notion that the opposites of joy and sorrow are intertwined: “Joy and Woe are woven fine / A Clothing for the soul divine / Under every grief & pine / Runs a joy with silken twine” (Auguries of Innocence).

Joy and sorrow are extremes of human emotion: joy is something more profound than happiness; sorrow, something deeper than sadness.

James Collins, Choosing Joy

I look back to the road and notice
the sky ahead of me has broken
into a swathe of blue and I feel
that flip of joy inside me – you know the one,
as if your heart and your stomach
have performed their own little high five –
and it reaches my face in a smile.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ordinary things

How can I love a changing world when it’s this moment I love? No, wait, this one. No, this one.

Already the shadows have shifted, the bright smear of sun dwindled. That leaf blowing sideways like a flag has stilled. Has it fallen? It has not fallen. It will fall. Marcescence is the hardening of a twig against the old leaf in preparation for the new. Brash bud will push out in fresh hue in due time.

No one is due time. Nothing is owed. But this moment is for the taking and I’ll take it, ticking though it is in the palm of hand.

I found this poem by Grant Clauser in the Broadkill Review. I admire this poem for its quiet attention. I am no fisher, but I understand the kind of attentive presence required, attention that ripples out from the lay of the line to the set of the shadows to the movement of clouds, and back. The minute made long, lingering. As only a poem can do.

Marilyn McCabe, from the swift current

My husband comes birdwatching with me. He is a brilliant bird spotter. He can spot a bird well before I would. He has, however, absolutely no idea what the bird is called. Even though we’ve been birdwatching for years. He will enthusiastically whisper, ‘Over there, big white bird at the edge of the water.’ Pushed to identify it, he says ‘it’s the fish-nicker’ – which I think is a brilliant name for the Little Egret he’s seen.

Watching birds is a joy for me. I am ok with identification for the most ‘obvious’ birds. It matters to me, up to a point. If I see something I haven’t seen before, I’ll look it up, but if I haven’t taken a pic of it, my memory won’t usually be good enough. And some birds even confuse the experts. 

I write poetry about birds too – and when I write I need to use the right name. I have to accept though, that any potential reader may not know the bird I’m writing about. So, if they feel inclined, they have to look it up. And then they may think, ‘ah yes, I can see that poem captures that bird’ or ‘I can see why she used that bird for that idea’, maybe.

That’s no different from references in poems to places, people, Greek gods or whatever. The reader will either know them or not, and will either look them up or not. And then they can decide whether that reference works for them. And, as always, it may or may not work for them, and/or may not mean the same as it did to the writer.

Sue Ibrahim, Birds and poetry

I’m now allowed to announce that my poem “Sex Talk” will appear in Best American Poetry 2025, chosen by Terence Winch. I had absolutely no idea it was under consideration and have never been in one of these anthologies before–didn’t think I ever would be. The December email from Mark Bibbins was a bolt out of the blue. Thanks to both of them and to series editor David Lehman for honoring a poem by someone they’ve never met. For noticing it in the first place, amid the flood!

I know that “grabbing the brass ring” is a cliché, but I have a vivid memory of the real experience. My mother used to take my sister and me to a tiny amusement park with a carousel. I loved mounting a brightly painted outer horse, not the fixed-in-place ponies but one that rose up and down, for maximum drama. It made me feel strong to rise in the stirrups each time I passed the dispenser, lean out at fullest stretch, snag a silver ring, and collect them on one finger. Then, once in a great while, gold! The shocked joy of opening the Best American invitation felt the same, although deeper and more lasting. I knew even as I wrote it that “Sex Talk” was a poem in which I stretched out in a new way, although that didn’t mean I was confident others would see what made it a breakthrough for me. Some did, I guess! Thanks to editor Mark Drew who helped me find the ending and accepted it for the final issue of Gettysburg Review, to Poetry Daily for reprinting it, and to others who reposted or wrote me notes about the poem. It’s not only joyful but kind of sobering when something you write actually does become, as you hoped, an instrument of connection. As if poetry does have power in a nonsensical merry-go-round world.

Lesley Wheeler, Best American, lit mags, and the merry-go-round

The past month has been intensely difficult for a variety of reasons, including the sudden loss of my youngest aunt. It’s hard to feel like updating a website is important in the face of grief and political upheaval, but sometimes poets and poetry keep me going through the dark, so reminding myself of good poetry-related things isn’t a waste of time.

One of the best poetry things this winter has been the release and virtual reading events for the anthology Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift. Editor Kristie Frederick Daugherty has made the whole process a joy, and I’m so honored to have my poem “1993” included alongside some of my poetry rockstars and friends.

Katie Manning, Swift, Nothings, & Finalists : a catch-up post

Our fixations make up our meditative landscape. When we use the material of our obsessions not as obstacles to be overcome, but as artifacts of the self to be admired and pondered, that is, in my opinion, when interesting art happens.

In a Yonkers, New York basement, a news article, “Elderly Couple Found Dead Buried Under Snow,” struck me with its stark beauty and tragedy. For years, the image lingered, resurfacing with every snowfall or story of tragic love.     

As my manuscript deadline drew closer I started mining my thoughts for fixations, such as the one I had about this article. Paying close and reverent attention to my fixations has been invaluable for combating writer’s block for me. I have realized that this is the most productive and fulfilling way for me to produce work that has the potential to lead me somewhere unexpected.

Because the article I was writing about was sparse, providing very little detail about the couple I decided I wanted my poem to do the same. This decision informed both the content and the form of this poem. I used the thin lineation and couplets to metaphorically “bury” the myriad truths about this couple under this particular moment of astounding tragedy. […]

The poem ends pulled away from the scene to an imagined dialogue between the speaker and their partner. This section of the poem was the trickiest to get right. I liked the idea of adding dialogue for many reasons. Philosophically, I think one could argue the medium of poetry is silence. A poet’s job is to sculpt silence into temporary truths. Silence is the marble block with which the body of language is found. It could be argued that what the poet doesn’t say is as, if not more, important than what they are saying and that those omissions are part of a poem’s ineffable beauty. The reason I put dialogue at the end of this poem is because I felt it honored the silence of death to not to make any grand conclusions about it. Part of why I find death so haunting is the aliveness that persists despite of death. This dialogue emphasizes that.

Drop-in by Lexi Pelle (Nigel Kent)

Letter poems are in my top three favorite poem types (after list poems and sonnets), and my most recent poetry manuscript is built around them. In the past, I’ve also participated in letter poem exchanges with fellow poets, and I highly recommend it. These pen pal-esque writings benefit from vivid accounts, comfort/intimacy and the energy of deep conversation, and they’re a joy to write.

I find that even when letter poems are “made up” (i.e. not part of an official correspondence) they deliver depth and emotion that can be tricky to pull off in other forms. Perhaps it’s because we, as poets, instantly feel connected to the “recipient” of the letter, which creates a kind of comfort that puts us at ease and simplifies the task of having something to say.

Whatever the source of the magic, letter poems have something special for readers, too: They let us in on private experiences and offer us glimpses into the relationships between others. (And who doesn’t like a little peek behind the curtain?) This dynamic is so compelling it can carry entire manuscripts, as in The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Yours, Creature by Jessica Cuello and Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann.

Carolee Bennett, 40 Letter Poem Examples for Writing Inspiration

First off, the point of departure for this post is the premise that no part of language should be off-limits or banned for poets. Writing is tough enough without forsaking a chunk of the toolbox.

However, there are a few lexical elements that seem fraught with danger. One obvious example is adverbs, which CW tutors are notoriously wary of their students employing. I actually (sic) love them!

Another is the use of abstract nouns, which feel far more troublesome to my mind. Why? Well, because they can mean so many things to so many individuals, social groups and nationalities, even within a single language. Let’s take the example of freedom. Its connotations would be hugely different for a Remainer or a Brexiteer, for instance! When a poet uses this word, they lose control over the effects that their choice of language may have on the reader.

And of course, once we get into the art of translation, this problem deepens even further. For example, la democracia in Spanish necessarily becomes democracy in English. But its baggage for a Spaniard who lived through la transición a la democracia (following Franco’s dictatorship) is very different from its multitude of meanings for certain English speakers from specific points in the political spectrum (need I say more?!). This is one key reason why translating an abstract-heavy poem is a huge ask.

Matthew Stewart, The use of abstract nouns in contemporary poetry

Ambiguity, when deployed skilfully, is not designed to frustrate understanding but to facilitate a more complex or subtle form of understanding, by positioning two or more contrasting implications against one another. In Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” for example, the line “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” simultaneously refers to the power and expanse of Ozymandias’ empire at the time of its peak, and to the near-featureless desert that remains long after its destruction. There is nothing to be gained by discarding one interpretation; the import lies in the ironic contrast between the two. Through such positioning of ambiguous elements, poetry finds ways of representing facets of lived experience and reality that cannot be achieved through logical sequencing alone.

The final question I would like to ask, for the purposes of giving an account of poetry that serves the aims of this chapter, is: what role does the reader play in the poem? From the perspective of New Criticism, they have only to recognise and identify what tensive energies and semantic equations already exist within an individual text. But for critics of the school of reception theory, ambiguity results in potentially boundless depth and restlessness, with scope for continual reinterpretation by different readerships. Umberto Eco identifies this as a defining feature of poetry in his Postscript to the Name of the Rose, where he writes that the “poetic effect” is “the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed” (2009, 545). This capacity can only be demonstrated, however, by the process of reading and re-reading. It is the reader’s engagement with the poem that fulfils its potential as a complex and compelling textual system. We might suppose, therefore, that it is the failure to take into account the role of the reader that leads [Ben] Lerner [in The Hatred of Poetry] to regard the poem as hopelessly gesturing toward a state of completion it can never attain. The reader may be cast as operator, as living component in a dynamic web, rather than the recipient who waits at the end of a single-use delivery mechanism.

Jon Stone, What is a Poem?

I was the starlight,
I was the moonlight,
I was the sunset.
Before the dawning
Of my life;
I was the river
Forever winding
To purple dreaming,
I was the glowing
Of youthful Springtime,
I was the singing
Of golden songbirds,—
I was love.

[…]

Fenton Johnson (1888-1958): “I came into the world in 1888. No notice was taken of the event save in immediate circles. I presume the world was too busy or preoccupied to note it. It happened in Chicago. I went to school and also college. My scholastic record never attained me any notoriety.”

“Taught school one year and repented. Having scribbled since the age of nine, had some plays produced on the stage of the old Pekin Theatre, Chicago, at the time I was nineteen. When I was twenty-four my first volume A Little Dreaming (1913) was published. Since then Visions of the Dusk (1915) and Songs of the Soil (1916) represent my own collections of my work. Also published a volume of short stories Tales of Darkest America (1920) and a group of essays on American politics For the Highest Good (1920).” (Caroling Dusk, 1927)

Johnson was a forerunner to the Harlem renaissance and his poems frequented the pages of numerous ‘new verse’ magazines, including Harriet Monroe’s Poetry and Alfred Kreymborg’s Others. He went on to found and edit The Champion in 1916 with his cousin Henry Bing Dismond, a magazine highlighting black achievement, and The Favourite Magazine in 1918: “The first and only weekly magazine published by and for colored people.”

In the 1930s Johnson worked for the Illinois chapter of the Federal Writers’ Project, under the direction of fellow poet Arna Bontemps, which focussed on collecting writings on the black experience in Illinois and helped launch the careers of numerous writers, including the poets Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, and novelist Frank Yerby. After Johnson’s death in 1958, Bontemps would go on to be the executor of his literary estate.

Dick Whyte, Fenton Johnson – 6 Short Poems (1913-1927)

The humans and their news are making me glare and swallow hard, in between I cook and clean and build lego, the Stranger Things set. Got a basic training on autism yesterday evening. I’m making plans for this year because this is the way I deal, I live up to dates. I’m having coffee in the morning at the kitchen table and light that candle, and I want to swear, loudly, vehemently, madly.

heavy winter clouds
we’re all voyeurs
intently
scrolling through
the lives of strangers

Kati Mohr, stranger things

I have been reading about writers writing under truly terrible governments – the Nazis, terrible Roman emperors etc – and studying exactly how they tried to write about their lives and their times. Ovid, of course, and Catallus, but also existenialist poets from France. I wrote quite a bit about Ovid in my first book, Becoming the Villainess because at that time I felt the echoes of the violence and helplessness in my own life. I had no idea what was ahead for my country. I had so much optimism, then, that things would get better for women. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Like this camellia in my yard that bloomed before our week of snow, I had unreasonable optimism, it seems. […]

I think about writers who lived in far harsher environments than I do, with far less encouragement. I owe it to them to keep going. Many women writers I admire did not live to be my age, and so I shouldn’t just take it as an impediment, but perhaps an opportunity to write from the perspective of an over-fifty woman. I have survived this long for a reason, when some of my friends have not. I am still here, for now, writing on a blog I’m not sure anyone reads in a time where writing at all seems perilous, even foolish. I remember Sappho’s poetry fragments being pulled recently from a trash pile, poems that have survived across the years, against the odds.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Snow Snow Snow, and Part II of a Desert Residency in a Grim Time Plus Writing Insecurity

ground mist . . .
atop the snow
one perfect pinecone

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: February ’25

Last Sunday was Candlemas, the commemoration of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, and the official end of Christmas. In Luke 2, the old priest Simeon breaks into a canticle — a song or poem or lyric speech, in language derived strongly from the Old Testament prophets — which for many Christians around the world is one of the most familiar of all pieces of scripture, because of its traditional use in liturgy. […]

All of the Biblical canticles have very often been made into verse, in both classical and vernacular languages. That’s partly of course because they are just so well-known, and the paraphrase of a familiar bit of a scripture has been a popular devotional exercise since antiquity. But perhaps there is also something particularly facilitating or even inviting for the poet about the form of these canticles, which are recognisably in a ‘poetic’ register, distinct from the surrounding text, but not in any specific Greek verse form. That’s presumably because they are translations of poetry composed originally in Hebrew or Aramaic: the author of Luke may have made these translations himself, or perhaps incorporated or adapted existing Greek versions. Whoever made them, they haven’t attempted to make a Greek poem as such — the Greek text has instead the feel of a fairly literal translation, complete with features which are slightly alien to the language. Sometimes, perhaps, the encounter with a translation of this kind — a text audibly at one remove from its original context — can be a more fertile prompt to the imagination than the daunting perfection of an original.

Whatever the reason, there are hundreds if not thousands of verse paraphrases of the Gospel Canticles, and some of them have become established liturgical texts in their own right, most often as hymns.

Victoria Moul, Hearing the dawn-wind stir

Micropoetry is a different love language. I like the longer poems. I walk through metaphors and anaphora and line breaks the way some people experience flower meadows. I like the way verses ebb and flow till an unexpected close.

But brevity is a trap. The smaller poems still demand beauty and layers and nuance — a profoundly elegant minimalism. And while a haiku might be just an intense moment and the tanka its refined extension, forms that limit lines and words and syllables (while sometimes insisting on rhyme) can be a challenge. The shorter they are, the more difficult to get right. To me, though, the most interesting of the microforms is the Cherita. Created by Ai Li, Cherita is about story-telling but in six lines, split into three verses. There is pause, there is room for light and air and enough opportunity to create. That isn’t a bad way to write. Life, if you’re listening, that isn’t a bad way to be, either.

I wrote a few Cherita this week as the news headlines, strident and acerbic, overwhelmed me. To anyone thinking this really can’t be the world we signed up for, I feel what you feel. How to glue a broken universe together is another problem altogether, but there can be poetry on the side while we look for tools and tape and humanity. Poems to hold us together…poems to hold on to…as we find a way forward. […]

Nothing was left.

Just the scarecrow
with the broken head.

But look,
even then,
not one bird.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Just the scarecrow with the broken head

In a wonderful essay for The Paris Review titled “In This Essay I Will: On Distraction”, David Schurman Wallace evokes reaching the point in his writing when the initial spark loses its come-hither glint—the point where distraction courts the mind. Wallace’s eyes fall onto his shelves, lingering in the memory of former trysts, former relationships with texts. And there, on the shelf, is Flaubert’s final novel, the book left unfinished. There is that temptation courting the mind, looking for an excuse to wander back into it. 

Wallace gives us the paradox of writing as labor, namely, that distraction doubles as blessing and curse. Distraction releases us from desire, or from the intensity of edits and drafts and evidence; desire lets the mind literally wander over the wall, and take a side trail into an elsewhere. Desire opens an Otherwise.

Flaubert’s two clerks want to know everything, and this interest in everything keeps them from the labor of attending to something. “Their curiosity has no staying power,” as Wallace observes. Their desire lacks commitment or willingness to sweat. 

Writing is not fun in the way that this word is conventionally used. 

Writing is cannibalized by “the possibility of detours”; research leads us to the rabbit hole that seeds new ideas and flirts with different beginnings or projects.

Alina Stefanescu, Of strangeness, complexity, and ‘scandalous visibility’.

A fantasy is an open door that allows us to try on someone else’s life for a moment. With a safe word. With a way out.

In the fantasy of my life, I am ready to be anything. I am finishing my memoir, Sailing the Milky Way. My first novel, Under a Neon Sun, is still walking around the world. Red Hen Press is about to be the biggest indie publisher on the West Coast.

We are changing the world, one story at a time. And when we do, we’ll drive down Lake Avenue in my Honda (with its 200,000 miles) and celebrate. I will buy another safer vehicle.

We have a saying at Red Hen: “What matters is how we walk through fire.” We didn’t mean literal fire. After the Los Angeles fires, the staff came back into the smoky air and all got pneumonia. Soon, we are going to fix Red Hen’s roof, which blew off in the storm. (Give us a literal break.) Now, we need to come back like we’re storming the canyons.

I have told the Red Hen staff: I have skin in the game. When we sell 25,000 copies of a book, I get a tattoo. When we sell a book to a movie, I get a tattoo. When we get a million-dollar donation, I get a tattoo. By the end of 2025, I’ll be posting pictures of my first tattoos.

Kate Gale, What is your fantasy, Babygirl?

I’m a stowaway on a cold rubber boat. 

My desires and old love letters are the sails,
I paddle with spoons and old New Yorkers.  

From a surge of waves comes a sleek head,
a piercing in its nose –

A seal with a straw of plastic.

Jill Pearlman, The Executive Restores Plastic Straws

In the kind of synchronicity that usually happens only in fiction, a piece that I wrote on February 4, 2020 was published exactly five years later, on February 4, 2025. I confess that I am not sure whether to call it a poem or a piece of creative nonfiction, but it’s called “On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address…” Michael Broder, publisher of Indolent Books, accepted it for the series he is calling “Second Coming: A poem-a-day series in creative response to the threats posed to our democracy by the incoming presidential administration.” You can read the piece I am talking about here.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four By Four #36

The Ravens Perch has published four of my poems this past week.  You can find the first of them, “The Plural of Albatross” at https://theravensperch.com/the-plural-of-albatross-by-ellen-roberts-young/

Then page forward to “Night Flight” an experiment at capturing the experience of not sleeping/sleeping on an overnight flight.

Next is “Absence” which evolved from a prompt at the Napa Writers Conference in 2023: many drafts before and after comments by our workshop leader, Ilya Kaminsky and fellow students.

At the end of the set, but perhaps most meaningful to share, is “Cry for the Earth”

            Old earth,
your home, is creaking.
Can you hear how much
too fast the hidden heart is
beating?

Find the rest of this one here.

Ellen Roberts Young, My Poems on The Ravens Perch

I had a couple of ‘grey walks’ this week; grey sky, cold air, no one around to exchange pleasantries with. And then this poem popped up in my memories on my phone:

Loneliness

Loneliness is grey

It tastes like the lamb that I wish had never been killed

It sounds like crying.

It smells like chips dropped on the floor.

It looks like a storm cloud closing in.

It feels like a rat that is going to bite.

Choosing a feeling, giving it a colour and thinking about what it tastes, sounds, smells, looks and feels like was one of my favourite ‘let’s get writing’ activities when I worked with children. This group poem was written by six year olds, and I love the way their images say something extra about their experience of the feeling. I liked it too when their adults joined in and everyone shared their different emotions. It strikes me that it could also be a ‘let’s think about that feeling’ activity. I know from having written one each time I have introduced it in a writing workshop, that the same exercise results in a different end product each time. Each poem told me something about what was important to set down or celebrate in the moment.

Sue Finch, HOW DO

Wintry weeks grind along like the noisy snowplows tearing through sheets of ice this morning. At least we are having a winter, unlike some years. I may not love winter–especially the short, grey days–yet I live in a region that needs it. Indeed, it is February (alas); but in a few weeks I’m liable to notice snowdrops emerging from the dirt. Anticipation stirs my heart. It feels something like hope, although hope is something I feel less inclined to believe in every year. I guess my problem with hope is that it feels like there is human agency invested in the concept, and as I age I recognize how little effect our wishes, hopes, and prayers have upon anything.

The snowdrops emerge all the same, until such time as they can no longer withstand changes in their environment. There is some comfort in that, for me.

Ann E. Michael, Something like hope

I learned this week of the death, January 9, of my friend the literary scholar and poet Jayne Marek. My friend and my comrade poet. You can read her inspiring obituary here. My review of her new book, Dusk-Voiced (Tebot Bach, 2024), is waiting to be posted at Escape into Life (apparently there is a problem with distribution of Tebot Bach’s books). You can hear Jayne talk about and read from Dusk-Voiced at the Meter-Cute substack.

Jayne and I met at a writer’s conference. Because she lived in Port Townsend and I live in Edmonds, we did not often see each other. Neither of us were crazy about long phone calls. We did not become the sort of friends who hang out on Zooms together, or share poems vis email, though we did share publication in Triple No. 10 from Ravenna Press.

Every November, for the last 7 or so years, both Jayne and I were invited to the Glen Cove Writers’ Retreat on Hood Canal, and every year (with the exception of 2020), we went. At Glen Cove we took long walks together and bird-watched. Jayne was an avid naturalist, and she took amazing photographs of mushrooms and bugs. Evenings, we drank wine and read each other poems.

Bethany Reid, Dusk-Voiced, poems by Jayne Marek

In contemplating writing creatively about the life and death of a real person, famous or otherwise, one has (a minimum of) six key decisions to make, the last four of which are dependent on the first and second.

First and foremost is whether to write poetry or prose. With five poetry collections and four novels already published, I imagine the decision Sue Hubbard made to plump for poetry to address her subject, Gwen John (1876–1939), wasn’t an easy one to make; however, the notes at the back indicate that Hubbard had previously written (at least) one poem about a moment in John’s life so perhaps that had left an itch that needed to be scratched. I admire Hubbard for even taking on such a large and complex project.

The second decision, perhaps a subconscious one, is how much of the subject’s life needs to be recounted to do justice to their main events, relationships, successes, failures and emotions. Despite some artistic success, John, as is widely known now, had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime and lived in the shadow of both her two-years-younger brother, Augustus, who became the most celebrated British painter of their day, and Rodin, 35 years her senior, with whom John had an unequal relationship for a decade from 1904 (and whose forename was, by coincidence, the French equivalent of her brother’s). The 34 poems in this collection run chronologically from John’s childhood and adolescence in North Wales to her death in Dieppe, two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. As we’ll see, they aren’t ‘Wiki poems’, i.e. they don’t clunkily include facts for the sake of it; rather, they tend more towards impressionistic sketches, pleasingly in keeping with John’s style of painting. Neither do they amount to a full-blown biography (her mother’s death when John was eight isn’t mentioned for instance, though her absence can be inferred), but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less meritorious or successful than had Hubbard written a fuller account in prose.

Matthew Paul, Review of Sue Hubbard’s God’s Little Artist

If this poem was in a family of poems, it feels as if it belongs to the family of poems that another one of my favourite poems belongs to “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm” by Wallace Stevens. There is that same strange rush of immediacy and peace to both of these poems for me, the same heady rush of restless searching and utter stillness.

I love the way into this poem as well – the ‘Here you are’. Who is the you? Is it us? Is it the poet? Is it the speaker of the poem? I know it’s not me because I’m not ‘near the edge of the world, rowing /across a vast lake’. Or am I? Perhaps this is why I feel so tired, so discombobulated, so unequal to the task of writing a Substack post, that is until I climb into the boat of this poem, and take myself back into language.

As I read this poem, I find the boundary between myself and the speaker in the poem suddenly becoming porous and I feel as if the poem is addressing me. When I read “You are tired of having / to re-invent yourself” I think of the wonderful Rilke poem and the shock of that poem in the last line, when the poem turns its face towards us and says “You must change your life”.

Kim Moore, Is February the new January?

Blossomise by Simon Armitage is a beautiful and nifty volume — poems by Armitage illustrated by Angela Harding commissioned by the National Trust to highlight and celebrate the spring blossoms in the UK which have declined in number of late. Obviously, the consequences of fewer blossoming trees has an effect on the human population and on various species. I’m not sure that I was expecting much TBH from a commissioned sequence, but I am delighted by these poems.

We have “Planet Earth in party mode, / petals fizzing and frothing / like pink champagne.” Refreshing and suprising takes, include the CV of Blossom, and also the lovely music in a poem which asks, “How many summers / up ahead? // How many autumns / in his hand?”

Somewhat reassuring is that slim and beautiful books like this go on existing.

Shawna Lemay, Poetry Club – Half an Hour

When I teach creative writing classes, one of the prompts I often give my students is to write a “persona poem,” or a poem written as someone (real or imaginary) other than themselves. This assignment is good for writers in the same way, I think, it’s good for all of us to visit unfamiliar views—it’s an exercise in empathy. The marvelous poems that many students produce are proof that deep perspective-taking can bring about surprising, as well as surprisingly deep, insights.

As a somewhat guarded and perfectionistic young poet navigating academia in my twenties, where I was compelled to share my poems with classrooms of peers and professors for regular critique, I discovered that it was often much easier for me to write in other’s voices—characters I seemed to channel from another plane—than to write openly as myself. Listening to and speaking through these other voices were like turning a palm-sized gemstone around in my hand and watching light refract off its many sides. The gemstone was me, and it was not me. The facets of the gemstone were also a web of possibilities, alternative lives and worlds. These characters acted simultaneously as shining windows into the sources of my fears, my questions, my griefs, and as a kind of shield for my personal vulnerabilities and the intimate details of my own life story that I didn’t want to expose.

As a result, my first two poetry collections—Best Bones and Darwin’s Mother—contain poems written from the perspective of a house servant, a blackfly, an 18^th century farmer, a monk, a ghost, an archeologist, a chimpanzee from Dr. Harry Harlow’s infamous primate experiments in the 1950s, of Charles Darwin as a child, a mother cicada, Achilles, the Virgin Mary, and an AI robot. As I’ve continued to evolve as a writer, I’ve become more comfortable speaking plainly as myself (hence this newsletter), but the other voices remain with me. The insects and ancestors and dinosaur bones are murmuring alongside and within my own voice. What began in part as a method of self-protection has expanded my understanding of self into something vast and fractal. […]

My fantasy, unlikely as it may be, is this: That as the negative impacts social media has on mental health and our ability to speak to one another in open-hearted ways become increasingly clear—along with the openly nefarious intentions of the tech overlords who profit from these sites—that there will be a large exodus from the rainbow river. People will put their phones in a closed drawer, then go outside and lay in the grass for a good long while, not doing anything in particular. Maybe on the third day of this new freedom, as they begin to dream up collective ways to resist the institutional crisis and ecocide-in-progress, they might see a pencil on a nearby table, pick it up, and write a poem.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Vast and Fractal

When I slap a mosquito sucking on the skin of my shoulder, I wonder
if the blood is mine or someone else’s

We’re all part of the same cellular network

It is the year of the snake and some have taken power
that isn’t theirs

Every spore, every bloodstained stone, every word we protect
and won’t give surrender

Look at the moths that arrow night after night
into basins of uncollected light

Luisa A. Igloria, Why We Should Care

if i don’t know where the poem is going
then who is writing it
how do i know when it is finished

and yet
after it is finished
i seem to know both

the breath comes from somewhere
behind the eyes

Jim Young, who poet who

to hear again one’s given voice
the great oak of infinite possibilities
breathes

Grant Hackett [no title]

In this massive, end-of-the-year edition: gold paint and bird wings, throwing words to the wind, liquid understatement, stopping by woods, a river about a river, and much more. Enjoy.

Geography is elastic but night has reversed or doubled itself and it is not yet late but soon it will be if I am not diligent diligent being the rudder the bow the shoe’s heel and sometimes it is a memory etched on a sidewalk happy new year floating from my eves as the starlings shoot out.

Rebecca Loudon, Christmas Eve

I cleared my mind for Christmas photocopying outlines of birds and brushing them with gold. Paper birds flew across the front room and others, backed with pages from a dreadful novel, flew across the stairwell. I cut birds out of linen scraps and sewed them onto a tablecloth. I went down to the pier and watched them gather late one afternoon. I read my paternal grandmother’s fortune telling book, its auguries and instructions for interpreting the behaviour of birds (ornithomancy). 

I stopped by the sloe hedge opposite mum’s yesterday evening and listened to birds, far too late I thought, it was dark, and remembered the tunnel into the hedge used by the vixen who visits mum. The dark hillocky ridge beyond, punctured by rabbits. Mist sinking into everything. 

Jackie Wills, Gold paint and bird wings

Her eyes skirt the trees,
the marshy undergrowth
for a safe settling.
She tires easily now,
seeks sheltered landings
on timeworn wings,
her flight nearing
an unfamiliar shore
that beckons
with no promises.

Sarah Russell, Bird Woman

Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. This year was different — a time of such profound pain and profound transformation that it fused reading and writing into a single, surprising act of the unconscious: I began making bird divinations to clarify the confusion of living and refill my reservoir of trust in the cohesion of the world. This daily practice left a great deal less time for other reading, especially anything new: The written word today seems more and more resigned to commodified virtue signaling and hollow self-help, so I found myself returning more and more to trusted treasures that have stood the test of time and changing moral fashions. 

Maria Popova, Favorite Books of the Year: Art, Science, Poetry, Psychology, Children’s, and More

I want to read more – but I do need to clarify in my own mind what I want to read, and why.

I want to write more – but I do need to clarify…

I want to keep posting online.

I want to keep connecting with lovely people.

I want to see more birds (real life as well as photos), photograph more birds, post more bird photos, read and write about birds (oh look, I’ve done some clarifying right there).

Sue Ibrahim, Another year…

Perhaps this particular bird is a singular bird:
its fluting tones original to its temperament

and not to any other in the larger murmuration,
though each wears the same coat lightly stippled

white, flocked with purple, green, and gold. Yet,
a song only becomes what it is when one note joins

or swerves alongside another, the mystery of never
breaking off a single feather even as it curves.

Luisa A. Igloria, Mozart’s Starling

A mixture of fear and feathers in Mary Ruefle’s “Tail Feathers” which opens so exquisitely . . . I arrived by rain. […]

Orientation for birds is accomplished by tail feathers. Usually, birds have six pairs of feathers on the tail, with each pair displaying increasing levels of asymmetry towards the outer pair, all of which are arranged in a fan shape that supports precision steering in flight. In some birds like the peacock, tail feathers have evolved into showy ornaments that are useless in flight.

Moist.
Like flames.

The tension in that implausible and totally possible image that evokes the world of school, disabling the tail feathers from accomplishing their purpose. All means of escape are ornamental in the classroom or the school corridor. The game is rotten, to mischaracterize a quote from a Concrete Blonde cover of a Leonard Cohen song. The board limits the choices that can be made. On that note, Cezanne had multiple peach-heaps that could be hiding the skull, this Still life: Assiette de pêches among them.

I always wonder what art or illustration Mary Ruefle is studying as the poem comes together. She reminds me of Samuel Beckett in this way; or else, my suspicion that an image is being assimilated into the language. 

Alina Stefanescu, Fear maps.

A comic in a blog can have a filmic quality–you scroll down through image after image, with screen light shining behind them. This week I’m delighted to show you Chris Gavaler’s comic “Rhapsomantic” based on my poem “Rhapsodomancy,” a poem from my forthcoming book Mycocosmic. (Text-only version here, in ASP Review). He and I consulted on the images sometimes, which he created after comparing my words to the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot images. There were moments I’d say yes, this is perfect, and others when an image had the wrong vibe and I’d suggest it went with a different Major Arcana card instead. I love the results.

Lesley Wheeler, Comics, newsreels, retrospectives

just cold enough
for puddles to freeze . . .
cubist moon

Bill Waters, 2 poems

The poets whose books I reviewed in 2024 addressed grief and loss, the experience of exile, infertility, and the natural world, of living in the spaces between illness and health, and the power of resilience. They wrote of how the abiding presence of Nature balances an acute awareness of climate change, how language connects family, and why the dead are never truly gone.

Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones: 2024 Book Covers and 2025 Reviews

I’m surprised by my own tears and wonder why I don’t feel this deeply when I read other, similar headlines. Though, occasionally, one will stand out and some detail in the article about strangers will hook me and deepen my understanding beyond the intellectual. Something specific that sparks a network of memories, not their specifics, but the silent knowledge inherent in memory that makes facts move from the part of the brain that understands words, to the part that comprehends lived experience.

We witness.

This is what reading is about, isn’t it? When literature can witness lived experience in a way that mirrors what we recognize to be true. When an external perspective shows us more than we can see on our own. I still find it amazing how words can bridge the gap of distance, and of time.

It’s strange to be working on two projects at once. One is nearly entirely factual, shaped with imaginative connections (The wasp memoir). While the other is nearly entirely fictional, set within a framework of a few facts (The Baroness play). Both attempting to witness the human experience.

Scientists say now that our memories don’t function like recordings, but that we recreate the memory each time we bring it to mind. Every time I get caught up in concerns about writing the truth rather than writing what is true, I think of this.

It is true that my great grandmother was a cuckoo wasp. That my grandmother left the cramped, hexagon cell in the strange hive to wander over the moor. Potter wasp, intermittent mother to my mother. Solitary down the line. I am a witness.

Ren Powell, What it Might Mean to Witness

She turns a page in the journal.
Blank. White. What’s the point?

And then, one day, a request for an interview.
A girl, student of history, inquisitive, gentle.

A canvas bag, a notebook, pens of different colours.
She has tied her lovely red hair into bunches.

Larissa invites her to sit by the window, says.
There’s nothing especially interesting about my life,

but do you know how Margaret Clitherow
was crushed to death beneath stones?

Bob Mee, TODAY I TRIED TO THINK ABOUT HOW ONE WAY OR ANOTHER SO MANY OF US ARE DISPLACED

Post-exertion malaise: it sounds like the title of a contemporary novel.

I’ve read studies that speculate PEM results from a sort of communications snafu among the many complex body systems: nerves, synapses, gut microbes, spine, brain, and probably processes science has yet to discover. What I wasn’t aware of until recently is that PEM can appear after mental or social “exertions” as well. Mental exertion such as submitting to journals; social exertion such as attending poetry readings, parties, family gatherings. It explains why I had to lie down for a nap at 5 pm every day the last few years I was working full-time, even though my job was a desk job. And why shopping has become such a tiring task for me.

Shopping, when you think about it, involves: 1) being in a public or social space; 2) attention to details; 3) frequent decision-making; 4) stress about finances, parking, and whether said decisions were the right ones; 5) unexpected stuff like long lines, a credit card that refuses to work, bad weather, and not finding what you were shopping for. Even if you shop online, some of these processes are involved. Yes, our brains are bombarded; and our brains are designed to filter and make efficient work of the bombarding, but perhaps that’s part of what goes awry with long covid and chronic fatigue. The filter may clog, so to speak. Brain fog and fatigue.

Similar micro-decisions go on when I send out poems to journals. Should this poem be sent to that publication? Do I like the other poems in this magazine, the editorial bent? Is this poem finished, and is it any good? Do they require a fee? Do I want to pay the fee? Are they okay with simultaneous submissions? Do they use Submittable, email, or some other method? Such analysis goes on constantly, as well as lots of even smaller decisions. I have to read the submissions guidelines carefully and, sometimes, re-format my work to suit. And then there’s the cover letter if required, and the bio–though I have a “boilerplate bio,” often it seems wrong for the journal; if they’ve asked for a personal touch or want me to stress place or background, I have to tweak the bio…and on and on. The task was never my favorite, but it didn’t exhaust me.

Ann E. Michael, Post-exertion malaise

I used to diarize and write my ideas down on napkins. Now that I don’t go to many places that have napkins, I bring along my book.

I’m a chronic chronicler. Every day on Facebook for a lot of years (and Flickr for many years before that), I’ve been posting a photo I took that day and writing about that day’s events.

It started as writing practice for times when I didn’t have a blog-worthy post. It’s where I dumped my shit, almost literally, like details about my colonoscopy. […]

My friend Susan, leader of writing retreats and author of several books and the Substack Writing and Roaming, advised me at lunch yesterday to get out of my own way. She saw that I was constantly throwing up roadblocks to keep from advancing to the finish line with my own projects: two unfinished novels, an unfinished children’s book about bugs (a passion project) and my finished poetry manuscript, Words with Friends.

I bought that manuscript with me, and she said “It looks finished! Why haven’t you submitted it yet?”

“Because it’s not organized. I need to put the poems in order.”

She said, “The last thing I want to read is six poems in a row about bugs” (or something similar), and I thought shit! She’s right. “Take this manuscript and throw it up in the air. Pick the pages up randomly, and that’s your order.”

Then she flipped through the manuscript, catching on a poem called “Pine.” I kept talking to her while she was reading it, and she was so intently focused on that poem. She pulled it from the stack and said, “Except make this one first.”

What has stopped me from pursuing personal writing goals and instead sent me to the basement to make lamps? Is it a fear of failure? Is it money? It’s certainly not a lack of time, now that I have nowhere to go.

I won’t call this a “resolution,” but I’ll try to spend my time more wisely.

In 2025, I will post my daily diary, along with other content, here, with a TL;DR summary on Facebook and a link to the post. And I will throw that manuscript up in the air and start sending it around.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Throwing Words to the Wind

Since it’s a big job, the remodeling of this site to contain both blog and personal website, there’s much to be done, including getting my book and zine page updated to reflect this year, which has been a whirl ever since last January when I decided to create monthly zines of art and writing work. At first, it was largely because I had had to graduate to a paid Issuu subscription, which was going to cost almost 30 bucks a month and I’d better take full advantage of that and actually use it. About midyear, I actually found a much better and much less expensive platform for hosting e-zines, so moved to that. I still enjoyed putting out monthly zines though, even with most of them being electronic with a couple exceptions. 

There’s something very rewarding about collecting and publishing poems this way, especially since my work is typically written as a series, and though I occasionally publish bits and pieces in collab zines, journals, and anthologies, they are best experienced in tandem with each other and any attendant artwork. I also like offering the bulk of my work with no impediments like expensive printing and shipping costs, especially in this economy.  I’ve been saving the printing costs for longer projects like this year’s full-length collection, RUINPORN, or the larger book projects that had specifications beyond my own printer like GRANATA and GHOST BOX (which was half created in studio, half by the professionals.)

As I was making the collage above for the webpage that lists everything, I realized that is quite a lot of work out in the world this year, which feels really good, because more often in previous years I’ve sat on things for years before releasing them, really with no benefits (at some point, they are done, so its not like they are aging like wine hidden away.) 

Kristy Bowen, bookish things

Here’s a sneak peek of the likely cover of my next book, coming out in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something good to read, I highly recommend a new anthology, The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (edited by Todd and Noah Davis and and Carolyn Mahan). it pairs descriptions, habitat and lifestyle notes on key species in the region with poems about those species. Yes, I’m included (my entry is the mayapple). Among the other poets included are David Baker, Kasey Jueds, Chase Twichell, Lee Upton, Marjorie Maddox, K.A. Hays, Michael Garrigan, Jerry Wemple, Chard deNiord, and many more.

Grant Clauser, 2024 Update and stuff

Lately, it’s been about counting. Years. Runs. Words. Work. Breaths. Days. Trees.[…]

12,000 words – the number of words my novel has been stuck on all year. I lost my writing mojo in 2024, but I’ve found it again. Standby 2025, especially February 14th.

18 – the number of years I’ve spent at Wrexham University building a project which includes the voices of those usually excluded from education, from life, from being heard. A few days before my birthday, Outside In won an Above and Beyond Award for embedding Inclusion into the everyday life of the university. A day after my birthday, the group threw me a surprise party with more gifts than I could carry, some flowers that have lasted right up to today.

Breaths – who knows how many? But lately I’ve been practising Yoga Nidra as a way of grounding myself back into my adult self after the re-emergence of childhood traumas, counting breaths in through my nose, and out through my mouth. At first, I found this almost impossible to do. Now, it’s becoming more of a habit.

24 – the number of my advent calendar, and maybe yours: a treat I bought in the dark of November. Each day in December, I’ve opened a cardboard drawer to find a gift to myself. Lavender salve to rub into my temples, geranium hand cream, frankincense oil to rejuvenate my 60 year old skins. It’s taught me something about self-care that I don’t think I knew before – how to treasure myself each day, regardless.

1 – the tree that came to mind in a therapy session recently. This tree is real and imagined, a safe place of non-judgement, acceptance, strength, solidity and power –  somewhere I can go, in my mind, to find all that I needed when a child, all that I need now to draw upon when I’m thrown back into child-learnt fears. 

And so I find I’ve numbered my days, counted myself into my sixties and up to this Christmas  Day. And what have I found? 

Love. A growing into love for myself I’ve never thought possible. A growing into receiving love from others I’ve never thought I deserved. A growing love for this world, with all its darkness, all its lights.

Liz Lefroy, I Number My Days

Asterisks and diamond drops
and the cold, so cold,
Lording-over-us blue 

and the rose chill – 
sky’s bright rim of ear, 
so cold, asking to be nibbled

this renegade that escaped,
a maraschino cherry
a cocktail on ice

so raw and beloved
the song’s song be-
longing in our mortal ear. 

Jill Pearlman, Bright Rim of Ear Lyric

Is it wildly obvious that blue is my favorite color? I’ve recently learned that it’s scientifically proven that the color blue lifts one’s mood. I’ve just ordered the book Blue Mind by Wallace Nichols to learn more. Wallace’s focus is on blue water, but since I walk the shoreline where I live nearly everyday, I think that’s probably relevant, too. All I know is that the calm and peace the color offers me is real.

No wonder my most recent book is Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) has blue in the title or that the swag bags for Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women are also, blue.

It used to embarrass me that I had such an affinity to one color above all others, but not now.

Not being embarrassed anymore is one of the greatest gifts of growing older. Creating space in the world for others to walk through is another. Almost exactly, fifteen years ago, my good friend Kelli Russell Agodon and I dreamed-up the idea for a poetry retreat for women and Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Writing Retreat for Women was born over a glass of wine, sitting by a roaring fire.

We had both taught at several conferences that featured a less than nurturing atmosphere: a small inside stairwell, an unheated room, and the list goes on. Kelli and I decided, at our writing retreat everyone would feel cared for and seen. There will be swag bags full of new books and everyone will have a one-on-one conference at no extra charge.

Over the years, we moved from Florence, Oregon, to La Connor, Washington. A number of years ago we started inviting guest faculty which have included Elizabeth Austen, Jessica Gigot, Claudia Castro Luna, Michele Bombardier, January Gill O’Neil, Rena Priest, Maggie Smith, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and Jane Wong.

This year writer-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield and poet Susan Landgraf will join me on the theme of wonderment and joy. What could be better?

Susan Rich, Another Year, Oh My: Celebrating

Sharing a name with a famous actress was innocuous enough, wasn’t it? We had little in common other than being white women. I am American; she was British. I’m a poet and writer; she was a renowned actress of the stage and screen. I was born in 1977; she was born in 1934 and had already won two Oscars by the time I was walking. Surely we wouldn’t be mistaken for one another!

But, to my astonishment and amusement, once I started publishing books and having a more public life, and especially after my poem “Good Bones” went viral in 2016, that’s exactly what happened. In 2017 Meryl Streep read my poem “Good Bones” at Lincoln Center, as part of the annual Academy of American Poets gala. I wasn’t in the audience that evening, but when I listened to the audio later, I heard her say, “I’m going to read a poem by Maggie Smith.” The crowd murmured with excitement, and she said, in her unmistakable voice, “Not that one. The American.”

I laughed. From that day forward, my social media bio has been either “Not that one” or “The other one.”

I hope Dame Maggie Smith, who was known for her wit, would have found all of this amusing as well. As her character Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, once said on Downton Abbey, “Life is a game, where the player must appear ridiculous.”

Maggie Smith, The Other One, Forever & Ever

For me, the year really got started in April with the solar eclipse, which Chris and I watched from Burlington, Vermont, in the path of totality. I still tell anyone who will listen that it changed my life. It sounds goofy AF and over-the-top, and I just don’t care. What I saw and felt was the most profound awe of my life. The magic and power were undeniable, and it became clear: that giddy feeling was what I needed more of in my life. And I needed it immediately, so I spent the year getting after it. [….]

I spent the first six months of the year dramatically revising my poetry manuscript and continuing to send it out. In the process, I crossed the 30-submission mark. And then? I pressed pause. Even though some of the responses included positive signs about the viability of the manuscript, all were ultimately rejections except two that I’m waiting on. I am writing still, just not as much as I used to. I completed Sarah Freligh‘s August Micro-a-Day challenge, gathered some free writes in my journal, attended a couple of local open mics and featured at one.

I’ll get more serious about po’biz again in the future, I’m sure, but for now I’m reassessing what I’m doing, who I’m doing it for and what I want out of it. […]

Art making has come and gone in my life over the years, but mostly, it has been gone. This year, it started calling to me again, however. I had lots of resistance and fear about it initially because I was taking myself too seriously. I’ve been working through it and trying to make it about play. I have some things I want to pursue in 2025, but for now, I’m just practicing and exploring. (You can follow me on an Instagram account dedicated to this art journey here.)

So what now? What’s up next? On the heels of this awkward ritual — the recap — there may be another one: the resolutions, the intentions, the goals for 2025. But if not, the main theme is this: I’m trying to channel the magic and wisdom from 2024 into a new model for writing and art making and being in the world.

That means returning to this idea that we can create what we need for ourselves and for our communities. Our strength lies there, not with typical measures like publications or likes or beauty standards or even elections. That’s a story for another day, but sticking to the theme I have going here, we got us.

We got us.

We make something out of nothing. Almost every day. And the worlds we make are as real as any we’ve been handed. And they’re ours. They belong to us. Imagine how powerful we are when we keep building. Imagine it like it’s already true — and suddenly it is.

Carolee Bennett, To Make a Safe Space for Myself

The final poem in our Palestine Advent series is Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin.

Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali.

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1933 in the village of Saffuriya and died in Nazareth in 2011. His So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Anthony Wilson, Palestine Advent 24: Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali

I do realize what has been lost, in our semester long focus on trees.  I love the idea of students choosing a topic and diving deep and learning a lot.  But through the years, I’m less and less convinced that happens, except for one or two students, who have probably been doing that on their own anyway.

In this time of planetary destruction, teaching students how to notice the world around them seems more important than ever.  Exposing students to the ways of being a naturalist in the world, even if they’re not going to be scientists–that seems very important to me.  Along the way we did creative approaches too, which I wrote about in this blog post, and I think those experiences helped some of them realize that they do have creative skills, that these, too, can be learned.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Success of Adopting a Tree in a Composition Class

When I was a child, my sisters and I were told (and believed) that on Christmas Eve when the clock struck midnight, for one hour all of the animals could talk to one another. This was a magical happening, and also a secret: if we were to try to stay awake and observe this convening (which I suggested on a number of occasions), the magic would be broken.

In my early childhood, we lived in a suburban house with a wide swath of woods behind, and always cohabitated with at least one cat and one or two dogs. Later, we moved to a seven-acre farm and in addition to the animals who shared our house, we also lived alongside chickens, Nubian goats, alpacas, horses and a pony, two barn cats, and a pig, not to mention all of the other wild creatures–birds, squirrels, mice and moles, raccoons, snakes and lizards, turtles and toads, deer–that shared the land. At that point, imagining the conversations that would take place on this sacred night became even more mysterious. What, given the brief gift of a shared language, would all of these creatures say to one another?

Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Christmas

i read in an old grimoire
that if we are sick we should bury all our hooves.
we should prepare for winter. we must
boil a whole tree until it is
soft as flesh.
i pickle the moon to go with it.
sweet lemon divine. i collect the hooves.

Robin Gow, healing spells

I grew up in the same New England that Robert Frost wrote about. I saw the roads. Drifts of snow covered them. New Hampshire used to get an average of 174 inches of snow a year. Now, due to climate change, just a lousy 60 inches, a third of what it was fifty years ago.

Snow or no snow, the question might be, do we take the time to look outside at all? Are we intentional about looking up from our phones? The answer is no. We don’t have time—or make time—to look at the woods.

What could possibly be happening on Instagram or TikTok that is more exciting than driving, crossing the street, or interacting with someone at our local coffee shop? It’s all too apparent that we are sucked into our devices. We are absorbed by our longing for the pixels of a digital world.

The first time I realized the phone was a competition was at a Red Hen poetry reading at Poets House. Leaves fell in New York’s late afternoon. Li Young Li was reading with Peggy Shumaker, two accomplished poets. Before the reading began, no one was looking through the Poets House library, one of the largest poetry collections in the world. They weren’t observing the beauty of the space. They were playing with their phones. I realized that the event was competing with something that could fit on their laps.

This was twelve years ago; the phone hadn’t really taken us by the throat. It has now.

Kate Gale, Stopping by Woods: On Returning to Intention

sun dying
i become
part of the darkness

Grant Hackett [no title]

In an Afterword, [Robert] van Vliet briefly explains some of Vessels’ compositional background. A few years ago, in the midst of the bleakness and isolation of the Covid pandemic, the poet was tied up in a difficult, exasperating writer’s block. Taking up a popular creative writer’s manual, which offered a method of daily exercises – applying aleatory, chance texts as writing prompts – van Vliet leaned instead upon three much-valued personal sources : the I Ching, the journals of Thoreau, and the gnostic Nag Hammadi Gospel texts.

The poet emphasizes the generative effect of chance operations, comparable to casting the I Ching oracles – and these methods clearly had a liberating influence, opening wide, exploratory dimensions, adding variety to the sequence. But if you read his explanation carefully, you find that the process involved several overlapping steps : sorting, mixing, shifting, recombining. And in fact this step-by-step approach allowed van Vliet’s own voice to emerge : quietly, subtly, unobtrusively. For me it emerges in the refined lightness, the liquid understatement, the powerful simplicity, of his images of nature. Like ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry in its foreshortened, whispering force, its emotional accuracy, his short lyrics find a place where heart, mind, and soul – feeling, thought, and truth – seem to merge in a transparency of light, wind, water, seasonal change.

The ancient source material is by no means an artificial scaffolding, a crutch. It is the avenue for an encounter : because for this kind of Transcendentalist, philosophical writing (think, Thoreau), there is no Truth but lived truth; there is no Word but felt words, embodied words – words in-relation to others, to otherness, to Another. The divine, the sacred, washes through these poems like a wind (or rain, or drought) : the fear and terror are there, as well as the longing and adoration. Moreover the free, questing, skeptical, philosophical mind is there : the only dogma, the only authority, the only truth… you must live them. You must experience them yourself. This is the encounter (in my rough approximation) that the reader will find in this volume. It is supremely paradoxical, supremely mysterious – as is our mortal life in this mysterious cosmos. The poet challenges himself – and the reader – to find life again, beyond the fraudulent twilight realm of illusions, self-delusions.

Henry Gould, A New Song : a New Walk

I’ve been thinking about connections, networks, and finding angels in strangers. These past two months have been an odd kerfluffle of dinners with family and friends, stretches of quiet, paroxysms of activity, stretches of how-can-it-be-only-4:30. My husband has invited another crop of people over for dinner, and I feel resentful. And I feel guilty for that. I don’t know these people very well, or at all. He relies on me for my conversational skills while he finishes cooking, and then also at the table. I don’t feel like pumping up that particular energy. I don’t feel like hearing myself say brightly to someone, “So…” and ask some question about their lives. I don’t care. But I ask myself, what is my preferred alternative? Another quiet dinner and then Netflix? Really? Again?

I think these people coming to my table have nothing to offer me, but how could I possibly know? And why would I cut myself off from the possibility? Don’t I believe that in community lies all hope and possibility, all potential for the human species on the planet? Don’t I believe that these interactions with friends and strangers make rich a life? What is my problem? Something inside me is unsettled and bleating mutely, and something about the prospect of these people, these particular people and their particular connection, makes me feel trapped. Which is completely ridiculous.

But I found a kind of resonance with the shrimp in this poem by Catherine Barnett, from her terrific book Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space. Alone or not alone enough, is the question of the poem.

But I think the real question of life is the “sharing a patch of sea grass” she mentions. I know from another book I’m reading right now, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, that it’s not just a couple of shrimp sharing that patch of sea grass, it’s teeming masses of bacteria and other teeny things, single celled whatsits and multicelled whosits, and fleas and waterworld insects, all awash in waves and winds frantically trying to keep everything in balance. I learned in some other article somewhere that even though we are an incredibly destructive force, we human species have also had some positive effects on the planet, and were we to disappear, those positive effects would disappear too.

I guess my point is, we’re all in this together, we shrimp and insects, we whosits and humans and winds. And although we’re never particularly alone, sometimes it feels like it, and against our will. So look, Elijah could show up for dinner at any time. Just set the table. Prepare to look at a stranger with your brainy eyes, and to say brightly, “So…”

Marilyn McCabe, then they’re gone again

There’s a delightful quickness of fantasy in early Yeats. When I was a boy, critics seemed to enjoy disparaging his ‘Celtic twilight’ poems as – I suppose – trivial and escapist. I don’t know if that’s still the case. Carrying Jeffares’ MacMillan paperback selection around with me, I loved intoning those early poems quite as much as the later ones and for the same reason – I gorged on the sheer richness and control of their music in a quite indiscriminate way. Nowadays the solemn drone of the Rose poems has lost its appeal for me. I don’t mean I now think of it as weak, or bad, or clumsy but that there’s something static and unchanging in its effect which means that it has lost its life through repetition. ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and similar poems have kept their freshness. I think this is partly because of the sparkling distinctness of their images. Each line brings a separate self-contained flowering of life as well as contributing to a developing narrative:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

The style of almost childlike simplicity is important. Aengus says things and we seem to see them with absolute clarity in a mood of wide-eyed, wondering but unquestioning acceptance. There’s no pushing of mood or meaning by the poet, and this is part of the difference from the Rose poems, and why this one seems to me so much more artistically resilient than they are. However, I think that there’s something entranced and entrancing about the feeling of the verse right from the start, before the trout transforms to a glimmering girl. What I started this piece hoping to do was to analyse how this feeling is given but that seems to be beyond me. All I can say is that the way we and the speaker are caught in the grid of these delicate iambic tetrameter lines with their abcb rhymes seems to have something to do with it, creating a sense of being in some sort of hyperreal, entranced state or space. 

Edmund Prestwich, Magic words: W B Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’

In the artist’s statement accompanying her “Poetry Recitation with Music: The Waste Land,” Beijing-based artist Wang Baoju concludes by saying that her recitation of a Chinese translation of T.S. Eliot’s famous 1922 poem performed in time to a Beijing traffic light’s beeping is “absurd.”

But if we stop at simple dictionary definitions (or stop with Google Translate), we lose some important word play. Wang uses the word 荒诞, pronounced huangdan and meaning “absurd, ridiculous, over the top,” to describe the nature of her performance. In doing so, she echoes the Chinese translation of the title of Eliot’s poem: 荒原 huangyuan.

The character 荒 huang repeats, suggesting that not only is Wang’s performance inherently absurd (or, better put, absurdist in the tradition of art that reflects real-world absurdity), but that it also does something with and to Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, that it, we might say, somehow wastes the poem, or uses the poem to waste something about poetry itself, or our time, or contemporary Beijing, that it somehow wastes the Waste Land, whatever that might mean.

What are we, as viewers, to do with this? 

Can we relate to interminable waits? 

To our time being cut up by machines, computers, algorithms, codes

Perhaps some of us might note that parts of Beijing look almost identical to parts of any other global megacity….

We might observe that traffic and people rushing about on their business in the city can, if we sit and watch for a while, seem somehow ghostlike, zombie-like, machine-like, unreal?

That we can feel unreal, too, in cityscapes shaped by the demands of commerce and technology more than by the needs of the human body, psyche, and soul? 

That maybe there’s something “dead” about this world we’ve made, with its pulsing energies and seemingly endless tearing-down and rebuilding, its material excesses, profligate consumption of resources, and flows of emissions and garbage?

That all of this is happening in a world that feels like it’s teetering on the brink of some kind of catastrophe, even as we drift through daily life as if things might go on forever just as they do now, distracted by our screens?

David Perry, Hurry Up and Wait: Wang Baoju’s Hyper-Unreal Absurdist Beijing Waste Land

Christmas himself was probably played by William Rowley, a famous comic actor who must — like Jonson himself — have been a large man, as he generally played jolly, plump parts (like Plum Porridge in Middleton’s Inner Temple Masque (1619) and the Cook in Jonson’s later masque, Neptune’s Triumph). But all the other actors were probably actually boys, drawn from the professional companies with which Jonson was associated. The contrast between their childish appearance and the adult jobs Christmas attributes to them (such as ‘Hercules the porter’) is part of the joke. The boy Cupid would certainly have been played by a child, as would his mother Venus, the only speaking female part.

Christmas has just got his show underway, and is part-way through his opening song, when he is interrupted, first by some noise outside, and then by the entrance of Venus, a ‘deaf tire-woman’ (that is, a dressmaker), who — a bit like Christmas himself — insists on coming in and, despite his protests, on staying so that she can watch her son, Cupid, who has a part in the play. Making Venus a deaf dressmaker and Cupid a local apprentice (to a bugle-maker, that is, a maker of glass beads) has obvious comic potential, and we duly discover that Venus lives on Pudding Lane (a poor neighbourhood, famous as the place where the Fire of London began later in the century); that she is the child of a fishmonger (a profession with a reputation for lechery and infidelity); that her husband was a blacksmith (an obvious reference to Vulcan); that Cupid is apprenticed to a bead-maker on Love Lane (slightly east of Pudding Lane), and so on.

The whole thing keeps nearly collapsing into chaos — more people want to come in; Venus keeps interrupting Christmas and then mishearing what she is told; Christmas’ children discover they have lost or forgotten half their props; and then Cupid begins his speech but, interrupted by his mother, loses his place and forgets his words:

CUPID: You worthy wights, king, lords, and knights,
O queen and ladies bright,
Cupid invites you to the sights
He shall present tonight.
VENUS: ’Tis a good child. – Speak out, hold up your head, Love.
CUPID: And which Cupid – and which Cupid [he keeps repeating it, unable to remember the rest]

There’s an energy to the piece, dependent to a large extent on the comedy of a performance going wrong — and never being quite sure whether all of the errors are scripted or not — which is quite a lot like a good pantomime, still a traditional part of the British Christmas.

Victoria Moul, Did Ben Jonson invent Father Christmas?

Szirtes’ career illustrates what Pasternak discusses in An Essay in Autobiography (Harvill, 1990). Though our experience of the world is necessarily subjective, there is a sufficient underlying matrix that remains “the common property of man” – the hard-wiring implicit in being human. Superimposed on this is the softer wiring derived from upbringing, environment and education, and the self is ultimately a function of these base matrices in progressive interaction with individual decision-making in the flow of experience. So the objective world is processed through the individual’s particular matrices – his/her sets of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, texturised as it were, accordingly. From this, Pasternak argues that when an individual dies he leaves behind his own unique “share of this . . . the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul”. This, of course, is where “art finds its . . . field of action and its main content . . . the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience”. Art can be defined as the expression of experience playing across the matrices of the self, saying not this is me, but this is, this was, mine.

It is the raw imagery of stasis and movement that emerges in Szirtes’ early work as being truly his and it blooms into the maturity of the late 1980s. In short lyrical pieces the point of stasis is associated with the preservative of art in the spit ball gobbed by a foreign worker in ‘Anthropomorphosis’ which is caught and “suspended” by the poem. The afternoon rearranges itself around it and even the narrator “hung there / Encapsulated in that quick pearled light”. Versions of this encapsulation abound: girls creating a silver foil tree find themselves absorbed into a Keatsian “cold pastoral”. Such freeze-frame moments anticipate Szirtes’ sustained meditations on photography but early on, images of snow and frost suggest the ambivalent status of such suspension. In ‘The Car’ a snowfall is both beautiful and sepulchral: “Fantastic Gaudi-like structures hung / Under the mudguard . . . . / Wonderful, cried the girls under the snow”. A girl who is observed sewing causes consternation (“I do not like you to be quite so still”) caught in a stasis that can “eat away a life” that can “freeze the creases of a finished garment” (‘A Girl Sewing‘).

Martyn Crucefix, George Szirtes’ King’s Gold Medal for Poetry

on a notepad
in the stonemason’s yard:
names to be carved

Matthew Paul, My year in haiku

At the opening of The Grail, the final part of the trilogy, in a poem dated 31^st October 2024, we find ourselves back in the Providence of Roger Williams and Cautantowwit, in a sense Gould’s earthly Eden. But then circumstances plunge the poem back into harsh reality, with two poems dated the 4^th and 6^th of November, bracketing the re-election of Trump, and, as it happens, Guy Fawkes’ Night:

Election day, the traitor, redivivus,
golden-orange, breathing fire, emerges
from Hecate’s diamond basement (Hades)…
wearing Empedocles’ bronze shoe, Jesus!
No one could have predicted this. Amen,
howls each mesmerized hurt soul… He’s us!
Meanwhile… Roger, Coke’s fiery lamb… sighs.
These trials of conscience burden suffering MAN!
he shouts: Only soft-hearted JONAH can restore us.
(from ‘Twisted Knot’)

I want to pause a moment to unpack at least some of the references in this stanza, which is typical of Gould’s method. By association with Hecate, keeper of the key to Hades, fire-breathing Trump becomes Satan, the ultimate traitor, and with the figure of Fawkes, who figures in Milton’s ‘In Quintum Novembris.’ (On the Fifth of November), a poem that could be viewed as an early draft of ‘Paradise Lost’. Fawkes’ basement full of gunpowder being an analogical Hades of its own. And then there’s Empedocles’ attempted deceit, a brazen (pardon the pun) attempt at self-aggrandisement.

Next we have Roger Williams, whose patron, the English jurist Sir Edward Coke, prosecuted Fawkes for treason. Williams knew Milton and tutored him in Native American languages. He also founded Providence as an oasis of ‘liberty of conscience’. As it turns out, he also wrote about Jonah as being, perhaps, soft-hearted: ‘Jonah did not compel the Ninevites to hear that message which he brought unto them.’ (I cannot source the apparent quote that closes the stanza.) And it may be just me, but Jonah brings to mind Moby-Dick. One way or another, these lines illustrate Gould’s insistence on history as a kind of process outside time, or in which all times and places co-exist and illuminate each other.

Billy Mills, Three Books by Henry Gould: A Review

Over the last few days, I’ve taken some very long walks, several naps, and I’ve read What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, trans. and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill (LiverightPubl, 2025). It is being hailed as “a landmark literary event.” The poems, presented in the original German and in English, were never intended by Arendt for publication, and they don’t strike me as being poems one memorizes or writes out in a commonplace book. They compel, however, if taken as a diary of Arendt’s life:

The thoughts come to me,
I’m no longer a stranger to them.
I grow into their dwelling
like a plowed field.

(from Part II, 1942-1961)

If you aren’t already steeped in Hannah Arendt’s work, the footnotes and the introduction of What Remains are a necessary guide. Additionally, they offer the editors’ obsession with the poetry, and a direct look into one of the greatest minds of the 20^th century.

Bethany Reid, What Remains

Edward Storer (1880-1944) was born in Alnwick, England, lived in Rome, and then returned to England to live in Weybridge, London; “In November of 1908, Storer, author already of Inclinations, much of which is in the “Imagist” manner, published his Mirrors of Illusion, the first book of “Imagist” poems, with an essay attacking poetic conventions.” (Flint, A History of Imagism, 1915)

One of the founders of the ‘School of Images’ group in 1909, alongside F.S. Flint and T.E. Hulme, both of whom were also experimenting with free-verse, inspired by French vers libre, and Japanese tanka and haiku (the influence of tanka, for instance, is particularly obvious in Storer’s short poems, as well as in the stanza forms of his longer poems). The School of Images group also included Florence Farr and a young Ezra Pound, among others.

Storer published three books of ‘new’ poetry between 1907 and 1909—Inclinations (1907), Mirrors of Illusion (1908), and The Ballad of the Mad Bird (1909)—and was a significant forerunner to the ‘new verse’ movements which would eventually take both England and America by storm in the 1910s-1920s. In the 1910s he also published an influential book of Sappho’s fragments in translation, seemingly using tanka and haiku as a model.

Storer also wrote the one of the first truly ‘modernist’ essays on poetics, included as an appendix to Inclinations (1907), but largely ignored by historians. The basic tenant of modernist theory was that each art had its own, unique essence, which differed ‘absolutely’ from one another, and that an artist’s highest calling was to identify, and nurture this essence. Up until the late-1800s narrative had always been seen as one of the foundations of Western poetry, which Storer disputed. Narrative, as an inherently ‘realist’ pursuit relied on ‘believability’, which was fundamentally at odds with the poetic, he argued. Conversely, poetry ignored its own essence the more it engaged with narrative. This led Storer to argue for an ‘imagistic’ model of poetry, in distinction to any kind of ‘realism’, grounded in ‘suggestive’ linking and combination, rather than ‘narrative’.

Storer seldom gets sufficient credit for his theory of poetics, though Pound would go on to plagiarise Storer, Flint, and Hulme’s ideas, as well as those of earlier free-verse poets like Yone Noguchi, in his essays of 1912-1915, under the name of ‘Imagisme’. This ‘new’ Imagist movement went on to include numerous extremely talented poets like Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, and Amy Lowell, and remains one of the most well know—if poorly understood—movements of the 20th Century.

Dick Whyte, Edward Storer – 7 Short Poems (1907-22)

Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony comprises around 450 poems that tend to begin with a name, a place (farm, factory, saloon, boarding house) and sometimes a time of day or the age of the named person if relevant, and that tend to end with violence – gunshots, knife wounds, mutilation in industrial accidents. Their language is court-room plain, these are the facts; courtly, I’d say, respectful; no Henry James sub-clauses; the power is accumulative. Testimony was published in the US in several volumes by New Directions and Black Sparrow Press between 1965 and 1978; it was reissued in 2015 by Black Sparrow in a single edition – subtitled The United States (1885–1915): Recitative – that also includes as an appendix the prototype volume, written in prose, first published in 1934.

I’ve known of this book without ever, until this year, getting to it. It is one of the books of the last century; it has never been published in the UK. Repeat: it has never been published in the UK.

Reznikoff (1894–1976), by all accounts, was a modest man. He was born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He sold hats for the family business. He wore out a lot of shoe leather, walking 20 miles a day on the streets of New York. In his twenties he had poems accepted by the magazine Poetry and then withdrew them; most of his work until the 1960s was self-published, and typeset and printed by himself. His poetry is included in anthologies of the Objectivists alongside that of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi (all of them immigrants to the US or the sons of immigrants). He studied law and practised very briefly but then ducked down, Bartleby-ish, and for many years earned his living by writing summaries of court records for legal reference books.

‘I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases – not a great many as law reports go – and found almost all that follows.’ This is Reznikoff’s brief prefatory note to his 1934 prose version of Testimony. Given that what comes to court is the bad stuff – murders, rape, theft, claims for negligence, property disputes and forged wills – Testimony is not a picnic in the park.

Charles Boyle, Late in the day, my book of the year

It’s nice to have so many little details all in one place when I can only remember bits and pieces read from articles and other books about Auden. A useful reference. I think Carpenter is right to stress Auden’s middle-class, Edwardian upbringing. His verse was innovative at all stages of his writing career, and he lived into the 1970s, but in his attitude to homosexuality, his longing for a settled, domestic life, and his return to the Christian fold, he showed the deep marks of home. Nevertheless Carpenter is alert to how Auden’s travels and different habitations around the world influenced his writing. The biographer pays his subject the tribute of close attention.

Jee Leong Koh, Humphrey Carpenter’s W. H. AUDEN: A BIOGRAPHY

The poem I’m writing about is “Boxers in the Key of M” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from her book Apocalyptic Swing. You can find the full text here in the archives of The New England Review.

I first met Gaby when I moved to San Francisco in 2003. Amy and I house sat for her and took care of her cat Clemente while we looked for a place to live, and then, some years later, we worked together running the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. I have always considered her both a wonderful person and an extraordinary writer and I recommend all her books unreservedly.

I’ve always found Gaby’s poems to be intimate, whether writing in the voice of a character or when the line between poet and I is more blurry, as it is in this poem. And it feels weird to write that when the poem starts with an announcement of its poem-ness, a sort of half-simile.

As in Marvelous and Macho, as in Leon’s
younger brother Michael, a name I learned
in Catholic school.

The connection of boxing to music is a natural one. Rounds are three minutes long, roughly the length of a pop song, and many legendary boxers have been described as dancing around the ring. Michael Spinks was apparently a dancer before he was a boxer, and his wife was a dance instructor. Camacho danced on Univision’s Mira Quien Baila after his boxing career ended. And while Marvelous Marvin Hagler didn’t have the same reputation for dancing as many other fighters, he still stayed on his toes and bounced.

I also like where the mention of Catholic school takes us, along with the rest of that line and the next one, “St. Michael of the mat, / of the left hook and the deafening blow.”

Brian Spears, Sometimes there’s nowhere to run

The surrendering in the above poem speaks to me. And whenever I read from my volume of Hermann Hesse poems translated by Ludwig Max Fischer I am always taken with the commentary by Fischer. He quotes Hesse, “To cut through the charades of this world, to despise it, may be the aim of the great thinkers. My only goal in life is to be able to love this world, to see it and myself and all beings with the eyes of love and admiration and reverence…”

I’m interested in his insistence on love. I like that he “saw himself as an advocate for the soul, as an activist for the spirit in everyone beyond ideologies and doctrines.” Hesse saw words as instruments for the possible, and which could lead us to joy.

How many thousands of time in a life do we need to relearn the path to joy?

Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – Winwood, Hesse, Michelangelo

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?

Always. Yes. Probably the primary thing I am always thinking about is: How does poetry’s condensed nature/its condensation yield an outsized MEANING? What does it mean (for my experience of time and space) to prop those effects up in a kind of shadow box?

A couple books ago, I was obsessed with the impossibility of a coherent self and what it MEANS to control the flow of information on the page.

Right now, I’m thinking/writing about the gaze, infection, vampires, the tone of ordinary suffering, rage as a holding of the line . . .

In the work of other contemporary poets (and other types of writers) who are much bigger in their thinking than I (btw I am totally cool with being B-movie-ish, a petty tinkerer), I feel like some of the big questions of now are related to what the inside (terrorizing, terrorized) of looking and being is, how language and art $erve capital in ways within and beyond our knowing, how writing with and from sources can be an ethos that might help to de-center whiteness, how Literature can facilitate an expansion of collective knowledge . . .

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The writer can help proliferate community and thus (quite actively or even very remotely/impressionistically) stabilize the fragile threads of solidarity between the many people needed to collaborate in service of surviving the horror of Now; 

can create literal or figurative occasions for what is also my current fave teaching strategy, “small explosive art situations”;

can narrate/express/compose/sing for the purposes of witness, observation, or mere preservation of the ephemeral–all of which can be meaningful to any single reader; 

can, because Literature is a shared experience and requires many types and modes of stewardship, be “a person for others” (I went to a Jesuit high school LOL); 

can offer a momentary or lasting un-selfing for another human, which might act as salve or as awakening;

can do what Grushenka (in Brothers Karamazov) suggests is as important as full devotion to goodness: at least once give someone an onion when they need it.

That’s what I can come up with right now. I’ll think on this again in ten years.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Olivia Cronk

From a construction point of view, the poem is a masterclass in the strong line ending, and the sounds of this…the ow sound of window, flower, over and glow vs the clipped ends of snapped, snipped, lapped, missed, and the rhymed couplets at the end, but beyond the technical details (in a book that is all sonnets) , I love it for its attentive nature, the partner noticing something that means something to their partner — I can’t always say I manage that despite my best intentions, but as I sit here at the end of a year that has very much done a number on me, it is acting as a reminder that I can and should do more to notice these little things.

Both R and me are struggling today to feel comfortable with doing nothing. She keeps wanting to do stuff (despite being knackered from organising Xmas and looking after my carcass for the last week). I am loathe to sit down having been ill for a week, feeling “better” but exhausted, so sitting still is hard, but we both need to remember we don’t “always need to be on the move”

Mat Riches, Uncareful Owner

the wild geese
are shitting on the snow
icy pond

Jim Young [no title]

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is poetry’s equivalent of Pachelbel’s Canon in D – overused to within an inch of its life. I don’t care. Both are wildly popular because they are beautiful; simple enough to speak widely; complex enough to hold and engage. “You do not have to crawl on your knees repenting” is the line I’d like to live in the coming year. And this year, more than ever before, I found my place in “the family of things”.

More often than not, I forget to say that it’s Clare writing this article – but maybe it’s obvious from the different ways Kim and I write, and the things we say. For example – I want to tell you about how, decades ago, one of my girlfriends complained about the way I spoke about my family. It’s always THE family, she said – like it’s a unit. The Family is coming. I’m spending time with The Family. Like there’s no other family! Like you don’t exist without it!

But, I was the youngest of six – a Catholic family – and we were a unit. We were cubs, we moved and lived and rested in a pile. We had our own bible, our own lore. We shared our underwear, changed once a week and washed by hand, we bathed in the same water, smelled of each other, caught lice and worms from each other, ate choddy from each other’s mouths. The Family was my horizon and furthest place; the Family was much more than world. It was my fingers, my thoughts and all my dreams. It was my arterial system and my exoskeleton; my tastebuds and my lens. What do you do when your systems all fall apart?

Clare Shaw, Family Estrangement, December, and the Family of Things

How can we get a decent night’s sleep on a mattress made from fists and crumbling civilizations?

How can we turn a blind eye when reality’s mugshot is posted on the back of our eyeballs, continually reminding us of the crimes humans commit against one another?

A bullet isn’t like a trained dog. You can’t tell it to sit and expect a positive outcome when all it knows is kill.

But something I can say to you with optimistic certainty is this: the story of us has been woven from other stories; our stories will weave with different stories to create future stories.

A hymn about a hymn, a kiss about a kiss, a river about a river, forever flowing.

Rich Ferguson, A River About a River

Overall I read about 41,000 pages. That’s about 110 pages a day on average. It’s a ballpark because some were facing pages translations, some had no page numbers so I didn’t count or made a guess. I only counted up to appendices if I didn’t read those. Assist points go to my back and sciatica and energy crashes which left me capable of doing little more than reading.

I am always adding new questions to track. This year I added a couple new columns to the spreadsheet: re-reads (28 titles) and cost of title.

• 66% were free to me: downloads, contributor copies, review copies, gifts, jury copies, library, or little free libraries
• 19% were bought at full price, from the author directly, at small press fairs, by subscription, or else came from indie bookstores
• 8% from Amazon (sorry)
• 7% came from thrift stores or used bookstores (so 50 cents to $10)

[…]

Poetry comprised 60%. Most of the rest are novels or novellas. Chapbooks rang in around 20%. The next biggest categories were memoir or essays, then history or science. […]

What work is it that I want written word to do?

To expand me. To teach me how to be a better human. To understand angles of human nature. To conceive of a supportive world. To enter play and silliness, and to enter scary experiences completely unlike my own. To live more lives and to live a life I’m better equipped to understand.

Pearl Pirie, Self-audit and Best of 2024 List

About a week ago, I panicked when I realized I had promised two different writers blurbs for their next collections by the end of December. I had already read the books and taken notes, but I hadn’t started parsing my notes and my pulled quotes to make cohesive statements. I proceeded to put aside everything else I’d been planning to work on and make sure they got completed.

Being asked to create a blurb for another writer is an honor, one that I take seriously and one that takes quite some time. (See ’s excellent recent stack about writing and asking for blurbs.) It is the same with writing book reviews, something that I have done A LOT over the past five years. (Thirty-three poetry reviews at Rhino Reviews alone, six at Tinderbox Poetry – plus others at Limp Wrist, South Florida Poetry Review, and other venues. If you add them up, it’s around 10 reviews per year for the past five years – almost one a month.)

I’m not complaining. Reviewing has made me a more careful reader of poems and a better thinker about my own poems. I have considered this practice one way of giving back to poetry, one way of giving attention and respect to what poets do. I think about providing space for poets on my reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey in the same way, and I hope that Asterales, the new journal I am launching with friend/writer Rachel Bunting next month, will be another way to showcase writers and artists with gratitude for what they create.

But all of these things take physical time and mental energy. The more time spent on blurbs, reviews, reading submissions, website work, booking, and promoting means less time on my own creative and personal pursuits, less mental energy for my own poems or freewriting, this Substack, artwork, or even pleasure reading. (Or other personal things like exercise, time with family/friends, traveling.) For this reason, and for some personal ones (including some travel plans), I have decided to make changes for the coming year.

I have decided I need to learn to say no.

Easy, right? Not so much.

Donna Vorreyer, Fa-la-la-la-Labor

Leaving aside the thornily persistent issue of whether ize or ise is the more authentic British spelling, I have to admit that U.K. poets who use American spelling really do grind my gears.

What’s more, I gather from other poets that certain U.S. poetry mags require American spelling and some U.K. mags demand British spelling. Both positions seem absurd to me. In fact, they’re only a short step away from asking poets to correct their use of an expression or a phrasal verb because the meaning is different on the other side of the pond. All these would be red lines for me, as my spelling and choice of syntax represent a key part of the roots of my poetry.

Mind you, before anyone starts getting twitchy about the potential politics of the above statement, it’s worth underlining that this is far from being a question of nationalism or Little Britain. Bearing in mind the negative effects of Brexit on every aspect of my life, I’m never going to be heading down that cul-de-sac! No, it’s more to do with how our uses of language in our poetry express our origin and identity. And we all write through both, whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not…

Matthew Stewart, Americanised (sic) spelling

For the past two years, I’ve collaborated with haiku friends on what I call the Midwinter Day Renku. I created this renku variation in response to one of my all-time favorite works of literature, Bernadette Mayer’s epic poem Midwinter Day. 

The story behind Midwinter Day is that Mayer composed the entire thing on Friday, December 22nd, 1978, the date of the winter solstice. The title refers to the fact that many older, lunar-based calendars consider the solstice the midpoint of the season rather than the beginning, which is the designation of the astronomical calendar we use today. 

Midwinter Day is a 100-ish page poem about the day in the life of a young family (Mayer, her husband, and their two children) living in Lenox, Massachusetts. Largely free verse, this poem is highly allusive, contains numerous lists, and frequently incorporates poetic devices such as rhyme. In Midwinter Day, poetry is not separate from parenthood and grocery shopping; it’s intertwined. There is no distinction between art and the rest of life; they are one and the same. 

Since first reading this poem in 2015, I wanted to create some sort of homage to it. But my attempts to truly imitate Bernadette Mayer fell flat, and didn’t feel true to the way I like to approach my own poetry. Once I went deeper into studying haiku and learned about the various forms of linked verse, I began experimenting with a linked form that I wrote solo throughout the day. But while you can certainly write a renku or other linked form alone, I found I didn’t really enjoy that. I wanted to collaborate. Midwinter Day might have been written by a sole author, and yet she is anything but alone. 

After a couple of years of noodling around ideas, I finally settled on a shorter version of the renku. I wrote the first one with my friend Claire, a poetry friend from my Austin days. Last year, I tried with a larger group: six people in three time zones emailing back and forth. Tomorrow, I will write the third-ever Midwinter Day renku with my friend Dan, who lives in another country. It’s the first international Midwinter Day renku! I’ve kept it just the two of us because juggling such disparate time zones is going to be a bit of a challenge, and I decided a smaller size would help navigate that. 

This approach to the form is still a work in progress. Not only do I keep learning more about renku, but I keep wanting to adjust the specifics of the structure itself.

Allyson Whipple, Midwinter Day Renku: First Notes on a New Form

Around this time of the year magazines ask contributors for their books of the year. Funnily enough, I am a lot less cynical about these than I used to be. But they are undeniably strange, in a way that should be familiar to anyone involved in publishing: you have to sign up to the fiction that the only books worth talking about were published in the last twelve months, when of course there’s no straight line between the year a book was published in and its relevance, let alone its quality. Many old books are painfully current. Plenty of new ones are out of date. […]

Winter Recipes from the Collective, Louise Glück (2021)

The first of Glück’s collections I’ve read, though I knew individual poems. Also her last book. So, I’m no expert and the Nobel Prize win probably speaks for itself. I will just say that the way her poems climb down the page is uncanny. And they are testimony to just how hard – in every sense – so-called free verse and so called-confessional poetry is, or ought to be. This is the beginning of “Night Thoughts”:

Long ago I was born. There’s no one alive anymore who remembers me as a baby. Was I a good baby? A bad? Except in my head that debate is now silenced forever. What constitutes a bad baby, I wondered. Colic, my mother said, which meant it cried a lot. What harm could there be in that?…

Jem Wikeley, Books of the year

[I]t’s awards season in the literary community. Social Media is awash with announcements, congratulations, and virtual high-fives, as it should be. But I’d like to give a shout-out to writers who have never had a nomination for Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Wigleaf Top 50, Best of the Net, Best American Essay, or any of the other awards that I’m not aware of.

There are lots of writers who aren’t on social media and don’t have the exposure others enjoy because, life. Writers who are writing on their lunch breaks, in rush-hour traffic, after putting the kids to bed at night, before the kids get up in the morning, on bits of napkin, on back of grocery lists and bill envelopes, on post-it notes, or maybe only in their heads for now. There are writers writing in liminal spaces as noted in Amy Barnes’ insightful craft essay in Reckon Review.

Lots of writers aren’t in academia, don’t have degrees in anything or maybe in fields like healthcare support or general business, who went to a technical community college instead of an Ivy League university. There are writers who don’t belong to writing groups or attend workshops, who believe in the stories they create in their own heads. There are writers who are published sparingly because the submitting process takes time they don’t have or cost money they can’t give. There are writers who aren’t aware, or maybe only peripherally aware, of literary awards. The first time I was nominated, back in the day, I had to Google the Pushcart Prize. I’d never heard of it.

I want to celebrate the writers whose own life stories, and their made-up ones too, beat anything written by a Booker Prize winner. Keep writing, keep living, hang in there. You are seen. You have people who are like you that read your work and think you are the bomb. Believe it.

Charlotte Hamrick, Reading & Writing a Strong Sense of Place

This year I’ve written 7 poems (none of them very good), 4 stories (2 ok), and 15 Flashes (some of them ok. Maybe 2 good). I’ve radically revamped 4 old stories – by merging 2 of them I think I’ve produced 1 printable piece.

I’ve had a dozen or so acceptances, mostly of old (sometimes very old) stuff.

Because I was long-listed in their competition, I got a story in the Leicester Writes anthology. And Full House nominated a Flash of mine for Best MicroFiction 2025.

And that’s about it. I sent 2 booklets off (one poetry, one prose) which got nowhere. This time last year I promised myself that I’d write some proper reviews. I haven’t, though I’ve read (or listened to) about 200 books. 

Tim Love, My Writing Year (2024)

I have to admit that this was a tough year for me. Is it because of my age? Is this a peri-menopause thing? A mid-life crisis? The election nearly wrung all my positive energy out of me. My last book’s sales were respectable but not great (not as good as my previous book’s), and my rejection vs acceptance rate was mediocre at best. I worked hard but felt a bit like I was butting up against a wall in the literary world. I am lucky to have wonderful writer friends but I’m missing the spark that usually drives me to write. Not sure if it’s plain disappointment or disillusionment or what, exactly. The grungy weather is bothering me a little bit more than normal, and my MS flared up worse this fall than it has in a long time—not sure of the cause, which left me unable to do much besides listen to audiobooks and watch old movies on TCM.

So, what do you do? Well, two good, very healthy friends—one died suddenly, the other experiencing a “surprise” terminal illness—have taught me a hard lesson. Maybe we should be kinder to ourselves, appreciating the days that we do have, and maybe not being so judgy about what we are accomplishing and focusing more and how much we are enjoying what we have, and experiencing things like “joy” and “awe”—things we often don’t put a priority on in our culture of productivity everywhere, all the time. While I am being scanned for tumors and tested for cancer and autoimmune problems, when I am dealing with yet another crown or root canal—I have to remember to prioritize the good days and take advantage of them. I have maybe, in the last four years, lived a too-circumscribed life, too safe? Certainly, too much damn time in doctor’s and dentist’s offices. Have I not been allowing myself enough adventure? Maybe that should be my goal for 2025—to live a more adventurous, joyful life—to maybe take a few risks in the days I have, because tomorrow is never guaranteed.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! Trumpeter Swans, Revaluating at Midlife after a Tough Year, MRIs, and Ballets

The sky is a persistence of cloud, its low mist erasing trees,
meeting fields, dampening my face, my hair; I feel like
a conduit between two states: earth and water. Perhaps
we always exist in dualities but rarely notice. Perhaps I am
beginning to understand both the beauty and decay
of my wondrous life, the gift and theft of inevitable death.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Superposition

[I]t’s less shocking than it is mesmerizing, even comforting, for me to see this evidence of my own aging, particularly as it means I get to see a little of mom every time I look in the mirror. It’s good to catch this glimpse every day because I need her—maybe actually I am inviting her, calling for her intercession with this very writing—to nudge me along on this book project which has already taken almost a year since I wrote the first unsure words.

I realized the other day that I need to look at it every day. I don’t necessarily need to write every day, but I need to keep it close to me because when I don’t, when I let weeks go by between writing sessions (because it’s painful to write about your mother’s alcoholism and recovery and death), my synapses get sleepy (a trauma response, remember?) and I lose the thread.

It took me 20 years to complete the book about my father. I do not want a reprise of that experience.

So. I hate resolutions, but let me try to keep this one.

Sheila Squillante, On eyeballs and grey hair and outlines

I made a decision at the beginning of last year to submit to publications I regarded as out of reach. Standards are higher, chances of success are lower – yet it’s a strategy that has paid off. Instead of chasing the dopamine hit of publication I’ve focused on becoming better at what I do, and really understanding what it is I want to say. I’m barely halfway to either of these things, but I am ending the year with two small collections of poetry that have a real sense of identity. Both have been longlisted in competitions I barely dared dream of entering and I am proud to have written them. Publication will come – I just need to be patient and diligent in finding the right home. I’ve had individual poems longlisted for publication in Butcher’s Dog, as well has being part of the final issues of Dreich and the fabulous Spelt Magazine. I’m growing braver in terms of style, and content as well as developing an understanding of what matters to me. […]

My morning has been spent looking at goals for next year – I’ve more work to do in terms of the nuts and bolts, but I’ve had a realisation that I need to give myself permission to focus on writing for its own sake, rather than as a potential income stream. My work as a bespoke poet and copywriter will continue, but as far as my creative writing is concerned I need to see the art as valuable for its own sake – which of course means seeing value in myself. I’m determined to connect with the poetry and writing community in a more meaningful way, rather than squirrel myself away in the safety of home. It’s hard to put myself “out there” but I can see how actively supporting others in their work offers a path to growth and nourishment for everyone involved.

I finish the year in a calmer place. I have a greater understanding of what matters to me, how I want to use my writing and where I want to be in this peculiar, terrifying world. I often bewildered and frustrated, and often filled with rage at my lack of confidence. I am proud that I keep going, and proud of how far I’ve come. As my mental health improves, I hope that the barriers I so frequently fashion will become less powerful and that I’ll be able to continue to develop my skills and build on the connections I’ve made.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I’ve learned this year

知らぬ間に冬の金魚となりにけり           遠藤容代

shiranu ma ni fuyu no kingyo to narinikeri

            without knowing how

            I become

            a winter goldfish     

                                                            Noriyo Endo 

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), February 2022 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 21, 2024)

This morning I stepped out of my little house in my little village on a day of low cloud and thick mist to head down to the river Hertford. It was the first time I’d been for a walk since before Christmas and I was ready for it. I was looking for fieldfares, which I found, along with a white egret moving through the grey like an omen, and the creak and tick of water dropping through the bare, wet branches of the beech trees. The air was full of the calls of crows, the rattle and croak made more gothic than usual by a mist that sucked the light but leant all sounds a crystallised ring. Through the village I went and out along the farm tracks, passing people from the village; dog walkers, bird watchers, who passed the time with me, telling me about what they had and hadn’t seen – owls in Parish woods, a swell of a storm on the brigg, less roe deer this year, but a fox like an burning ember in the top field and always, always the otter sightings for the luckiest, luckiest few. I have never seen the otters. Though I look or signs and sounds of them, not a single sighting. Maybe they are a village myth.

Out and along the farm track where the land opens up, where the turbine sliced steadily away at the low cloud, and down to the Hertford, straight and low in its man-made state, flowing away from the sea in its strange manner, the sound of water over pebbles bright and hard in the gloom. I stood on the bridge and looked down its length and imagined I could see all the way down to Folkton, Flixton, down past the paleolithic islands of the long blade people to the Mesolithic site of Star Carr and my lake-people ancestors. The cloud was too low today to see any of it, or the mound of Seamer Beacon, or even the lip of the valley, Folkton moor over the rise, the site of the Folkton drums only visible in my mind’s eye.

Here I am, I thought, at the edge of the lake again, paleolake Flixton, The Ghost Lake of my book, my landscape-nature memoir which defined 2024 for me, the year it was published. I have washed up at the end of 2024 satisfied, happy, rolling dazedly to a stop here with the publication of my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to The Ghost Lake.

This is like the ancient custom of beating the bounds, of returning and marking your land, the boundaries of your community by beating on the boundary stones, as if waking up the spirit of a place and attaching yourself to it. Though, obviously, without smashing small boys about. I have this in my head as I tap my gloved hand along the metal of the bridge. 

Wendy Pratt, Beating the Boundaries

After ten years of sharing poetry on WordPress, it feels like it has lost its raison d’être. Maybe I, maybe poetry, maybe the passion, maybe that ecosystem — something, some things, all things – have crashed into a wall.

Not that there aren’t still things to say. Maybe just not there. Not that there aren’t any more poems. Though I don’t really know what or where.

But it is a new year. Or it will soon be. Just like this year was new, once.

I think of Naomi Shihab Nye who wrote so evocatively in ‘Burning the old Year’:

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

And even if there are solid keepsakes, events that will crystallize into memories, some even fragrant or warm – like Kobayashi Issa says:

New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

How does one look back at a year? Never mind the sun, the silhouettes tell a different story. Different stories. The sky rips open. Moonlight bleeds like a wound all night. And the poet picks at scabs. It is their job. Sometimes it is poetry that is contrary, sometimes it is life. Sometimes, it is the poet.

It is cold and grey today and the drizzle is a fine mist. The impending year has brought me to this poem. Cold and grey and wet. Beyond this lies 2025.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, One for the road

This week: what worms are eating, invisible dogs, fishing for Leviathan, the presence of birds, and much more. Enjoy.

Poems grow like rumours……a poem begins as a whisper, half-heard, changes from voice to ear, from ear to voice, until the poet can’t hear it at all.

Poems spread among the ghost rock formations of Madagascar,
the pink lagoon in Spain,
among mist and spray spread over the green reef in Taiwan.
The wind blows them in gusts
around the Callanish Stones on Lewis…

Poems leave Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Somalia, Sudan.
Reach out, gather them in.

Bob Mee, FIVE POEMS FOR THIS MORNING

---

It’s full-on fall here, and I love how everything is changing. The trees are all lit up now—red, pink, orange, yellow, burgundy—but they’ll dim soon enough, and we’ll have a better view of the sky through the bare branches until spring. I’ve lived in the same house for fifteen years, and I’m still awestruck by what I see from my windows and in my neighborhood each day. It never gets old—which is to say, it’s somehow always new.

I want to talk a little about novelty. Sometimes I hear from young writers that they can’t think of anything to write about because nothing exciting has happened to them, or they haven’t traveled much. They think they need more—or different—experiences in order to have something to say, as if their own lives aren’t enough material. But they’re plenty. Your life, whatever it looks like, is plenty. You don’t need to be someplace new to see—or hear, or taste, or smell, or feel—something new.  

The other day I walked outside, and the sky was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. (See cloud photo as evidence. I mean: wow.) Each day is a one-off. Each day’s sky, too. Thoreau, who walked almost every day for years in the same vicinity, wrote, “two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.”

Maggie Smith, On Writing Place

Oh, look, it’s the day before Election Day. THAT’s the sick feeling I keep waking up with.

Tired

Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two–
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

(Published in New Masses magazine, 1931)

Marilyn McCabe, Aren’t you

My book’s approaching its first birthday! It might have garnered great reviews and accolades, but the best reward has been seeing it reach over 200 pairs of hands so far. Poetry only comes alive once it enters a reader’s imagination! Thanks are due to all the editors at journals such as The Spectator, The Rialto, Acumen, Wild Court, Stand, Poetry Birmingham, Bad Lilies, The Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures, where some of these poems first appeared, but especially thanks to Helena Nelson for publishing the collection.

However, its journey’s only just begun. More readings from Whatever You Do, Just Don’t are coming up in the New Year. Chichester and Faversham are confirmed so far for late February, and I’d be delighted if any other events or festivals were able to offer me a slot…!

Matthew Stewart, My book’s first birthday

I did manage to finally get the ghost box artist book edition under wraps and release the e-zine version, which you can always read for free HERE. I am always torn between wanting to make work freely available (because, hell, in this economy) but also give people who want to get a physical thing the opportunity to get something tangible or collectible.  In terms of other soon-to-be shop offerings, I was able to get the final tweaks done in the layout and design for RUINPORN and am eagerly awaiting the proof copy. No word on when that is shipping, but I did get a notification that the finalized stack of Elizabeth Devlin’s chapbook Milk Spine I ordered a couple days before that one went out this morning, so it is sure to follow soon. Her book turned out lovely with the perfect binding and I plan to do more for unusually sized volumes in the future in addition to my own project and the handmade volumes. Since the color and image printing was so good with granata, I might also use it for books with a lot of art going forward, which while a little costlier, the difference is made less by the amount I end up spending on color toner for those books.  I plan to just charge a little more to offset the printing cost difference. The covers and interior paper were glorious on Devlin’s book and all the ones I’ve done so far on my own. 

As I’ve mentioned, November will always be a rough month. The sparkle and spooky of Halloween fades, the Christmas glitter isn’t quite set yet, so I always felt a plummet in my mood as daylight savings took hold and the trees gave up the ghost on their leaves.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 11/1/2024

As a child, we were not allowed television, movies, newspapers, magazines, or most books. But we watched one movie once a year. It was about an hour long, made in 1953, a documentary called The Conquest of Everest about Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who scaled Mount Everest on a shared expedition.  […]

It’s a challenging time to be in publishing. It’s like swimming in Greece and being out at sea beyond the edge of the coastline with the big waves. When I swim out there, I start to get pulled out toward the ocean, and it takes a long time to get back around the point to the harbored waves, and an hour to swim back to shore. 

That’s what it feels like. I’ve swum out beyond the point, and I’m trying to get my bearings, and wondering if I do get swept out to sea if Mark will get in a boat and come get me, but there is no boat, so I really need to swim back to Lampi Beach. Publishing is like that now. 

But my story is this: I’ve been training my whole life, and my team are all smart, like Nepalese mountain climbers, and we are going to figure out the best route. If anyone can mastermind change, it’s our crew.

When I watched The Conquest of Everest as a child, I thought climbing Everest was something men did. Everything important was done by men. Publishing used to be run by men. But the world is changing. My children grew up in a world unclouded by such ideas. This is our day to climb. 

Kate Gale, Green Boots: The Story of the Mountain

On October 13th, alongside new books by Isaac Pickell and Giulia Bencivenga, I released a book of my own called Interrogation Days (complete edition) through Dead Mall Press. This will likely be the last time I self-publish through the press, at least for a while, and going forward my own books will be available trough the “Bookstore” here on the blog. And while I’m only talking about my book here, you should check out the details on both Giulia’s and Isaac’s work, and read interviews with each of them here. […]

Additionally, all three books—mine, Giulia,’s, and Isaac’s—are raising money for Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity, a small collective in Gaza that is on the ground baking bread, providing shelter, equipment, and services for displaced Gazans. You can find more info about them on their Linktree, and also see videos of their work via their Instagram. Right now we have $222 raised, but we’re hoping to get the number up to $300 by mid-November (in particular, by the 13th, when we will celebrate the books’ release via an online reading. Send me your email to join the list to attend).

RM Haines, Nothing Survives the American Mind

‘You stop at your local bookshop. You want to kill some time in a place where you’re admired.’ This is voice-over in episode 4 of Disclosure, an Apple TV series starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline which is bad in very many ways – the writing and acting for starters – but let’s focus in here because it’s hilarious. The Cate Blanchett character goes into the Lutyens and Rubinstein bookshop in Notting Hill and asks if the books she has ordered have come in and is told: ‘I think we’re still waiting for the Agota Kristof.’

Many months ago I was emailed by a film production company who wanted to have the CBe edition of Kristof’s The Notebook on the set of a series starring Blanchett and Kline. Yes, go for it, and it was nice of them to ask. There must have been a lot of emails because every inch of every shelf is meticulously curated: jars, plants, fruit bowls, pots and pans. The sex is curated too. Not the cooking – the Guardian review of episode 1 ends: ‘What kind of idiot starts frying sole meunière when it’s already obvious her husband is going to be late?’

I think we are meant to be impressed by the Cate Blanchett character in Disclosure wanting to buy a book by Agota Kristof; I think it’s intended to signal sophisticated intelligence. (Kafka would have been too obvious; if she’s asking for Kristof, she has already read Kafka.) This is lazy and silly. My bookshelves are not evidence of my intelligence; nor is there any simple correlation between the making of good art and the betterment of society. By the end of next week the new president of the US will be either a women-hating racist or Harris, who needs the votes of everyone who wants to avoid Trump but is in hoc to a colonialist lobby that’s OK with genocide in Gaza.

The US election is next Tuesday, 5 November. Which happens to be publication date of Invisible Dogs, by me, with a nice review in the Telegraph already up, and the day before a lot of good-hearted people will gather to learn which book on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize, Lara Pawson’s Spent Light from CBe being one of them, gets the cash and the pats on the back. It will be a strange week.

Charles Boyle, Disclosure: Waiting for Kristof

He says he likes poems that
are forest rivers: sunshine and
leaves making patterns like
so many possible meanings.

He says he likes poems that are
abstract paintings, colour
spreading to all corners from
a layered centre.

He says a poem must know
where it stands. And bow
when it passes the graves
of destroyed children.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Twelve times two

Perhaps I felt slightly behind with things because I forgot to make pumpkin soup at Hallowe’en. That and the fact that no one knocked for trick or treat this year. I was late buying the sweets, but took a special walk out to get some before dusk. I put all the orange ones aside as a special treat for me only to find I had the full selection to choose from anyway!

Thank goodness for the reliable tradition of the Eat The Storms Hallowe’en Special. It’s always good to settle down for the Storms podcast, and a special episode is special indeed. This one had a lovely mix of poetry and prose and gave the perfect opportunity to sit still and listen. It is good to be still from time to time. I shared Rapunzel and Clambake this time as they seemed to fit the Hallowe’en theme. It always makes me chuckle that I wonder what I will sound like reading the poems and then like to give myself a congratulatory nod if I read well! The sweets on the plate were a splendid accompaniment to the episode.

Sue Finch, OH MY GOURD

Larks (Ohio University Press, April 2025) has a cover, and it is a beauty. It’s not often you can ask for what you want, or receive what you want, but the conditions and the timing really came together here, and with OUP’s blessing I asked the artist Nicola Davison-Reed for permission to use her photograph “Breathing” for my cover. Nicola is a portrait artist based in the UK, and takes studio preparatory shots before she begins her sessions every day—this is one of those shots. (When I asked, she had just posted this photo and told me “this one is fresh as a daisy!”). Because these poems work with the documentary and multiple lenses, as well as the domestic (yes, there is a curtain blowing through), I have had one of Nicola’s photographs on my vision board for several years. It is SUCH a joy to feature one on Larks’ cover—both soft and spare and reflective and inclusive of the viewer. I can’t wait for you to read Larks in April. Holler at me if you want a review copy or to schedule a class visit or interview with me this spring.

Han VanderHart, Cover for Larks, New poems in Dusie, Psaltery & Lyre, Raleigh Review, Black Lily Zine

The frosts, though light and few, are arriving now. Maybe we will get rain by Election Day? I have too many hopes for next week. Best not to speculate; I can wait.

In the meantime, I have just finished reading Cindy Hunter Morgan’s very beautiful new collection, Far Company, and I recommend it, especially if you like poetry with an environmental resonance and poems of memoir and recalled experience. Purchase it from Wayne State, not Amazon, if you can. To frustrate a certain billionaire, not that he will notice.

We do the small things, right?

Ann E. Michael, Drought, again

I believe poems have to stand or fall on their own merits.  Describing their origin can certainly add interest, but if a poem can’t be understood on its own, it probably isn’t speaking clearly enough.  I have been accustomed to sending out poems into the world on their own.  I’ve had two recent experiences that suggest this is not how others do things.

The first case concerns my poem “In the Service of Beauty” published by Muse,  a journal of Riverside City College, Riverside, CA.  The poem is in the voice of Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter.of 17^th century Italy. I received an email from students asking thirteen questions about the work and my ideas.  When their professor told them that was too much to ask, the questions were reduced to three, questions about my thoughts on femininity, the influence of the women’s movement, how that had influenced my writing of the poem.

I wrote back that “femininity” is a construct of patriarchy and I don’t use the word any more.  I made general answers to the other questions, but what did this have to do with my poem, I wondered.

Not long after, I came up against a request to include with my submission a ‘Positionality Statement” “Please state how your identity as a writer serves the content of this piece, if it speaks to a specific component of your identity or intersectionality.”  I conclude that academic discourse is doing its best, once again, to destroy our language.  Of course I have a position, in relation to all the variables of class, race, gender, etc., etc.  But how does a person have positionality or intersectionality? – we are not abstractions.

I will not submit to a journal that wants me to work as seriously on a statement as I do on the poems.  The poem is what the reader makes of it.

Ellen Roberts Young, Odd Questions—Or Am I Just Out of Date?

I read Kathleen Jamie’s first two collections of nature and travel essays – Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012) – when they appeared and loved them both. But they weren’t so much nature or travel essays as uncategorisable, touching on humankind’s relationship with nature, both mutual and destructive,  rather than aspects of nature itself. You might say that they were as anthropological as anything. Her third essay collection, Surfacing (Sort of Books, available here), was published in 2020 but I’ve only just got round to reading it. What a deferred pleasure it was. Passing into middle age had evidently deepened Jamie’s already considerable philosophical grasp of time, ancestry and rootedness, as she wrote about places and peoples at what ‘civilisation’ might regard as the edge of things:

Transformation is possible. A bear can become a bird. A sea can vanish, rivers change course. The past can spill out of the earth, become the present.

(‘In Quinhagak’)

But Jamie is no wide-eyed truth-seeker ready to swallow other cultures’ wisdom unconditionally, and puts enough distance to enable the reader to intuit her strength of feeling. As one might expect from such a first-rate poet, Jamie’s writing is often beautiful. It’s now 32 years since her first non-poetry book, The Golden Peak was published (reissued in 2002 as Among Muslims, subtitled ‘Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan’), so a rate of one every eight years seems to me to be just about right.

Matthew Paul, October reading

Rob Taylor: Near the end of Fishing for Leviathan you write about the poets (Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Al Purdy, John Keats) who provided the “thinnest thread of light” in some of the darkest periods of your life. In those times, you were also sustained by writing your own “wonderful, worthless poems.” Where do you think you’d be today without poetry’s thread of light? From that perspective, are the poems really “worthless”?

Rodney DeCroo: I was seventeen years old when I encountered poetry in a high school English class. I’d only recently arrived from Pittsburgh to live with my father in Surrey, B.C. He was the manager of the infamous Newton Inn and wasn’t around much. I spent most of my time pilfering from my father’s considerable cache of drugs and getting high, so I made it to school maybe three out of five days a week. No one at school seemed to notice or care and I was good with that. My English teacher—I can’t remember his name—didn’t like me much. On one of the rare days I attended class he was teaching T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men.” I had no idea what was going on. I knew nothing about poetry. He kept asking me to explain for the class what various lines of the poem meant. I felt humiliated by him and whatever this indecipherable fucking thing poetry was. 

A year later my father moved us to Cranbrook and I had to take an English literature course taught by a man named Mr. Fossey. The first poem he taught was Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and that was it. He talked about the poem in the context of Keats’ life when he wrote it and I was hooked. I didn’t necessarily understand the poem, but I loved the sounds and it made me feel something I could relate to even if I couldn’t articulate it. I kept repeating lines from the poem to myself. After school that day I rushed back to my room in the Tudor House Hotel (my father was the manager so we lived there). I grabbed some paper and a pen from the front desk and started writing poems. They were horrible, unintentional parodies of the poems I was reading at school but they were pure magic to me. I’d nothing going on in my life. I’d drink alone almost nightly in my room and/or get high depending on what I could get my hands on. My dad didn’t care what I was doing as long as I wasn’t causing trouble in the hotel, and it wasn’t too hard getting booze or dope surrounded by drunks and addicts. My father ignored me and I had no friends. So I’d lock myself in my room, get wasted and write poems.

When I dropped out of high school and ran off to Vancouver—even when I lived on the streets—I carried around an old battered briefcase filled with pages of my poetry. I used to give free poetry readings on the bus for my fellow commuters. One time a man stood up on the #14 Hastings Street bus to applaud and I was thrilled. Hey, an appreciative audience is an appreciative audience! I’ll take it! And throughout that time I was reading all the poets you mentioned. They all excited me in different ways. At the time Bukowski spoke to me the most because his poems were so accessible and used language that was similar to the way I spoke. When I started reading his poetry I felt like hey, maybe I can actually do this and I began to try and write the way I spoke. 

Poetry gave my life purpose— I was part of something fine— and that made me feel like I mattered in some way. I was a poet, goddamn it! By my late teens when I dropped out of school I was already a drunk and a drug addict. I lived on and off the streets and worked horrible, humiliating jobs and got fired regularly. I got into fights and often got my ass kicked. I spent many nights in the Vancouver drunk tank. So while my poems were awful they kept me going. I was betting everything on them. Now, I think differently about those poems. Sure, they weren’t much but learning to write poetry is a long, unbroken process that is never finished. The poems I write now contain the DNA of those early poems no matter how awful they were. So yeah, my wonderful, worthless poems. Without them I wouldn’t be here. 

Rob Taylor, The Silence of the Woods: An Interview with Rodney DeCroo

Sometimes a person retreats to a cave or a remote croft to find themselves, worried that others might influence them, that their true self will be diluted.

Some writers are rather like that, not interacting with others. If their writing’s good enough for them that’s all that matters. Some become famous, albeit belatedly – Emily Dickinson for example, or to a lesser extent, Hopkins. But most writers like the company of other writers, thinking that it helps their writing. Many join their local writer’s groups. Some reach out further, participating in the big world of literature, thinking that the advantages of joining a local group are magnified by interacting with more people. Maybe so, but the risks are greater too – writers risk being driven by market forces and social pressure, losing their authenticity by doing anything to be published, selling themselves out.

I’m one of those people involved with bigger groups. I look upon new styles not as a betrayal of Self but as a way of exploring new aspects of it. I think some compromise is inevitable – friendships depend on it, so why not the writer-reader relationship? 

Tim Love, Losing yourself

Flowers and votives attract the souls of the departed;
and bowls of food, glasses of their favorite drink.

Flying creatures draw near—wings like stained
and soldered glass; feelers that curl and uncurl.

Across thousands of nights they’ve hovered,
spellbound by light, trying to sort blue from silver,

broken glass from the startling sheen on bellies
of fish.

Luisa A. Igloria, Day of the Dead

Nan Hardwicke was a real person, a real witch living in North Yorkshire. She is mentioned in Peter Walker’s book, Murders and Mysteries from the North York Moors, a book my dad used to read to us when we camped on the moors in my childhood. She’s mentioned in William Henderson’s 19th C. book, Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. She’s always mentioned briefly, as a witch hare, fleeing from hunters, living in a cottage in Danby, or in a farm near Danby. She is ethereal in the sense that she’s hard to pin down as a person, her legend is all that remains.

My own version of Nan Hardwicke the witch, the inspiration, or rather the poem itself, arrived in my life fully formed, sliding into my head one day not long after the birth, and death, of my daughter in 2010, during that long summer of maternity-leave-grief. This was a time of walking and wailing and noticing that I had slipped through the thin veil of normal life into an alternative landscape in which I was completely wild, completely animal. I had fallen away from the tight knit, baby-focussed community, the women with whom I had travelled the territory of years of infertility to reach the hallowed point of pregnancy, to get past the early scans, the scares, to reach the glorious third trimester, though I only had my toes over the edge of that marker, only to find myself suddenly outside it, my body emptied, by little person lost. I can see how Nan entered me then, how I found my experience of the wild transformative experience of pregnancy refleted in stories of transmogrification into the hare, her outsiderness, her unnatural being reflected in my new wandering status.

Nan arrived in my head and brought a poem with her. It was one of those poems that rushes out like a bleeding injury to spatter across the page. The poem is probably my best known, though in the niche world of poetry writers and readers, I’m not sure what that means, but it is certainly the one that has been anthologised the most. It appears, in fact, beautifully illustrated by Chris Riddell in the anthology Heroes and Villains, edited by Ana Sampson. […]

Recently my work on a new project has brought me back into the realm of witches, or rather into the realm of the women healers, the elizabethan era in particular, where it seems you could be a woman healer, you could operate on people and animals, you could cure, you could even incant rhymes or spells, but if you were a poor woman, and not wealthy or a woman of the gentry, watch your back, because a rumour was as good as a noose to a woman without wealth.

I don’t want to jinx the project so I’ll say no more and instead quietly incant a little spell over the MS in progress. On this day when the veil is thinnest, perhaps my main character, herself a real woman, might come to me in the way that Nan did and guide me through it.

Wendy Pratt, The Real Witch, Nan Hardwicke

In Alice Notley’s epic poem The Descent of Alette (1992), a woman travels through an underworld of subway trains–trains that sometimes take the form of a giant snake–and caves, meeting strange and ghostly personages who are forced to live underground. The woman undergoes a series of transformations as she comes ever closer to the “Tyrant” so that she might kill him, releasing the world from his thrall. […]

I wondered whether this isn’t where we are now, collectively, at the beginning of an epic poem of descent. A poem in which we are waking up together, out of a fog, and finding that all is not as it should be. That we are in a dusky wood or in an endless subway tunnel, divorced from light, but learn that we cannot emerge without first going deeper, down into the center of the earth, the center of the beast, for the teachings we’ll receive there. That the only way out is down and through. 

In Notley’s book, the Tyrant—who seems at first to be all-powerful—could be a symbol for any man with out-sized ego, influence, and death drive–Trump, Musk, Bezos, take your pick. Men who seem huge until their bubble is popped by the smallest pin. But the Tyrant is closer, I think, to an embodiment of modernity itself, a system that seems inescapable and absolute until it isn’t anymore. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, The Descent

Until the end of the year I shall be polishing my next small collection of poetry. This little beauty has been part of my life since late 2022 when I began writing poems inspired be the artwork of my friend and neighbour Maggie Cameron. We took our work to the public in the form of an exhibition (which turned out to be one of the most successful the exhibitors had held) and mused on the idea of a book. From these poems the concept for my latest book emerged. It’s had some success being both longlisted and highly commended in two notable competitions, but there’s something missing. As I’ve been working with the book, I realise there is a question I need to answer…does the world really need any more poems about birds? […]

We live in a world where new horrors emerge each day. Art, music, poetry, dance are ways to express what it means to be human and to make connection with others. Through connection we can actualise change. Change happens in the individual and if one poem I write connects with someone in a way that gives them a better day, then that is something to be proud of. The presence of birds in my poetry brings the presence of joy in simplicity, the presences of ancient legend and myth, the presence of folklore and shared history. It seems that hope is indeed the thing with feathers.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Does the world need any more poems about birds?

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
I’ve never read any of her books, but I enjoyed this on audiobook. The chapters are short, so you could read one a day as a little writerly pick-me-up. I like that she says to write for the love of writing—whether you win awards or earn degrees or publish books—do it because you love it. She is a believer in “the muse” alighting upon writers, but also that writers have to make themselves available for the muse to light upon them—and then do the work once its there. Couldn’t agree more. Maybe I’ll read one of her novels sometime. […]

Broken Waters by Amy Bornman
This collection of poems was interesting in structure to me—it alternated between a poem for each week of pregnancy with a poem from a perspective of someone from the Bible. Even though I’m an old lady and past this baby-having-nervousness, I still enjoyed reading these poems about the yearning and trials of a first pregnancy. (You can also listen to Amy recite one of her poems while holding her adorable baby HERE! How cute is that?)

Renee Emerson, Alexander the Great, 101 Dalmatians, Big Magic, and The Restorationist series

Later in the evening, fellow resident Pamela Tucker and I took a walk to a cocktail bar she wanted to visit for dinner and over beautiful drinks (boulevardiers for her and hibiscus tea for me) and a flatbread, we talked about art and poems. She sketched and I wrote, and we had a lovely relaxing time in the dark narrow cocoon of a setting that made us think we’d been there all night when we emerged to walk home at 7:30 PM. It was a lovely way to spend the early evening.

Today has been quieter, and I’ve given myself permission to slow down a bit in anticipation of leaving this place tomorrow. I did some more submissions this morning, a little website work for Asterales. I spent some time thinking about my dad, whose 90th birthday would have been today. I think about him a lot, but birthdays are always hard for me. If I was home, I’d probably have headed to the cemetery and had a little chat with him. Instead I did it on my walk—inside my head, don’t worry—and felt him with me.

Thinking about him on the last day of this time away from home led me to think about endings in general—how the ending that comes from loss is never-ending, how the ending of a trip is sometimes both a disappointment and a joy in returning home, how the ending of a poem needs to leave the reader satisified but resonate beyond a “summary” or a “gotcha” line. Right now, I’m on an accountability Google Meet with two writer friends, and my goal was to write one more poem this afternoon. I started one. It was utter trash. So instead I’m here, ruminating on this particular ending and what it means.

First, a list of countable things that have been accomplished in the last six days:

• New poems drafted: 22
• Number of them that are decent or viable: Questionable- we shall see
• Number of poetry submissions prepared and sent: Eleven
• Number of art submissions prepared and sent: Two
• Number of older poems revised: at least 20
• Number of new forms created: 1 (see post from a few days ago)
• Number of book re-read and re-read to take notes for blurbs: Two
• Number of blurbs completed: Two
• Number of lovely meals with all the other residents and our hosts: 3 (will be four after tonight’s farewell meal)
• Number of excellent conversations about art, both writing and poetry: Too many to count
• Number of times I have cried: Two (once when fellow resident artist Freda Shapiro read my draft of Unrivered and everything she said about it let me know the book is working the way I want it to work, and once this morning while looking through pictures of my dad. )

No wonder I feel and look like a wrung-out sponge. But, I’m heading home with more writing and more submissions than I’ve had in months. I’m also heading home with lots of ideas for new pieces of art to work on after spending so much time with visual artists this week, which is probably good since I’m sick of words right now. (I keep hearing the song WAR in my head, except as “WORDS…huh…good God, y’all…what are they good for?”)

Donna Vorreyer, Closing Time

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

Graphis scripta snuck up between an anthology of essays on Jan Zwicky, far behind me, and a novel just ahead: between those slower, thicker books, this one deked through like a breakaway kid chasing the puck for the slapshot & through sheer luck landing it. After decades collecting lichen and slow walks, plus a daily whirl of work and parenting, the book itself happened fast—had to—and was a sneaky joy to make.  I thought that would be the end, didn’t realize that a book can generate its own life once it’s out, and now it’s me chasing after it—readings in unexpected places, lichen walks, scientists getting in touch about poetry, connecting with ecopoets in other countries, new projects. New life. […]

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?

I write lots of one-offs in the moment, most in my drawer, be glad, but I love reading books with a tiny focus—could be structural, thematic, conceptual—as they tend to take you everywhere, and that’s what happened here.  After a couple of early lichen poems and essays on metaphor, the idea of a science-art poetic field guide with an Index of Names came at once, sketched, grounded in walks for local species, after years of silent looking.  Graphis scripta was always a book.

As for the poems themselves – most begin with looking and a phrase that arrives unbidden —like a line of music—the notes and the vibe all there – and for me the work is to see if there’s more there, a whole song.  Often what comes first is an end that I then write towards (chasing after the puck again). What to me are the four or five truest poems in the book arrived entire like that, whole, one draft, it was like taking dictation. Elf-ear, mushroom, the diva Cladonia, a couple others. Maybe some writers can access that sphere often or easily or all the time. I’m not there yet!

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Clare Goulet

As chance would have it, a couple of weeks ago I received two books on the same day that seemed designed to be written about together: the beautifully produced Flood Editions volume of Basil Bunting’s translations from Persian (Bunting’s Persia, edited by Don Share), and a particularly accomplished first collection of English verse taking its inspiration from Iran, Armen Davoudian’s The Palace of Forty Pillars (Corsair Poetry, 2024).

Both of these are slim volumes. The Palace of Forty Pillars contains — like the palace at Isfahan itself — actually only 20 separate titles (or ‘pillars’). (The point of the title is that the pillars are reflected in the water: twenty of the forty are the reflections.) Two of these ‘titles’, though, refer to quite long sequences, the longest of which, ‘The Palace of Forty Pillars’ itself contains twenty sonnets. The other sequence, ‘The Ring’ contains five linked sonnets. The maths doesn’t quite work: you end up with twenty poems (counting titles), or 39 (counting only ‘The Palace of Forty Pillars’ separately), or 43 (if you count ‘The Ring’ sonnets separately as well). But as a conceit it’s neat enough, and it’s a great title, especially as the motif of the palace is linked to a recurring slogan or saying, Isfahan nesfe jahan (‘Isfahan is half the world’), rendered several times in the collection in both English, Roman transliteration and in Persian script.

The phrase refers to the artistic and cultural wealth of the ancient city of Isfahan: there’s so much there that it amounts to “half the world”. But in a biographical and literary sense, too, Iran is ‘half’ but not all of Davoudian’s world. The poet was born and raised in Isfahan, but he is of Armenian heritage, and now lives in California. Poetically, this is a collection in English which draws richly on the genres, forms, styles and stories of Persian literature, but does so in a style of English verse which is always keenly aware of English literary heritage. We find ghazals, quatrains of the type used by Rumi in the Rubaiyat (a word that means ‘quatrains’) and allusions to many of the great Persian poets and poems, but also sonnets, sonnet sequences and an echo poem, and allusions to Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Shakespeare.

Victoria Moul, And lances, making the valley a cornfield

I have a soft spot for any book published by Wandering Aengus Press—their publications include the anthology, For Love of Orcas, a gorgeous tribute book published in 2019. Jed Myers’s Learning to Hold won the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award, and is another beautifully written, and beautifully wrought book.

This was one of my August Sealey-Challenge books. I read it on Amtrak, Portland to Seattle, on August 26. (I know because I used a print-out of my ticket as a bookmark). So, I read it on a journey, and the book is a journey, placing a personal and familial history of war and trauma and healing into a larger context. Yes, the world is a bloody mess, but this book tells us, with the tenderness of a father reassuring a child: “Don’t let go now.”

When I opened Learning to Hold this morning, this poem leapt out at me. It’s a wonderful antidote for election anxiety.

A Prayer

A cormorant crosses a harbor low,
wings’ pulse keeping an air pillow
on the bird’s shadow, that black
belly a steady few inches aloft. […]

Bethany Reid, Jed Myers, LEARNING TO HOLD

The poems in “Baby Cerberus” draw from classical mythology, video games and speculative futures, mostly but not always earthbound. Their primary focus though is connection, how humans interact and care for each other. The first poem, “Tamagotchi” remembers those early electronic virtual pets,

In a thousand years, this poem will be forgotten too
like an unopened email in the trash, or a dream

lost to vicious waking. I ask the earth instead to cradle
our long-dead device, hold rusted gears in mercy.

Not all love stories merit monuments, but every story
is worth its weighty moments: the first time your heart

beeped like that hungry digital pet as fingerprints soiled
the hem of your shirt, or when a heavy silence traced

your shoulders so gently you’d already abandoned
thoughts of swapping the eroded battery…

The poem ends with a plead to be remembered. Love, like pets, needs sustenance and care otherwise it withers and partners drift apart. Plath wrote of poems being “moments’ monuments”, but the poem argues that not all moments deserve monuments. That maybe the best we can hope for is that someone remembers, that we don’t become entirely obsolete, like an old electronic device that can’t connect with contemporary devices.

Emma Lee, “Baby Cerberus” Natasha Ramoutar (Buckrider Books) – book review

“Make the ark with rooms and pens.”
Include thick creamy paper, soft
as brushed cotton, and enough ink
to write our way through.

None of us asked to be born into
the generation that might lose
everything: not just homes
falling into the waters

from North Carolina to Alaska
but also democracy. Not just
a free press, freedom to be Jewish,
freedom to not be pregnant

but also the capacity to draw
a full breath. Who does that anymore?

Rachel Barenblat, Ark

Emil Cioran calls it sublimity. Across decades of words and texts, music shuts him up and pours the ineffable all over his head.

There’s a part in Anathemas and Admirations where Cioran sits inside the stone womb (or the tomb-birthing chapel) of Saint-Severin and listens to an organist playing through Bach’s fugues, calling this moment “the refutation of all my anathemas.” 

Like music, poetry is composed from sound and silence, two materials which invoke each other and are figured in different ways. Because the resonant sound of a text is subjective, depending on the reader’s relationship to sound, the text exists in relationship to the reader’s sonic experience. 

“Mute” suggests an inability to speak, or a state of speechlessness which may be imposed from the outside or chosen as a response. But to be muted is to be rendered inaudible, to have one’s volume turned down. To say that ‘I muted myself’ is jarring, since the conventional use of a muted female involves being rendered silent, and then being determined to be complicit in that silence, insinuating that  muteness, as a condition, inscribes the power of the world over the sound one can make. Watching someone go rapt over music is like watching their face during sex, or realizing they love it.

Alina Stefanescu, A poem and 2 things: Louise Bogan’s “Words for Departure”

Bowie died. Prince died. Leonard Cohen died.

And everyone that made you feel beautiful and young is going, one by one and there is nothing you can do about it. Everyone who knew you when you were beautiful and young will all fade away. One by one. Nobody will be around to remember the young you any more. And your heroes will disappear, they will stop being there and then you will hear that they died and then you will die a little bit too. You probably haven’t seen them for years. Nor listened to their music nor read their books nor watched their movies. But there was a time you had their poster on your wall, a shrine in your heart, they were the soundtrack to the good times, your glory days. You might go to their funeral. You might go to a bash in the local pub in their honour. This is how it will go. Your heroes die one by one. […]

I just hope new heroes are being born this year . . .

Your heroes are here! Your heroes are all already here, darling. I see your heroes, I follow them, I watch them, they keep going and never stop. Your heroes are never giving up on their dreams. I see heroes at the food bank, your heroes are at homeless shelters, they take food to people sleeping in doorways. Your heroes are itinerant and broke, with no funding or arts grants. Your heroes are in Calais and Dunkirk, they wait by the shores of Mediterranean seas and volunteer to help the capsized boats and refugees. Your heroes are on the borders. Your heroes are down in Soho donating and distributing food and blankets. Your heroes are working overtime in the crumbling NHS departments, your heroes are your doctors and nurses, your teachers and volunteers, people taking phone calls at the Samaritans and talking people down from the edge.

Your heroes march for human rights and the future of the planet. Your heroes are millions of school children protesting for the climate strike. Your heroes write graffiti and poetry. Your heroes are everywhere, they walk among us. Your heroes are waking up every day, skint and underpaid and busking it, your heroes are making work, beautiful books and music and art that you cannot see or find or read as is drowned out by all the propaganda and noise and adverts and the fear-mongering and the performative cruelty of politicians. It is your job, your only job, to seek out and support and nurture heroes, this is all your responsibility. We can all do our part in the chain, to help others to help others, to help the others who help the others who inspire and help the others.

Salena Godden, We Could Be Heroes

Let me recount all the stars I’ve witnessed in my falling.

Giant stars, congregations of hydrogen and helium angels, combustible godbreath whispered into their divine bounty of being.

In my falling,

there have been other stars,

the city lights of Los Angeles. Illuminated streets and brake-lit freeways, vast as a string of diamonds and blood pearls spilling across the landscape.

There is peace in this falling when your feet aren’t touching the ground, as if you’re smoke, feather, air.

When worry slips away from your being as you hang above the earth—

waiting for it to shift into Tuesday and beyond, and whether the world will lean more towards darkness or light.

Rich Ferguson, All the Stars In My Falling

i decided not to give myself a shot that night.
instead, let the light pass through
my three little testosterone snow globes.
recently my lover asked me,
“why don’t you switch to the gel?”
suggesting that maybe i could
stop taking injections. i felt sad
& insisted i did not want to stop.
it’s hard to let myself
find anything beautiful because
it is always too late. i want
to save my life 3 milliliters
at a time. do not tell me there are
easier ways to be alive. i want the ritual.
the alchemy. another election ad
pops up on my youtube video
& says, “trans gender ideology.”
it is so bad right now that you have
to laugh. i am so afraid to tell you
what i think is beautiful.

Robin Gow, beautiful poem

November 1st saw our first batch of snow here in Southern Finland, just as I was driving my car home from getting its winter tyres and service at the garage. Everything was sorted by the skin of my teeth. I was hoping the autumn weather would hang on for a bit longer, but there’s no escaping from winter. The temps will bounce back up above zero after the weekend, but this was just a reminder to not get too comfortable.  

I didn’t manage to do much of Scotstober this year, but I have a handful of snippets, some poetic lines that I might try to do something with. I’m not getting much writing done, even when I was on holiday. Ideas rattled around but didn’t stick. I can’t seem to focus on writing and I have too many other things I need to do first before I can relax into poetry. Even today I was scanning documents for a child’s school application and going through some course work rather than work on a poem. 

I’m not worried, my writing is cyclical like the seasons. When I have been writing the past few months it’s been autumnal, the fear of winter side-by-side with the love of the harvest season. The geese leaving me behind. Now, when it comes, my writing will be full of ice and frustration with the long, dark winter hibernating behind windows. 

Gerry Stewart, First Day of a Too Familiar Winter

This week: trusting the unsaid, questions for trees, beautiful birds of thought, hearing singing through the walls at night, and much more. Enjoy!

A scattering of airborne seeds, like baby dandelion fluffs, float over me when I’m coming home and walk back up the drive. And early in the evening Vega is still right overhead, still presiding. Yes. This remains my favorite month. I don’t hate the summer any more, and I look forward to the cold and the rain less than I used to, but it’s still, to me, the month of promise. It’s the month I used to look over my new school books, and anticipate understanding new things and meeting new people (living and dead: new to me.) Mysterious names will fill with meaning; eyes will fill with light.

Dale Favier, September

[I]t was the last day of the Butterfly House being open, so we snuck in a quick visit. The snow leopard cubs were hiding while we were there, but we got to visit with their beautiful mother.

Going to the zoo is one of the summer rituals I didn’t want to skip, even though the weather is getting cooler, and the timing was hard. It’s important to squeeze in the things that matter to us—even if it’s just watching butterflies—in between paying bills, doctor appointments, work, and the busy work that is too big a part of our lives. To be a writer is sometimes to prioritize the butterfly watching.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Fall is Here, Sign Up for a Spooky Season Zoom Class with me and Kelli Russell Agodon, Zoo Visits and More

i will never make real peace with
the fact that we live in a world where
the soil is cut up like a tray of brownies.
here is your citadel. here is my porch
& the dead spearmint bush in a row.
once a week or so i see them. the deer.
they peer into my apartment
the way i gazed into their house.
always startle me with those reflective eyes.
the mirror keepers. i open the front door
to try to tell them they can come
live with me. i am desperate for anyone else
to talk to about the house i did not get.
they are not there. just ribbons
of early autumn wind.

Robin Gow, for sale

This morning there is a tang of wood in the cool air. It is the kind of scent that might come from opening a little used cupboard door or how I imagine the very centre of a conker smells. […]

Even though I knew the sun was a star,
that the shine had something
to do with immense pressure
changing hydrogen to helium,
even though I could have told you
that there were hundreds of billions of them out there
I didn’t.
All I was actually sure of was that
I needed to stand in the darkness
with you.
Will you lift your eyes and look with me?

Sue Finch, ANGEL OF THE NORTH AS DANCER

On the TV, images of British wildlife appear and disappear: blackbird, goldfinch, roe deer, hedgehog. I’m glad of it. I’d rather have random images of animals and birds than some awful gossipy morning television show. On the walls, two long distorted images of the Yorkshire moors add a sense of peace and expanse to what is in fact, I notice, a windowless, hot room.

Two and a half hours. I’m quashing my panic. I tell myself if there was something wrong they’d let me know. But all the time my mind jumps back to the time around my daughter’s death, when we made assumptions it can’t be an emergency if they are still treating us as a non emergency. It can’t be that bad if no one is calling for an ambulance. I pick up the book again and highlight a quote with my highlighter:

We do not have to choose one story and run with it.

My stories are converging here in the blue-sea-storm room, the too hot room. The past story that I keep retelling, keep putting to bed, only for it to rise again and keep circling me is running into the story of today, the story of a capable, intelligent woman taking her mother to a routine hospital appointment. I am trying too hard not to feel the stories of myself. I remind myself that all stories change the landscape of self, that I am a a landscape that has been changed, but that I am still here, still working, still habitable.

Wendy Pratt, The story resurfaces and I let it flow through me

Let us gather our words.
Pretend is no longer a game. It is a meadow
where the sun is shining, where nothing is amiss.
Look, there is Van Gogh painting the ripening
wheat, golden under the green Cypress trees.
Does it really matter if he has one ear missing?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Ugliness does not become verse

Unsaid: The dreams that follow me into the kitchen, the ghosts that grab my chin and force me to look at them, the way the world whirls away mid-conversation when unsaid things run their goosebumps over my arms, my legs, the whorl of their Listen. 

“Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning,” Giorgio Agamben says of poetry in When the House Burns Down.

And there is something lucid hewn from the possibility preserved by the unsaid. The best way to describe it is by looking at how much is said, how much is spoken and communicated across alienating mediums and disguises. 

Agamben urges us to trust that moment when we look at one another without posing words, screens, and Beauty between us. 

Trust the unsaid that doesn’t fear being read in simultaneity, amid the absurdity of dailiness—- the demands of those roses.

Trust a stone to keep the whole story carved into it.

Trust the bark of a tree in Tuscaloosa.

Alina Stefanescu, Unsaids.

what is it like to grow     from the ground     up into the air
     why do we break              dawn                        what about
              dawn    deserves breaking          and why

on the white branch         of the birch tree                a crow

Romana Iorga, questions for trees

Earlier this year, a group of artists in The Netherlands set up the Ongelezen Boeken Club (Unread Books Club). It is a sad fact that many library books are never borrowed. Currently, there is an exhibition in a public library in Amsterdam featuring some of their unread books. […]

The artists have declared Thursday 19 September as the first Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag (National Unread Books Day).

There is the concept of the anti-library: a collection of unread books as a research tool, as an ode to everything one wants to explore. Related to that is Tsundoku, acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up. Many poets I know feel somewhat guilty about new poetry books piling up.

Fokkina McDonnell, The unread book

A little over a week ago, we were in Ireland, and my husband and I visited The Old Library at Dublin’s Trinity College, one of the oldest and most impressive libraries in the world. The main gallery of the Old Library is the Long Room, which is approx. 213 feet long. The Long Room normally houses over 200,000 of the libraries oldest books, but at the time of our visit, a huge restoration project was underway on these precious books. […]

One of the biggest draws now, while the restoration is in progress, is an enormous, illuminated artwork, titled Gaia, by artist Luke Jerram, that has been installed in the Old Library. The installation features NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface, showcasing the planet floating in three dimensions as it might be viewed from space. It’s a stunning thing to behold.

In lieu of the books in the stacks, visitors can watch large format film loops of the book restoration process, from the handling and packing of the books, to rebinding and cleaning. […]

  A visit to the Old Library is included when you buy a ticket to the “Book of Kells Experience,” which you also do not want to miss. At the end of the Book of Kells Experience, illuminated on the wall is the Jorge Luis Borges quotation: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library” in English and in Gaelic.

Katharine Whitcomb, Letter from The Old Library at Trinity College, Dublin

Herbert’s ‘Aethiopissa’, which is so different from any of his famous English religious lyrics — and has surprising elements even if you know his Latin verse well — was written for Francis Bacon, and sent to him, with a dedicatory English poem, as a kind of thank-you in return for a book (described as ‘a diamond to me you sent’), probably part of Bacon’s grand project, the Instauratio Magna, the first portion of which (the Novum Organum) was published in 1620, but which Bacon had been working on for many years.7 All of the early manuscript copies of ‘Aethiopissa’ contain the English and the Latin poems together. Bacon was a family friend of Herbert’s, they had known each other for more than a decade, and several of his other Latin poems in praise of Bacon’s work also had a wide manuscript circulation.

Since English literature written from the perspective of a black person is very rare in this period, the poem has attracted a fair degree of scholarly attention and speculation, not all of it, however, displaying much sense of its cultural context. (Sometimes the fact it was written for Bacon isn’t even mentioned.) Other scholars have interpreted the poem as a kind of formal ‘courtship’ of Bacon by Herbert — in a social or patronage-related way, rather than a romantic one. This doesn’t seem quite right, given their well-established friendship, but there does seem to be something distinctly personal and playful about the combination of the English and Latin pieces. The conceit of the Latin poem is probably inspired by Song of Songs 1:5 (‘I am black, but comely’), a very fashionable text for Latin verse imitation and response at just this period. In addition, though it has not to my knowledge been remarked upon, several of Bacon’s scientific works address the question of why some people have darker skin than others, pointing particularly to the heat of the sun (as mentioned in the Latin poem); since Herbert knew Bacon well, it is likely that he was aware of his interest in this question and they might even have discussed it. Overall, though, Herbert seems to be using the girl’s ‘blackness’ and her characterisation as a shadow to comment on the relationship between public office (as held by Bacon) and the relative obscurity of Herbert’s life of scholarship. Indeed, many of Herbert’s Latin poems are concerned with the choice between a public and a more private career (whether of scholarship or, later, of ministry).

Victoria Moul, Stay lovely boy! Why fly’st thou me?

Up late – or at least late for me –
I lie on my stomach reading Galway Kinnell,
wondering at the lives I could have lived
if only I’d run away at 14, or
gotten on that plane, or been more
comfortable alone, or finished that degree,
or kept any one of a number of jobs, or
done the thing people thought I should do,
rather than what I did which was often
weird – you have to admit – and which
finds me up late, reading Galway Kinnell,
wondering at the lives I could have lived.

Jason Crane, POEM: Up Late Reading Galway Kinnell

I’ve taken to making of my first cup of coffee a little be-here-now meditation, to try to ground myself for the day not in plans and lists of tasks, but in a few minutes of taking notice. I’m not sure how long it lasts, the effects of this practice, as I pretty quickly end up flapping around in body and mind in my usual barnyard way. But still. For a moment I’m still. I’m giving the day’s world my attention. I hope that’s enough for the world, for the day. As Rilke wrote, “Maybe we are here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate…”

This poem by Betsy Sholl, called “Poem in which Emily Dickinson Scolds Me,” struck me not because of the Emily Dickinson nod — I confess, I rarely understand what the hell Emily Dickinson is talking about. Don’t judge me. — but because of this couplet: ” What are you but two weak eyes/and too many shadows inside your head?”

Marilyn McCabe, A little terror can see a long way

The interweaving of memory and art, the poet’s art, is typical of [John] Levy’s work and what’s striking here, as elsewhere, is the careful construction of what might at first glance seem almost careless form. Look, for example, at the use of line and stanza breaks, with words and phrases isolated so that they look backwards and forwards at the same time:

I remembered. What it was

I was going to do
doesn’t matter

The pivot here between second and third line slows us down; life is full of us doing things that don’t particularly matter other than we intend to do them. What matters is the sense of coherence that memory brings, and from that, for the poet, a shape of words to express the extraordinary ordinary.

Which is why, for a poet like Levy, the accidental or coincidental has such weight; a dog barks as the poet types, or a typo is integrated, again via an enjambment, as a means of expressing love:

what fills my life with with worth. Ah, a
typo, the doubled with, as if one with isn’t enough

when I’m thinking of you.

Reading these two reminds me yet again why I love the pamphlet as a vehicle for poetry.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading September 2024: Part One

There is an irresistible vibrancy and immediacy about the poems in the first section of All About the Surface that draws the reader into [Karen] Macfarlane’s world. Take for example, her description of open water swimming in When you need courage for the year ahead (A swimmer’s perspective).  It begins with the lines: ‘It’s going to be cold./ Bloody cold./ Squeal when it reaches your oxters cold./ Fecking freezing./ The cold will take your breath away;/ you will take it back/ and exhale, slow and loud/ like an old seal.’ The syntax and line breaks convey the speaker’s hesitance and her anticipation of the imminent pain. The use of the vernacular creates an intimacy with the reader, as if it is a friend talking to a friend. The humorous, self-deprecating image of the ‘old seal’ suggests someone who doesn’t take herself too seriously, yet it is cleverly and originally appropriate for its context. As a consequence, we share the moment, as if we are alongside her. We see the same qualities particularly in Tightrope ridge and Flying down the hill at Clachtoll. In the latter poem she writes: ‘I run, dodging thistles,/ and sheep’s purlies, (but not them all), / lowping fast, down and down/ breath bumped out of me/ streaming hair, more and more/ air between each step’. This time she skilfully imparts the jolting rhythm of her run, the breathlessness, the sense of speed and the lack of control so that we feel we are running with her.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘All About the Surface’ by Karen Macfarlane

There’s a note from the poet, “Seeking joy”, which starts, “I was in my late teens when I was assaulted, but I’ve only started talking about what happened to me in the last two years.” It goes on to talk about “Following my joy is now my habit.” However, it’s a joy that allows acknowledgement of how women’s bodies are treated through sexual assault and childbirth. There are contact details for PANDAS Foundation (for new mothers needing mental health support), Rape Crisis, SARSAS who support victims of sexual assault, Samaritans and resources that helped the poet. The sexual violence is not explicit, but it’s a welcome acknowledgement that reading this collection may not be easy for some. The collection’s focus is on the aftermath and living with that aftermath as the assaulted teen grows into a woman and later becomes a mother to daughters. Healing is not easy but possible.

Unsuprisingly then, the first poem, “Venus de Milo speaks”, takes on the male gaze, observing that,

“Either way, I define
the ‘classical woman’ for you.

A quiet one’s air
of aloofness. Tried,
now passive, with this
hairstyle and marbling of flesh;

it evokes the very kind of woman
likely to stand before a kitchen sink”

and concludes,

“Just don’t reach for my hands,
never seen or touched.
A touch of mine, never felt.”

The Venus de Milo statue shows a woman, assumed to be Aphrodite, with a bare torso, but her lower body covered in drapes, standing. Her arms have been lost although a fragment found near the statue when it was discovered in 1820, shows a hand holding an apple. In the poem she’s not just a classical woman but also one cast into the classical role of a woman: to serve, provide a family and provide for and nuture the family. But she has no arms so cannot respond to the gaze which puts her in those roles. Men project their wishes onto her but she cannot comply or rebel. 

Emma Lee, “Feeling All the Kills” Helen Calcutt (Pavilion) – book review

In workshops I often see writers try to write about a feeling, but then back away from it. They say “I feel this sometimes, but I know I’m being melodramatic,” or “I feel this sometimes but not always.”

But one of the tasks of poetry is to help us express a feeling completely, without backing away from it, without reasoning our way out of them, or overanalyzing them, or dampening them down with qualifications, . What I love about this poem is that it takes a feeling and amplifies it to the nth degree.

Another job of poetry, to quote Shakespeare, is to “give to Airy Nothings a local home and a dwelling place.” (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, scene i. Oberon). This poem takes the emotion, which has no form, and ties that emotion to the physicality of the speaker’s own body. This is appropriate because sometimes feelings are so intense it seems like they take over your entire body. 

Tresha Faye Haefner, “Blatant Blister” Analyzing Kim Malinowski’s Poem, Inspired by Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Rajinderpal S. Pal is a critically acclaimed writer and stage performer. He is the author of two collections of award-winning poetry, pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read and pulse. Born in India and raised in Great Britain, Pal has lived in many cities across North America and now resides in Toronto. However Far Away is his first novel. 

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

My first book, pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read, was released in 1998 by TSAR. The attention that this poetry collection received completely exceeded my expectations. As well as winning the Writers Guild of Alberta award for Best First Book, the publication received a couple of mentions in the Globe and Mail and allowed me to do readings across the country. I have been working on a New, Unpublished and Selected collection, working title The Lesser Shame. I really wish I knew then, at the time of writing my earlier poems, what I know now about craft and structure. Writing and editing my debut novel, However Far Away, I have gained a discipline and rigour which has previously eluded me. In some ways, I am covering similar ground to what I covered in my two published poetry collections (themes of family and tradition, love and commitment) but the novel feels very different in terms of scope and reach.

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

My father was a published and much-admired poet, and poetry readings were a regular occurrence in my childhood home. He wrote in Punjabi and Urdu, both languages that I do not read or write. My father was only in my life for a short time before he died of a heart attack. I was ten at the time. In my late twenties I was desperate to understand my father: his life as a soldier, a headmaster, a poet, what led him to move our family across continents, why he wrote, and what he wrote. Poetry seemed to be the natural medium to examine this man and try to understand my relationship to him.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rajinderpal S. Pal

I don’t know if poems are conversations
           with God, though I tell my students to think
of poetry as a way to enter a conversation 
           that has been going on through the centuries,
but one in which they can add their voices. 
           At this point, I try to think of a party
analogy, but I have never been very good
           at parties. I would likely be among
those who sit on the edge of a couch pretending
           to nibble thoughtfully on an hors d’oeuvre, 
one among a rapt circle listening to the life of any 
          party pulling out one brilliant silk square 
after another from inside his sleeve as beautiful
          birds of thought flutter in the air.

Luisa A. Igloria, Conversations

Students on Creative Writing courses, and other writers too, are sometimes invited to events at which they will meet ‘industry experts’ – literary agents advising on how to pitch your work, and editors advising on what kind of writing they are looking for, and marketing people advising on how to use social media to promote your work. Few literary agents, in my experience, know anything about how books are actually sold, and few editors in mainstream publishing: that’s for the guys down the corridor or the IT crowd in the basement. Few editors of literary magazines, few reviewers, few authors, few journalists covering the ‘arts’. Books simply appear – by magic – in bookshops or on online retail platforms. I don’t claim expertise here myself, but I have a little more understanding than I used to and a lot more confusion.

I blame the public schools. Going back a bit, I blame the Greeks and the Romans, whose celebration of the life of the mind and disdain for manual labour – plenty of busts of emperors and philosophers, none of the engineers who designed the aqueducts (300 in the province of Gaul alone) or those that built them, mostly slaves – was incorporated into the English public schools. While claiming to instil self-reliance these schools turned out generations of men who couldn’t boil an egg or wash their own clothes, for which they too required slaves (women), including a succession of prime ministers whose ability to quote a Latin tag was perceived as intelligence. The class division enshrined here still prevails in much of UK life, publishing included. (So no, this paragraph is not irrelevant.) The media run interviews with authors and sometimes editors, people from the sexy side of publishing, but not with sales managers and printers.

The above is prompted by CBe’s problems with the listing of its titles on Amazon. Some CBe titles are not listed at all on Amazon; some are listed but don’t appear when you type the author’s name in the search box; some are listed inaccurately (the Francis Ponge book is not a ‘French edition’); some are listed but only available from third-party sellers (though the books are available to Amazon to stock if it chooses); some are listed but at vastly inflated prices: the Amazon mark-up on the cover price for 10 CBe titles is between 300 and 500%.

Most readers of this newsletter probably don’t buy CBe books from Amazon, but other potential buyers might. The authors would like to reach these people, as would I. I’ve been told that my problem is that I don’t have ‘control of the metadata’, and this is true. But even if I did have that control – transmitting data in a specific program standard to the various listing and selling parties – I’ve been told by ‘industry experts’ (them again, but here I do mean experts: people who know how this works or doesn’t) that there are interface problems between the several parties sending and taking the data (Nielsen, Gardners, distributors, Amazon and holders of vendor accounts with Amazon). If you are a bestselling author published by Penguin Random House then the Amazon will probably work for you, because they will make it work; if neither, not. You are cannon fodder.

Charles Boyle, Cheaper from Amazon: really?

(extracts from my most recent rejections)

Thank you for entering
what can I say
and thank you for your patience
we received 1,800 poems
Your entry has helped
After much deliberation
Unfortunately, we didn’t
We are sorry to say
we have not shortlisted
your poems did not make it
on this occasion
can be very disappointing
please don’t be discouraged
Please, don’t give up
keep going
hope you’ll trust us
again in the future
next time
Best wishes

Ama Bolton, Found Poem

How will you live like an artist today? This is the question I keep asking myself and I try to throw it out there into the wilderness too.

We all know the answers, but we need to hear them again and again. We need to listen to the work, our life’s work, most of all, because it tells us what we’re required to do.

I’ve written a few of these posts on living like an artist by now, but maybe this whole blog leans toward demonstrating how to live like an artist. The over and over of process. The repetitions, the ego, the lack of ego, the doubt, the joy, the humility, the humiliations! Living as a civilian, as I’ve pointed out in a book called The Flower Can Always Be Changing, is at some point no longer an option.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – The Work of Art

[Mary] Oliver was born in Ohio, so I like to claim her as a fellow Ohio poet. She lived in Provincetown, Mass., from the 1960s until the death of her partner, Molly Malone Cook, in 2005. She was living in southern Florida at the time of her death. Though the bulk of Oliver’s poems are set on the northwest tip of Cape Cod, I can’t help but see in them so much of our shared Ohio landscape: the deer, the birds, the grass, the water, the trees, the light, and the darkness. 

“I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up,” Oliver said in a 2011 interview in O Magazine. “I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.” 

I, too, spent much of my Ohio childhood walking among trees or with my nose in a book. Like Oliver, I started writing in my teens and published my first book at 28. And, yes, my work is concerned with place. It is full of deer, birds, fields, rivers, trees, light, and darkness. 

In a sense, Mary Oliver, and another Ohio poet, James Wright, gave me permission to write about Ohio’s flora and fauna. It was only natural—no pun intended—for me to write about what I saw every day, and to build metaphors using my surroundings. It did not surprise me to learn that Whitman, Emerson, Keats, and Rumi were some of Oliver’s favorite poets. These are poets of big ideas, poets who used metaphor—often based in the natural world—to build a bridge or open a door. 

I learned from Mary Oliver how attention is a kind of love, how shining your mind’s light on a thing—a grasshopper, a bird, a tree—is a way of showing gratitude. I learned that poems do not need to be “difficult” to be intelligent, that poems can be both inspirational and investigative, that poems can be tender without being soft. I learned from her to own my wonder and to stay open to uncertainty. 

Maggie Smith, On Your One Wild and Precious Life

I don’t really go through old rough drafts that often.  I was surprised to find some polished poems hiding in that rough draft file.  I started a new file so that I don’t have to dig through the rough draft file each time I want to polish a poem.  I fought off the why should I even bother blues–and I put that line in the abandoned lines document.

As I was cutting and pasting, I remembered the poem I had planned to write.  Back in early August, we had a professional development day, and one of our options was a stop the bleed workshop, where we learned how to tie a tourniquet and/or bandage a wound.  I thought back to my Girl Scout days where we learned how to tie a tourniquet using only our bandannas and sticks found in the yard–while being severely cautioned that this technique was a last ditch effort only because it would lead to a lost limb.  One of my colleagues remembers being taught to cauterize a wound with a lighter–not a technique recommended by the workshop leaders. Ah, the joys of growing up in the 70’s!

I’m still puzzling over the possibilities of that poem.  But here’s an unexpected joy.  As I was sorting, cutting, pasting, writing, I came up with a new poem, about living in seminary housing, seeing people cross the parking lot, hearing singing through the walls at night.  It’s not finished, but I have enough that I’ll remember what I was doing when I come back to it.

I’m getting a lot of writing done these days, but I have to be intentional to get poetry writing done.  I’d like to do more poetry writing.  It’s good to remember that puttering can lead to poems.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Abandoned Lines and Poetry Puttering

Maybe I relate to wasps because I saw an exhibition at the museum with all the social wasps singled out under glass bell jars, each hovering over the earth on the blunt end of a stainless steel pin.

Sometimes I can’t eat at restaurants or other people’s houses because I can taste the metal of the fork’s tines, or of the edge of the spoon’s bowl when it’s rough from use. I always have to push away the thought that it’s some kind of hex.

It tastes like pain.

If I were to paint pain, it’d be a metallic silver. Like mercury. The astata species of wasps are sometimes silver. The males, at any rate.

I have no idea if this is some kind of synesthesia. Transference. Free association.

But this is a true thing in my life. Sometimes I think the truest things in my life are the experiences that strip down to nothings. I think that’s why I’m drawn to poetry. Its witches’ work: lashing the elements of the world together to create meaning—and motion. I don’t know if belief can move a mountain, but belief in a mountain can move an entire community.

Maybe belief can resurrect the dead in pieces and in portraits such that no one can dispute, defend, or deconstruct them. You can’t deconstruct an alignment of memories. You can only shuffle them around. Like the gems in a kaleidoscope.

Ren Powell, It Tastes Like Pain

The definition of a good day
keeps changing. In “Metamorphoses”
the monsters began as beautiful,
or sometimes the reverse. The sun fell
in love, and what it loved, who it loved,
leaked thick droplets of pain. There — the end.
At least, that was the end of something.
Today was a good day. 

PF Anderson, Want (#BlogElul 6)

My long weekend is drawing to a close. It’s wet and moody out, bringing dusk earlier and earlier. The days are slowing down and I’m giving in to them. There’s never enough time, there’s still a sense of urgency different from what I get in the summer. To nest, to harvest, to prepare for what’s coming. 

I’ve made banana bread, apple cake and applesauce cake for home and school, two types of chicken with apples and applesauce. All trying to use up my apples from my cinnamon apple tree. I’ve wrangled my reluctant daughter into dinner, homework and taking out the rubbish, but not a shower. Compromise. 

And writing, I’ve managed a little. Sent out some submissions, one already declined. I’ve fought with a poem that I can see but can’t express. It’s coming, gradually. 

Gerry Stewart, Moving into Autumn, Moving On

at the sadness of a falling leaf
we call the wind felicity
it’s agreed
the seance ends
a broken butterfly wing knocks once

then silence

Jim Young, we call the wind felicity