Courtney LeBlanc – Via Negativa

Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 8

Dave Bonta — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:25:50 +0000

This week: active hope, the anti-ship of Theseus, knocking the brain off its pedestal, smutty Persephone poems, slow stitching, and much more. Enjoy.

I spent time today sitting with noise — the husband noises, the mice in the ceiling, the cluster flies bopping against the lampshade, and I walked alongside the river today, its noisy winter fluster that, once my path turned away from it, was masked by the fumpswish of my boots in ankle-deep wet snow. I heard, and felt as well, the rumble of a truck shifting gears on the road. I spent time in the silences — woods quiet of birds, windless, the house empty for a little while, even of mice. I took it all in like nourishment, to try to remind myself to be fed.
Marilyn McCabe, Our echoing lives

The full-length debut by Chicago-based poet Willie Lin, following the chapbooks Lesser Birds of Paradise (MIEL) and Instructions for Folding (Northwestern University Press), is conversations among stones (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023), a collection of meditative lyrics composed in clear narratives with direct purpose. “A knife pares to learn what is flesh.” the two-line poem “Dear” offers, “What is flesh.” There’s a remarkable way Lin’s poems unfold, unfurl and slowly reveal, offering an intriguing patience, pause and cadence. “The things in my life / I remember with perfect clarity:,” she writes, but I’d offer that these poems themselves are wonderful examples of that “perfect clarity” she suggests, as Lin composes first-person intimacies of thought and narrative that work to comprehend the world, both internal and external, and how one finds and secures one’s place. There’s a lot of considering within these poems, and a lot to consider. “Now when the wind comes,” she writes, to open the poem “Brief History of Exile,” a six-page expansive lyric set at the heart of the collection, around all else is structured, “I lean into it. / I’m learning to be that pure, relinquish or carry without // seeming to.” This is a book of tethering and of feeling unplaced, untethered, attempting to better comprehend those connections, and the very notion of belonging, instead of automatically attempting to latch on to what might come along next. “I thought if I / could desire less / I could be happy.” she writes, to open the poem “Gauntlet for the Left Hand,” “I was moving toward / an idea.”
rob mclennan, Willie Lin, conversations among stones

I’ve been thinking about, and reading, poetry, rather than writing it, lately. I’ve been looking back at lots of my old poetry and wondering how I manage to have such an inconsistent style of writing. I didn’t come up with an answer. Nor to the question why so many different types of my poetry have been published – and so many haven’t. Right poem, right place, wrong poem, wrong place, rubbish poem, etc…
Sue Ibrahim, Different versions of me

I tried to return to my skating class nearly two weeks ago, which marked the beginning of this challenging run. I made it through 2/3 of the Monday morning class, but by that evening I was in the beginning of a headache that didn’t clear for 6 days. I really, really miss skating. (I know it tried to kill me, but I still love it.) Walking, though, I can do, and this week we had some sunny weather, and I can see the beginnings of buds on trees and shrubs, and the very first little flowers have begun blooming.

Honestly, that’s about it, and I need to get off screens again because that seems to be the most reliable way to keep headache away. I miss writing even more than I miss skating. I miss reading and interacting with writers online.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Small comforts

This is not my favourite time of year I confess, although I love all the early signs of Spring – the first sunny days, the first buds, daffodils and birdsong. Just look how grand the beach looked the other day! We even had breakfast outside on Friday! But this month in particular I’ve been plagued by asthma. Struggling to swim, or jog, or even walk uphill is a bit depressing. I’m managing to do a little yoga, and I’m still singing, although my chest sometimes hurts afterwards. Roll on warmer and dryer weather.

But what about the writing, you might ask. I’m kind of in a no-man’s land at the moment. I’m not writing poetry with any great intent. But I feel as if I might be moving towards writing something. Hard to describe the feeling really but it’s there.
Robin Houghton, And there goes February flying past…

Mariame Kaba isn’t a poet. She is an activist who talks about hope. She has said that hope is not an emotion, nor it is the same as optimism. She describes it as a discipline. Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, writers and activists, have coined the term “Active Hope”. They liken it to Tai Chi or gardening, “something you do rather than have.”

Every morning now – in my simplified life – I focus on the energy as I flow through the 18 moves of shibashi. I hope that the discipline will ground me. Open me. That this will allow poetry to flow into me. And through me.

A flower is a poem of beauty. And a scorched earth is a poem of hope.
Ren Powell, Hope is a Round Thing

First, consider the sentences and line breaks. The sentences are perfectly formed, varied in length and syntactic complexity (from ‘We drifted in silence.’ to the first and last sentence, each of which spreads over four lines). The line breaks do not disrupt the syntax, rather they complement it, or accentuate it. In terms of lines and sentences the poem is structured as it could be if it were smooth free verse. But it’s not: the line-sentence structure additionally serves a metric pattern, iambic pentameter. Sentence and metric line are working together.

As for the metre: I’d say, L1, L2 are perfect iambic pentameter. So are the lines beginning with ‘as if’, ‘in undulating’ and ‘The paddle’. The other lines have various substitutions (a trochee instead of an iamb here, an extra unstressed syllable there) which are never irksome, are always easy enough to read over, or through.

Surely the final, perfect line would not be quite as beautiful and affecting without all this rigour?
Stephen Payne, Finding Jeffrey Harrison: a reading of ‘The One That Got Away’

how fragile is the house of now
a time of endings
our finals farewell

the walls will hold our sound
the floor our footfalls
the air our breath

we will never end
though all come to stillness
energy translates
Paul Tobin, WITH LOOKING GLASS STEPS

I don’t really know what translation is. It carries one thing to another place that is perhaps the same place after all. Reminds you of it. Or it carries it across a river from one bank to the other; sister places, brothers beside the river. Translation is a tricky mirror. Someone’s tongue in another’s mouth.

Here are two texts about translation. The second presents E. Pauline Johnson’s The Bird’s Lullaby and my “translation” of it. It’s a translation by reordering the words, keeping the sound, the tonality, the elements of its world. A kind of antiship of Theseus. The universe is made of the infinite juggling of finite atoms.

The first is about translation within English. What is it that the world is possibly or impossibly Englishable?
Gary Barwin, Translations as the Anti-ship of Theseus

I always find listening to someone who is both an expert and enthusiast captivating and today was no exception. Simply enjoying poems for their own sake is easy to forget – especially in this social media age when everything is comment fodder.

I feel not “better” but certainly less scattered. I think perhaps the answer to this current state of disquiet is either to get away from writing completely (the garden is whispering a soft song of spring) or perhaps to engage in more focused, tiny writing tasks. The big picture is unwieldy and overwhelming sometimes. Perhaps the next few days need to spent exploring and enjoying form – creating structure despite the sense of internal chaos that I’m feeling. Perhaps for now the sonnet will be the box for my dreams.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, Creative Tuesday

Lately I’ve had evenings with long stretches of alone time as my husband’s season as a track and field official has begun. […] I’ve found that these times have been relaxing and creatively useful in ways I wouldn’t expect. After all, I’m retired from teaching, and I have long stretches of time most days where I can read, write, make art, workout, go for walks. The time itself isn’t anything new. Maybe it’s the darkness outside the windows. Perhaps the strange sense that the person that is usually next to me at this time is not. But free time in the evening hits differently. Whatever the reason, I find myself being more open and able to engage: with writing projects (particularly organizational tasks like researching and sending submissions, completing materials and plans for workshops); with difficult or deep reading material (craft essays, lectures for a class I’m taking online); or simply with entertainment that brings me joy. (Who knew there was a whole series of Pixar shorts centered on Dug the Dog from Up? Now I do, and they are all delightful.)
Donna Vorreyer, Alone Time

We live in a green house fronted
by a pair of Japanese maples, with a bright orange love
seat in a room wall-papered with books and the hearts
of plants spilling generously out of themselves. Laundry
unsorted, coffee and noodles in the pantry, the entry
adorned with favorite coats. We remember the thrift
store find of a coffeetable, what we wore when we
stood on the boardwalk that burnished day. Cake
slicer in the drawer, file folders of the bankrupt years.
Keepsakes we can’t bear to throw away. Everywhere,
evidence of undimmed desire for life in this world.
Luisa A. Igloria, Anniversary

I’m a writer who likes to knock her brain off a pedestal. I don’t want my brain to be so exceptional that it is unlike anyone else’s, just as I don’t wish to believe that my worries are entirely unique, or for that matter, that my accomplishments are singular and isolated examples of greatness. I signed up for a human life, and that means a life in community.

I say that in case you’re wondering why a newsletter called Poetry Today focuses so much on the brain. The poet’s mind is in a relationship with this—and every other—precious organ. Each of us is a constellation, a finely tuned feedback system between the different layers of our human experience. I’m drawn to books that offer a narrative approach to the brain, telling the story of its idiosyncratic functions and revealing how we might better acquaint ourselves with its programming to live more consciously.
Maya C. Popa, The 1% Rule: A Poet’s Take on Atomic Habits

in the warmth of the sun i offer the sun my warmth
Grant Hackett [no title]

Yes, Valentine’s Day is nearly a week past, but I’m just tomorrow sending cards and greetings to friends near and far, mostly to put a dent in the Love postage stamps recently purchased through USPS. All those kitten and puppies and doves accessoried with tiny hearts and red accents need to fly, even if late in their arrival. I’m a sucker for such seasonal postage, even if my efforts are less than timely.

I’m happy this morning to come across the recent publication of The Wild Word’s issue, Love. Their fine editors have included three of my poems in this issue and I’m over the moon at this odd little gathering of three: poetry as a lover, the wonder of scallops, and a hodge podge of Valentine ephemera haiku. The issue promises of all kinds of good reading. The editors are good humans to work with in this world of words and publishing.
Kersten Christianson, The Wild Word: Love

I had no recollection of ordering George David Clark’s Newly Not Eternal, published this year by Louisiana State University Press, though obviously I must have done since it arrived here in Paris last week. Whatever late-night whim prompted me to put in the order and then immediately forget it, it was a good one. This is a very good book of poems: I was moved and amused as well as admiring — these are satisfying poems to read or to say, in which form, theme and rhetoric truly come together.
I suppose most of my readers already read quite a bit of poetry in English, but even if you don’t — if you’re here more for the Latin, or thoughts on translation, or because you’re my mother (hello!) — I’d recommend this collection. It’s accessible I think in the best way, and actually perhaps more accessible to people who don’t think of themselves as big readers of contemporary poetry than those who do. If you read the piece about verse for children a fortnight ago and thought, to be honest, Julia Donaldson and Peepo are about my level, much past that I don’t quite get it: well, for a start, you have a good ear since Donaldson, as was much discussed in the comments, is a fine poet, and secondly, George David Clark is just the sort of “adult” poet you might want to try. I mean that, like Donaldson, he is putting his very considerable set of technical skills and expertise at your service as a reader: though many of these poems deal with the most difficult of themes, there is nothing at all difficult about the verse itself. Several of the best pieces here, a little like some of the best of Wendy Cope, distract you with the nursery-rhyme pleasures of the form so much that the wit and wisdom of the ending lands like a blow.
Victoria Moul, Letter from America

Gould’s prose is much more limpid than his often quite Baroque poetry, and he relates his adventures and failures with a convincing honesty. This is reinforced by his repeated admissions of memory failure, of not knowing how or when certain events took place. This has the effect of calling into question the very genre he’s working in; how does a memoir work when most of us have only hazy recollections of our own pasts? Regardless of the story Gould has to tell, it’s this awareness of his limitations that makes the book so interesting.

In New York, Gould sees a newspaper article on Mick Taylor’s leaving The Rolling Stones and decides that here, at last, his destiny can be achieved, so off he sets to London on a wing and a prayer, so to speak. Here he falls on his feet, finding off-the-books work with some very well connected people. He actually meets Mick Taylor, then Keith Richards and finally cuts Cat Stevens’ grass. But I suppose I’m not giving anything away if I tell you he doesn’t get the gig and the world is spared from his musical vision. In the end, he’s back in Providence and back in time to tell us the story of how he ended up in hospital in the first place.
Billy Mills, Poets in Prose: A Review of Holy Fool by Henry Gould and The Making of a Pure Poet by Augustus Young

Once we become aware of something, we start to see it everywhere. The long-ignored thing, which existed but meant little to us, asserts itself with a vengeance, a passion of the slighted and overlooked.

Thus my relationship with chapbooks, small book-objects, often handmade, that slide in your pocket, call to you whimsically because they’re cheap and they can.

A panel at AWP literary conference sparked my appetite, reminding me of my days when I preferred indie records to corporate labels.  Last week when I uttered the words aloud – “How can I get into this world?” – it seems the chapbooks heard me and said, let’s give the chick a ride.  I sparkled to wonderful names such as Carrion Bloom, Eulalia, Small Orange, Sibling Rivalry, Ethelzine and my favorite name, Rinky Dinky.
Jill Pearlman, Passion of the Slighted Chapbook

Yesterday, I was doing the things that you do when you’ve been gone from your home – cleaning, laundry, getting ready to start the garden seeds. In between, I was reading the latest issue of Poets & Writers, looking at social media, sorting my books, reading poetry.

To be honest, I’d also been doing some work for Storyknife and for the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. Suddenly I was struck with a certain amount of anxiety that the joke that I’ve been making in the past couple of years, I’ve been an emerging poet so long that I’m now submerging, isn’t funny anymore.

I won’t be going on any residencies or trips or guest teaching at colleges this upcoming year. Instead, I’ll be providing those experiences for other people. Gladly. I love this life I’ve crafted for myself. I love being able to make manifest those gifts for others. But the gnawing desire to do these things myself is still there.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, The Thread

On Tuesday, I attended ‘Making A.I. work for writers’, part of a series of workshops organised by ARU’s A.I. working group, in collaboration with my own Cambridge Writing Centre. The emphasis here was on Lynda Clark’s concept of A.I. as ‘creative amplification’; that is, as a tool to use in conjunction with one’s own writing practices to produce new and surprising effects.

For the second half of the workshop, we wrestled with Max Woolf’s GPT2-Simple, a Colaboratory Notebook for training your own pet text-generating A.I. Think of it this way: freely and commercially available language-modelling software like Google Gemini and ChatGPT 3.0 is trained over months, using vast swathes of harvested data so that it can produce statements and respond to prompts in human-like fashion. We trained ours over the span of 20 minutes, using about 50,000 words (or, in my case, almost everything I’ve written in the past decade), so that each one could produce random assemblages of text which crudely resemble the work fed into it.
Jon Stone, ‘Creative Amplification’ and A.I. poetry

Yesterday’s mail brought the proof for granata, which meant spending today, free of other writing projects, marking it up and fixing any margin issues inside Any pesky remaining typos or off punctuation. This one was a little less tricky with lineated lines instead of prose blocks, but the lines do run a bit longer than I usually go, which meant some additional adjustments. There was also some small movement of images that were a little too far over, and some final typography touches that were simply cosmetic. It’s always a joy to feel the final project come together and bound so neatly, especially this one, that started as an indeterminate shorter series of poems in summer of 2022 and eventually grew into a considerably longer project that incorporated over 20 pieces of visual art as well. Amazingly the cover was absolutely perfect this time (I have a hard time centering text when you can’t readily see the trim lines in action.) It’s even more beautiful on the back cover where you see more of the images. […]

As I was working on them that summer, I kept calling them the “smutty Persephone poems” even though I already had the working title in place. Reading them now, they feel very lush and sensuous, more so than a lot of what I’ve written in the intervening year and a half. It’s of course, not just Persephone’s story, but also that of the Sirens, who were punished or gifted with their transformation depending on who you ask. I begin with a quote from Ovid, who frames it as a gift. But then Ovid may have been wrong.
Kristy Bowen, doomish and beautiful: writing about myth

My first full length book entitled A Godless Ascends published by Lithic Press is now available for pre-order. Tremendous thanks to editors Danny Rosen and Kyle Harvey for the impeccable design and quality printing. The book is divided into four sections with beautiful artwork by Nancy Smith, including the cover art. A Godless Ascends will be officially released to celebrate the vernal equinox, March 19, 2024.

You can pre-order from the Lithic Press website or if you’d like a signed copy with a bookmark, contact me here. Those who order signed copies before March 19 will be entered in a drawing to win an 11×14 print of one of the paintings used as artwork in the book.
Trish Hopkinson, My new book “A Godless Ascends” released for pre-order!

Now that the news has officially been announced, I can tell you: my next collection of poetry, Her Dark Everything, will be published April 2025 with Riot in Your Throat. Her Dark Everything grapples with the loss of a friend to suicide and the continued survival of my best friend, despite her battles with major depression. It’s about hope and joy and sorrow and loss and survival. The Riot in Your Throat 2024-2025 lineup is fantastic, every single one of these books is amazing and I promise, you’re going to want to read them!

In other news, I survived AWP and showed some real restraint by only bringing home ten books. Seriously, this is impressive since I essentially have an unlimited budget for books — life is too short to not buy poetry!!
Courtney LeBlanc, Exciting News

Although I missed AWP this year, I did try to make up for missing the bookfair by picking up a few books at our Seattle all-poetry bookstore, Open Books, today, during a windstorm. (A tree fell in a car in our neighborhood while we were away, the 520 was closed for construction, and I was nearly blown over walking down the street. Still, we would not be stopped!)
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Early Cherry and Camellia Blossoms, New Poetry Books and a Rattle Podcast Where We Talk about Poetry Submitting

It can be dispiriting when you see a writer post that they had a book rejected because the publisher “didn’t feel their social platform was big enough”. However, that might not have been the actual reason for rejection or the writer might be better served viewing it as a dodged bullet: a mismatch between writer and publisher. A publisher should be a partnership otherwise you might as well employ a printer and do all the marketing and promotion yourself. Yes, it’s a good idea to be on social media, but not to the extent you’re doing so much promotion there’s no second book.

So how can writers achieve that miraculous balance between writing, promoting on social media and other commitments which may include caring and/or a day job without burning out?
Emma Lee, Writers and Social Media Platforms

Sometimes I struggle to find a connection to the world, to people, to whatever it is I read or watch, either in real life or on television. And writing reflects that. Each line, each thought seems isolated, struggles to connect to the next.

Now it’s no great revelation to say that these days I live apart from the general run of things. This does happen to some of us from time to time as we get older – reference points become increasingly obscure. Just now I feel about as relevant as a Tommy James And The Shondells tribute band who have forgotten the tune and words for Mony, Mony.

And on the plus side disconnected thoughts, lines, images are sometimes the key to finding something unexpected, as with this small piece. It’s short because it connected to nothing else but maybe that’s its strength.

FOUR LINE POEM ABOUT EARS IN A TIME OF WAR

It was the night my ears, with a twist and click, unclipped themselves from my head.

They enjoyed how light they were when freed of the weight of my head, my body.

They floated on the breeze, up above houses, above trees. My ears rose above clouds.

I don’t know where they ended up. They just never came back. I miss them.

Exclusion and disconnection, then, can be a positive state, but it’s still disorientating to feel the world is travelling along on a parallel line, always just out of reach with rules that might be understandable but which still seem unreal, the work of mad folk.
Bob Mee, WHEN NOTHING CONNECTS…

not one word wasted
daffodils in the sunshine
in a blue pot

after the rain had gone
after i had had coffee
Jim Young [no title]

I am in a warm house on a quiet day aware of the suffering in Yemen, Syria, Darfur, the Congo, and what clutches me most of late, Gaza. How is it possible the children I adore are safe when children just as beautiful and just as precious are exiled, starved, shot, bombed, buried under rubble? Many survivors are left with the world’s newest horrific acronym WCNSF: wounded child no surviving family. I know a moment’s trauma can take a lifetime to heal. I cannot imagine the relentless ongoing trauma for people in Gaza.

I am fortunate to host family Sundays here. Each week I plan out the day’s breakfast and lunch, making as many dishes as possible in advance so I can play with children and follow conversations on the day itself. This week I’m using beans I canned in September and the remaining potatoes harvested in October. I’m using pear sugar I made last summer and hot sauce I made last fall. I use eggs from our chickens, jam from our elderberries, tomatoes canned from our garden. There’s deep satisfaction in nourishing others with the food we’ve grown. Food, in nearly every spiritual tradition, is sacred and meant to be shared. Yet legacy olive groves are relentlessly bulldozed in Gaza. (Since 1967, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinian olive trees have been illegally uprooted by Israeli authorities and settlers.) Gaza’s orchards, greenhouses, crops, and fishing fleets are intentionally destroyed. And the nourishment lost, too, when libraries, universities, and museums are bombed into dust.

One child suffering is too much. The news that over 12,660 Palestinian children have been killed and more than one million displaced from their homes is impossible to imagine. The suffering too, of the 36 Israeli children killed by Hamas and the child hostages Hamas still imprisons. Each number represents a whole person, as unique and amazing as a child you love, as the child you yourself once were.
Laura Grace Weldon, Warm House On A Quiet Day, Disquieted

What is the colour of your poem? What
is the colour of too much loss? What is
the colour of a rain that cannot fall? All our
hands together, every single one, pushing a
skewed world back where it belongs – what
would be the colour of immeasurable love?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, What if you looked through another’s eyes?

Tamsyn Farr read a fabulous poem of her creation in the lovely community space of the library.

Behind, you can see the gift bags of cookies I made up, some gluten free, some gluten-rich each with a poem from Adding Up to This attached. I made 60 or cookies (gingerbread, freezer cookies and thumbprint cookies), some of which made it so far as the event. 30 bags and I took no pictures.

Some book sales were made and donations, which is sweet and encouraging.

I test read a couple poems from a new manuscript which went over well. And one of Gertrude Stein because never pass up on a Stein.
Pearl Pirie, Love was the theme at Poetea

Ah, the manuscript process! It interests me even when I’m not in the midst of putting a collection together, because it seems there is no consistently efficient way to go about it–no matter what people claim. It’s fascinating to read, in interviews, articles, and blogs, how poets decide on the poems to gather into a book; I have put together three full-length collections, and yet I can’t say that I have developed a method I can rely on. Each volume seems to have had different inceptions and different means of getting to an end.

My first approach is to choose several dozen poems, about a third of which have been published in literary journals. After that, no system: I ponder possibilities. My last two books had titles early on, which helped a little, and my chapbooks have had themes that guided me about what to include or exclude. Not so this time. The process this time reminds me of how I put together Water-Rites, which evolved from my MFA thesis in 2003. In other words, I don’t really know what I’m doing! Which feels edgy and uncomfortable, and is probably therefore a good thing. I don’t want to get too confident or at ease with writing. Creativity sometimes thrives on obstacles, or on the prompting to do more, to try new things, to solve problems.
Ann E. Michael, Process: shosin

Today’s post is a destined to be an old timey ramble, where I share just a bunch of stuff I have been inspired by or enjoyed of late. Enjoy what you enjoy, is a line from Woolf, that I endorse. Take your inspiration where you are able!

The first thing that I’ve found to be inspiring is the following quotation.

Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
— Doris Lessing

Perhaps it was this quotation by Lessing, and the persistence of Rilke’s line throughout my adult life “you must change your life,” and the following by Enrique Martinez Celaya that finally spurred me to change my work circumstances last week:

“Launch yourself recklessly towards your dreams. Wake up and be desperate. Desperation demands action. As an artist you must always be desperate. Try anything. Be careful with your calculations. Calculations become a habit. A calculated life is seldom radiant.”

I’ve left my position for something more precarious and lower paying, but for something that allows me to be more reckless and desperate perhaps. Different calculations. Impossible ones. But memento mori and all that. Time to get radiant.
Shawna Lemay, Whatever You’re Meant To Do

i watch my neighbor fill
the little free library with bibles.
he pulls each previous book resident
from its shelter. puts them
into a coffin he is carrying on his back.
in a country of squirrels
i do not mean to be a prophet. i always
seem to witness these fissure moments.
i think about what it would look like
to stop him. the box
a little word stomach.
Robin Gow, little free library

As I read, I kept writing out passages in my notebook. “My revision process is, overall, one of inquiry,” Rose McLarney writes in “Identifying Gems” (p. 57). In “Finding the Language, Finding Story” (a gorgeous essay that is also about raising a child), Joe Wilkins shares a strategy I honestly had never thought of: “I usually write in couplets (you can’t hide anything in couplets, all that white space forces you to interrogate every word)” (p. 18).

In “Emptying the Zendo,” Shin Yu Pai admits that she doesn’t revise very much, then elaborates:

Revision, for me, is like polishing a gem to bring out its beauty. However, this working and reworking of the stone also changes its rawest qualities and alters its energy. The place where I decide to put down the pen and stop fussing with the poem is not the place another poet, teacher, or scholar might choose to end. Ultimately, we find our own relationship to our voice and our objects through reading, practice, and deep listening. In this way, we are our own teachers.
—Shin Yu Pai

This might be good advice for life, as well as for writing. We find our own relationship through using our own voice, but also reading, practice, and deep listening.
Bethany Reid, THE ART OF REVISING POETRY

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. I am up tending to my old dog who howls from downstairs in the middle of the night when he is feeling anxious and wanting me. I keep a few books on the coffee table and I pick one up, M Train by Patti Smith, and read a few pages. A passage reminds me of the time years ago when my husband and I bought a pot of bamboo.

A sudden gust of wind shakes the branches of trees scattering a swirl of leaves that shimmer eerily in the bright filtered light. Leaves as vowels, whispers of words like a breath of net. Leaves are vowels. I sweep them up hoping to find the combinations I am looking for. The language of the lesser gods.

We once were at a garden show where we became beguiled by an exhibition of bamboo. The grower had pots of all kinds of bamboo but the one that demanded our attention was the Giant Bamboo, the possible eventual size of which we didn’t grasp at the time. This is where my husband’s and my memories divide. He says he knew that fact but I don’t remember it at all. It was so beautiful that we purchased a pot of it on impulse, not considering whether it would fit in our yard or if we had a place for it.
Charlotte Hamrick, The Dog & The Bamboo

winter thaw
a sigh returns
to the pines
Tom Clausen, four views in situ

I started my workshop with the Economics, Leadership & Governance masters class at Universidad de Navarra with a premise: every morning starts as a negotiation between your present self and your future self (the past is just a reference point).

I was in the strange place of walking the line between my poet-self and my professional-self: asked to speak about my experiences that led to the current place in my career as a corporate lawyer specializing in sustainability, I chose to use poetry to frame the discussion.

It was a negotiations class so we negotiated where the discussion would go. It was up to each party to make the most of our time together. I gave them a packet of poems and asked them to prepare one to read. My plan was that the poems would prompt a discussion about my life experiences, taken out of order, but with a thread woven through the stories. We started with a meditative poem, Lost by David Wagoner. I told a story about getting lost on purpose only to find my way back to purpose.
Cathy Wittmeyer, Negotiating What We All Get Out Of This

My first poetry reading was at the main branch of that same Brookline Public Library, a formidable building I have loved forever. In 1994, I was lucky enough to be a featured reader for the poetry and prose series hosted by Edith Pearlman. It was in the fall of 1994 and my father was still alive, but not well enough to come out to his daughter’s first ever event. Instead, an angel appeared in the guise of my friend, Michael Sheridan and he came equipped with tripod, video camera, and lights! This was in the day before smart phones or any common mobile phones. Michael, now a documentary filmmaker, was more a brother than a friend. The video meant that my father would be able to see me read my poems after all, just a day or so later. Not only was this my first reading, but it was being memorialized on tape!

As Pearlman introduces me to the audience she adds to my name, “a prize winning poet,” (reader, I had no prizes, no books to my name). And then she did a remarkable thing, she winked at me. I remember her face so distinctly. White hair, red lipstick, sparking eyes. She must have been in her mid-50’s at the time. I had never seen a more beautiful “older” woman.
Susan Rich, Edith Pearlman

The best thing this week: my poem “Sex Talk” was featured by Poetry Daily. Lots of friends and a few strangers sent or posted lovely notes about it. This poem came not long after my mother’s death, if I’m remembering right, as I worked through the grief and freedom that follow the death of a beloved, suffering, usually kind, sometimes hurtful parent. Even on the day of initial drafting, it felt like a big poem for me, but it was rejected many times before Mark Drew, after some judicious edits, accepted it for what turned out to be the last issue of The Gettysburg Review. Big thanks to him and everybody else who has cheered me on. […]

Meanwhile I’m rereading Jan Beatty’s powerful 2020 collection The Body Wars, and it’s so resonant with my internal struggles. That old battle–to what extent I’ll let work devour my hours–still rages, with health stress increasing the strain. My theory is that my body is working through hurt I cognitively processed long ago. That’s probably good in the long run, but for the moment, it’s not easy. I often feel maxed out the way I did in the pandemic or during episodes of more personal grief: a certain amount of bandwidth is always devoted to background noise so there’s just less energy for, say, writing that midterm exam or teaching another roomful of distractible undergrads.

My understanding is that panic attacks can happen without any immediate cause, but anxiety attacks are clearly connected to real stimuli. If so, I’m experiencing the latter way too often. Recently I attended a university forum on the war in Gaza: good speakers, devastating subject, and an audience full of inconsolably angry people. I could hide my symptoms even from my husband sitting next to me, but I became short of breath, my heart palpitating uncomfortably, and had to do surreptitious breathing exercises to remain in the room.
Lesley Wheeler, Three of swords time

I have just come back from a very enjoyable ‘slow stitching’ workshop locally. Before I went I thought this was simply stitching slowly without pressure, but I have a better understanding now. It’s about stitching as meditation, stitching for well being and relaxation. It’s also a great way to use up small scraps, and odds and sods of thread, ribbon, net, buttons and so on. […]

Apart from the company, it struck me that slow stitching was similar to how I work as a poet. I am constantly trying to tap into my subconscious mind, get away from the world of ‘ideas’ to the world of instinct and going where the mind wants to wander, not worrying over word choices while at the writing stage. Before the writing comes the pondering and mind-freewheeling. Then comes the tentative scribbling down of phrases, half lines, sometimes if one is very lucky, a couple of lines. Those lines might end up anywhere in a poem, or not at all, but they are all gifts from the subconscious brain.
Angela Topping, Slow Stitching

Nobody wants to talk about the breakdown of bodies.
The way finger joints become tulip bulbs beneath frozen ground.

How a thyroid can burn itself out like a star or a spine
can collapse like a sinkhole.

I drink coffee at the kitchen table,
thumb through seed catalogs, pray my winding road

of a back bends to zinnias one more season.
Carey Taylor, Ode to the Cooper’s Hawk

Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 4

Dave Bonta — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 22:38:08 +0000

This edition begins and ends with small trees, and features tongue fire, a dandelion seed, a shirt soaked with life, little pooping monsters, and magic shoes, among other signs and wonders. Enjoy.

One morning out on a run while traveling for a poetry workshop, I stopped mid-stride at the sight of a tiny tree shooting up from the center of a trunk twice as wide as me — a regenerative growth known as coppicing. I must have walked past dozens, hundreds of such stubborn second lives over the years. But for some reason, this one — at that moment in my life, at that moment in the world — became a mirror, a portal, a miniature of a larger truth about what made us and what we have made of ourselves.

By sundown, it had become a poem […]
Maria Popova, How to Make a World: A Poem

every time i cut my tongue off
it just grows right back.
the tail of a lizard. i am talking like scabby tree sap.
i’m talking like a sidewalk lighter.
Robin Gow, tongue fire

Writing is a lonely office. Alone, mucking through the bogs of our own minds and bodies, writers can easily feel isolated, stuck in quicksand, unable to maintain forward momentum. Finding the right group of like-minded others is one of the best ways to combat this. Putting words on a page in an effort to articulate the self, the world, and the space between those two things can feel like bobbing in a tempestuous sea on the flotsam of a wreck. Finding a group of like-minded friends who are trying to do the same is like the Coast Guard showing up with blankets, warm soup, and a reassurance that you will be fine.

I have been lucky to find such rescuers. Some are constants for me, people who will always say yes if I ask them to take a look at something, no matter how busy they are. People who I have known for years, whose voices and advice I trust, people who I can work beside even in silence and feel their support. They know who they are. But the time I get to spend with those special folks is limited. Work and life and distance get in the way.

Recently I have found a new group of people to trust and to hold me accountable for producing new work. I was invited to join a group of REALLY SMART and VERY TALENTED women who meet on Zoom once or twice a week(when available – no pressure) to discuss poems, pull something from those poems to use as a prompt, write for 30 minutes, and come back to share drafts. Some of these women I knew, some I “knew” on social media, and some I had never met before. None of that mattered, though, the first time I joined the group. I immediately felt welcome and as if I was understood. And with the impetus to create something in 30 minutes, I let go of some of the concerns I usually have when drafting and just dove in. I was a little intimidated after hearing what some of these women wrote in only 30 minutes – I mean, seriously good stuff – but the format of receiving only positive feedback on what’s working results in everyone feeling like they produced something of value to return to later. Ideas bounce from writer to writer in appreciation of what the other has done. And celebrations and disappointments are also shared. It’s a network of ideas and emotions that I didn’t know I was missing until I became a part of it. And it has pushed me beyond those meetings to keep creating, drafting new work more regularly.
Donna Vorreyer, On Camaraderie and Commiseration

I was in Wolverhampton last weekend and I visited the Art Gallery. It was excellent. If you get the chance to look at the art you won’t be disappointed. It houses the largest collection of Pop Art outside of London, and the Ed Isaacs exhibition was worth the journey in itself. I had an idea for a poem while I walked about the streets, though I do not know where it came from. An anchoress was a woman who was confined within a cell in a church in medieval times. Once consecrated they remained in their cell until death. it was not unusual for them to dig their own grave and be interned within the church.

the anchoress dreams
sap green spring leaf
here time again would be
like a dandelion seed
Paul Tobin, LIKE A DANDELION SEED

Joy is not necessarily the opposite of sorrow. To begin with, sorrow is a natural response to a loss, real or imagined. Joy may also be a natural response — one may be “surprised by joy,” as C.S. Lewis put it — but joy may also be a choice. One may seek joy. One may seek the rainbows even while one is wandering in the darkness.

I don’t think this type of joy would turn to tears. If I can train myself to seek joy as an on-going discipline, I would find delight. “Some are born to sweet delight,” Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence, “Some are born to endless night.” But what if those born to endless night — and I’m not saying I’m one of those — what if they could seek joy?

Excess of joy may weep when you think you’ve exhausted all sources of joy. You think you’ve exhausted the well of joy. It’s been said, “Only the dreamer can change the dream,” (John Logan); likewise, only you know your capacity for joy. If you limit yourself, you begin to build your own prison, with bricks of self doubt.

”If the Sun and Moon should doubt, they’d immediately go out.” Blake wrote elsewhere. Likewise, your bricks of self-limitation block beams of joy. Your excess has bred tears.
James Collins, Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps.

world gone wrong
i take a look
close up
Tom Clausen, mini

On average (and average is doing quite a lot of heavy lifting here) the human body has replaced all its cells within a seven year cycle. I like this idea of rejuvenation and release from the seven years previous, I like the idea of an entirely new body being gifted to you repeatedly until you die. Lately I’ve felt stuck. For all my moves towards a different type of writer life, a more authentic writer life, a slower life, I have not quite had the courage to throw over some of the parts of my previous life, a previous way of being that was about should and must and not really what I wanted. I hand in my tax return this week and had had my lowest income year in a good long while. Partly this was choice – I chose to take the book contract and prioritise writing the book, the advance for which, though very welcome indeed, did not cover the time spent writing it, hence the drop in wages. But also, I am still being drawn in to doing free and low paid work out of a sense of duty. This is the third year in a row where I have vowed to do less. I think I need permission to have a fresh start, not a new year resolution fresh start, but the gift of a new me who will perhaps be a little braver than me. I am going to embrace my seven year skin shedding like a snake.

What was I doing seven years ago? When I scroll through my iPhone photos a version of myself appears, a thinner version, a version of me that was not long left my job as a microbiologist. In these photos I am moving forward with my life, shedding a life that I couldn’t return to. I look confident, but I know me and I know that slight hesitance, I can almost see the ticker tape of not good enough not good enough who do you think you are not good enough rippling past her eyes. Here I am delivering leaflets for my small animal care business in the rain and my hat is soaked through and my glasses steamed up and I’m laughing to see myself like this, but also a man just shouted at me for putting a leaflet through his door and I’m really feeling like I might be doing the wrong thing, though you wouldn’t know it to look at me. Here I am walking dogs for a living, and visiting cats, and here I am on a train to Hull to have a Creative Writing PhD meeting and here is my husband and I on our last visit to the IVF clinic where we will be told our options have run out and we must consider double donations or adoption, or life without children. You cannot see this decision in the photograph, just two tired individuals smiling for the traditional pre IVF clinic selfie. Here I am in my houndstooth coat and little red hat looking at a mermaid in a box at Hull Maritime Museum and feeling a connection to it, feeling so badly put together with wire and string.
Wendy Pratt, The Seven Year Replacement Cycle

What does it mean, anyway, for a writer to “get back to normal?” Well, I’ve been writing new work, editing my next book, submitting, and finally getting to my vision board for 2024 (clearly, I’m winning no awards for my collage making, but hey, I was sick!) The headlines for 2024 haven’t exactly been the stuff of cheer and light—this year of the dragon has already been called, for instance, the fourth year of the pandemic, the year of the solar eclipse (again, which makes me book cover super relevant lol), the year of the cicada (two different swarms coming out at the same time for the first time in 200 years!) or, of course, the election year, which brings up different emotions for me that run from anxiety to disappointment…and two wars.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Celebrating with Writers, New Hair, Vision Boards and Book Promotion, and Getting Back to “Normal” (?)

full of the wars
i am wearing
a shirt soaked with life
Grant Hackett [no title]

“White” dates back to 2003 and 2004, right after I received my MFA, though it didn’t appear in book form until 2015. It was inspired by two things: my insomnia (still an issue all these years later) and the bleakness of an Ohio winter, which comes on suddenly and lasts several months. Neither is good for one’s mental health, that’s for sure. An Ohio winter tends to be cold, gray, and very overcast; often the ground and the sky are the same washed-out white. It’s everywhere.

I stand by the choice of tercets in the poem because of what happens in the last line. If the song is a round repeating, with a repetition in three (“white, white, white”), then three-line stanzas enact that round. […]

Sound is particularly important in this poem, with the M consonance in gleam/time (also internal slant rhyme) and in hum/company (partial rhyme with the short U and M in hum/com here) enact the vibration of a hum. And as you can see in the annotation, I scanned a couple of lines where the rhythm stood out to me, including what I hear as two anapests (unstressed unstressed STRESSED) back to back, across lines two and three: to the ROOTS/ of our HAIR.
Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: Two Related Poems

This blog post is written in response to the poem [] noise by Victoria Adukwei Bulley. You can read the poem online at bath magg.

When I first read this poem, I was on a train on the way back from work. I remember reaching the end, looking up from the page, and being suddenly so conscious of the noise around me – the train on the tracks, the hushed conversation of its passengers. Even more though, I was conscious of the noise inside me; the echoes of a busy day of listening all clamouring for attention.

As I read the poem again now, I’m propelled again through that one, long sentence, its urgent rhythm. For me, it has this incredible shapeshifting quality to it; one moment litany, the next checklist, almost business-like. At times, the discrete noises start to blur, like notes in a symphony. It takes focused attention to avoid slipping into quick-scan mode, to slow down and listen.
Jonathan Totman, White Noise

I’m using this poem in an MA class this week – offering it, perhaps unfairly, as the archetypal literary sequence in miniature. I don’t think that’s what it set out to be; the title is punning on ‘quince’ and the whole thing is obviously an extension of that joke (15 lines in total; ‘quince’ is Spanish for 15). But it does serve my purpose. Despite it being made up of individual, haiku-esque tercets, there are strong indications of time passing between each stanza: fruiting follows flowering, ‘Exile’ begins “By now”, and reference is made to ‘transience’. I’m not sure what to make of the weird chronological inversion whereby oil paints turn up long after an iPhone, or the sudden appearance of Shakespearean English – perhaps, in keeping with the theme of renewal, the history of the world is cycling round and round.

The word ‘quince’ repeats throughout like a series of haphazard stitches, and softer echoes of that word are frequent: ‘one’, ‘borne’, ‘whence’, ‘wind’, ‘since’, ‘white’, ‘sweeten’. Hence we have the essence of the sequence, how it differs from a narrative: something is being held in place, squirmingly, even as everything around it changes.
Jon Stone, ‘Sequence’ by Jamie McKendrick

This is no nambypamby lovingkindness. This is a walking alongside, slowly, a letting Judy be Judy, a letting be. It’s not that I identify with Judy, a character of singular nature, nor even with the speaker, walking so close by. But I love the love. I love the effort of (or, maybe, toward, as it seems possible that Judy can be a handful) empathy, “in-feeling.” It’s this radical empathy I admire in this poem.

Empathy is that ability to go right up to the line between Self and Other. We can’t ever BE someone else, but we can make an effort to try to be WITH them. Even the planet and all its denizens can be empathized with. If human beings have a superpower, it’s our imagination. And what is empathy if not a use of that imagination to bridge that Self/Other gap?

Empathy seems in such short supply in our world. I feel that all around me. I struggle myself to maintain empathy, often. But it seems to me it is what will save us, what will save all our human initiatives. Empathy is what can serve to drive our imagination, our innovation, our quotidian interactions with Self and Other, Self and World, such that maybe we can stop this endless destruction. Can we? Can’t we?

Listen, I fail daily. We’ve got a steady stream of mice coming into our house, and I want to throttle those little pooping monsters with my bare hands. No, actually, I couldn’t do that. But geesh, can’t they just make their own home someplace else? These Others in my house? Anyway… I struggle toward some peace with it all.
Marilyn McCabe, Flimsy Prayer

Reading Frans de Waal’s books always gets me thinking about the use of anthropomorphism/personification in poems. When I was studying and first learning about poems, the general thinking from critics seemed to be to treat anthropomorphism, and even personification, as a “no-no” in contemporary poetry. We were not to make trees or grasses or wolves “humanized”–which does make a kind of sense; instead, we were told to observe and describe what we saw with less of a reflection on whether the non-human thing bore resemblance to human things.

For example, the bee was not to love the flower or the hive, nor the ostrich to love a fellow ostrich. A willow shouldn’t sway like a dancer. It should sway like a willow in the wind. There was science behind all this, maybe Skinner’s science but still; and there is Nagel’s bat: how can a person imagine being a bat the way a bat experiences being a bat? I’m not going into reductive materialism here, don’t worry. Just trying to provide some context outside of poetry to suggest there may be forces behind the trend away from anthropomorphism, some of which are valid.

I have always been tempted to title a book The Personification of Everything.

Now science is fairly certain that emotions preceded “rational intelligence” as life evolved and that animals possess traits and behaviors that aren’t so fundamentally different from ours; we are hominid animals. I would add that, as reflective hominids who employ language for reasons beyond basic information, human beings make connections (metaphor, simile, parallelism…) and can observe the “others” in our environs as not always so unlike ourselves. Or dream of inhabiting the lives of those others, or imagine telling stories from those vastly strange (to us) points of view.
Ann E. Michael, Hominid animals

Sometimes the camera will unveil
Sometimes the surface is scrambled
That hidden message in the “White Album”
“Paul is dead” when dragged concentrically

Backward.  Remember the walrus.
Turn me on, dead man.  Kruger on
The collision of looking & being:
The eye is the major player.  A threat
to that eye is a threat to what it means
to live another day.
Jill Pearlman, The Secret Face

I lost a friend.

She chose “intelligent euthanasia” in Switzerland because she wanted to live her life on her terms, right down to the terminology of her final choice.

She was the kind of playful person who’s hard to forget, her bright colored clothing, iridescent hair strands, amazing art in the most incredible neon colors. She was also a private person, holding her past and her private life and her spirituality quietly. […]

I have to admire a person
who lives on their own terms. Who loves
themselves and their way in the world
more than they want others to love them.
That pink sky is a kind of love I understand.
The hare understands it as she searches
for breakfast beneath the snow made blue by
morning. I can just about hear that party.
It sounds like the creek laughing under ice.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Keep loving

Why, when I kept a private diary from middle school into my early twenties, did I stop? I was twenty-nine when my daughter was born and my husband and I started keeping a joint “baby log”; maybe there was too little time. Also, as I began to publish more, I think I lost the drive to write anything I didn’t intend to find an audience for. Of course, many people journal then use that material for future poems and essays. I do keep a small notebook for ideas, lecture notes, etc., sort of a commonplace book. But, weirdly, journaling makes me more self-conscious than blogging does, or drafting a poem or story that I know may never see the light of day. Surely diary-writing shouldn’t seem more pointless or affected than poetry! […]

This blog constitutes a partial record of what I’m doing, thinking, and feeling, like a journal. It’s definitely been a resource for later writing. I launch trial balloons here for what later, occasionally, become full essays. It’s maybe halfway between a diary, though, and a long correspondence with multiple and shifting addressees. I really like the form: intimate and public, shaped by associative logic, like poetry. I do revise before hitting “publish,” but lightly. These are snapshots, imperfect.

Blogging is Not In My Job Description. I feel guilty for spending time here, sometimes, not because I’m neglecting my students or committees–they get PLENTY of attention–but because I fear I blog in avoidance of other, harder projects. There’s writing I want to finish and one day place in curated spaces (journals, presses). During the teaching year, it’s difficult to find time for them, but I do get a blog post written every couple of weeks, maybe because I feel no stress about writing them. I guess defining it as Not Work has advantages.
Lesley Wheeler, Forbidden blog

I am about ready to finalize the publication file of GRANATA in the coming week (hopefully) and if so, will be on schedule still for a late February release. There are images involved, so it will no doubt be a little more complicated than previous book projects. On Instagram, I’ve been mostly sharing some older work from my early collage days, many of which I only have digital files of, having sold most of the collages in the early Etsy days. There are regular paper collages, assemblages, an artist book, and some installation projects. All created when visual exploits were very new for me, so they are a little rougher than work done later.

I am floating in between written projects currently, having finished up the very last of the witch poems I started in the fall and have been sharing regularly over on Instagram as well. I am still uncertain where these poems belong..there are a couple longer manuscripts crudely constructed, but this may not fit in either, but I don’t know until the second one tales shape more fully. RUINPORN, the one that is mostly done, still needs a lot of work and help later this year. The second I’ve been turning a title for over in my head, is maybe two series so far, the villain poems and the urban crypto series. The witches and the governess poems may be a third, or may just as likely not be.

I’ve been thinking about the concepts of wintering and hibernation but also noticing that at 5pm, there is now a bit more light still left in the sky when a few weeks ago, there was none. Winter may not have its hooks out of us yet, but its time is more limited. I did (finally) put my tiny tree and wreaths and garlands away (the tree had burned out shortly after the new year and I was loving the lights on the garland near the tv too much to remove them.) But as usual, after the holiday stuff comes down, the living room feels bare and darker than usual, much like the landscape outside. I’ve been fending off most of the winter blues with tea and fancy meatloaf cooked by J and more Game of Thrones carefully tucked under the more serious winter comforter in the bedroom.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things / 1/26/2024

Since opening our doors, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to take the current temperature of the publishing industry and to feel the pulse of authors who approached Heresy Press as their last refuge. Interestingly, the left-progressive specter of “soft censorship” is perceived as much more serious threat in its effect on creativity than the coarse book-banning monster on the right. Among the countless expressions of disgust over the current situation in publishing that I’ve received from writers since opening for business, 99% were directed against the threats to creative freedom issuing from the enforcers of rigid appropriation-and-sensitivity standards.

This makes sense. Book banning takes effect once books have already made it past the editorial offices and through the printing press, venturing out to libraries, bookstores, and the public square; if anything, book banning may directly boost the sales of a title, lending them the cachet of forbidden fruit. By comparison, the Damocles sword of cultural appropriation and sensitivity exerts a more insidious and subtle influence, prompting writers to veer on the side of safety, to self-censor, and to regress to the mean. As one National Book Award winner put it in an email to me: “I wonder if I’m being too safe in my current work—if I’ve subconsciously assimilated safety into my work.”
Bernard Schweizer, Why Heresy Press? Why Now?

In the seven years I have been a member of the Open University Poetry Society, I have met some outstanding poets, several of whose collections I have reviewed on this site: Ross McGivern, Barbara Cumbers, Julie Anne Gilligan, Kate Young, Brian McManus, Patricia Osborne and Susan J Bryant. Today I have the pleasure of reviewing the latest collection, New Blues and Other Poems (Littoral Press, 2023),from another highly accomplished member, Adrian Green. The Society publishes five workshop magazines a year, and I must confess that Green’s poems are some of the first I turn to when the magazine drops through the letter box. Having the opportunity to read and reflect upon a body of his work has, therefore, been a particular treat, and I can think of no better way to begin 2024 than to share that pleasure with you.

New Blues and Other Poems, as the title suggests, is split into two parts. The first part consists of poems inspired by his passion for jazz. Though Green’s poems we share particular performances (Wilko at the Railway – Roxetta), experience the atmosphere of jazz clubs of the past and present (Jazz at the Royal – Now and Then) and reflect on the lives of the jazz performers such as the drummer, the cruise pianist and the jazz busker (Time Lord, In the Cruise Piano Bar, Busking After Hours). Now, although I have an eclectic taste in music and will listen to jazz, I have little knowledge of the subject. That doesn’t matter when reading Green’s poetry. His enthusiasm is infectious, and he has that rare ability to make another art form live through words in his authentic poems.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘New Blues and Other Poems’ by Adrian Green

I’d like to start by quoting the fine short poem ‘Names’ from [Sean] O’Brien’s new book It Says Here. If just saying it aloud enchants you as much as it does me then this is a book you should buy:

Ravenspur, Ravensrodd, Ravenser Odd,
Salt-heavy bells heard only by God.

Drink to the lost and the longshore drift:
When there is nothing the names will be left.

It’s reminiscent of Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Merlin’ in its particular elegiac feeling and tune, but the names it refers to aren’t literary in the way those in Hill’s poem are (‘Arthur, Elaine, Mordred, they are all gone’). All three are different names for a port city on the Humber that was significant in the Middle Ages but has been completely lost to the sea. It’s a wonderful little poem that instantly communicates a powerful emotion or complex of emotions while inviting endless meditation and remaining in some ways teasingly enigmatic.
Edmund Prestwich, Sean O’Brien, It Says Here – review

Kay Ryan
is a lion-
ess
of wiliness

These notes were written for the book club, Finding Poetry, which I run with Griffin Books, Penarth. The second book I recommended was ‘Odd Blocks’ by Kay Ryan. This is a Selected published by Carcanet. I enjoy Ryan so much that I have all her USA- published collections. ‘Dew’ comes from the collection ‘Elephant Rocks’, and can be read on the (excellent) Writers Alamnac website, here:

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2005%252F09%252F27.html

‘As neatly as peas in their green canoe, as discretely as beads strung in a row, sit drops of dew along a blade of grass.’

This is the first of three sentences in the poem. Noting its properties, we learn quite a bit about Ryan’s characteristic techniques and attitudes.
Stephen Payne, Finding Kay Ryan: a reading of ‘Dew’

There is something fascinating about the shift in Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s lyric across her sleek new collection, extraordinary tides (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2023), a book that follows on the heels of her six prior full-length collections, all of which appeared with Berkeley publisher Apogee Press […]. McCarthy has long been engaged with the book as her unit of composition, composing book-length lyric suites as thematic and structural examinations around language, history, gender, time and lost threads of the histories of women (much of which focused on Medieval women), but there is something quieter and more immediate about this particular poem, something akin to a moment of calm—almost a palate cleanser—as she stands on the shoreline, listens to the water and considers the horizon. “the sky keeps bright / eyes on us – we // look up into the cold / the tide makes,” she writes, as part of the second section, “a friction like / a song in glass // that is the tide sings / while it spins in glass // so deep midwinter the light turns iron / there is no end to your tongue [.]”

Set as a quartet of extended lyrics—“neap tide – autumn,” “[untitled yule tide],” “lent – in extraordinary tide” and “neap tide – spring”—McCarthy’s lines hold a deep meditation across the opening and closing of the winter months, researched and responsive, as is her way, but held across a sequence of moments, from tides through the difference of seasons. “the sky spangled with crows,” the second section offers, “a night body of water // serrated wrack saw wrack toothed wrack / dulse spiraled tidy into // a whole universe [.]”

The space between her words, her lines, through this book-length suite are enormous, and allow for leaps and silence as connective tissue, providing the reader enough space and time to not merely fill in the blanks, but to employ and occupy those silences that are as important as the words themselves.
rob mclennan, Pattie McCarthy, extraordinary tides

One of my older daughters (the quietest one)
once confessed that every now and then, driving
alone on the highway, she’ll scream within
the enclosure that’s her car for no reason
other than that she can. Call it what you will—
catharsis, relief from the ordinary crush of days,
our lumbering through foibles as well as more pressing
problems. The windows are up, and it doesn’t last very long.
Motorists on the road who happen to glance sideways
might think she was simply singing along to the radio.
In this, just as we’ve been taught, we keep our eyes
on the road, our hands on the wheel. But no one ever
said anything about how to handle the bumper-
to-bumper traffic, stalled or coursing through you.
Luisa A. Igloria, Surviving the Commute

There are two worlds, it would seem. There is the bigger world where all the news is bad, on a scale that we struggle to comprehend, let alone know what to do about, except protest. And there is the smaller world which is our individual life and the lives of those closest to us. And we struggle to deal with that too. And poetry takes on those struggles.

The struggles themselves are evoked, but always too, it seems, the clutching at something that could give hope. And those straws that are clutched at seem to be the little things – the touch of a hand, the texture of a rock, the sound of a bell, the smell and taste of food, the colours of a flower… so many possibilities.

But even these are ambivalent – because it can be the last touch of a hand, a rock that cuts, the bell that tolls, the food from a homeland long lost, a flower that is dying…

The daily rituals that provide some comfort can at the same time remind us of someone who is no longer with us to share those rituals. And nature, which everyone seems to turn to (or are, at least, encouraged to turn to), likewise holds sorrow as well as joy – the sea we used to walk to together, the erosion and destruction…

But so rarely does a poem seem to hold no hope. Despite the struggle, the feeling of powerlessness to change things, the losses, the poet seems to need something to hold onto – the moments, the little things that matter.
Sue Ibrahim, Little things that matter

if you put magic shoes
on the feet of a wooden goat
it will fly to the moon
if you put magic shoes
on the feet of an oak
it will sing a lullaby
if you put magic shoes
on the feet of the earth
it will swallow up the sky:

but there:
there under the rubble
are feet and shoes
Rajani Radhakrishnan, If you put magic shoes

I’ve written and posted elsewhere about reading on holiday in Rome. In these photos I’m sitting in Colle Oppio and Terme di Traiano Park or Oppian Hill Park near our apartment which was near the Colosseum. Admittedly, I’m sort of “fake reading” for the photos here, but we actually did quite a lot of reading at the end of our days in that park. We’d stuff a couple of pillows and a blanket into our bag and head out with some books. When we were lucky we’d find a bench in the sun, but the pleasure of reading outside was so delightful in November and early December. I’m remembering those time with such intense fondness.

I recently read an article on The Guardian which got me thinking once again about how I read, the act of reading, and how I’m reading now. In the article, the author, Ella Creamer, quotes a paper about digital reading, remarking that the researchers were not “against digital reading.” However:
“It’s just that, based on what we have found, digital reading habits do not pay off as much as print reading. That is why, when recommending reading activities, schools and school leaders should emphasise print reading more than digital reading, especially for younger readers.”

She also quotes a professor from U of Valencia who says:

“that the “reading mindset” for digital texts also tends to be more shallow than that for printed materials, with scanning being more common. This can mean the reader “doesn’t fully get immersed in the narration, or doesn’t fully capture the complex relations in an informative text”.

Does this track with your experience? It does with mine.
Shawna Lemay, Reading Will Not Go Quietly

We talk a lot about originality when we appraise literature, but of course any literary work has to be vastly more unoriginal than it is original, otherwise it’s not readable at all. A successful poem or story or essay or song has to be in a language its readers understand (or very largely understand), with diction and tone they are familiar with, and a form that is legible to them — that is, they have at least some sense of the generic expectations of what they are reading, and to have learnt how to appreciate its form. Everyone has to learn how to read free verse just as much as they do a sonnet, for instance; and though the gap has noticeably narrowed, I think, just in the last couple of decades, reading contemporary poetry from the US still requires different skills and experience than poetry from the UK. (This is even more true for Anglophone poetry from elsewhere in the world.)

The best way to get a real feel for how narrow the zone of ‘acceptable originality’ really is is to read literature from another time or place. Very quickly indeed, you are completely at sea. Try reading a literal translation of the Rig Veda, for instance, if you have no relevant cultural background or knowledge: it’s hard to make any sense of whatsoever, and most of it won’t seem to be recognisably poetry or liturgy at all. But this can be true much closer to home, as well, especially where a genre or form which was once standard fell at some point completely out of fashion.
Victoria Moul, On new forms

Last weekend, I asked subscribers to share a poem of their own or their favorite poem by another poet. The vast majority of responses—close to 200 of them—were from poets on Substack offering their own poems, which was thrilling to see.

I sifted through the poems with admiration and chose 10 for this week’s round up that speak to each other in surprising ways and showcase the talent of folks on here. I absolutely plan to do this again—it was lovely to see poets reading and responding to each other’s writing on the thread, and very fun for me to curate a selection of Substack poet voices.
Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

When I was a child, praying was a thing that befuddled me. As I understood it, praying wasn’t much different from wishing on blown dandelion seeds or writing a letter to Santa. Doing it felt much like whispering into a void. My inability to feel connection to God or anything else while “praying” was the beginning of the end of my faith.

In my month of using attention as a path to love, though, I absolutely had moments of losing myself in admiration and joy. They came through focusing on and seeing and feeling what was in front of me: the air pockets in a misshapen loaf of bread; the soft give of old, shapeless flannel; the patch of sky caught between bare branches; the ease of unstructured time.

Call it attention, call it love, call it prayer: Aren’t they all the same thing? And does this mean that writing, too, can be a kind of prayer? Or, if not prayer itself, a conduit to it?

The words I shared above about the things I’ve loved this month are not first-draft words. They are the words I came to as I searched for the best ones to create the reality of my experience for others. As I paid more and better attention to my words—which led me to attend closely to the words of others, too—they took me more deeply into seeing and knowing the things I was using them to describe, more deeply into joy and appreciation, more deeply into love. Then they took me here, to this place of considering what prayer is or might be to an atheist like me, blowing open doors to my childhood and focusing the memories I could see through them. They took me to seeing in a deeper way than I previously had that writing and reading are and always have been my way of knowing realities outside myself, of losing myself in admiration and joy, even when writing and reading about things that have broken my spirit and heart.
Rita Ott Ramstad, 003: Learning to love January

Dear Most of the Internet:
this is not the Superbowl
or the World Cup, so
wash the face paint off
your social media accounts.
Sit down with one of “them”
face to face, knees touching,
and listen to their losses.
Then do it again, open heart
becoming bruised like a peach.
This is called compassion:
feeling-with, the center
of feeling we call the heart
constantly vulnerable.
Rachel Barenblat, Status Update

Last week I also visited a colleague’s class and read from my new essay collection, which grew from the whole life I’ve lived in the shadow of my father’s early death. After the reading, the students asked me questions. One that I get regularly is, “How do you do it?” Meaning, how do you share such personal details of your life? Meaning, aren’t you worried? Afraid? Aren’t you embarrassed?

I published my first poem in a literary journal in 1999. I was 29 years old and the poem was about pawning my diamond wedding ring for (very little) cash after my first marriage ended. Hello, world, I waved, more than naked.

But I had already been writing personal stories via poems for years and years. Since high school, probably, and surely in college. Some of those poems were about my parents and their dysfunction, about my longing for stability for and from them. I didn’t worry, or even think about, hurting people with those poems. I knew the only people reading them were my professors and classmates. They were really just for me.

With that first publication in 1999, all that changed. But I didn’t miss a beat. There was no part of me that hesitated to write or publish it. It was my story, after all. My ex-husband was free to disagree with my crafting of the scene, but there was no point arguing it didn’t happen. (Sidebar: when I went on to win a contest with Glamour Magazine for an essay that was explicitly about our demise, he told me over the phone that while he didn’t necessarily remember the details the same way, he understood that it was my perspective and felt okay with that. I still appreciate him for that understanding, which made my life as a writer easier.)
Sheila Squillante, Looking for the Pearls

Sunday saw me take Kathryn Anna Writes Bespoke out into the big wide world. I loved every moment of the wedding fair at the Hundred House hotel – having people read my work (and even shed a tear!), admire the prints and generally fall in love with the idea of a poem being written for them made my heart sing.

Starting your own business is fun. Tough, terrifying, exhausting,fun. I feel like all my skills in talking to customers (thanks to years of selling specs), learning how to write and use SEO (thanks to years of writing content for anything and everything) have joined up with my greatest love to create an opportunity that’s too good to miss.

When I began writing poems for family and friends I was amazed that people were interested. They were, and they loved them, but you know there’s always that nag that perhaps people are just being kind. Changes to the content writing landscape early last year (AI I’m looking at you) meant I had to make a decision. Either pursue content writing as a fully fledged career or find another way to use my words to make a (modest) living.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, Kathryn Anna Writes Bespoke – A new adventure

AWP, the largest writing conference in the country, is right around the corner: 8-11 February in Kansas City. It’s early this year which makes me feel slightly rushed and anxious because I have a to-do list a mile long. (Side note: Who knew being an adult would consist of making daily to-do lists and never reaching the bottom of one…) In addition to prepping for the independent poetry press I run, Riot in Your Throat, to be at the book fair, the press is currently open for submissions so I’m busy reading manuscripts. (If you have a full length poetry manuscript looking for a home, send it my way! We’re open through the end of the month!)

This year I’m taking it a little easy at AWP – last year I had a reading every single night and it was exhausting, especially since I’m at the Riot in Your Throat table at the book fair all day, every day. Even as an extremely extroverted person, by the end of the day I was exhausted from being on all day. This year, I only have one offsite reading I’m participating in so I’m hopeful I’ll be slightly less exhausted.
Courtney LeBlanc, Find Me at AWP

A goal for my sketching practice for this year is to include snippets of observations that might become poems. Here’s one of my favorites so far (the sketch itself doesn’t photograph well):

Squirrels scamper
across the spines of winter trees.
Skeletons of past springs.
Sunset coming, cold winter sky.

Soon I will bundle up and head out for a different kind of inspiration, the kind that comes from a walk in the winter landscape. It’s the kind of day that will be windy and cold all day, so I may as well go early before I can talk myself out of it.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Winter Weather Inspirations

the last leaf
on a corkscrew hazel
is called a wren
Jim Young [no title]

Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Weeks 51-52: Holidaze edition

Dave Bonta — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:23:05 +0000

Happy 2024! This edition of the digest—a personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond—takes us from the winter solstice to New Year’s, with year-end summary posts, favorite books, and plans for the year ahead as well as reflections on the season. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack.

By the time Tess and Claudia exhort us to ‘Keep dancing!’ we are too settled into our evenings, too comfy, to do anything about it. So how about us all doing it now … putting down this card, getting out of the chair, or up from the sofa, taking the hand of someone we love, or even placing our own hand on our own shoulder, perhaps even over our own heart, and saying out loud, into the air of the New Year, ‘Keep dancing!’ And look, here we all are, smiling and moving forward together.
Lynne Rees, Happy New Year – Keep dancing!

can silence be gleaned from winter geese

can shadow give the cry of birth

shall faultless blue endure as the robe of our earth
Grant Hackett [no title]

At the lake, last week, flocks of Canada geese slept on the water every night, leaving in the mornings to go feed in the cornfields and then return around sunset. It was a predictable pattern. But one night, toward the end of our stay, I heard a commotion among them in the late afternoon. At least half of the flocks swam into the center of the lake and then took off. The sun went down, but in the morning, they hadn’t returned — and they never did. What had they sensed? The weather wasn’t a lot colder, and the snow that had fallen earlier in the week was all gone. There was no ice on the lake yet. No humans or other predators had spooked them. It was just — apparently– time to move on.

I’m so much more comfortable when I can witness these natural events that remind me who I am in the world. I like to be able to see the night sky, the winter constellations, the positions of the planets. I like to feel the cold on my face, and be able to see my breath; I like to make stews out of root vegetables and to bake bread. I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have a choice but to eat seasonally, and how that made sense. I enjoyed growing food in the summer, and preserving some of it for use in the winter. Of course, like so many other people, we buy strawberries in February now, and anything else that attracts us in the markets unless it’s ridiculously expensive. Still, I don’t want to forget who I am as an animal, a hunter-gatherer, a creature made mostly of water who can freeze quickly.
Beth Adams, The Shortest Day

It’s been one of those years — I’m thinking of the news headlines, but also the loss of people dear to me. The last of my mother’s brothers died this summer, and a shocking number of my older cousins slipped away throughout 2023.

In the writing world, we lost several notables, including Linda Pastan and Louise Gluck. Locally, we lost the Edmonds poet John Wright. And, as I learned only last week, my poetry teacher, MFA advisor, and long-time mentor, Colleen McElroy died on December 12, 2023.

Perhaps that’s why I keep bumping into these lines from Wendell Berry:

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
–Wendell Berry

In such times, when one doesn’t naturally dwell on gratitude, there is all the more reason to lean into it.
Bethany Reid, Happy Solstice

On this, the darkest
and longest of nights,

what has not been razed
in Gaza gives shelter:

a wind-whipped tent
among tents, a hospital

corridor, the burned-out
shell of an Orthodox church

where Christ, new-borne,
will lie among the rubble.

Soon a blast mistaken
for God’s own voice joins

with the cries of children,
the silencing wails of women.
Maureen Doallas, There is a light (Poem)

Good poetry, William Empson argued, is characterized by its ability to hold multiple meanings—often contradictory or ambiguous—within a compact and tightly structured form. A poem can convey a complex set of ideas or beliefs with focused, concentrated economy.

Turns out a holiday can do that, too. (Substitute tinsel for economy.)

I’ve decided my own breed of ambivalence is strongly rooted in time. December’s early days exist in anticipation of its later ones. Travel, gifts, traditions all play out in future thought. For some of us, this feels giddy, expansive, energizing. For others, it means anticipating arguments or rehearsing the weight of absence. Either way, the present’s roots are tenuous at best.

Then, the day arrives, and we’re teleported to the past. It is painfully clear who is missing from the family tableau. Loved ones you haven’t seen all year ladle the gravy with a shakier hand. New family members are brought forward, and their wondrous newness seems the truth of the matter—it is, after all, the birth of a child that’s brought us here. But, then, there’s the inevitable business of imagining those you love, those upon whom you steady your own sense of self, not being around for future holidays. Suddenly, you’re in the future again. The gifts have been opened. The babies are not your own. Somehow, you seem to have missed the main event.

Christmas is a sort of emotional asymptote—we near what it promises but never fully arrive. On either side, we are bewildered by time’s sleight of hand and a collective cheer that never changes: the songs, color scheme, temperature are stubbornly fixed, revealing just how mutable and fleeting everything else is.
Maya C. Popa, Reflections on Christmas

Thank you for the flat-pack Build-Your-Own-Garden-Gnome set.
Thank you for the lifesize model of King Charles The First made out of matchsticks.
Thank you for the 1934 edition of The History Of Pigeons In Wales.
Thank you for the rubber inflatable pet dog with legs that really walk.
Thank you for the sealed bucket of pure Devon rain.
Thank you for the nightmare in which
snipers shoot who they feel like shooting.
Bob Mee, THANK-YOU LETTER (CHRISTMAS POEM)

even if you squeeze
your eyes shut:
cries from the rubble
Jason Crane, haiku: 19 December 2023

I have struggled with a Christmas poem this year. I was reminded of the story of Christian de Cherge at the Mount Atlas monastery, saying to the terrorists who came to the monastery, “This is the birthday of the Prince of Peace, and you come bearing weapons”. The terrorist leader apologised and left the weapons at the door, at that time. Peace is a hard concept to think about just now. Then I went out to the garden. […]

There’s a riff
of starlings around the feeder and a single
collared dove among the groundling pigeons.
I can hear spring begin to whisper beneath
the drone of distant traffic, in the heave
of frost-lifted ground and the quiet undersong
of the little burn. Dark is gathering, but light
waits, in the hush where we might hear the song
of angels, and a voice that speaks of peace.
Elizabeth Rimmer, Christmas Wishes

I stopped watching broadcast news completely in 2023, especially after the Hamas invasion of Israel and the horrific images from Gaza as the Israelis conducted an expected, but disproportionate response. The images of children twisted and screaming in the rubble finally forced me to turn away. I get my news now from global newspapers that offer a varied perspective not only on the Israeli-Hamas War, but also on Ukraine and the battered United States.

I spent three months – from mid-May to mid-August – in Ann Arbor, Michigan with quite a few side trips to Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, and Toldeo. While I was still working my day job, it was nice to have a change of scenery, a cooler summer, new surroundings to explore, and a chance to work on the new & selected collection, Wonder & Wreckage.

Speaking of the new & selected, it’s nearing the finish line and the April 2024 release timeframe is still happening. I’ve already started booking some readings, both online and in person, so that has lit a fire under me. That said, I cannot wait to get this project off my plate so I can move on to the next one. I started planning this new & selected just after Midnight in a Perfect World came out five (?!) years ago, so it’s been a long process.
Collin Kelley, Looking for holiday cheer in dark times

there are never enough boxes in my house.
i search for more places to sequester
my ghosts. bird cage. storm cellar.
damp steps to the well. have you been a boy
inside someone else’s dream?
they would ask me to stand on the table
& be the turkey. devoured one leg
at a time.
Robin Gow, 1/1

When I ask myself what I want to accomplish as a writer in 2024, the answers come back loud and clear. I want to take more risks in my writing, to challenge myself in what I write about and how I write it, and to help others with the same goals. I want to make this blog more useful to my readers, whether they’re writers or not.

Whatever it looks like, I want to work as hard as I can for as long as I can at this craft called writing.

These lines from Denise Levertov’s poem, “Writing in the Dark,” express that longing I have:

words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices…

words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.

Erica Goss, Challenge Yourself in 2024

I’m hoping the coming year will offer more peace and rest for us after the hectic flurry of last year’s AWP, book launch readings, and several large family visits. I want to focus again on my writing and photography, and tend more closely to my health. I may start IVIG treatments this year, which is scary but also possibly hopeful, giving my immune system more of a boost so I don’t get sick (and stay sick) as easily.

A lot of the things I’m anxious about (war, election, my health problems, etc) I don’t have a lot of control over. I want to build in more restorative activities to my year. I read something that I really liked – thinking about what makes you happy, and putting more of that into your life. We are more than what we weigh, or what we earn, or what we get done. We worry so much about being productive, but how much do we actually think about the activities and people that make us happy or give us joy? So that’s my modest goal for 2024 – trying to focus on the things that bring joy, and less on everything else.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! What About 2024? Recovering from Christmas, and Planning on a Restorative Year

Dear Lord help me not to feel hopeless.
Dear god-that-may-be, angels and saints although I
haven’t seen any evidence, and who
cares for the prayers when the book has been filled? Who
kneels in a circle of candles and incense and
blesses the pages? Who sets it alight
in a ritual cleansing and scatters
its dust to four corners?
I just want to tell them all: Wait.
O body O body where
does your Hopelessness live? All over my hands, in little
moles and splotches. I just walk around with it. How
else can it be housed. And the prayers, where
are they supposed to go?
Who’s monitoring.
Kristen McHenry, The Book of Prayers

When my attention spirals beyond the very local, I see lots of friends grieving or upending their lives. I feel constant horror about the massacre of so many Palestinian civilians in Gaza. It sure looks like climate change is accelerating. US politics suck. 2023 was rougher than my small griefs, and I can’t rationally believe that 2024 will be safe and just for the world.

However, even a tough year brings gifts. Again looking inward: while I’m fed up about many problems at my workplace, the core work of teaching students remains a positive constant, as does my editorial labor for Shenandoah. Otherwise the positives, like the negatives, involve upheaval or at least turns in fortune. My son started graduate school; my daughter is applying now; my spouse and I both had books accepted. Likewise, some of those friends upending their lives will be better off in the long run, even though the interim is hard.

I haven’t reported on the acupuncture regimen I started in September, but that, too, has felt like a minor revolution. From the start, it brought a reduction in pain and lift in mood; I also just find the process deeply interesting, and learning makes me happy. Just before Thanksgiving, though, the acupuncturist (known in our house as The Needle Witch) cleared a blockage (no, I don’t know exactly what that means), and since then I’ve been flooded by emotions whose intensity is hard to manage. I cry more often and feel raw, like layers of skin have peeled away. The Needle Witch says that the lower abdomen is the body’s closet, where we store old hurts, and I’m on a path to a new balance, at which point I won’t need treatments anymore. I hope so. Certainly acupuncture has been more transformative than I expected.
Lesley Wheeler, Reading through change

I am happy to report that I continue to have a hundred percent survival rate. This is a phrase I’ve picked up from my therapist. It shook me the first time she said it. The acknowledgment of still being here despite the struggles and setbacks over the years hit like a punch in the gut. That still being here is an accomplishment, something to build on, not just the frayed edges of just enough.

Here’s to keeping that up, all of us.
José Angel Araguz, some highlights, 2023

Yeast rises like praise
clings to the cloth,
leaves its thready face there.
Dough rolls smooth
springs back
seamless in hand as thought.
The oven opens and closes its arms.
Smell seeps from room to room.
Bread, as finished as a child.
Every slice of the knife it sings its fearful litany:
I live in the jaws of hunger.
I break as I give
I rise as I die
Anne Higgins, Baking Bread for Christmas

Out here in the North 48° geography is elastic. Night reverses or doubles itself and if it is not late it will be late soon. If I am not diligent diligence being the rudder the bow the shoe’s heel sometimes it is a memory etched on a sidewalk happy new year floating from my eaves as the starlings shoot out. I have no chart on the proper way of seduction by water the low drone of an airplane fur or deep beds. I’m afraid of dogs running at me but not an ant parade or chemistry’s miracles. I have to admit that I am small and helpless with zero raspberry jam a tea set’s small flat knife and a rose patterned saucer. You don’t have to know me one hot second to know I am not fond of roses or rats or how they are depicted at the end holding the earth’s skirt in their teeth. If I’m lucky I can disconnect for weeks at a time starting right now.
Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report

I wanted to write so many more reviews and responses to books and individual poems this year! More than that, I want to start proving and exemplifying that reading and critical writing can and should be as expressive and creative as what we deem ‘creative’ writing. You’ll know if you’ve been following my thoughts on this subject that this is because I value poetry and art as an ongoing, inclusive conversation and that my bête noire is the idea of the poet, the writer, the artist as the one who speaks for, at or over the top of others.

But drafts and notes have mostly failed to coagulate into finished, publishable pieces — except in the case of one more ‘Single poem round-up’ where I investigate poems by Sarah-Jane Crowson, Kate Crowcroft and Callie S. Blackstone, published online in Stone Circle Review, Berlin Lit and Rust & Moth respectively.
Jon Stone, “Your skullsy secret”

I took the bathroom selfie above a few weeks before Christmas. I was at a local brewery for a lunch and beer break in the middle of a day I’d set aside for holiday shopping and prep. I intended it as a “proof of life” kinda thing — here I am, along for the bumpy road to the holidays and still kickin’.

Instead, when I shared it on Instagram, it morphed into a “not dead yet” claim about my creative life. Despite zero acceptances in 2023 (ZERO!), writing and rejection haven’t killed me. Not yet. For the caption to go with the photo, I wrote, “This is what trying to be unstoppable looks like.” It became a reflection on remaining upright despite dozens of consecutive rejections.

Since posting the photo, I’ve considered whether or not I actually feel unstoppable. It seemed like wishful thinking. Like pep talk. Like dreamy brain snack for dark times. I’m not sure I really believed it. But here I am — writing something.

It’s possible I couldn’t actually stop writing if I wanted to. It’s my way of being in the world. Still — here’s that pendulum — it’s wild and wildly painful to be an emerging writer over 50, comparing where I “should” (or could) be vs. where I am… sending around manuscript #3 and no book yet.

There’s a quote in American Symphony about this risk, about the possibility of failure. [Jon] Batiste says, “You have to confront the brutal facts of the reality that you might not pull it off. But at the same time have unwavering faith. Completely unwavering faith. And you have to do both at the same time.”

Both at the same time. Both?
Carolee Bennett, An Emerging Writer Over 50 on Living With the Specter of Failure

The kids and I have pushed our schedules back, staying up too late and waking when the sun is actually above the horizon. It feels odd to see the sun during the day, I usually drive to work in the dark and come home in the same. I need to start taking my recess or lunch break outside, so get some direct light. It might help with my mood.

Not much has changed in terms of writing since my last post. I’m still barely writing, I don’t even have anything to edit really. I keep sending my books out and they keep coming back declined. I don’t know what to do there. I’ve even sent out the one that has been on hold at my publishers for going on 4 years. No communication there again from my editor since his once-a-year group email.
Gerry Stewart, Heading out of 2023

On December 6, my doctor told me to go home and not use my brain for at least 2 weeks. No reading, no writing, no driving, and–especially–no screens.

“Just rest,” she said.

“But what am I supposed to do all day?” I asked. She suggested walks in nature, meditation, long baths, relaxing music. I felt a little panicky. I remembered my son, age 3, telling me that his imagination was his best toy because he could never lose it or break it. I realized I’d broken my best toy, one I’ve always taken for granted.

That night, I slept for 10 hours. A few hours after waking from that sleep, I took a 3-hour nap. The doctor had told me that my brain needed rest to mend itself, and when I woke from that nap I made a decision to surrender to its need.

A multitude of lessons, realizations, and gifts have come with necessary stillness during what are usually the busiest weeks of this busy season. I hope I will remember them when I am able to really write again. Normally, I would capture them, process them, interrogate them, and share them through words, but words have been mostly off-limits. I began capturing images with my phone camera, hoping they will help me remember as much as words have always done.
Rita Ott Ramstad, December reflections

While I did not keep to a poem-a-day rate all year, I did practice daily writing in enough spurts to garner around 100 or so poems I can be happy with when all is said and done. Lots of other fragments and bits that may still prove useful. Less than other years, but still a solid showing, especially when you consider how much other kinds of writing I was wrapped up in. I also landed some poems in journals when I would light a fire under my ass to send out work, including peeks of new projects in Sweet Tree Review, Aura, and Grimoire, plus some older work in a couple anthologies and some pieces set to debut in 2024.

I made around 160 collages or paintings, nearly 300 reels and video poems, released one zine project, and two full-lengths (technically AUTOMAGIC was the last week of 2022, but all my promo and sales happened in 2024.) There are several zines that are in the wings (some of them waiting for poems accepted by journals to come out.) I also put a wrap on GRANATA, the Persephone poems, for release this year and finished RUINPORN which will also likely be coming this year if all goes well There are also two half-completed manuscripts I would love to finish by the end of 2024. For the press, I edited, laid out, and designed around 30 titles, with more in the works, and made and assembled too many to count. I was successful in adding quite a few bits of paper loveliness to the shop, including several different postcard sets and some blank book journals. I am still wading through submissions from summer, but so far have read around 300 manuscripts in the queue.
Kristy Bowen, goodbye 2023

Last year, I declared it to be the year of “my All.” And while I wouldn’t take any of it back, it played out in really interesting ways. Most of them good but with a few unexpected moments thrown in for good measure — because health (mental and bodily), because spread too thin, because hustling like mad, because so many things all at once with loved ones, self, others. There was a lot going on, and a lot that one doesn’t talk about except in private. Which, I increasingly find to be true, must be the case, unless you’re writing a poem, you know?

So, this year, I’m declaring it to be the year of being okay with being of two minds. […]

I’m interested in excellence speaking to excellence, and I’m also interested in holding one thought against another. In a recent post I talked about Tommi Laitio’s ideas on conviviality and our “capacity to live together.” I liked his way of thinking about the frictions we experience as similar to being on a crowded dance floor. And this is also what I talked about a bit in my last year’s NY post, dancing with change. I have also been wont to consider the opposite, which is also a decent tool in my tool belt.
Shawna Lemay, Learning to Be of Two Minds – A New Year’s Post, 2024

I’d say my worlds collided but that would imply some destruction and there was only growth. In 2023, my professional and writing worlds gently brushed past each other so that they not only overlapped in subject matter, but also people started showing up in both worlds and there was some confusion between my pen name and my family name.
Cathy Wittmeyer, My Worlds Hovered Closely in 2023

I made a conscious decision to make time to think. I needed more time to think, walk, experience life in order for my work to grow. I didn’t set rules or time allocations around these activities, I just made sure they were there. This is the upside of being self employed. Often I will step away from my desk and go and walk on the beach or round the lanes and it gives me a chance to let thoughts settle and solve writing problems. I am enjoying my slower life enormously. I felt guilty initially, every time I left my desk. But I don’t anymore. I see this as part of my creative practice.
Wendy Pratt, Ten things I did to prioritise my writing in 2023

I read back through some recent posts the other day and came to the conclusion it’s mainly been a lot of complaining about not doing stuff, not writing…not having time, not having energy, not getting on…And that’s fine, but it’s not getting me anywhere. And quite frankly, I’m tired of my own voice.

I’ve decided to spend less time reviewing in 2024. And I’ve decided to spend less time writing this blog as well. My original plan was to do something weekly, and to a greater or lesser (mainly lesser) degree I’ve kept to that, and I’ve enjoyed posting the poems from other people, and I may do that as and when, but I can’t think that stopping/pausing the rambles that came before will cause much weeping or gnashing of teeth.
Mat Riches, Why the big pause?

Instead of “New Year, New You,” I’m embracing a gentler, more open approach, and I’m reflecting on what’s weighed me down in 2023.

If, like me, you’re wary of resolutions at this time of year, you might use these questions as a writing prompt: What can I set down at the end of this year instead of carrying it into the new one? What can I loosen or release?

Begin where you are, as you are. That’s more than enough.

And if, for whatever reason, the words aren’t coming right now, trust that they’ll be back. They always come back.
Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

Last year I read 329 books and this year I read 314 books. Here are my favorites.

Poetry

~ Little Beast by Sara Quinn Rivara – A collection of poems equally brutal and beautiful, Rivara writes about the woman’s voice, violence, hope, heartache, and survival.

~ Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith – A collection of poems about Hurricane Katrina – the people affected by the storm, the area, even the storm itself has a voice in these brutal poems.

~ The Anxiety Workbook by Christina Olson – A collection of poems about anxiety, survival, family, identity, home, the pandemic, and trying to fight the demon inside your own brain.

~ Avoiding the Rapture by Karen J. Weyant – A collection of poems about a rural childhood, about survival, about rooting for the girls who make it out.

~ Brilliant Little Body by Brett Elizabeth Jenkins – A collection of poems about love – finding it, losing it, searching for it. And about life and survival and humor and wit.

~ A Plumber’s Guide to Light by Jesse Bertron – A chapbook of poems from the plumber-poet perspective. There’s light, sorrow, loss, wit, humor, hope, and love in these poems.

~ Pink Elephant by Rachel McKibbens – A collection of poems that will fuck you up. Trauma, loss, abuse, survival, hope, and love, this collection comes out swinging and doesn’t stop until you’re down for the count.

~ Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones – A collection of poems about survival, identity, loss, grief, and being Black in America. The multiple versions of the title poem are especially good.
Courtney LeBlanc, Best Books of 2023

Every year or so I reread my entire collection of poetry books to see which books I still love and which ones I could place in better homes.

This spring, I plan to reread my collection and make a list of what poetry books are in my personal library, and a line or two of thoughts about why each one is there. I only keep books that I either absolutely adore, find inspiring for my own work, or that I think will be instructive for my children as they read poetry themselves. If I choose not to keep a book, that isn’t a reflection on the quality of the poet, just that my tastes have changed over the years.
Renee Emerson, The Poetry Library Challenge

I’ve been reviewing a book by a favorite poet lately, Alice Oswald, and thinking about magical realism in poetry. I realized one of the qualities I love in her poetry could be termed magical realism, if that term can encompass verse and imagery that evolves into story.

Oswald is an acclaimed British poet, author of the award-winning book Dart, and has published a total of eleven volumes of verse. I happened to dive back into my paperback copy of Woods, etc. and found myself as disturbed, electrified, and fascinated as the first time I read these poems. They form miniature fairytales of nature and natural forces, blended with the chilly realities of mortality, age, and history, as if the Brother Grimm wrote verse or songs.
Rachel Dacus, Magical Surrealism in Poetry – Alice Oswald

My friend and collaborator Beau Beausoleil’s digital book, War News, poems written during the first two months of the war in Gaza, is free to read and download from Agitate! Journal. The stark lines of the cover image by San Francisco artist Andrea Hassiba perfectly complement the poems, all of which have the same title.

‘This collection of 90 poems is a witness testimony from afar. It is an archive of grief, mourning and solidarity. It is an accounting of the cost of war. Through these powerful and devastating poems Beau reminds us that we cannot turn away. In the poet’s own words, “Our humanity, our collective morality, requires that we bear witness and then take some kind of action.”‘

I hope you will share the link/book within your own circle of artists and writers.
Download here: (top right corner) https://agitatejournal.org/
Ama Bolton, War News

Mark Davidson, editor at The Hedgehog Poetry Press, has brought out the fourth in his seasonal Stickleback eBooks. Winter is published today to coincide with the Solstice. The anthology contains ten poems, including my ‘Christmas Questions’. You can download a free copy here.
Caroline Gill, ‘Winter’, a Special Solstice eBook

There’s the ghost of a story running through Aaron Kent’s collection, Requiem for Bioluminescence. It’s about an owl, a fox and a submariner (Kent was, for a while, a submarine SONAR operator: almost, in itself, a metaphor for the kind of poet he is, delving into the subconscious the way he does). Influenced by JH Prynne and jazz (he’s a fan of Miles Davis), the poems are playful in their use of language and musical in structure. Nevertheless, they have a dark, mythical feel to them. You can read my review of the book here at Stride Magazine.
Dominic Rivron, Requiem for Bioluminescence

Today I’ve taken many of my Mary Oliver books down from the shelf. The “newest” one is Winter Hours, which was also her last. It’s nearly 25 years old, published in 1999. Here, I meet my younger self who has underlined and starred passages throughout the essays and poems.

This one received 5 inked stars from me 24 years ago, and today, too:

What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?
Mary Oliver, Winter Hours

In early summer I had the distinct pleasure of returning to Cape Cod to visit with a chilldhood friend, poet Jennifer Markell and together we signed up for a class with poet Elizabeth Bradfield, titled, “In Search of Wonderment,” at the Turo Center for the Arts.

Did the class make good on its claim? Yes, dear reader, and more. We found wonderment in the scrub pine, the butterbur, the coffin berries and in a 1,000 other discoveries. And while Mary Oliver is no longer taking her morning walks or working in the local bookstore, the spirit of that peninsula feels as vibrant as ever.
Susan Rich, Mary Oliver: In Provincetown and Beyond

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to reverence the garden. No wonder Emily Dickinson spent her life believing that “to be Flower, is profound Responsibility.” No wonder Virginia Woolf had her epiphany about what it means to be an artist in the garden.

The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them (public library). Envisioned and edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor, it is a blooming testament to the etymology of anthology — from the Greek anthos (flower) and legein (to gather): the gathering of flowers — rooted in her belief that “the garden poem is as ancient as literature itself.”
Maria Popova, Favorite Books of 2023

I’ve written before, here, about the debt I owe to Sarah Maguire, for the inspiration her poetry gave me to pick up my own pencil again. Moreover, she remains one of my favourite poets – possibly my very favourite contemporary poet despite the curtailing of her career by her tragic early death. Her lyrical, economical style was suited perfectly to her big themes: her adoption; London life; gender inequality; sex; flowers, gardening and, by extension, ecological catastrophe; migration; and the injustices suffered by the Palestinians and other peoples across the Arab lands.

The Pomegranates of Kandahar, her final (Chatto & Windus, 2007) collection, contained all those themes and more, with, as its title implies, a larger focus on the last of them. If any one poem in the collection stands out it is ‘From Dublin to Ramallah’, dedicated and directly addressed to the Palestinian poet and novelist, Ghassan Zaqtan, a small selection of whose poems, translated into English by Fady Joudah, is available here.
Matthew Paul, On Sarah Maguire’s ‘From Dublin to Ramallah’ and Ghassan Zaqtan

A few decades ago, at a time I knew very few infants, I made the acquaintance of a baby. This person stayed in my life for 20 years or so, but since then we haven’t had much contact–life happens, distances increase, friends of parents…etc. However, during their mid-adolescence they developed quite an interest in poetry, so we spoke a bit about that; I cannot say I was a mentor, but I may have been an inspiration of sorts. I had no doubt of their talent in the writing direction–at 14, they were composing better poems and essays than some adults I knew.

But again: life intervenes. Their life went in other directions than poetry. At least for awhile. Not long ago, though, when I was working with Moonstone Press on my chapbook Strange Ladies, I noticed the name Emma Wynn as author of Help Me to Fall, a recent chapbook from the press. Yes, the same person I knew when she was a child. I ordered the book, of course, and later attended a Zoom event that Moonstone hosted, in which Emma was reading. We said hello across the virtual divide. And now, Wynn has a full-length book out that I’m pleased to say is well worth reading. It is full of little marvels and careful observation, noticing the pain in love as well as the joys. Wynn writes, “Every day I turn over the stone of the world/ready to be surprised,” and I believe it.
Ann E. Michael, Nourishing

Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ is one of the most anthologised poems in the English language and for good reason. Though it was written for the end of a century, and the nineteenth century at that, the weary but undimmed hope held by Hardy’s little thrush still seems to capture something fundamental about how we feel about the turning of the year. […]

Just how hopeful is‘The Darkling Thrush’? This is a poem in which the landscape is compared to sepulchre for the whole century. It is the deadest part of winter. Even the ‘aged’ thrush is ‘frail, gaunt, and small’. Still, he sings, flinging his ‘soul / against the growing gloom’ and in that act of defiance Hardy wonders whether there isn’t a sign of something better to come:

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

Carol Rumens suggests that this is Hardy, the famous pessimist and author of some of the most depressing novels ever written, at his most optimistic. For John Berryman, on the other hand, those final lines should be read ironically: the ‘blessed Hope’ is a fiction.
Jeremy Wikeley, A darkling thrush

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

Scientific facts are constantly inspiring me with ideas for poems and stories – it’s a challenge to elegantly work these amazing facts about the universe or the body into art, to engage in this dialogue between the ways the world works on our perceptions and the ways language works on our perceptions. My debut Safety Razor has lots of science sprinkled throughout, touching on memory, weather, DNA, linguistics, and ultrasound waves. I’m the kind of person who loves learning new things and loves finding connections among things I hadn’t previously viewed as connected. Film and visual art often find their way into my poems as well, although in a general sense as opposed to directly ekphrastic works describing a painting or film scene. Perhaps ekphrasis will be a future project! […]

What are you currently working on?

Finishing off a draft of an anthology of translations of skaldic poetry – a form of verse composed in Scandinavia between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. I’m so excited about sending this out to publishers and sharing this genre with the world. To date, there is no easily accessible and lyrical anthology of this genre, but it is incredibly fascinating and rewarding to read. These are the actual words of the Vikings and their descendants, and their poems give us a view of Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia that is difficult or impossible to find elsewhere.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Emily Osborne

[Rob Taylor]: In the preface, you say something interesting about colonization in relation to your writing: “writing acts as a therapeutic medium for making sense of intergenerational trauma resulting from colonialism.” You also write that you “use poetic elements” to try to “figure out what language means to poetry and what poetry means to language.”

Could you talk about these two goals of your writing? Are there ways in which they are distinct from one another, or do you think of them as a shared goal, united by the impacts of colonialism on both peoples and their languages?

[Wanda John-Kehewin]: I wanted to use poetic elements like tone, diction, syntax, meter, form etc. to weave my way through discovery and what it felt like to write in another language which wasn’t my own, but which was the only language I spoke. It felt foreign and still feels foreign to try to sound out Cree words, like I am trying to learn a second language when it should be my first. I have talked to many fluent Cree speakers, and they have all said that the Cree language is descriptive. For example, aski pwawa is Cree for potato but does not translate to just potato; it actually translates to “Earth’s Egg.”

The Cree language is poetic and changes over time. For example, a table is not just a table. In English when we say table, we all see a table, we all know what a table is. But in the Cree language mîcisowinâhtik loosely translates to “something made out of wood that we eat on.” So the word “table” had to be descriptive to describe what it is used for.

Imagine we all went around describing things without using the word; a table wouldn’t be a table but something made out of wood that we eat on. A potato wouldn’t be just a potato but an Earth egg; which conjures up more of an interesting image? Perhaps a broken heart would be something like grieving the loss of a loved one who still walks the Earth, or grieving the loss of a loved one who no longer walks the Earth. That is what poetry is, it is description, it is imagery, and it is relatable to the human experience.
Rob Taylor, Learning a Second Language When It Should Be My First: An Interview with Wanda John-Kehewin

We used to read
stories about a changeling left in the night,
while the girl that was taken was wed
in the underworld. The ice baby sobbed
its heart out and as soon as it could,
ran into the yard to bay at the hills.
Or perhaps it was the mother
taken away? I can’t remember right
sometimes. But here we are in the middle
of the wood again. Finally the train
has moved on. The town looks
dusted with sugar. The trees
are brittle with change. Every bird
sings with the shadow of your voice.
Luisa A. Igloria, Tale

Sorrow is not zero-sum. “Their” trauma doesn’t cancel out “ours.” There is more than enough to go around. It can be simultaneously true that Jews around the world are grieving and that Palestinians and Arabs around the world are grieving, all of us broken-hearted at once.

And there’s a sense that others don’t “get” why we’re cloaked in grief. “The world doesn’t care about our suffering or our deaths” is a refrain keenly-felt both by Jews and, as Abdelrahman ElGendy notes in today’s Washington Post, by Arabs. Has grief become our most common ground?

A small cause for hope came to me from Aziz Abu Sarah in a message about Meet the Peace-Makers, a series of digital events featuring “women leaders in Israel and Palestine, building the peace movement from the ground up.” It takes so much vision and courage to be a peace-builder in a time of war.

My Arabic study has slowed to a trickle. I am scattered, forgetful, unable to hold new information. Most days I just review, trying not to lose what I’ve learned. I do not like running. I like reading and writing also. My friend is behind the house. A tiny way of holding fast to my values.

In the words of poet Naomi Shihab Nye, “It’s late but everything comes next.”
Rachel Barenblat, In parallel

The end of war is only
the downing of arms.
Peace is a different word.
Peace needs freedom.
Needs all things equal.
Needs quiet afternoons,
a little garden in
the heart, the half-sleep-
half-smile that is
both memory
and expectation, the
soft promise of tomorrow,
a bird singing in a familiar
tongue, a cat curled
up on the one tile
that draws a mellow,
winter sun.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Untitled -14

My memories of Australia are coming ashore in small groups, and often at dusk when the day’s work has been done. I’m waiting for them as patiently as we waited for penguins in Tasmania. I haven’t written much about Australia here because I want my memories to stay afloat, swim around where they are most fluent for as long as possible, until they land themselves as poems.

Our guide in Bicheno on the east coast of Tasmania told us, as I waited to see penguins in their natural habitat for the first time, that a group of penguins can be called a waddle (on land) and a raft (in the water). They can also be called a parcel. Parcel’s the word he used most often as we watched them come ashore after a long day’s fishing out on the reef several kilometres away. They took their time coming up the beach, stopping to clean their feathers, to chatter to each other, and to regain energy before reaching their main aim: feeding their hungry young chicks.

I travelled around Australia for a month, and I’ve been back home for a month, but the month in Australia feels much brighter, probably because it was. I’m making this feeling of brightness into a parcel of daylight, blue skies and wide horizons full of warmth and t-shirts. I’m writing my way into poems which I may be able to share with you one day.
Liz Lefroy, I Parcel Up

In our corner of southeast England, we were treated last week to a spectacular display of nacreous clouds. I had occasionally observed nacreous clouds during the years I lived in Aberdeen in Scotland, but this was the first time I’ve seen them so far south. Their iridescence provided a glow of joy in what has been a bleak time.

Clouds often feature in my poetry. My first poem, composed when I was five, was about sunrise and clouds.

Quietly dawns the day
golden sun arising
copper clouds are scattered
over the horizon.

The night skies of my childhood were full of wonders: the Milky Way, like a vast river of lights against the darkness; the moon, home to Kalulu the African hare; the glittering Southern Cross; fireflies flickering among the reeds by the dam at the bottom of the hill where we lived; comet Ikeya-Seki, its long, shimmering tail spangled with stars.
Marian Christie, Of Sky and Earth and Other Things

I read this article in The Washington Post about trees and what their rings tell us about the changing climate. I love the term “latewood,” a term I hadn’t known before today. I started thinking about my own bones, and what they might tell a researcher. I created some lines that might become a poem. Later today, on my neighborhood walk through the church camp Lutheridge, I will look at trees differently, with a new sense of wonder.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Tasks on the Shortest Day: Grocery Stores, Sermon Writing, and Wonder

winter sunshine
on the toppled gravestones
the weight of the past
Jim Young [no title]

Found this little ‘worry worm’ on my walk yesterday, but left it as I though maybe a child might be out with parents today and that they should have it. However, it was still there when I went out today, late afternoon and turning dark, so I brought it home. I’m telling myself how fortunate I am in my own life – I don’t have any major worries, nothing that keeps me awake at night. I do fret about not having done enough though, whether it’s reading, writing or playing the guitar. So, maybe the worry worm will be my talisman as we head into 2024. Happy New Year to everyone. May your worries be less of a burden with the worry worm. And thank you to the kind and generous person who crocheted it.
Julie Mellor, Crochet kindness …

When I said I believed in lightness,
I wasn’t kidding. Over and over, I return –
not to escapism or fantasy or ostrich necks–
but to dissolving solidity, breaking up the world’s fixity.

My holidays – as if a wild angel came reeling
from the wings and slammed into despair –
as simple as reckless laughter, unplanned, unbidden
or a piece of hot bread with butter and a shard of salt.
Jill Pearlman, Memo for the Next Year

To the activists fighting for environmental and human rights. War vets and animal vets. All the harbingers of light with sunflower minds, the hope-challenged folks with deeply scarred lives. To the dreamers and climate change believers. Bookworms, grocery baggers, artists, and poetry addicts. The sick and infirm, the healthy and holy. Those who can dance on the head of a pin and those who can bench press the weight of the world. To every one of you, I wish you a happy and healthy 2024!
Rich Ferguson, 01/01/2024

And the clay? This clay that is the stuff with which she has formed this life? Has she worked well enough with what she was given?

The teachers at the pottery class would say sometimes, “Looks like the clay just doesn’t want to do that,” if it seemed to push back stubbornly against what hands were asking it to do, or if it kept cracking against such working. Clay, apparently, has its own ideas. I’ve heard myself say similar things about a poem in process: “it seems to want to be about something else entirely.” As if the raw material of the made thing must be respected, has its own inclinations.

I hope in my work with words I’m entering deeply the questions my words are asking. I hope in my work I see and listen closely enough that the questions the words are asking are not just mine but yours too. I hope the bowl holds firm through the fire so as to carry its soup later, whether I know it or not, whether I sip from it or you do. And may the work of your own hands be beautiful with your questions.
Marilyn McCabe, Bowl

Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 48

Dave Bonta — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 01:23:18 +0000

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack. This week: old books and libraries, echo salesmen, mouths and spectacles, catastrophes and the delights of life. Enjoy!

It started thirteen years ago when I wrote and published my very first review, of Voyeur by Rich Murphy, which appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of Main Street Rag. Fast forward to the end of 2023, and that number has grown to one hundred and fifteen. I’ve placed reviews in Cider Press Review, The Pedestal, Rain Taxi, PRISM, and the Georgia Review, among others. Most of the reviews I’ve written appear in my monthly newsletter, Sticks & Stones.

Review-writing has become one of the most important parts of my practice. It’s certainly made me a better writer, but the real benefit is in my reading abilities. To write a good review, I must be a close and meticulous reader. I’ve learned that to write a review I can be proud of and does the book I’m reviewing justice, I need to slow down and read each poem carefully. Poetry collections are filled with surprises, and I don’t want to miss them. This improves my comprehension and focus. Writing the review uses different mental abilities than writing poetry or nonfiction, and helps me hone my critical-thinking skills.

Slow reading delivers aha moments, for example when I discover a theme running through the collection which I might have missed had I read it too quickly. My favorite part of writing a review is the period after I’ve initially read the book. The ideas from the poems are fresh in my brain, buzzing and darting like a charm of hummingbirds.
Erica Goss, 115 Reviews and Counting

As a resident of Normal, Illinois, I was delighted to pass through Boring, Oregon on a recent trip to Portland for the birth of my grandbaby! I’m happy to report that Boring was not boring at all, but a charming town, as was Sandy, Oregon, both on the way to Trillium Lake, pictured here with Lola and her mother (my daughter!) in the foreground and Mount Hood in the background, near sunset, looking golden. It was still white on our way up. […]

Upon my return to Normal, I went to work. I did laundry. I paid utility bills. I tried to catch up on various tasks. I visited my father, who is doing OK. I love to get mail. Good old-fashioned snail mail. But, so far, I have been unable to open the many condolence cards that arrived in my absence, were held at the post office, and got delivered in two bunches on my return. I’m sorry! I will open them eventually, and reply to you, as would my mother. I will probably use the box of cards she had saved, that I found in her house as I was clearing it out in September and October so it could be sold. My father closed on the house on November 1. Lola was born November 4. My mother died November 5. It was a lovely circle, and it makes me 1) weep 2) grateful. […]

And now this next adventure, navigating grief. I’m starting with evasion, leaving those letters sealed, doing chores, decorating for Christmas, but, as my dad said, I have to “go through it,” and we will. Together and on our own. In my case, some poems are coming, to rescue me. Words are suddenly rolling out, not quite randomly.
Kathleen Kirk, Boring, Oregon

talking in bed
between two rivers
about the last Victorian steamship

heat and good wine
an old palace in Venice
a secret I can’t divulge
Ama Bolton, ABCD November 2023

Sometimes I find myself ploughing through old books to remind myself that poetry is a chain. It grows out of what has gone before and doesn’t just suddenly end and begin again. I first came across Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea From Prison’ when it was turned into a lovely song by Fairport Convention for their album Nine, released fifty years ago. I believe it was Dave Swarbrick who adapted the poem, which was written when Lovelace was in jail during the English Civil War. Quite rightly, Swarbrick deleted the third verse, which is a devotional grovel to King Charles I, but the rest works beautifully as both a straightforward love poem and a soaringly defiant message to his jailers. […]

Lovelace was born in 1618 during the reign of James I, was described by one scholar as ‘one of the chief ornaments of the Court’ (of Charles I), but was also, it seems, a soldier in the king’s army, before being imprisoned in the early 1640s. When he was released, he fled the country, but on his return was locked up again between 1647 and 1649, following the execution of the king. He seemed to spend the rest of his life in obscurity and poverty in London, keeping his head down but at least keeping his head, until his death in 1657 before the end of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan ‘interregnum’. One critic suggested Lovelace ‘perished miserably’.

He will have had no idea that four centuries after his short life, his poems would still be read and analysed. I think most of us bashing away at what passes for our craft today might settle for that.
Bob Mee, RICHARD LOVELACE – TO ALTHEA FROM PRISON

In the late 1970s I sat in Fulham town hall listening to Bruce Kent (CND) ask Richard Harries (who wrote on the ‘just war’ and later became Bishop of Oxford): Do the personal moral values and standards we ask of our friends also apply to politicians, or do they get a realpolitik get-out clause?

Palestine. Israel. I cannot speak on behalf of all the writers I publish, I am not their elected representative, but by definition a publisher operates in public so, for the record: damn the State of Israel’s apartheid and barbarous actions, and damn Hamas, whose own actions are those of a death cult. And damn, too, political leaders in my country and elsewhere who are prepared to accept indefinite killing and mutilation of women and children in the interests of what, precisely?

Books. A free copy of Leila Berg’s Flickerbook, which is one of CBe’s touchstone books, will be sent with the next 12 online orders. Berg: immigrant Jewish family, Manchester, defiantly left-wing and an activist for the welfare of children all her life.

Tony Lurcock’s Uncommon Places, a commonplace book by the author/compiler of a trilogy of books about Finland published by CBe that stretched to four volumes, was recommended in the TLS last week; it’s not a CBe book but is available from the website.

Books alone do not save lives. But they are voices too and my work is to get some of them heard. Either for yourself or as a present for others, see the Season Tickets on the website home page: 6 books of your own choice for £45, or 12 for £80.
Charles Boyle, Lives. Books.

To begin, I want to acknowledge the obvious: It has been an awful two months. We have watched the genocide of the Palestinian people day in and day out. There is no ignoring this or sidelining it. The press has done what it could to raise money and voice solidarity, but it feels like very little. Regardless of how it may feel, though, the important thing is to keep paying attention. Simply to acknowledge that it is happening — that Israel is committing genocide with the support of our own government and most of the Western world — is an act of defiance against those who want to erode our memory and sense of reality. And so you have to keep saying it:

END THE GENOCIDE. END THE OCCUPATION. FREE PALESTINE.

As I’ve made clear, the press is committed to freedom in Palestine, and more specifically, it is in alignment with the aims of BDS and PACBI. I will be saying more about this soon in a separate post, specifically regarding my decision to leave Wix, an Israeli company, which I’ve been using for the press’s website. Although BDS has not singled out Wix for boycott themselves, they have officially recognized and endorsed the organic boycott that has been raised against the company. My year long subscription with them runs out Dec. 19th, 2023, and I’ve cancelled the auto-renew on that. Meanwhile, I’ve been building a new one on Squarespace.
R.M. Haines, Summary & Receipts for Fall ’23

They keep their hands raised as they walk
but the soldiers shoot anyway.

There is gunfire everywhere.
There are explosions everywhere.

Flares set fire to the night
so the soldiers can keep shooting.

The next-to-the-youngest one
digs her baby brother out of the rubble.
Jason Crane, POEM: Virginia/Gaza

Some poems take on experimental shapes. The poem “Yes” is a repetition of the word “no” shaped as the word yes so the reader is not immediately seeing what the speaker is saying. An abuser interprets a victim’s words as consent even if the victim is not consenting. Or shifts the blame, “look what you made me do”. Other poems use redaction to show how victim’s words are shaped and (mis)interpreted. “So [redacted]” observes, “you have taken/ my words my words/ redacted blacked out” and ends,

“I demand the return of my words
[redacted line]

I’ll start with the verbs
they are heavy
perhaps just one for now per sheet
mine to confer
my turn to speak”

From a social worker’s viewpoint, they just need enough information to make a decision, preferably in a form that fits the bureaucracy they need to complete. From a victim’s viewpoint, this is chance to tell their story or to work through and try to make sense of what was happening to them. It is personal. Shaping their story into a form-filling exercise diminishes it and becomes another form of silencing. The poet resists and wants to reclaim her words.

The final poem, “Holding it Together” where she starts to knit, ends

“No-one mentions the fragile edge
beyond the dropped stitch, the lost
idea, the way the whole is a patchwork

of endings.”

Life is still messy, even when someone takes back control of their narrative, explores what happened, the might-have-beens and realises that first drafts are never perfect. They’re merely suggestions that offer alternative endings, but are still worth completing nonetheless.

“Safety Measures Against the Sea” is a subtle exploration of aspects of witnessing and surviving abuse. There is no graphic, explicit description. Katharine Goda has captured that sensation of insecure foundations, that feeling of a life under repair being met with the uncertainly of a new wave or a forever shifting base.
Emma Lee, “Safety Measures Against the Sea” Katharine Goda (Vane Women Press) – book review

The dictionary explains: not all pauses
are preludes to a tapering off or an end.

And pauses are not always instances
of hesitation. Some pauses are brief

stops on the way to an intended destination—
the stop simply provides some kind of rest,

relief; a chance to refuel, after which
the action that came before the pause

comes into play again. Regular
traffic pauses to let a funeral

cortège through: hearse after hearse
after hearse, seemingly without end.
Luisa A. Igloria, Pause

One of the big questions I’ve been sitting with is: who benefits when we share horrific news out of Israel and Gaza? When does that serve a greater purpose, and when does it just harden us? I know we share links with the best intentions — bearing witness, and uplifting voices that need to be heard. (I’m including myself in this!) I’m just… not sure we’re bridging the gaps between echo chambers.

There’s a “gotcha” feeling to so many interactions on social media right now. As though anger were a virus, and whoever makes their fury most contagious, wins. Once you read this, you’ll hate them as much as I do. I notice what happens in me when I read stories of horror and trauma. The turbulence of emotion, the sickened feeling of disbelief. And I wonder: are these feelings actually helping anyone?

I worry that reading these kinds of articles makes it harder to see people on the other side (or those who sympathize with them) as human beings. It harms our capacity for empathy. That’s part of why I make a point of seeking out the voices of both Palestinians and Israelis. (And wow is that painful. I know the distant pain of reading stories doesn’t hold a candle to actual trauma. It still hurts.)

And wow, it sure seems as though a lot of people want to discount any stories of suffering that come from “the other side.” I hear people saying, that’s just propaganda, you can’t trust anything they say. Or sometimes, it’s their own fault, look who they voted into power. And sure, there’s propaganda fueling the war of public opinion. But that doesn’t invalidate the horrors that are also real and true.

If the subtext when we share news or personal stories from Israel or Gaza or the West Bank is, just read this and you’ll see how barbaric Those People are — I don’t think it helps. My fear is that the more we marinate in our feelings of righteous indignation and justifiable fury, the more the world’s rage and polarization benefit extremists who are perfectly happy to ignore their enemy’s humanity.

I don’t know how to end this post. It’s taken me all week to write 400 words. I want to be a source of light rather than heat. The internet does not need more kindling for the world’s angry flames.
Rachel Barenblat, Versus

knocking on the door
the echo salesmen are determined
to make a repetition out of you.
perform the same mistake again
& become a voiceover. i am talking
into a lady bug’s heartache. i am
calling friends i haven’t spoken to
in lifetimes. i say, “do you remember
when we tried to eat the bible?”
Robin Gow, echo suitcase

After watching that video on Instagram I started thinking about my eating, about my body, about what I wanted. I went to bed with these thoughts swirling around in my brain. When I woke up the next day I decided I wanted to change. I didn’t want to continue to fight this monster, I didn’t want to continue to give so much energy into hating myself and my body. So I did something brave. I focused on how I was feeling when I ate and what I was actually craving. I journaled that morning, telling myself I was ready for a new way of living. I went to the gym and had a hard workout but I didn’t record it in the app I’ve used daily for over 5 years. I ate that day when I felt hungry and stopped when I was satisfied. I went to bed that night feeling content and proud.

And then I did the same thing the next day and the next and the next. It’s now been a week since I participated in the behaviors that I’ve held close for so long. It’s hard to let go of habits, it’s hard to rewire my brain into new thinking. But I’m determined to do it, I’m determined to love myself and have a better relationship with food.

And of course because I’m a poet I’ve been writing, albeit rather crappy poems about this. It’s what we do, we write our way through it. This is from an untitled poem, written the day I decided to make a positive change and stop battling my body:

And when I stopped bingeing the world didn’t / crack open but I think, maybe / my heart did.

Courtney LeBlanc, One Week

If you’ve not read Jen Campbell’s Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit, put it on your TBR pile, ask someone to buy it you for Christmas. It’s a thought provoking, superbly crafted collection in which the poet explores health trauma and IVF, loss and belonging, othering, chronic illness and disability. It’s a purposeful collection; to read it is to be taken somewhere and shown something. The poems are bold, often using metaphor to expand the exploration of self, always with attention to craft.

When the book club met to chat about it, it’s no surprise that there were wide ranging topics explored – health, healing, the doctor’s perspective, the patient perspective, trauma, what it means to be a woman in a health environment, craft, decision making in poetry composition. It was, I think, one of the best meet ups yet and I came away feeling energised and full of that particular joy that sharing book-love brings. Jen has very kindly given up her time to answer the book club questions with typical honesty and thought. Thank you Jen.

To what extent was writing Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit a healing process, and what was the emotional cost of writing the collection?

Perhaps it began, naively, as a kind of healing process. I started writing Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit in 2020, when it had already been several years since my first IVF appointment. As the collection progressed and I could feel the book stitching itself together, I decided to tell my editor I’d have it finished by winter 2022 (not to be unromantic but I work better when a deadline is involved). Winter 2022 would also be the end of another IVF cycle, so I knew I might be pregnant by then or I might not be. I was writing towards an unknown ending; wherever my body found itself, the poems would have to meet me there.

At the beginning this was objectively interesting. Yet, as the end date crept closer, and not only was I not pregnant but the whole process had been awful, nothing about it was interesting — and it was certainly not poetic. I’d been extremely ill with Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome; 85% of our embryos had died and the doctors didn’t know why; years of pandemic and shielding were heavier than ever. How ridiculous, I thought to myself, that I’m trying to make a book out of all of this. How absurd that I am trying to craft something, that I am trying to elevate it in some way. I didn’t want to show up — to my writing desk or elsewhere. But I did because, truthfully, I didn’t know what else to do. I felt I’d signed a contract with my body; if it was trying to make something, then my mind would also try to make something. And if my body was trying so hard, it felt wrong to break my side of the bargain. So, I finished it, and I delivered it. (The painful puns are endless, aren’t they?) And, from this side, I honestly don’t know how I did that last part, but I’m glad I did.
Wendy Pratt, “I was writing towards an unknown ending; wherever my body found itself, the poems would have to meet me there.”

I write poetry, but maybe surprisingly, I’ve only ever written one poem directly addressing MS. It’s in a post below (the last I posted before I stopped blogging in 2022). I’ve written about it in other ways, but I’ll come back to that another time.

MS is something that needs a voice. Julie Stevens is a poet who gives it that voice. You know that wonderful thing that happens when you read a poem and you think, yes, I understand, I feel like that. Well, if you’ve got MS and you read Julie’s poems I think you’ll feel like that. And if you haven’t got MS, I think it will help you understand.

Sometimes I see a poem and think that really speaks to me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a poem and thought that really speaks for me. With Julie’s poems, that’s what I think.

If you don’t know her poetry, please try it. Her new book ‘Step into the Dark’ is now out, available from her website jumpingjulespoetry.com or from The Hedgehog Poetry Press. See the reviews – they’ll give you even more reason to read it. Julie has MS, but more importantly, she is a wonderful poet.
Sue Ibrahim, Julie Stevens

was i a petal waiting
for the sun’s eye to open

or the sky who chased
a small bird into breath

when did i learn that blue
is the planet of our death
Grant Hackett [no title]

It snowed and slowly I awoke, slowly I remembered that I was born a winter person, born for adapting. I remember now, that I have few but vital knowings: How to Protect from the Wind, How to Keep the Blood Warmed in Freezing Conditions. How to adapt my eyes to the dimness, how to become, in fact, intolerant of light. And my essential nature–how my skin shrinks from the breath of the sun. How I was born fighting against the elements, how it changes you when you’re delivered at birth into the shock of chill wind and deep frozen white, when you must choose early and wisely your methods of survival, when you are weaned on tales of frostbite and the lengths others before you have gone to keep from dying of cold. It changes you, to know that you must always carry with you the tools of survival: Matches in a waterproof tin. A blade with which to stab your prey. A fur to protect the heart. And of course, the dexterity to build a fire in the wilderness, in the dead of winter, everything hostile and incurably damp.
Kristen McHenry, Winter People

I’ve long been on FB, Instagram, and Twitter/ X, preferring the latter, where I try to be a writer in conversation with other writers rather than performing some version of my personal self via partial news and mediocre photography. Twitter, hence, was my favorite of the sites. While X occasionally feels like the old days and I’m still more likely to hear about the latest literary controversy there than elsewhere, it’s extra toxic now, throwing up random right-wing posts in my notifications, for instance. Nor does anybody sane want to support Elon Musk’s business ventures. So while I still check it a couple of times a week, I do so very briefly. For a while I tried Mastodon as a replacement, but I was never able to curate a rewarding feed. Now I’m trying to build community on Bluesky and Threads, with a preference for the former, where I seem to have more positive literary interactions. I’m @LesleyMWheeler in most places and would love to friend more of my poetry-blog-reading-and-writing people, so let me know if you need one of the invite codes Bluesky requires of new users.

Why, though, would an introvert be on any of them? I started FB as a way of communicating with distant friends and family when I had the Fulbright in New Zealand, encouraged by the poet Ned Balbo in particular, who swore you could get a lot out of it by engaging for 5-10 minutes a couple of times per week. I’ve disliked many of FB’s algorithm shifts, but I still appreciate some personal and professional news I find there. I started Instagram to follow my college-age daughter, and I can’t even remember when and why I joined Twitter. The general goals are 1) to learn things and 2) to be visible as a participant in the literary world. If I were famous maybe I’d just quit–social media doesn’t contribute much to my happiness–but it just seems impossible to find readers without it. And I have a poetry book, Mycocosmic, scheduled for winter 2025 publication; I’ve just started querying agents about my new novel, Grievous. The last year has been quiet-ish but I will need platforms. Nor would it be worthwhile to just appear sporadically to promote my own projects and hop off again. I see plenty of those feeds, and they’re dull. They certainly don’t create a sense (an illusion, perhaps) of human connection.
Lesley Wheeler, Socially antisocial

Last night, online, I saw Mary Mulholland, Paul Stephenson, Lesley Sharpe, Fiona Larkin, Chris Hardy and Helen Ivory.

I may have got the titles mixed up, but I think the pieces I liked best were Mary Mulholland’s “pig town, o the shame of you”, Paul Stephenson’s “Button” and Fiona Larkin’s “Beach”. I’ve not seen Helen Ivory read before though I’ve read 2 of her books. I liked much of what she read without any particular poem standing out.

For slow listeners like me it was useful to have the text shown during the readings – about half the poets provided this facility.

I’m still thinking about the use of the chat facility. At this event the remarks were not followed up by the emcee or other attendees. Sometimes they mentioned particular poems. More often (understandably) they were lists of adjectives.
Tim Love, Red Door Poets at Milton Keynes Lit Fest (Zoom)

Identity follows action. But if I’m not writing a poem, how can I call myself a poet?

Most of the time I am in a moment of waiting. For the poem I want to write (but cannot) to arrive. For it has to start with some scratchy fragment of language, never an idea. There is no other way.

This is especially true after publishing a book, when I enter a phase of persuading myself that the whole thing was an illusion that happened to someone else, that no poem is on its way and is unlikely to happen again.

This is the normal pattern of things. It requires a lot of trust, of sitting in the darkness, and waiting.

I am in that darkness now.

Happy Advent.
Anthony Wilson, Advent meditation, 2 December 2023

Poetry as Spellcasting, written and edited by Tamiko Beyer, Destiny Hemphill, and Lisbeth White is a beautiful collection of essays and poetry about the ways in which poetry connects to and reflects the sacred, spiritual, and magical — and the ways the author use the act of writing poetry as a sacred practice, a form of healing, a method for connecting with ancestors and community, and a path toward building a better future. In addition to the essays and poetry, the book includes prompts and suggestions to delving into poetry while staying grounded and connected to spirit.

In the essay “Articulating the Undercurrent,” Dominique Matti writes:

“I learned that it was possible to feel what one could not otherwise know. And that I could transmit feeling where rational explanation failed, by using poetry like a lyre — plucking invisible energetic strings. I discovered that where no one would cry for me, my poetry could conjure easy tears. And when my spirit could not represent itself in mundane gesture, it could rise up and shout in verse.”

In “Text of Bliss,” Kenji C. Lui writes:

“There is a time and place for the poetry of comfort and contentment, the poem that pleases aesthetically even if the subject is difficult. Beyond that, I think my poetry goal is to break something. Not in the sense of something broken in my interior, a confession and healing, but instead a methodical attempt to

break certain aspects of

this world.

. . . to bring to a crisis [their] relation with language.“

In “Poetry as Prayer,” Hyejung Kook writes:

“Rilke says, ‘Every angel is terrifying.’ But what if you are the angel? What if the power you are afraid to call upon and know is your own power? Consider the possibility that the outward address of poetry as prayer was actually an inner invocation, a tapping into our own divine and enlightened self.”
Andrea Blythe, Culture Consumption: November 2023

my mind a head of a train window
on a journey without a destination
scenes pass me poems
poems pass me scenes
bonging in like texts

always facing backwards
station names pass misspelled by speed
like anagrams of my past
so many sidings shunted
so many signals jumped
the lines shining under flattened pennies
closing my eyes upon a thought
Jim Young, picture this

I don’t know why I decided to keep the two small, gold-rimmed, Royal Albert plates that were on display, in the same position, for years, in the old oak cupboard in the front room. After all, what use would I have for them, these bone china, fragile, smaller-than-saucer plates in my kitchen of plain white, dishwasher proof crockery?

But … they share our evenings now. They’ve held a single welshcake, chocolate truffles, a crescent or two of frozen mango, and, more recently, slices of Waitrose’s, or Tesco’s, or M&S’s iced fruit cake, the ‘bar’ one, not the round one. They feel as if they were made for this – sweet, rich cake crested with icing and marzipan on a halo of pink roses and a flourish of gold.

We can’t always know what will matter to us. Sometimes it’s worth ignoring the voices of logic and reason and, at the last minute, slipping beauty and memory into a small box and forgetting about them … until we don’t.

late autumn sunlight
illuminates a field of frost
memories of my parents
Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Beauty, Memory

I’m very happy, and grateful to editor Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, to have a poem in the latest, landmark (i.e. fiftieth) edition of London Grip, available here, in good company. It’s a follow-up to my poem ‘Half Board at the Alum Sands Hotel’, which was published in The Evening Entertainment and subsequently also at The Beach Hut, here.

I like the idea of threading themes and the ongoing adventures of characters through collections, as if the reader is greeting old friends. If and when my second collection ever appears, it will include two poems which feature characters (other than my family) who appeared in poems in The Evening Entertainment.
Matthew Paul, New poem – ‘Half Board at the Alum Sands Hotel Again’

So excited about this publication, for several reasons. Excited that doctors will be reading this poem, one of a series that will form my next book. Excited for my parents, who, since I got a Biology degree, always wanted me to be a doctor – well, at least I can now say I was published in JAMA. And excited for the thoughtful editor’s note that accompanies the poem.

Here is a screenshot of what the print version looks like, and links to the poem and note online:

“Persephone Explains Global Warming”

Editor’s note on the poem by Rafael Campo
Jeannine Hall Gailey, “Persephone Explains Global Warming” appears in JAMA!

‘Long-awaited debut’ is a cheesy cliché in the poetry world, but it’s actually true of Hard Drive (Carcanet, 2023), Paul Stephenson’s first full collection, following three stellar pamphlets that had left readers wondering how he might deal with a broader canvas. Throughout those pamphlets, if anything had defined Stephenson as a poet, it was the feeling that his writing was indefinable. Impossible to pin down, refusing to be pigeonholed, his principal aim seemed to be a constantly evolving exploration of the genre’s possibilities.

The above backdrop is key to an understanding of Hard Drive, which revolves around a series of elegies for a partner. It’s often stated that elegies are ideal for poets to stretch themselves and push their boundaries, due to the inherent attempts to capture something that lies beyond the capacity for expression of human language. As a consequence, they lend themselves perfectly to Paul Stephenson’s approach to poetry. In these poems, his inquisitive method revolves around a continuous and continual reinvention of itself, desperately thrusting into the indescribable agonies of loss.
Matthew Stewart, Dislodging preconceptions, Paul Stephenson’s Hard Drive

Masaya Saito’s translation of Sanki Saitō’s Kobe and Kobe Sequel in a single volume can, in a sense, be read as a companion piece to his wonderful Selected Haiku 1933–1962, particularly as it helps the reader understand the shift in Sanki’s practice of haiku writing, but it also has enormous interest as a memoir in its own right.

Sanki’s time in Kobe began under a number of shadows. Not long released from prison, having been incarcerated as part of a police crackdown on the ‘unpatriotic’ New Rising Haiku movement, he abandoned his wife and child, and, as it turns out another woman and his love child, to seek a kind of anonymous freedom in a somewhat seedy long-stay hotel in Kobe in a Japan in the grip of a war fever he failed to share.

His fellow residents are, for the most part, foreigners of dubious legality and prostitutes, and ‘unpatriotic folk’ whose presence attracted the attentions of ‘people from the prefectural office and the plainclothes military police’, who became regular visitors to Sanki’s home.

This level of observation probably contributed to his reluctance to break the ban on writing haiku, but what we have instead is a fascinating record of life in wartime Japan that serves to undermine stereotypes of a population driven by nationalistic fervour; Sanki paints a vivid picture of extreme poverty, hunger, and uncertainty. His personal life, living with one of the hotel’s resident bar girls, Namiko, and working as a supplier of materials that barely existed to munitions companies, spending much of his ‘work’ time idly sitting around an office, was one of tedium and anxiety. This was alleviated by the occasional visitor from his Tokyo past and by the at times ridiculous escapades of his neighbours.

What emerges is a sense of his own limitations:

Little by little I have grown to understand that my writing has but one purpose, which is to reveal the stupidity of one being, known as Saitō Sanki. That is why these tales seem not to be written for anyone but myself. Though they may cause me dishonor in the eyes of future generations, I desire to expose the full extent of my witlessness, which can strike at the worst of all possible moments.

Towards the end of the war, conscious of the impending dangers, Sanki and Namiko moved to a rented house above the city just before the hotel was utterly destroyed by US bombing. This house would serve as a focal point for a regathering of his New Rising peers.

As the war came to an end and the German sailors and Japanese police were replaced by Americans, Sanki slowly returned to haiku, and as readers of the Selected will know, his style moved closer to classical haiku, with its seasonal words and emphasis on direct personal experience. One impetus behind this development is spelled out here:

With the end of the war I once again began writing haiku, which I had not done since the summer of 1940. Since the repression of the New Rising Haiku movement, I had tried to find a new direction for my life. That blank period of five years was a time of introspection for the movement also, though I would never suggest this as a justification for repression. For me, this period allowed me to discover the connection between classical haiku, which I read in a book kept on a shelf in an air-raid shelter, and the spirit of New Rising Haiku.

One haiku from this period is quoted, alongside a description of the circumstances surrounding its composition, an insight into the blending of the personal and public that is worth the price of admission alone:

Hiroshima –
to eat a boiled egg,
a mouth opens.

Perhaps as a result of the hardships of his life in prison and then during the Kobe years, Sanki’s later haiku often focus on what he calls ‘the quiet shadow of death’ and his sense of his own mortality, and yet, the poems of this period are marvellous achievements, as anyone who reads the Selected can attest.
Billy Mills, The Kobe Hotel: Memoirs, Sanki Saitō trans. Masaya Saito: A Review

I must admit I found it hard work reading this translation straight through. I’ve had the same difficulty with other versions. It’s a difficulty in the substance of the work rather than the style of the translator. Though I admire the craftsmanship and cheeky wit with which Ovid links tales, in the end I find their sheer mass too repetitious and lacking in sustained narrative impetus. The great joy is in dipping. Reading like that, even the shortest tales open on riches – witness the immense afterlife of Midas’ misadventures in many versions, or the haunting power Titian found in the little anecdote of Marsyas’ flaying. Soucy’s Commentary gives lavishly helpful guidance to the piecemeal reader, noticing links and making comparisons between different tales.

For the general reader, in fact, this copious Commentary is a real treasure chest, something that can be enjoyed as a lucky dip box of information about the Greek and Roman worlds, regardless of a particular note’s specific reference to the Metamorphoses. Written in a chattily digressive style, it’s fun to browse through on the hunt for interesting titbits, like the fact that the ancient Greeks kept weasels domestically, as pets and mouse-catchers. However, such things are just amuse-bouches to the main fare. They’re interwoven with extensive examinations of aspects of Greek and Roman culture and attitudes, with reflections on Ovid’s handling of particular themes in different stories, with comments on particular points of narrative technique, and with direct expressions of Soucy’s subjective reaction to characters and events. All these are offered in a clear, engagingly personal style.

In both translation and commentary two major strands are the desire to bring out the subversive, antiheroic nature of the Metamorphoses and to give full weight to their erotic elements, particularly their erotic violence. As Soucy’s website informs us, he himself is gay and biracial. He’s refreshingly sensitive to the way contemporary concerns with sexual and identity politics can feel urgently addressed by the Metamorphoses. Equally refreshing, from the other side, is the fact that as a scholar he feels the value and importance of seeing past attitudes clearly, neither discreetly veiling elements in them that might affront a contemporary sensibility – as many translators have done with divine rapes – nor reading them as if Ovid were our contemporary and saw life as we do.
Edmund Prestwich, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A New Translation by C. Luke Soucy – review

The wren is hidden
among the leaves of the ash
and sings without ceasing.

And the púca sings
in the depths of the sea,
‘The water is poisoned with oil
and the krill are scarce. We are hungry
and choking on plastic.
There are small boats, sinking
beneath the weight of sorrow
and the men with guns who turn
the lost ones away from their coasts.’

And the völva is casting the runes.
The leather bag is thick,
tough and unbending,
and gives away no secrets,
but the stones mutter
and grind against each other.
The black angular lines –
tree, hammer, wealth,
ocean, ice – will come together,
fall in the right configuration,
give their bleak verdict soon enough.
Elizabeth Rimmer, Hope for Cop 28

In most public libraries, the hardest books to locate are small-press poetry titles; but the campus library has a good selection of those and, as a former employee, I can drive over there when searching out poetry collections. This means that I will still purchase the occasional new or hard-to-locate poetry books by writers whose work I feel I simply must possess. It’s a big challenge to get over that hurdle of needing to own books, though. A series of full bookshelves feels somehow comforting to me. I’d much rather divest myself of clothing, shoes, jewelry, electronic devices, furniture, craft supplies, maybe even artwork or gardening tools, than part with my books…especially the poetry collections and the philosophy texts.

I’ll keep those for now. But I will also return this $65.96-worth of books to my local library and borrow another $66-worth of books in their place.
Ann E. Michael, Local libraries

Born in Surrey to Iranian refugees, Nina Mosall attended Kwantlen Polytechnic University and the University of British Columbia, in which she obtained her BA in Creative Writing and MA in Library Studies. Currently working as a librarian, she writes poetry during her spare time when she is not singing and reading to babies, or helping seniors figure out how to use cell phones. Her poetry and short stories have appeared frequently in Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s literary magazine, Pulp, and in the literary magazine, Event. Bebakhshid is her debut poetry collection, which explores Middle Eastern identity, immigration, familial relationships, and the romance of everyday life. […]

How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Without sounding pretentious, I think poetry is in my blood. I’m Iranian, and my father was born and raised in the city of Shiraz, known as the “city of poets.” My father recited and read many Persian poems to me as a child, so it definitely wasn’t a form I was unfamiliar with. But overall, poetry came to me secondary in the trajectory of my life. I initially thought myself a fiction writer, and had been slowly working up to full length novels by writing tons of short stories in my highschool years. During my time there, a teacher had told me that poetry wasn’t my strong suit, and to stick to fiction instead – as a very serious, sensitive, and insecure kid, I took that sentiment to heart and didn’t doubt it for a second. It wasn’t until my time in university that I felt permission to experiment and explore where my gut told me to go. That’s when I got serious about poetry. […]

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?
In relation to Bebakhshid, I think a concern I explored was, “will I ever understand?”

Some of the questions I had during the process of writing the poems that ended up in the book were in relation to understanding my parents, their varied past, and my cultural and religious roots. Who are these people who raised me aside from being the people who raised me? What was their experience in and out of Iran during a time of immense political tension? What was their experience being refugees? What are they going through? Who am I in relation to my parents? Who am I in relation to my culture? I also had a lot of questions about familial relationships, as that has always been an area of concern and fascination with me. What does it take to be a family? What kind of bonds occur? Will my family ever be happy? Will I ever understand what it means to have a family bond? Etc.

Currently, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like the book was published so I could move on with my life. I still grapple with these questions and topics, but to go back to that book and fully explore it again feels like I’d be moving backwards in my writing and personal life. Although it is my first and something I hold dear, I also feel a bit combative towards my book now. I resent having the writer-of-colour label and tokenism that comes with it. I’m currently tired of exclusively focusing and talking about my ethnic and cultural identity. Books take a few years to publish, and so it’s been around 4-5 years since the last poem that was written in Bebakhshid. I feel and am different now.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nina Mosall

Thanks so much, Nigel, for this opportunity to go a bit deeper into the process behind one of my poems in my recent pamphlet from Hedgehog, Zoetrope.

I have chosen a poem called ‘Outside the frozen room’, which was written in response to Alex Dimitrov’s poem ‘January’ from his collection Love and Other Poems.

In Alex’s poem, the narrator is stuck in traffic ‘at the end of the frozen room’. His poem evokes the monotony of urban working life and missed opportunities, and suggests breaking out. I love his poem, but I found myself wondering what happened next, and how that escape might pan out. I also wanted to kick a little against the romanticism of the ending. My starting point for the poem was: What would you find if you followed Alex Dimitrov’s call to ‘open the car door and go’?

The answer turned out to be a surreal anti-pastoral.
Nigel Kent, Drop-in by Hilary Otto

We came to unwind, stifle the contraction
of a muscle, ease psychic anxiety, thicken
the moment, elevate life from sorrows revealed —
drizzle honey, find tea to paint with,
wake with, dazzle our eyes, spy, spin words,
sun on a surfing bird, its bright wing, soon
pink lakes that pool in the clouds,
see or imagine them.
Jill Pearlman, A Spectacle and Nothing Strange

It’s been such a satisfying semester. I’ve really enjoyed being back in the physical classroom, teaching in person. I thought that I would, but even so, I’ve been surprised. I’ve really enjoyed being in charge of the Sunday service at Faith Lutheran. My seminary classes have been good, but even more, I’ve enjoyed being an intern for the Southeastern Synod of the ELCA–such great experiences that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I’ve loved living in our Lutheridge house near Asheville. Although I haven’t had time to do all the cool things that the area offers, we’ve gone to a brewery here and there, and I’ve gone to the apple orchard and pumpkin patch.

One of the reasons that I often feel sad as one season shifts to another is that I reflect on how much I enjoyed about the season that is passing. Even when I haven’t enjoyed the day to day of my life as much as I have this past semester, I’ve felt a bit of sorrow at these passages. I see it as the good kind of sorrow, the kind that reminds me of how fortunate I am to have these days/weeks/months that remind me of the delights of life.
Kristin Berkey-Abbot, Last Class Day of the Semester

It is a mistake but I do it anyway, start the day by reading the news, seeing the photographs of the recent disasters, generally human-caused in one way or another. The sight of twisted rebar — the how we unmake the things we made, violently — shakes me. And yet.

On Halloween, we had a few trick-or-treaters and one little gaggle of them giggled up onto our porch. I noticed one little boy in the center shouldering the others a bit roughly. He reached a hand into the bowl I held out and pulled out a handful of candies, which alarmed me, as we didn’t have very much in store and never know from one Halloween to the next how many kids will come. “Oh,” I said, “you don’t want all those…” With one handful he’d put us in the danger zone of no-candy. Then he reached in and took another handful. “Uh, no,” I said, “you can’t take all those.” Then a dad started forward from the dark with a stricken look on his face, and I realized, oh crap, this little guy is neurodivergent and doesn’t know the deal. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.” I figured we’d just turn off the light and be done with the event. And felt for the dad and for the kid, for the long years ahead of confusions and misunderstandings, for the flaws in all of us that make life, well, what it is.

But a little girl, probably the boy’s sister, said, “Here, I’ll give one back.” And she dug into her own stash, and returned her candy bar. Even as I tell you this, I am still moved to tears by this, by all it says about the girl, about the dynamic between those two kids, about all of us, each of us, our flaws and possibilities. And I thought of this poem I encountered over 20 years ago that I still hold dear.
Marilyn McCabe, Made Thing

Rob Taylor: There are a lot of mouths and teeth in Derelict Bicycles: human and animal; open, devouring, singing, speaking, silent. What draws you to images and metaphors around the mouth?

Dale Tracy: Mouths get my attention because they are inside/outside things. Mouths are the inside of us, but they open: we can look right into them. These are points of inordinate access, right on our faces. The fact of a mouth can become fascinatingly unreal, even unsettling, if I keep perversely pushing the thought. I surprise myself in poems frequently because I write something that upsets me—not because it threatens harm but because it opens up some strangeness of existence that I maybe am not really comfortable with. These mischievous thoughts are probably at the heart of my poetry. Well, maybe they are the mouths of my poems.

What we say comes out of the mouth, which is relevant for poetry. But teeth also bring the world into us, as we keep making ourselves. Having multi-purpose body parts is such a strange efficiency. Bringing in the material to keep building our bodies has nothing to do with communication, but they cross each other in the hallway all day long.
Rob Taylor, Uncooperative with the Unexpected: An Interview with Dale Tracy

“Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”
— Chico Mendes, Brazilian environmentalist

***

If when we re-green the earth
so we can re-blue the sky – this
world that is already askew, will
it tilt further? Blocks of light
and air and unfairness that we
built into towers of progress, how
do we reassemble cubist dystopia?
The arc of climate breakdown
bends unevenly towards the
blameless. Where the permafrost
is melting under homes. Where
the sea is swallowing land. Where
a schoolgirl writes 2050 as an
existential question.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Justice

The story I write explains how the future contains a small box the size that might hold a wedding ring. But inside this box is no ring, instead, a nipple. Perfect red raspberry rising from the pink galaxy of its areola. I do not know if it is the left or right only that it is from one whom I love. Think of the difficult borders of nations. Wind rustling trees, moving through fields, over dunes, has a source just as rivers have a source. I carry this box with me always as a guide, a token, a relic. The sound of the ocean in a shell, but which ocean?
Gary Barwin, OCEAN

鏡古りたり梟の声容れて　中村　遥　

kagami furitari fukurō no koe irete

            the mirror

            getting old

            with an owl inside

                                                            Haruka Nakamura

from Haidan, (Haiku Stage) a monthly haiku magazine, February 2019 Issue, Honami Shoten, Tokyo
Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 1, 2023)

Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 39

Dave Bonta — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 23:38:36 +0000

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack. This week, we’re in the thick of it, with odd dreams, recalcitrant language, blockages, burning letters, dwindling daylight, and poems struggling to be born. Enjoy.

For the first time in a long time, I reached for my poetry drafting notebook, to capture two lines that came to me suddenly: “Remember the knife / and the tiny spoon.” These are a cake knife and a salt spoon, brought home from the farmhouse–the spoon because it is so tiny and charming, the knife in case I bake a cake. But who knows what they will be in the eventual poem? It is assembling itself in fragments. “Will there be a piano?” I don’t know where it will go next.
Kathleen Kirk, My Nasturtiums

Watch this space. There is the kernel of a poem in there but at the present it isn’t clear. It’s definitely a case of some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you and some days you both go hungry. Wow! I was looking up the origin of the phrase when I came upon this long thread relating to The Great Lebowski. I love the internet for this sort of thing!
Paul Tobin, ALL THE BEAUTY DRAINS AWAY

who cried eight tears into the heart of each star

who runs the circus of death

whose martyred howl shall be restored as flesh
Grant Hackett [no title]

While a couple new poems have wriggled their way out of the ground, I am still not back to full productivity, but October can sometimes be a fruitful time even with the landscape dying off and folding in for the winter. November is never particularly kind to me, as the last few years have attested, so I am determined to enjoy thoroughly what comes before it.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/1/2023

Our minds take us wherever they need us to be.
Whenever’s another matter but that too.
I remember when we had no particular place to go.
All the same we knew the way.

Cluster bombs of napalm follow orders, are buried with full military honours.
Out on the bright sea something sparkles.
Bob Mee, THIS VIOLENT SKY

In physical chemistry, the critical point is where the temperature and pressure of a substance are both sufficiently high that there is no longer any difference between its liquid and gas states. In mathematics, the critical point is where the rate of change of a variable of interest is undefined or zero. In the rest of the world, anthropogenic climate change is advancing at an ever-increasing rate. Climate scientists warn us that once we cross some critical climate tipping points, there can be no turning back: things will only get worse and the “new normal” will be largely undefined.

Nevertheless, we can guess how things might look. When language fails to describe how we feel about the disasters occurring around us now, we must invent new forms of expression. As the world contorts and reshapes to the stresses we place upon it, we should bear witness and record what is passing, what is coming to be.
Ian Gibbins, Critical Point at FELTspace

In my sighted days I had a very cluttered Windows desktop. Sometimes I would intentionally position an icon so that it overlapped and obscured one of the other icons. One of the mandatory icons was a shortcut to the Training and Development folder. An icon interfered with this, resulting in raining and velopme. I had exotic dreams about a pair of star-crossed lovers from ancient Greek mythology called Raining and Velopme! Maybe it’s like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold … the repair enhancing the beauty.

The opening asks us to consider what if everything was beautiful? Can something only be considered beautiful if we have something that is not beautiful to compare it with? What if the broken then repaired item is more beautiful than the unbroken item? Maybe the average person is more beautiful than the supermodel simply because the scars of life have created a resilience and beauty beneath the surface.
Giles L. Turnbull, This is the Way the Pamphlet Ends

I decided to start Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans, a book so good that it didn’t lull me back to sleep. Eventually, I had to force myself to go to bed. The book so far is about a grad student at Iowa who reveres poetry, but not his fellow grad student poets. In some ways, it seems to be offering an interesting window into the state of literature in the 2020’s, but in others, I suspect that these grad students are going to be very different from most poets I know, poets who are in a very different stage of life. But it’s still an intriguing read.

I just finished Marge Piercy’s Braided Lives, also a book about a poet, but a very different poet. She’s from a working class Detroit background, and the book is set in the 1950’s. She’s working her way through undergraduate school at the University of Michigan. I’ve read it numerous times before, but this time, perhaps I loved it most, and I’m not sure why.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poets on the Pages of Books Then and Now

I loved hearing the poems of my fellow winners, Rachel Spence and Ben McGuire, and Maria’s fantastic poems, also. And what an honour to share our reading space in the gallery with the stunning artwork of Sandra Suubi, selected for this year’s Liverpool Biennial.

Yes, I did wear the second-hand red silk dress (mentioned in my previous post) that arrived at my house folded neatly into a large envelope. Thank you Oxfam Online!
Josephine Corcoran, One Deliberate Red Dress Time I Shone

This week the fatigue has caught up with me. 7 weeks in to this new chemotherapy, and writing is difficult. Mid-sentence I stop typing, because I’m not sure where my thoughts were headed.

Right before I sleep the words come rushing. The images. The poignancy that may or may not have real.

In the evenings, I’ve been trying to concentrate on poetry. Learning to identify dipodic meter. Attempting to write in it. But my attention span is short when I’m sitting still, I can’t get past a quatrain. The body objects to a stillness that is not sleep.

Oddly, the best way to fight fatigue is to exercise. So I am either exercising or falling asleep.
Ren Powell, AWOL with apologies

A good poem can create links and resonances that overload a melody. You can go forward and back, pick up echoes, go slowly through a stanza, stop at a phrase or skip a line. You have time and attention for layers of meaning or step outside a poem altogether to enter a whole new landscape. And you can afford to make every word, every line, new and different. A reader has the headspace to pay attention.

Listening to a song is very different. Familiarity is important. Simplicity and space is important. Rhymes matter, because a good rhyme might be predictable, but it is as welcoming as a well-prepared cadence. It doesn’t matter if you have filler syllables the way it would in a poem:

The weary earth we walk upon
She will endure when we are gone
Karine Polwart Rivers Run

because the voice makes good use of them. Words are there to guide you through the music, and the music is there to interpret the words. You may visit the realms of thought and imagination, but more likely you will find your emotions stirred and become deeper acquainted with your heart. Writing a good lyric is a synthesis, and requires knowing what not to do, how to create space, when to leave well alone. A poem that falls flat on the page (like most of Burns, as far as I am concerned) can fly as a song.
Elizabeth Rimmer, The Words of Mercury

In their strange cosmogony predating Copernicus by two millennia, the ancient Greek scientific sect of the Pythagoreans placed at the center of the universe a ball of fire. It was not hell but the heart of creation. Hell, Milton told us centuries and civilizations later, is something else, somewhere else: “The mind is its own place,” he wrote in Paradise Lost, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

Grief and despair, heartache and humiliation, rage and regret — this is the hellfire of the mind, hot as a nova, all-consuming as a black hole. And yet, if are courageous enough and awake enough to walk through it, in it we are annealed, forged stronger, reborn.

That is what the non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson celebrates in her shamanic poem “Center of the Universe,” found in her extraordinary collection The Kissing of Kissing (public library), song of the mind electric, great bellowing yes to life.
Maria Popova, Center of the Universe: Non-Speaking Autistic Poet Hannah Emerson’s Extraordinary Poem About How to Be Reborn Each Day

I’m not convinced the pigs know what dessert is but they seem to have survived their nightly road crossing, so far. The scene they create is timeless enough to be considered for embellishing a decorative jar. Better still if humans weren’t around to interfere and build roads that endanger the pigs in the first place. Harsh, perhaps but the rhythm is gentle and the language simple so it doesn’t feel didactic.

In the title poem, a ginkgo tree, thick with age, offers shelter to Taoist poets, one of whom calls it “A Tree Becomes a Room” […]
Emma Lee, “A Tree Becomes a Room” J P White (White Pine Press) – book review

Did I ever tell you about the time I was on an AWP shuttle bus and a publicist’s assistant told me that my sacral chakra was blocked? We were chatting about reiki, so I’m clearly receptive to that kind of random conversational offering, but it’s pretty bold to diagnose a stranger. I instantly knew that I’d landed in a funny creative-writing-conference anecdote. What surprised me was that it also felt like a serious and sincere exchange: she was trying to be helpful, and for my part, I suspected she was onto something.

I don’t use the term “writer’s block” because I find it unhelpfully mystifying. There are tons of reasons to feel paralyzed at the keyboard: fear that you have nothing worthwhile to say; fear of certain audiences’ criticism; illness and exhaustion; and the sheer difficulty of articulating some material, for emotional or intellectual reasons. Blockage IS a perfectly good metaphor for those obstacles; I’ve certainly spent years of my life getting in my own way. But I have to diagnose the obstruction in a more specific way before I clear it. Plus, calling it a “block” implies complete stoppage, and I seem to spend my writing time discovering side roads. If I can’t write a poem, maybe writing a blog will show me what I’m bothered by. If I can’t bear to finish that article, could it be the wrong project? Do I need to re-route completely?
Lesley Wheeler, Blockage, re-routing, clearance

The story of her suicide seems, like many suicides, improbable. She jumped/fell off the bleachers of Warren McGuirk Alumni Stadium in Hadley, Massachusetts. At the time, I remembering one of her sons protesting that she would never have committed suicide. Now the narrative of her jumping seems the single story. But anyone who has studied suicide knows that women rarely jump, or shoot themselves, or do anything that distorts the body.

She came from a family of ten children, was married three times, and had two sons. None of these are points of connection with my life and yet I deeply connected with her poems. Poems that often spoke of the dead; of the thin veil between this world and the next. Image and sound, the real turning into the surreal.
Susan Rich, The Lasting Work of Deborah Digges

Somewhere in time the mother is depressed. The child doesn’t know this, the child has never heard of depressed. The child watches the mother from behind her eyelash curtain, not knowing this is the beginning of secrecy. She watches for the slightest upturn of her mother’s lips, for the lines on her forehead to smooth out like waves on a sunny, sandy beach. The child has never been to the beach but she’s seen it on TV, broad and sparkling like thousands of smiles.
Charlotte Hamrick, Curtained

Under a froth of mosquito netting, an island
from which to push off toward sleep. You tucked
every fold carefully around the mattress, leaving
no space. In the ceiling or in the floor, some houses
held a secret door—one rusted handle coupled with
an iron slide lock. Before the grownups retired for
the night, sometimes they walked around the house
perimeter, checking windows or scattering salt.
Luisa A. Igloria, Allowance (3)

Contrasting Kinetic Kissing with Mekong Delta shows something of the range and variety of the collection. This is also a poem about relationships, but very different in form, tone and style. There’s is no hyperbole on this occasion: it is infused with melancholic realism. The narrator in the poem has kept some love letters from an old boyfriend. The opening line, ‘They’re white as rice that wasn’t thrown at us’, suggests that this had been a very close relationship that might have resulted in marriage given more conducive circumstances. However, the lover served and died in Vietnam. She had kept his letters, meaning ‘to re-read, gather them for warmth’, but she resolves to burn them instead: ‘I light a match, red breast flames releasing/ Angels illegible in their ascent.’
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Apprenticed to the Night’ by LindaAnn LoSchiavo

I dream of elevators
in a large hotel. A wish
to be lifted up? One is
too crowded, the next
stops at floor nineteen,
my room on seventeen.
As I realize I could
walk down two flights,
the doors close, reopen
on floor twelve, my fear
of yielding control
justified.
Ellen Roberts Young, Thinking about dreams

I’m facing a blank grey concrete wall.
The desk came in a flat-pack box.
I assembled it with the included
Allen wrench, named after the
Allen Manufacturing Company
of Hartford, Connecticut,
the town where my father was born.

An Allen wrench is also called a hex key.
Will it, if properly applied, free me
from this curse?
Jason Crane, First Poem At A New Desk

In the Dean Koontz interview I mentioned last weekend, he also said something interesting, if a bit harsh. He said that if you’re constantly writing yourself into a corner, then perhaps you’re not meant to be a writer.

Harsh, because I don’t think it’s anyone’s place to tell anyone else that they’re not meant to be a writer.

Harsh too, because I am literally constantly writing myself into corners.

I have written myself into so many corners my home office is actually the shape of a megagon.

Finding one’s way out of such corners, I suppose, is part of the satisfaction of writing. It is also, at least for me personally, part of the anguish. It feels as if I never know if I will actually make it back toward the other side of the room, where there are merciful doors and windows, or if I will stay in this particular corner for yet another week, month, year, eternity.
Becky Tuch, How do you get out of a writing corner?

All I want is house filled with color.
A little bit of privacy.
A green vine.
A sky filled with water and sun.
Carey Taylor, Enough

How did your first book change your life? The first book truly gave me confidence. It confirmed that it was possible to do this thing I thought impossible which was to write and publish a book of poems. How does your most recent work compare to your previous? Aurora Americana and my previous book, Radioactive Starlings, are both thinking through the notion of place. They are doing this in different ways but the notion of place is the link by which they connect. How does it feel different? Aurora Americana is a dawn book. Most of the poems take place during or close to dawn. I’ve never centered time in this way. […]

I write every day. I wake up very early, before sunrise. I like to have that new day’s sunlight fall over the page as I write. I usually write for four hours in the morning. I end the morning writing session with a run. I dedicate the evenings to revision.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Myronn Hardy (rob mclennan)

The end of September brought rain (from Tropical Storm Ophelia) and cool weather. I returned from Chicago, the most recent leg of my book tour and spend a whole week with my pups – hiking muddy trails and getting out as much as the quickly fading daylight would let us.

I love fall – the cool weather, the turning leaves. But I hate that the sun is setting earlier each day, that I have to rush home after work to try to sneak in time on the trails. Still, I appreciate every mile and every minute we spend outside.
Courtney LeBlanc, Autumn is Here

Welcome to October! Here we had a weekend of cool sunshine after a week of a deluge of cold, crazy hard rain. I had a new fairy tale poem appear in the journal The Broken City and a kind new review of Flare, Corona in TAB journal. I had a really delightful Zoom book launch with Malaika and Redheaded Stepchild Lit Mag and a wonderful group of North Carolina readers and writers. We also had book club (We read The Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes of New England at Bookwalters in Woodinville, and we chose Osamu Dazai’s Blue Bamboo for next month), plus a Supermoon! And I got together with an old friend to catch up and wonder through a sunflower maze. Whew! I am ready for sleep.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Welcome October! A Busy Week: Reading Reports, Supermoons, Writing Friend Dates, New Poems and New Reviews of Flare, Corona and Pumpkin Farm Visits

After we’ve whispered the name of our country like a curse and a cure.

After mistaking rupture for rapture and exit for exist.

After we’ve stuffed all our love and differences into a time capsule, telling ourselves we’ll revisit them on our deathbed—
Rich Ferguson, After and Before

The third level he identifies is being willing to ask for help in promoting your work. Yeah, this is tough. It’s a little “please, sir, I want some more”-ish, in that I’m holding out my work in trembling hands to the Great Creative Orphanage Master who will sputter down at my little bowl astonished at my temerity and utter, “What!”

But of course, it’s not that way at all. There is no such orphanage, nor master. My bowl is not empty. I am not seeking gruel. I’m just one among many looking to complete the circle of creation: a writer wants a reader, a painter wants a viewer.

There are in this world people who can help you get read or viewed. It may seem like they’re gatekeepers, that is, that some people slip through skippingly and the portcullis slams down on the rest of us. But it’s not really that way. People by and large like to help other people. Not all the helpers can help all the seekers. That’s just a fact. But many help many. And sometimes the one who is helped is you, and sometimes it isn’t.
Marilyn McCabe, So much younger than today; or, On the Art of Being Helped

“Life is as stuffed with episodes as a mattress is with horsehair, but a poet (according to Aristotle) … must remove all stuffing from his story, even though real life consists of nothing but precisely such stuffing.” An interesting detour into the apparently meaningless episodes that happen and are forgotten though Kundera points out that “In infinity every event, no matter how trivial, would meet up with its consequences and unfold into a story.” That is if we, like god, were eternal.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Reading list update -16

If there was ever a time to learn to set boundaries, it was when I needed to work to a deadline, on my own published book. Alongside taking the app off my phone, I began to say no to unpaid and low paid work, I began to change my own working patterns, I moved to Substack and I took a risk on myself as a writer, or to put it another, more healthy way – I invested in myself as a writer. My wages dropped, initially, but though growth is slow, growth is growth. I am making it work.

A couple of days ago I logged into facebook and felt a familiar sense of dread and guilt. Because I’d not been on the site for a while I had missed so many people’s news – sad news and happy news – I felt a terrible guilt to have missed birthdays and anniversaries and competition wins and publishing news etc. And it was at that point that I realised that Facebook was no longer enjoyable, I found that it provoked anxiety rather than joy.
Wendy Pratt, Leaving Facebook

Last month Tesserae: A mosaic of poems by Zimbabwean women, was released into the world. Working on this book with Samantha Vazhure, founder and editor of Carnelian Heart Publishing, and the wonderful poets whose voices are featured within its pages, has been an immensely rewarding experience.

During the Q&A session following the book launch on Twitter/X Spaces, a participant asked: what poetry do we as poets read? It’s an interesting question to unravel. I’ve been thinking how my answer would have evolved over time.

At my all-girls’ school in the nineteen-seventies, English literature was exactly that: English. It was also dominated by men. We read Chaucer and Shakespeare, John Donne and Andrew Marvell, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelley, Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen. Golden daffodils fluttered and danced in the breeze; brooks bickered from haunts of coot and hern, whatever those might be, while outside our classroom the African sun blazed and jacaranda trees wept purple tears.
Marian Christie, What poetry do we as poets read?

october
in the corner of every window
a sleeping snail
Jim Young [no title]

Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 27

Dave Bonta — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 23:09:12 +0000

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack. This week: the joys of summer, including friends, community, celebrations and get-togethers of all sorts. Plus: walking away from certain journals, becoming a city poet laureate, experimental poetry books, the second Langport Moot, and more. Enjoy.

The weather’s gone from dry to wet–we are experiencing the region’s much more typical summer now, humid and hot with frequent rainstorms. As for my writing, it’s gone the other direction…I am in a dry spell. Garden gets prolific; I get, well, not prolific. The heat takes motivation and inspiration right out of my body, it seems!

But I’m accomplishing tasks of other types which may, eventually, lead to drafting poems and revising work again before too long. Tackling my “office” at home (it is actually a book-lined hallway) means that I’m finding forgotten drafts and ideas, folders of possible inspirations, old letters and cards, and lots of duplicated documents I can happily discard. The challenge is to remove what’s no longer necessary while at the same time figuring out a simple and easy-to-recall strategy for organizing what I want to keep.

I have even managed to give away a couple of cartons of books. Not so many that my existing collection actually fits on my current shelf space, but hey–it’s a start! Getting rid of books is hard. It is much easier to give away zucchinis….
Ann E. Michael, Wet, dry

After my reading a lady came over to read aloud the poems she liked from it to her husband who missed it. They laughed, said they were great and left it on the table unbought. Ah well, to reach people is the thing. All poetry is not for profit.
Pearl Pirie, Chelsea Author’s Market

So, over the holiday weekend, my friend writer editor and publisher Kelli Russell Agodon and I snuck away for a few days at a local lodge to work on our manuscripts, talk poetry, goof around a little bit but mostly try to make some dents in our work on both of our next books. And I think it was very productive! In just a few days, Kelli and I both had updated versions of our manuscripts (mine hadn’t been touched for about eighteen months) and we got cocktails, went out for sweet potato fries, visited Woodinville’s awesome lavender garden, visited the Lodge’s resident pot-bellied pigs, stayed up late/got up early, and talked poetry. I did that thing where I spread out all the poems on my bed to see how they went together. I think I talked Kelli into putting mermaids in her book (you’ll have to see when it comes out!), and she talked me into putting less plague in my book and more spells.

This also made me feel empowered as a disabled person, because I was able to pull off a trip with a friend without any major illness/disability crises. Sometimes people like me with chronic illnesses and disabilities can feel shut out of the traditional residencies because they’re not particularly handicapped-friendly or they’re someplace far from doctors or the difficulties can just be overwhelming, so I want to suggest this kind of alternative.

I felt so motivated, got so much done, and had such a good time. Grab a friend, find a place to stay for a couple of days (hopefully you’ve scouted out its ADA appropriateness and it has some local attractions around to visit and a good fireside lounge)—you don’t need two weeks or anyone’s permission—try it!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Academy of American Poets Puts Flare Corona on Their Summer Reading List, Writing Retreats with Friends and Working on a New Manuscript (with Supermoon)

This year I was accepted into Vaulting Ambitions, a 5 month incubator program “designed to arm creatives to tackle the business side of their craft.” It’s run by Libby Trainor-Parker and Matthew Trainor at Prompt Creative under a strategic partnership with City of Adelaide.

There’s so much learning going on! I realised I was hungry for this kind of learning, from digital literacy to how to write a pitch letter, it’s hands-on, with practical application, and we’re getting to meet all kinds of industry professionals.

One of the program’s great strengths is the regular check-ins and mentoring sessions. A regular space that holds you accountable can seriously help with ticking off those list and bigger goals.

I think what I’m saying is that the real gift here is community. Being in contact with other creative folk has made me feel less alone, more connected. I’m reminded that everyone experiences challenges when running a solo arts business; and that talking about it with others can help to solve problems and soothe anxiety. I’ve felt a palpable sense of energy, motivation and buoyancy. And I’ve got shit done.
Caroline Reid, Vaulting Ambitions, July23rd Showcase

Recently I spoke to the wonderful and hilarious Jen Hatmaker for her podcast, For the Love, and we talked all about friendship. Coincidentally, the day I spoke to her, I had a whole weekend of plans with friends. That Friday night I went to Metric with Dawn. The next morning I drove 90 minutes to spend the whole day with five of my beloved high school friends. They’d rented a cabin for the weekend, and while I couldn’t get away overnight, I was able to find a sitter to be “home base” for my kids (and Phoebe the Boston terrier) for nine hours so I could sit outside, looking at old yearbooks and photo albums going back to middle school, catching up and most of all cracking up.

The next morning, I had brunch with my friends and neighbors Lisa and Jen, who I get together with at least once a month without fail, and we’re on the group chat in between. We all need this kind of connection, and Jen Hatmaker and I talked about how challenging it can be to find—and maintain—friendships in middle age. I’ll share the podcast conversation when it goes live.

It was a privilege and a joy to speak to grief expert and psychotherapist Megan Devine for her podcast, It’s OK That You’re Not OK. I said, during this conversation, “trauma does not give you a glow up.” I stand by that. It’s OK to let the hard things be, well, hard. Megan is so wise, with a wonderful sense of humor, and I hope you’ll listen to our conversation—and the other episodes, too.

What else has been bringing me joy? Hanging out with my kids: baking, long walks, bubble tea runs, bookstore adventures, movies all snuggled up together on the couch or sharing a king size pack of Twizzlers in the theater. Binge-watching Veronica Mars with Violet. Riding bikes with Rhett. Trimming my backyard trees and more-giant-weeds-than-actual-trees with a small, battery-powered chainsaw. (Yes, you read that right, a chainsaw. It’s so satisfying, y’all. I’m very careful.) Roadtripping. Writing, even though it’s slow going. Enjoying the summer pace as much as I can.
Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

I made a deal with myself some time ago that my 60th year (which just recently came to a close) would mark the end of my submissions to Poetry Magazine if I hadn’t cracked that market by then. A rejection from them just after my 61st birthday put a bow on that one, and I felt fine about it. Even relaxed. So why not stop with the handful of other journals who consistently send form rejections and never take a poem? So I made a list this week of journals that I am considering dead markets FOR MY WORK, and it was liberating.

When I mentioned this on Twitter, I got all kinds of responses ranging from “Good for you!” to “No! Don’t quit!” I don’t view this as quitting. Quitting would mean I would stop submitting altogether, which despite my current drafting drought, I am not prepared to do.

Thus the title of this post.

Crossing these journals off my list is akin to “walking away” —from a food that will make my stomach protest, from a conversation that is clearly not including me, from a party that is too loud and blaring terrible music. None of those things will kill me, but I am so much happier and more comfortable if I do not partake in them. To overwork the metaphor, I’m looking for a carrot cake that makes me willing to be overfull, an easy, laughter-filled back and forth with a friend, a party where people can hear each other speak and still enjoy a killer playlist.
Donna Vorreyer, Knowing When to Walk Away

Over the years on social media and in real life, I’ve had to distance myself from people who frustrate me, gaslight me, or make me feel negatively. I have no problem doing this, never regret it, because my own emotional and mental health is a priority. I’m pretty good at curating my social media so I rarely see discourse or real negativity. We are allowed to opine now and then. I’m talking about toxic trash. In doing this selective curating I have built an online community that I enjoy – even if I don’t always agree with them. Hell, I don’t want to live in a bubble where everyone thinks exactly like me! How boring that would be.

It feels like a good many people I follow are leaving Twitter, a site that has really helped me connect with other writers. I don’t plan to leave because I haven’t had any of the problems others are upset over. Plus, WTH do I need with yet another SM site to grow and maintain? I feel like what Twitter is doing is similar to the company you work for doing a restructure. Most people my age have been through a few restructures or new owners. They always have to shake things up and do things their way. I’m flexible. It will probably work out.
Charlotte Hamrick, Drama

My poetry manuscript — The Pear Tree: Elegy for a Farm — has won the 2023 Sally Albiso Poetry Award from MoonPath Press.

I’m feeling stunned and honored and — even after a week has gone by — a bit disbelieving.

I’ve shared here some of my process in cobbling this book together, but just to recap, it’s the book that wouldn’t lie down and be “done.” Three years ago in a Hugo House course taught by Deborah Woodard, I rather shamefacedly introduced myself by saying I was working on a book of poems about losing my parents, adding, “I really should be finished with these poems.”

Deborah said, “Maybe the poems aren’t finished with you.”

That is exactly what it felt like. It’s about more than my mother and father; it’s about growing up on a farm, and it’s about giving up that farm after my dad’s death in 2010. It’s about letting go of trees, fields, cows, fences, wells, ponds, bee boxes, books, orchard trees, creeks, barns… It’s about my mother’s memory loss, and how keenly that paralleled our folding away the family place, the farm my grandfather had owned before my father owned it. It’s about…so much.
Bethany Reid, Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award

From publisher acceptance to manuscript editing, from redrafting to publisher liaison, from first launch to audience feedback and pamphlet sales, I’ve been bombarded with a rush of many different emotions. Fear, nerves, exasperation, excitement, gratification and love! – and that’s just for starters. I have one more reading tomorrow, Thursday, for the lunchtime concert series at St Philip & St James Church, Norton St Philip, and then no more readings until September and beyond. So I’ll soon have a chance to process all the mixed emotions I’ve been experiencing, to consider the kinds of audience responses I’ve received and how they might feed into my future work. I’ll also be able to attend to an increasingly large pile of new books. They’ve been accumulating since the spring and I haven’t had the time, energy or inclination to give them proper attention.
Josephine Corcoran, Returning to earth after a book launch

This week I finished my nature memoir, The Ghost Lake, and moved into the brief but intense self editing phase before I let it go to the editor next week and it ceases to be a book that exists entirely inside my head, and becomes something other people will read. Terrifying. The Ghost Lake has been a beautiful writing experience. But I’m ready to move forward to the next stage now, and it feels like a time in my life to make changes to my writing and working habits.
Wendy Pratt, Deep Summer – A Sensory Experience: August Writing Challenge

Usually, I find out what I am doing by staring at my daily calendar. It reminds me of when the kids were growing up–so many things to keep track of: practices, school health exams, softball, volleyball, summer baseball…

More tasks await in emails. I do them all as they come, as there is only this moment to do them in. Just now, I put on gloves and wiggled two wheels on the little blue car, helping my husband with a car repair. That wasn’t on the physical calendar, just on the calendar of our brains. The car needs new transmission fluid, and if that doesn’t work, its time has come. (It’s a 1991 Ford.) I have been checking out the Chilton Repair Manual for several years now, my circulation stats probably keeping it in the library!

My dreams, too, are task or trouble related. They might possibly lead to new poems…if I put that on the calendar.
Kathleen Kirk, Soon

Since I finished up edits on the new book and am in a holding pattern on the latest poem project til I figure out what the hell I want it to do, I’ve spent this weekend working on visual things, including these little postcard packs for the SEA MONSTERS series that is one of my faves (you can find them in the shop as of this afternoon. )

I often feel like art is just a different language for saying many of the same things, telling the same stories. While this series is not particularly rooted in mythology as much as some of the others—like the Persephone or Iphigenia collages, or even the The Muses, it was spawned both by some lessons on Greek sea stories I was writing and researching, as well as the Calypso myth, which was always a favorite, so I suppose is in a similar vein. I’ve been making collages, sometimes daily, sometimes in a burst like the ones that will accompany GRANATA, and the processes are different and vary. Sometimes, I save up clip art and stock images and snippets. Sometimes I go looking as I go, finding the elements I need. Sometimes I just start with something and see where it takes me.
Kristy Bowen, sea monsters and citrus fruits

What if — I hold the words like a pashmina
cloak to hide my nakedness from the mirror.
It is a trick. What if — no longer a question,
no longer an argument: a finality, a surrender,
a road that has taken too long. What if a
father thought to hold my hand. What if a
mother knew how to care. What if there was
always a way to begin again. What are the
odds it would have still led to this moment,
to this poem?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 54

Recently I noted a call for submissions from one of my dream publishers. Sigh, I sighed. I faced the prospect of a book manuscript submission with ambivalence.

Do I really need to publish another book? Isn’t it highly unlikely anyway? And what if they did pick me pick me? Then what?

Yes, the fun of a cover choice. The thrill of the box o’. Oh, but the chasing after reviews, after reading opportunities, the gnawing fear that my book will be the worst selling one they’ve ever produced. What’s it for?

I guess those little gifts: the email from a stranger or call from a friend saying “wow, x poem, that really spoke to me.” I’ve had that happen! It’s terrific!

Only connect, wrote Forster. Yes. I mean, that is it, right? And how else to connect than through publication? Well, I mean, there are the lovely random interactions that have nothing to do with poetry. Yesterday I heard the telltale scronch and squeal of the city yard waste pick-up trucks heading up my street. I raced out from beside the house where I was weeding, waved wildly, and started racing around to the back of the house to pull out my barrel full of sticks and weeds. “We got you, we got you,” called out one of the guys. “Don’t worry, we got you.” It was sweet. There’s that. He’s probably forgotten already but it was a lovely human moment for me. I gather them, in that face of all the unlovely ones. Some of which I cause.
Marilyn McCabe, I’m ready; or, Does the World Need Another Poetry Book

Magnolias showered your head
with their heavy musk as you passed.
The bombast of radio announcers
came through the windows, sometimes
loud enough to mask domestic
quarrels within.

In the last house down the way,
the town’s first policewoman
swilled down her sorrows
with beer. Blind men walked
home in pairs, carefully
tapping with their canes.
Luisa A. Igloria, City Camp Alley

Author Miriam Sagan founded and then directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. One very visible part of her legacy are the ten poem posts dotting the campus: poetry boxes whose purpose is to intrigue students with the work of poets far and near (and in this particular instance … me!- ).

My contribution includes two free verse poems, a found poem, a list poem, an ekphrastic poem, a book spine poem, a photo-haiku, a Shakespearean haiku, a graph-haiku, and a haiku mobile.

I like to imagine a student pausing, by a building or in a desert meadow, to read and reflect amidst the hustle-bustle of things to do and places to be. That’s the power of public poetry: to meet us where we are as we go about our lives. [Click through for photo documentation.]
Bill Waters, Poetry posts @ SFCC

My training and experience as a poet is serving me well as I try to create memorable children’s sermons. Just as when I’m creating a metaphor for a poem, I do the same in a children’s sermon: I’m trying to create something that makes people see the world differently, to see an object or a concept in a way that they never have before, and that each time in the future, they’ll think of what I did in the poem or the children’s sermon.

My training as a teacher of first year college students is also serving me well, and it’s training that goes back to my days as a drama kid. I’ve always been good at improv and thinking on my feet. I’ve always been good at projecting my voice and finding ways to engage the people watching me. I’m good at making connections which often only come to me as I’m teaching or presenting the material. I am happy to make a fool of myself if it will lead to memorable moments in teaching or preaching–because if I don’t care what people think about me, I’m more likely to reach people, and it’s more likely that I’m not going to make a fool of myself.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Children’s Preacher as Poet and/or Teacher of First Year College Students

Yup, it’s official, I am Arlington’s new Poet Laureate!!!

Arlington made the official announcement last week and so I was able to then share the news. I’d been sitting on it for a little while so I was excited to finally share it with the world.

When I first moved to this area fifteen years ago something magical happened: I finally felt like I belonged. Before that I’d lived in North Dakota (where I grew up on a farm!), southern Maryland, and a brief stint in Puerto Rico. None of them felt right. None of them fit. But when I moved to northern Virginia (settling first in Alexandria before eventually buying a home in Arlington), everything fell into place. This is where I was meant to be.

I can’t wait to share my love of poetry with the community I love.
Courtney LeBlanc, And the Poet Laureate is…

Now that the Summer 2023 pre-order period is over and the chapbooks by MJ Stratton and Tim Carter have begun shipping into the world, I want to give a brief summary of sales and provide receipts for the donation to the Urban Youth Collaborative of NYC. I do this after every sales period as part of the press’s commitment to transparency.

In total, the press sold 124 booklets, with the new titles by Tim Carter and MJ Stratton making up the overwhelming majority. Tim and MJ sold an average of 53 copies each spread across 71 individual sales (there were a few bulk sales). Both writers sold above 50 copies, which is a first for the press. The two writers also earned an average of $326.35 for their work, which is the highest pay out yet.

Also, I’m very happy to report that the donation to the Urban Youth Collaborative is $340.35 (plus extra to cover their processing fees). This is the most we’ve donated since spring 2022, when over $500 was raised for the Transgender Education Network of Texas. Here are receipts from the donation (Note: Make the Road is one of the three local groups collaborating in the UYC):

Lastly, the press itself brought in $364.35. Deducting various expenses and costs of production during this period, this meant a profit of $104.83. Adding this profit to the press’s previous balance, we now have a total surplus of $664.31. (If we take into account that $500 of this was a generous donation from a friend and supporter of the press, the press has officially earned $164 through its sales model) This surplus will be allocated in coming years to pay for ink and paper, upgraded supplies, and the cost of the website itself (from Wix). Previously I ran the press off of my personal website, which I paid for separately; however, now that the whole site has been devoted to the press, I will be charging its cost of $16 per month (or $192 per year) against this balance.
R.M. Haines, Summary & Receipts for July 2023

I often see poems, written in an approachable tone with contractions in their verbs, etc, that suddenly throw in an until instead of a till to no specific semantic or syntactic effect. Why has the poet chosen to make this decision? Is it for musical and/or metrical reasons? In these cases, is until being used as syllabic padding?

And then there’s ‘til. I encountered many hurdles during the editorial process of my first full collection with Eyewear back in 2017, but one of the toughest was an editorial intern’s unilateral and systematic imposition of turning every single till into ‘til throughout my ms. I had to put my foot down at that point and refuse to continue unless they accepted my tills. From my perspective, ‘til is only acceptable if the poet wants to strike an explicitly colloquial tone.
Matthew Stewart, Till, until or ‘til?

Geometries of Belonging is a collection of short stories and poems from R.B. Lemberg’s Birdverse, a world said to be created by the mysterious god, Bird. The publisher writes, “The intricate Birdverse has at its core a magic based loosely in geometry, from which comes healing, love, and art. It is a complex, culturally diverse world, a realm with LGBTQIA characters and a wide range of family configurations. Lemberg probes the obstacles behind traditional social boundaries of cultures; overseeing this world is the deity Bird and all its incarnations. Each story and poem, exqusitely crafted, will richly reward long-time fans and newcomers alike.” This was a fantastic collection of stories, and I would love to read more in this universe.
Andrea Blythe, Culture Consumption: June 2023

Lately I’ve been going through Los Angeles-based poet Victoria Chang’s striking non-fiction project, the stunning and deeply felt, deeply intimate Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2021), a book of memory, history and mentors. Interspersed with collaged archival photographs and other documents, the collection is composed as a sequence of letters individually directed to intimates such as her late parents, childhood friends, acquaintances and former teachers, as well as to her daughter. Dear Memory follows Chang’s poetry collections Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013) [see my review of such here], Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Obit (Copper Canyon, 2020) [see my Griffin Prize-shortlist interview with her here], although I’m realizing how far behind I am on her work, having missed The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon, 2022), with a further poetry collection forthcoming in 2024 with Farrar, Straus & Giroux: With My Back to the World.

This is a book of contemplation, recollection and reconciliation, as Chang offers the fluidity of a combined book-length essay and memoir through the form of journaled and unsent letters. There is such an intimacy and an openness to the way she holds the book’s form, one that predates, arguably, even the novel; think of books such as The Pillow Book (1002) by Sei Shōnagon, or even Bram Stoker’s original Dracula (1897). The back-and-forth of recollection in Chang’s Dear Memory are even reminiscent to what Kristjana Gunnars wrote about in her novella, The Prowler (Red Deer College Press, 1989): “That the past resembles a deck of cards. Certain scenes are given. They are not scenes the rememberer chooses, but simply a deck that is given. The cards are shuffled whenever a game is played.” Or, as Chang writes, mid-point through the collection: “Now I admire writers who write with an intimate intensity but also a generous capaciousness. I enjoy reading work that expands while it contracts. Writing made by an instrument with a microscope on one end and a telescope on the other, leaving some powder on the page in the form of language.”
rob mclennan, Victoria Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

I have a shelf of books with vivid, arresting covers adorned with a black swan – the logo of Beir Bua, an independent publisher of experimental poetry. Among them is my collection of essays From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry, which was published in 2021. Working with Michelle Moloney King, the press’s founder and editor, was a joy. She fizzed with ideas, enthusiasm, and creative energy. A gifted poet in her own right, Michelle also designed all those gorgeous Beir Bua covers herself, including creating the artwork.

Over the course of two years, the press published an astonishing number and variety of titles by some of our finest contemporary experimental poets. It was through Beir Bua that I first came across many writers whose work I admire, including Laura Besley, Oisín Breen, Richard Capener, Nikki Dudley, Sascha Engel, James Knight, Aodán McCardle, Margaret O’Brien, JP Seabright and Lydia Unsworth, not to mention Michelle Moloney King herself (you can read my review of Moloney King’s book Cartouche, written in collaboration with her son Dylan, here).

Helen Bowie’s Word/Play introduced me to the delights and possibilities of puzzles as ‘deconstructed poetry’. I discovered what a cento paradelle is courtesy of Matthew Schultz’s Encomium. Reading Mike Ferguson’s &there4 (which I had the pleasure of blurbing) gave me a deeper appreciation of the art and craft of found and erasure poetry.

Beir Bua’s catalogue included books by writers with whose work I was already familiar, such as Anthony Etherin’s Fabric, in which poems explore their own poemhood; Teo Eve’s fluid, shape-shifting hybrid On Shaving Or, The Taxonomy of Clouds; and The Fabulous Op, a gloriously anarchic collaboration between Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts.

The contents of Beir Bua books were invariably as innovative, exciting and thought-provoking as their covers. Sadly, the press closed down at the end of June and the books are no longer available in their original form.
Marian Christie, Beir Bua Press: A Valediction

Anthony Wilson is one of those “unmet literary friends” that Carolyn Heilbrun talks about in an essay in a book I no longer own and wish I had back. I’ve read his blog for ages and he’s been such a tremendous supporter of mine. When his new book came out I ordered it immediately. The cover is perfect. The quiet, the empty vessels, the waiting, the contemplation, the soothing tones, the always present theme in a still life: memento mori. It’s very satisfying when the cover really reflects the contents, and this one does.

I read it, fittingly, in the rain. When I was finished I wanted more. I wanted the voice, and the sensibility, and the wisdom, and the good company, good words. […]

I won’t share the whole poem (you’ll need to buy the book to read it), but there’s one that just settled into me so tenderly. It’s titled “After Raymond Carver” and begins, “Did I sleep that time? / You know I did. I did nothing else. Just not at night.” And then comparing his early mornings to his mother’s early mornings. “The laughter, the elegance, the smell of onions frying. / How did she do it? She never stopped.” Then the blackness that we’ll all walk into or have at some point.

Our losses, oh our losses. And then the awareness of the gravy, the pure gravy, that Raymond Carver writes about. A good poet, a generous one, as Anthony Wilson is, will send you on to other poets. So I found my way to the Carver poem which I’ve lived with for a long while, the gravy reminder.
Shawna Lemay, The Wind and the Rain by Anthony Wilson

It’s been five years since David Cloke of East Coker Poetry Group convened the first Langport Moot. I wrote about it here.
This time, seventeen of us gathered in perfect weather at Great Bow Wharf in Langport last Friday for another great day of walking, observing, writing and sharing. We began with short introductions to three poetic forms: haiku (me), found poetry (David) and ancient Chinese four-line rhymed poems (Wendy). During a long lunch-break we explored this delightful small town and its waterways. Every bench by the river was occupied by someone busy with pen and notebook. Later we returned to Great Bow Wharf to share our ramblings. Graeme from Fire River Poets invented a new form, which I named the Ryan. Diana made us all laugh with her poem about two neighbouring local businesses, a dance studio and a foot clinic. Someone wrote a lovely memory of Caroline Mornement, a supporter of East Coker Poets, who was at the first Langport Moot and drew water-birds in her notebook, being an artist rather than a poet. […]

down Stacey’s Court to the river
a boat broken and grounded
purple loosestrife by the waterside
two white butterflies
engage in their chaotic
intricate choreography
Ama Bolton, The Second Langport Moot

Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 18

Dave Bonta — Mon, 08 May 2023 21:04:48 +0000

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack. This week: trees, book tours, literary envy, in defense of reading fees, and much more. Enjoy.

I watched the coronation of King Charles yesterday with my parents. My father remembers watching Queen Elizabeth’s coronation as a child in South Africa. What if we crowned a leaf? Made trees our king? Or better, leaves as our elected representative, a river as the head of state. What if winter made legislation, or springtime was the judiciary? Let’s make butterflies our police force, an army out of photosynthesis.
Gary Barwin, THE NEW KING

We broke that word. We let it fall, let
it shatter into infinite sounds. When
a word is destroyed, a tree grows
from every whisper, bearing
poisonous fruit. When a world
is destroyed.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 45

Let the trees give the valedictory
and the billows confer their tasselled caps.

Let the noon heat gild the heads of those
who’ve labored bravely, even with no prior

guarantee of reward. Let the procession
of bodies shimmer like a promise

that kindness and comradeship will keep
rising up like wildflowers in the fields.
Luisa A. Igloria, Commencement Day

I wrote 30 poems in 30 days again this April. As my writing partner, Heather, can attest–it was tough. There were some days I doubled-up, after missing the deadline the day before. There were some days where what I sent her was less poetic than some texts. At the end of the month though, I have 30 poems.

I’ve only just now started sifting through them. I had set out with the idea of writing a group of poems about You’ve Got Mail (the movie). I have already written 3 or 4 in that vein, and I wanted to explore it further. Instead, it looks like I mostly wrote about angels, scars, and birds. Ok. Who ever knows what will pop up when one is writing every single day?
Renee Emerson, NaPoWriMo Wrap Up

I am looking forward to writing full-time for a while now. Weeks or months, I’m not sure yet. I am literally compartmentalizing my time. I’ve started a new blog to write about how I am handling cancer treatment. And I’m continuing in this space (and there, too – and in so many others) with what makes me honestly feel happy and alive in the moments as they come. I once wrote a poem that said it was absurd to say that imagination is a good thing. But it really can be. It can be a source of good things.
Ren Powell, Rumors

May is much like the interior of my email inbox right now; varied and eclectic. It bridges this spring with its publication notices, publication opportunities to come, and the business of the day that needs tending.

I published “Of Paper Moons, Glimmered Words” in the Spring 2023 issue of October Hill Magazine. I’m happy to publish with them again. They assemble a sweet journal, and it was three years ago that I not only published in their winter journal, but was invited to read my work at an online reading. It was a cozy assembly and the kindness of editors during Covid is certainly an event and aspect that lingers even today. A wonderfully warm reading all the way around.

I have shared gratitude for the editors at Cosmic Daffodil Journal who published three of my short poems: “Untitled,” “Early Spring,” and “This Pot” in their Buds & Blooms issue.

My advice to you? Write on through all the delights this month will bring. Summer is all too short. Find all the ways necessary to collect, savor, and share those words.
Kersten Christianson, May and All

Spring creeps in a little further each day, raising my mood even if it’s still a little too chilly to have the windows open for long. I have been devoting some time to submissions and collages and procrastinating on final edits on the home improvements series of poems I worked on earlier this year (thankfully the NAPOWRIMO ones only require minor modifications but I have no idea what sloppiness I was victim to earlier in the year.) I’ve been finalizing the cover design for the next book and making fun little reels about inspos and aesthetics. I’ve been researching Mesopotamian bloody baby-eating goddesses and writing about Celtic Queens and cupboard doors and bathroom towels that won’t make you hate your life. In other words, much the usual.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 5/6/2023

I am listening to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which I only usually do “when the skies of November turn gloomy” (to borrow a phrase from the song). But Gordon Lightfoot has died, and it’s a gloomy May day, so the song fits my mood.

Of course, Lightfoot was 84 years old, and from what I can tell from the various news stories, he seemed to have lived a good life. He wrote amazing songs and had a good run as a performer. Lots of people will be reflecting on his life and appreciating him today, and plenty of us have been doing this for over 50 years.

His music is the background of my childhood, along with Neil Diamond, Simon and Garfunkle, and John Denver. Yesterday on my drive back to my seminary apartment, I heard John Denver’s live version of “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”–what a great song.

He also wrote songs that other people made more famous, like “Early Morning Rain.” I’ve been listening to some of those songs this morning. At some point, when I don’t have seminary papers to finish, I might do more reflecting on how this folk music formed my perception of what it would be like to be an adult–not because I listened to it as a child, but because I continued to listen to it in adolescence.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Gloomy Skies: Goodbye to Gordon Lightfoot

There are many blossoming trees in this glen – it started with blackthorn and plum, and is just about to hit its peak with gean and bird cherry, pear and apple. The celandines are coming to an end, but the yellow on the gorse is thickening up, there are wild violets on the Cairn footpath, and I am watching a clump of wild arum which is just about to open. It isn’t a rare plant, but I’ve never seen in elsewhere in Scotland, and judging by my instagram feed, it seems to be having a moment just now. The trees are in the first flush of bright green opening leaves, and the birds are louder each day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many goldfinches in my life! The rain has brought on the garden enormously in the last three days, and I’ve been planting and sowing tomatoes, courgettes, chillis, dill and coriander. […]

A big part of my poetry practice is connecting with the territory, and though I mostly concentrate on the plants wildlife and weather, I have become very interested in the history and the engagement of the community here, which seems much livelier than in the Forth Valley. Every spare bit of ground that lies unoccupied for more than a few months seems to have trees planted, and as I get to know the area, I am becoming aware of a lot of organisations dedicated to keeping the urban sprawl much greener than you might expect, such as the Friends of Holmhills Wood Community Park, or the Friends of the Calder. There is an active ramblers’s group, and plenty of walking routes, from the Clyde Walkway to the Rotten Calder path, which I mentioned in a recent post, and a lot of interest in the landscape and archaeology of the area. […]

I am writing more thoughts about poetry than actual poetry just now, as there seems to be some activity around Ceasing Never, which I hope to share over the next week or so, and a revised edition of my translation of The Charm of Nine Herbs is going to happen at some point, but after a much longer lull than I was expecting, new poetry is finally happening – look out for moon and fire poems, and some weird mythology.
Elizabeth Rimmer, Blossom Time

If there is anyone still out there who reads my stuff on here, thank you. I’ve been through many stages of hell the last few years and am slowly starting to get myself to a place, a new place that is more about creativity and shaking out the demons from my bones.

I’d love to start a newsletter as well as have you subscribe to my substack (which I plan on updating soon as well). […]

I want my work in your hands, eyes, teeth.

To me, it’s not so much about surviving to create. It’s creating to survive. I am here to be creative, and to share with others so that they know they’re not alone.
Jennifer E. Hudgens, I Don’t Know Where I’m Going.

After I’d spent time at my desk, tinkering with poems, writing a bio and acknowledgements, collating blurbs, giving feedback on a possible cover, I was happy to press ‘send’ and email everything to Helen Eastman at Live Canon.

“Thanks for giving me time and space this weekend,” I said to my husband, Andrew. “I’m pleased with my work and I’m sending everything off to Helen.” “You don’t want to sleep on it and send it tomorrow?” “No, I’ve done loads of work on this, it’s all done, I’m sending it off.”

Then time for some gardening after being deskbound for hours, stretching my limbs and planting sunflower, nasturtium and cornflower seeds saved from last year’s plants, plus some new seeds, basil, gypsophlia, sweetpea, cosmos, salvia. Who knows what will grow. The garden’s ready for No Mow May, my semi-wild flower beds are already bursting with forget-me-nots, dandelions, honesty, daisies, celandines and (I think) borage, herb robert and other not yet identified species.

Then, a good night’s sleep a little interrupted by doubts arriving in the night. What about that lockdown poem you haven’t managed to publish anywhere yet? Wouldn’t this be the perfect opportunity to include it? Could you swap out a couple of those small ‘seen-while-walking’ poems and replace them with this two page poem? Is this really the best order for these poems? Is that really the best poem to end the collection? Back to my desk and my manuscript for some rearranging. A hasty note to Helen to disregard my first email. Andrew’s saying nothing. Note to self: always sleep on it.
Josephine Corcoran, ‘Love and Stones’ my new chapbook coming soon

I’m once again a featured poet at the Gaithersburg Book Festival, an absolutely wonderful festival that is FREE and open to the public and has a wonderful list of authors who will be reading and discussing and taking questions. […]

On Sunday, 21 May at 5:30pm I’m reading with Reston Readings, a local reading series that is always delightful.

And last but definitely not least is my official book launch party at the end of the month!! […]

May is going to be wildly busy but I’m so very excited about it and hope to see you at one of these events!
Courtney LeBlanc, Book Tour: May

Hereverent has been thoroughly and lovingly launched!

My poetry & jazz book launch was fantastic on April 20 at PLNU. We had poetry, music, drinks, and dessert in this little parlor that makes me feel like a wealthy great aunt has invited me to tea. :) I’m so grateful to Brenda Martin for her gorgeous music and her fun improv collaborations! (And thanks to Emma McCoy for the photo!)

Then my virtual book launch for Hereverent on April 21 was also lovely. What a gift to hear poets I adore read my poems alongside theirs. I’m so grateful to Agape Editions for publishing and celebrating my book! […]

Finally in this countdown to launch, 15 of my favorite local poets read with me in my church’s sanctuary this past Saturday night, and I brought my favorite brownies (a recipe from my beloved dissertation advisor, Marthe Reed), and many more dear friends and delightful people came to celebrate my new book too.
Katie Manning, Hereverent Launches!

Yes, all the waiting is over – if you pre-ordered the book, or were waiting for the book to be available from BOA or Amazon or you wanted to review it on Amazon, the 9th is the day! That’s tomorrow!

In celebration, I’ll be taking over BOA Edition’s feed on Instagram May 9th, 10th, and 11th so keep your eyes out for that! I’ll talk about inspirations, making cocktails, playlists, and more. I’m a little bit nervous because I’m not the world’s most confident Instagram user, but hopefully I have respectable posts and stories. Isn’t it funny that now Instagram videos are part of promoting a book? That wasn’t true the last time one of my books came out. Ah, how things change!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Ready for Launch? Flare, Corona’s Official Pub Date Arrives, an Upcoming Open Books Reading with Martha Silano, Instagram Takeovers, Plus More Pics of Tulips and Parties

Here’s the truth about envy, judgement, and comparisons: the other person feels none of the bitterness, defeat, and ire you feel. You—exclusively you—feel the discomfort, and it’s a slow poison you mix with your own particular brand of injustice and insecurity, then self-administer.

At various misguided moments, we can come to believe that envy is a motivator. If that were true, feeling it just once would do the trick to skyrocket us into productivity and success. More often what happens is this: we feel discouraged, then immediately seek to buffer the feeling. Judgement, Netflix, potato chips: all effective buffers. None of these, however, is a catalyst for growth, development, or change. None is half as powerful as reading a book, sitting with a draft, or going for a walk.

You alone can make a conscious effort to ease yourself of these unnecessary feelings in 2023. How? By noticing them and calling them what they are. Then, by diffusing them by focusing on yourself. What is my envy/comparison/jealousy telling me about what I want? And how can I take the step towards what I want, instead of sitting here paralyzed by indignation, elbow deep in a bag of Fiesta Doritos?
Maya C. Popa, Progress Report: Literary Resolutions

Many agendas may drive the urge to bash particular writers or their works, among these envy, attention, pride, status, self-preservation, righteous indignation, or a sense that one needs to scramble to make space for oneself in an already small environment (“the literary world”). Even, dare I say, ignorance. I could speculate on reasons for unkindness until the proverbial cows come dawdling home, but I suppose it can be attributed to a kind of social Darwinism. People can be mean-spirited when threatened. Though exactly how the writing of poetry poses a threat to other poets remains a mystery to me.

Maybe I am a Pollyanna (entirely possible), but although I can recall some incidents and critiques that have stung me, there have been far more instances of generosity from fellow writers. While contemplating writing this post I sat back and decided to count how many fellow writers have extended courtesy, respect, useful advice, helpful criticism, networking and publication leads, encouragement, and the sense that I’ve “been seen”–acknowledgment as a writer–and I found the list was long. I considered listing names, but there are so many…and I was afraid I’d inadvertently overlook someone. I consider this an excellent “problem” to have.

Granted, some stings have been…memorable. However, I’ve been writing and publishing poetry and related prose since the early 1980s, so there have been many years during which I’ve had the joy of connecting with other writers in generous ways. Writing is both a large community and a small one, depending upon where I am in my own life: local at times, semi-isolated other times, and then–thanks to social media platforms, with which I have love/hate relationships–national and international!

As I get ready to pull back a bit from my work in the realm of higher education, I hope that the lessons I have learned about being generous to my students, gently encouraging while pointing out areas to keep working on, will stay with me. My feeling about poetry is that there’s certainly room for more of it in a world which can be harsh, and that acknowledging other humans’ urge to express their awe, fear, grief, passion, love, anger, and perspective won’t actually harm many of us.
Ann E. Michael, Generosity

Publishers aren’t charity operations (though it often feels that way), despite the enduring myth that there is something noble and good about the literary industry. It’s still a business, and it’s still operating under the same suffocating tenets of capitalism that writers are. Lumpenproletariat or not.

Alas, the writer’s personality consists of the yin and yang qualities of self-hatred and self-aggrandizement. It is the latter quality that so often comes into play when they submit a piece. They think their writing is special or “god’s gift” and that it should therefore not only be immediately accepted, but that the publisher should waive any fees for the sheer pleasure of reading their work. But newsflash: reading submissions is not a pleasure. About five percent of the pool will actually be enjoyable. It’s that five percent that keeps the publisher going. Fighting the fucking windmills while the schlock in The New Yorker is touted as some sort of literary high standard.
Genna Rivieccio, On Submission Fees and the Belief that Publishers Are Pirates

This particular advert, however, seemed seriously weird. It wanted an exceptional poet and tutor to be a part of a happy and successful team. Happy kept cropping up. The school, it said, is a happy place. It provides a happy environment.

The candidate it said would be an established member of the literary world (so one of the boys and girls, then) with an excellent academic background, a PhD in English or Creative Writing (naturally, what else would you expect?), and experience of teaching at graduate level. Blah-de-blah. Highly skilled. Blah-de-blah. Supportive, Understanding. Blah-de-Blah.

Ok, fair enough, I wouldn’t get in. I’m not qualified. I don’t mean academically, though that’s true. My ancient BA Hons is nowhere near good enough, even if I knew where the proof of it was. No, it’s the happy bit I couldn’t do. I doubt I could even do it at the interview (not that I’d get one).

I grew up in journalism, grew middle-aged and grew old in journalism. We knew what happy was, especially when we’d had a drink or four. We knew what angry, passionate, bad-tempered and noisy was too. When we wrote, we wrote alone. We wrote in doubt, asking ourselves questions, trying to get what we wanted to say down as best we could and as truthfully as we could. We were alive. Are these people in that supportive, understanding, positive, constructive, happy world really alive?
Bob Mee, THE POETRY ACADEMICS vs JOHN STEINBECK

Back in August of 2022, I wrote the blog post, Browsing the Archive on a Summer Afternoon, in which I talk about my pleasure at revisiting my collection of journals that have published my work over the years. I realize that I neglected to point out something very important: writers should read all of the contributor’s copies they receive.

I do mean all. If you primarily write poetry, then of course you should read all of the poetry, but don’t stop there. If the journal includes fiction, reviews, and essays, read all of them too. If you write prose, read the poetry! As Virginia Woolf wrote, “The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself.” Woolf wrote prose, but she definitely “got” poetry. Poets dream of readers who appreciate their craft with such deep understanding.

Reading every page of your contributor’s copy, whether in a physical journal or online, connects you to a community of writers, because each journal is its own community. I sometimes imagine the other writers who sent their work to a particular publication at the same moment as I did. What were they doing just before they hit “send” or “submit?” It’s entirely possible that some of us sent work simultaneously, our words traveling through the ether and arriving at the magazine’s inbox at the exact same moment. There’s a kind of mystery about this process that’s always intrigued me.
Erica Goss, You Should Read Every Page of Your Contributor’s Copy

I will be reading next week at Shelton Timberland Library with poet friends Cathy Warner, Gary E. Bullock, and Dan Coffman (and maybe a few other Washington poets if it works out!). Cathy Warner and I have been friends since 2012 when we both found ourselves new to Bainbridge Island. While she and I have both moved about since then, our poetry friendship has stayed intact. Gary and Dan are new poetry friends who I met in a workshop class with poet Gary Copeland Lilley and whom I have not met in person due to COVID, but will now be able to meet in person! It is not hyperbole to say all my poet friends and connections are what got me through those long three years of isolation. Come and hear us read. Come celebrate our connection to poetry and each other.
Carey Taylor, Upcoming Reading!!

It’s not just the practical blocks – lack of time, being interrupted etc – it’s the psychological blocks, and the societal blocks that prevent people, particularly older women, from writing. There is a prejudice in society that says that older women are, at best dull, at worst invisible. When I searched the stock photo database, pexels, for a header photo for this post, I searched ‘older woman writing’ and found virtually nothing. When I searched ‘older man writing’ I found plenty. When I searched ‘writer’ I found plenty of young women with beautiful nails holding pastel notebooks, and lots of older men at gnarly wooden desks grumpily screwing up pieces of paper. I use this as an example because these stock photos are the pictures that the media uses as an example of what is present in society: as examples of products, as examples of aesthetic lifestyles to strive for, as examples of, you might even say, what is the acceptable face, or the seen face, or the most associated-with face, of a product, a person, a genre, a section of society.

We know older women writers exist. Just looking at my own over filled bookcases I can see them everywhere – Hilary Mantel (God, I miss Hilary Mantel so much) Margaret Atwood, Maggie O’Farrel… but somehow the perception still seems to be that older women at the beginning of their careers, those not established yet, do not exist.
Wendy Pratt, How to Give Yourself Permission to Write

But the important part here is the student loans, because those things literally made it possible for me to go to and stay in college. See, that full-time job paid maybe $10 an hour, which was okay money for working in Hammond, Louisiana in 1995 but not enough money to support a family and pay tuition, and really wasn’t enough money to support myself as a newly-single person, pay tuition and pay child support.

So I took out loans, every one I could get, and for the next four years as an undergrad, I would start my semester in line to pay my tuition, get two checks for the balance over what my tuition was, and immediately sign one of those checks over to my ex-wife. Pretty much the same for my grad school experience.

So now it’s 2005. I’ve got my MFA, I’ve just done two years at Stanford as a Stegner Fellow and I have my first full-time university teaching job. I’m a lecturer at Florida Atlantic University teaching a 4/4 and making $30,000 or so a year, which is more than I’ve ever made per year in my life at the time, and which is not enough to live in south Florida, not really, so I go into economic hardship deferral until that time runs out and then forbearance and at some point in there, there’s a program that allows you to pay based on your income and also we move to Iowa because Amy gets the job she has now at Drake University. I’m making payments, but they’re not large enough to even cover the interest and if this part of the story sounds familiar that’s because there are a lot of people in similar boats.
Brian Spears, A little personal news

What appears to be a simple poem covers so much ground…Masculinity, memory—both positive and the (I think) implicit nod to poverty at the end in ‘the hungry roots beneath’. It’s an entirely different poem, but it puts me in mind of Paul Farley’s poem about Treacle. I love the musicality of the poem, particularly in the first stanza, and I raise a pint of Kingfisher (NB I mean cup of tea—it’s now 7.30am) to the internal rhymes of ‘furnaces’ and ‘curry houses’. We’ll also give ‘curve and ‘trove’ and ‘pucker’ and ‘nutter’, a respectful nod too.

I bought this book from Andy via Facebook a year or so ago, so my apologies it’s taken me this long, but I was hooked in by him saying it was pretty much his last copy. Take note: I’m an absolute sucker for that so, so make sure you use the scarcity bias[.]
Mat Riches, High and (Mar)mighty…aka A Toast To Marmite aka Boys For the Black Stuff

M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a stunning collection of poetry. Inspired by M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, a transnational black feminist text, Gumbs envisions humanity at the end of the world. While there is struggle, this is not the typical depiction of humanity as viciously and violently struggling for survival, but a vision of humanity as transformational. As the environment and world shifts (due to human causes), humanity takes to the dirt, sky, fire, and sea, creating new communities and ways of being. It’s a beautiful, compelling and hopeful depiction.
Andrea Blythe, Culture Consumption: April 2023

‘Snow’ does all the right poemy things. The sounds match the sense. The world is busy, busier than we realise and so is a phrase like ‘soundlessly collateral and incompatible’. Then there’s that tangerine. The words come down to single, propulsive syllables, so that you almost have to spit to say ‘spit the pips and feel’. But there is a deliberate unpoeticness to ‘Snow’, too, an awkwardness of phrasing and language, and this is one of the things I like most about it. (That and the refusal to explain: why is there more than glass between the snow and the roses?)
Jeremy Wikeley, incorrigibly Plural

This poem began in my car with my kids sitting together in the backseat. As we sat at a traffic light, watching some workers cut the limbs off a tree, my daughter said the body of this poem in almost these words exactly. I don’t recall if I wrote it down (or typed it into the notes app on my phone) right away, or if I remembered what she said and wrote it down later, but the process involved paring down the description to its essentials, looking carefully at line breaks and opportunities for music, and maintaining her voice the best I could (“the sky’s like finally” is one of those moments, but I also love the long I assonance in that phrase). I think the pauses after “branch” and “blue” are doing a lot in the poem. Those line breaks slow down the pace and give the reader time to reflect. I see the break between “branch” and “hits the ground” as enacting the branch’s fall and landing.

I found this idea comforting when my marriage ended: When something is gone, it makes space for something else. In this case, the tree losing its limbs made space for the sky. The view changed. My perspective changed with it.
Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: Two Related Poems

This is observational humour at its best: the humour of recognition. Waldron catches those unguarded moments that betray our weaknesses; he observes and reports the embarrassing that we would rather not admit to; he exposes those frailties that make us human. For example, The Sweet Smell of Failure is a cautionary tale which shows the romantic consequences of not changing one’s underpants regularly; Digging in my Archives explores a life of pretensions; Valentines Day tells of a major romantic failure; and Shop (lift) Local exposes the limitations of our moral compass when we’re offered a bargain. There is something of us all in these poems. In his drop-in Waldron describes the imagined persona narrating the poems as a ‘37-year-old man’. Yet there is something universal about these poems. When we laugh at him, we are laughing at ourselves, man, or woman. In fact, there is something of ‘Everyman’ about these poems, but without the moral imperative!
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘My C&A Years’ by Roger Waldron

A follow-up to the creative non-fiction and poetry title Album Rock (Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s NL: Boulder Books, 2018) is St. John’s, Newfoundland poet Matthew Hollett’s full-length poetry debut, Optic Nerve: poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2023). Through an assortment of first-person poems set in a lyric simultaneously narrative and cinematic, Hollett offers a descriptively-thick and finely-honed intimate portrait of east coast space. “It took two of us to haul the river out of its box / and wrangle its segments together like vertebrae / or slabs of sidewalk. As rivers go,” he writes, to open the poem “Waters Above and Waters Below,” “this one had been / stepped in more than twice, its leisurely ripples and eddies / scuffed with footprints from small armies / of schoolkids.” Hollett works his lyric as a way of examining small moments of time, comparable to how Michael Crummey wrote contemporary and historic Newfoundland through his Passengers: Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2022) [see my review of such here], or how Michael Goodfellow wrote his personal Lunenberg County, Nova Scotia through Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. One could say that all three of these poets are simply following elements of Newfoundland-based poet and editor Don McKay [see my review of his 2021 collection Lurch here], and that would be entirely correct, each writing their own small perceptions through carved lyric observations. Weighed down through the dark, there is significant and even pragmatic light in these lines. “If you find yourself lost,” the poem “Coriolis Borealis” begins, “try not to walk in circles. A forest / is an aura of revolving doors, every spruce or fir is / a celestial body that wants you in its orbit. For the first / twenty-four hours, you’d be wise to stay put.” Across his densely-packed Optic Nerve, Hollett writes short moments and scenes, fully aware of the differences in seeing and perception, writing narratives many of which are centred in and around Halifax. “In Halifax it greets me like a gauntlet of bear traps.” he writes, to open the poem “Shipshape.” “Sidestepping swollen potholes on Quinpool, I pass a traffic island / with its mascara of snow, a bicycle wheel crushed into a taco, / a bird’s nest asquint with icicles.”
rob mclennan, Matthew Hollett, Optic Nerve: poems

There’s a primarily Anglo-Saxon obsession among so-called experts with attempting to turn wine into a dry, dead subject, to reduce it to exams (WSET/MW stuff) and points (Robert Parker, etc).

And then there’s the marketing ploy, often used by pubs and restaurants, of flogging wine by grape variety. This supposedly makes everything easier for the consumer to order once they’ve decided that they like, for instance, Sauvignon Blanc, in an impossible struggle to simplify things. Of course, such a strategy ignores the vagaries of soil, climate, grower and winemaker, all of which mean that there a huge gamut of Sauvignon Blancs. Many of them barely resemble each other in a comparative tasting.

Much the same could be said of poetry. It too is a slippery, incredibly complex subject that defies repeated critical and academic attempts at pigeonholing and classification. Poets are categorised but they defy those labels on a regular basis because the genre is alive and constantly shape-shifting.

In both poetry and wine, the more you know, the more you realise you know nothing.
Matthew Stewart, Pigeonholing in wine and poetry

Sure. The whole project misconstrued or misconceived.
Thunderstorm at dawn: deep dark with lightning,
and now a morning pretending nothing ever happened,
but a gore of draggled blossom spread across the walk.
Dale Favier, Making My Heart Beat

My chalkboard poems alternate now between humor and sad nostalgia with images from the natural world, spring blooming all around, and a subtext of the long goodbye. Last night, a woman asked if I was still writing poems and if I had ever been in the New Yorker, which reminded me of a fairly recent personal rejection from the New Yorker asking to see more, and my inaction upon that. Uh oh. “I want to see you in print,” the woman said, and I realized again how few people, even those who love me, know that I am very often in print, or in online magazines, and have several chapbooks out there in the world. But I do feel loved and appreciated, especially for the chalkboard poems, which are short and connect to people’s lives. I love those people back.
Kathleen Kirk, Candy House

when there’s
no memory of
the moment of
passage and
tissue and salts
have gone to
the denizens
themselves now
gone to earth
those feathers
make a brave
show folded
still into the
intelligence
of flight as if
they might still
know the air
Dick Jones, wing.

Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 11

Dave Bonta — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:24:12 +0000

This week: flowers and the dead. Plus more on AWP, thoughts on publishing and blogging, poetry in schools, which poets were our gateway drugs, and much more. Enjoy.

I’m about half way through reading Heather Clark’s magnificent biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet. […]

Plath was one of the first poets I discovered on my own terms, without instruction. I was in my mid twenties and completely lost in my own life, not knowing who I was or what I wanted. In the high ceilinged calm of the local library, down on the bottom shelf of the poetry and plays section, I picked up Ariel, and opened it at ‘The Hanging Man’ with no previous knowledge of Plath, her life, her myth, the story of her complex personality, her intense light.

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

I’d never read anything like it. Something like an incantation, so bold, so big, those metaphors! Those similes! Along with a few other poets found in my local library, among them Ted Hughes, she was my gateway drug to reading and writing poetry. Because I’d read these poems I began exploring how to think about myself, my own life, my own complexities in creative writing, and I discovered how poetry is a transformative device, how pain can be described in beauty.

I had a migraine last week that took some recovering from. I took a rare day off work and simply went to bed. Like a child, I stayed in my PJs and ate the chocolates I’d got for my birthday the week before, drank tea and read the book, all day, without doing anything else. It was wonderful, even if I was feeling rotten, to have a day with Sylvia. I’ve read a few biographies of her, and her letters and journals, some of them skewed towards the myth of Plath and the demonisation of Hughes as a scapegoat for all things wrong in the fifties and sixties when Plath grew up in the claustrophobia of pure, undiluted cultural misogyny. When Hughes was able to simply be – be a poet, be an intellectual, be big and powerful, be a bit of a womaniser, be a bit brutal – but Plath had to fight, fight, fight to be a writer and not be forced into the sausage making machine of wife and mother.
Wendy Pratt, There is a voice within me/That will not be still

How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or nonfiction?

Fiction was there too, back in grade school, but fell away, partly because I suck at linear time and thus narrativity, also because I was fascinated by the sounds of words, their materiality in the mouth and in the ear, and poetry offered more of that, even though the only early examples I had were my lavender-covered Best Loved Poems of the American People, the Bible, and before that, Goodnight Moon, which (the latter) was also where I first connected words to emotions, which is to say that as a lifelong insomniac, Goodnight Moon was a horror story: wtf an old rabbit lady whispering hush?

I do remember a top-of-the-head-blown-off moment in grade school from a line in The Best Loved Poems, though. There’s a volta in John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” (which I still have memorized and can recite when intoxicated) that stopped me in my tracks—it’s after the first stanza when the collective first person shifts to the simple, devastating declarative—

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
    That mark our place; and in the sky
    The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
        In Flanders fields.

I didn’t know what WWI was, really, that nine million soldiers died, didn’t know that at 51yo I’d be sitting here in Boise worried about my brother in Tbilisi being reached by potential nuclear fallout over the Black Sea because failed and incalculably traumatized empires die hard—none of that; I just realized that in a poem, dead people can say “We are the dead.” How astonishing. How terrifying. How magical.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kerri Webster (rob mclennan)

When I got home, I also didn’t work, meaning do any housework, making it a Slattern Day in the blog. As usual it is also a Poetry Someday, as I wrote two morning poems, one on my chalkboard, to a mouse I found dead in a trap this morning by the refrigerator (sorry, Mouse!) and one in a Lenten online workshop where lately I have been doing mostly prose, so a poem was a nice surprise. I did catch up on some computer work. Sigh… Tough week of hospital visits for my dad, so I was staying with my mom, therefore. Lost a little sleep. For escape…and because we saw the season finale of The Last of Us, I am reading World War Z. I am hoping the mouse does not reanimate.
Kathleen Kirk, Tiny…Dead Things

“Demi-Sonnet for the Dead” is just that, a half sonnet that reveals not the living, but the burying of those made victims of war. The speaker has a preference for pine-box or ash-urn burials, but never ditch or pit, and that burial, when done properly, requires “…one sifted fistful at a time, / dirt mixed with tears. Sometimes blood.” The collection’s concluding poem is “Ghazal for the Trees,” a fitting end that offers some hope that war is like seasons, that as it comes it also goes. This ghazal hints of peace, of the song to be sung to trees.

Poet Dick Westheimer reminds us that while the war may not physically be outside our door, we nonetheless bear witness to these events and the stories that emerge. Overall, A Sword in Both Hands is a superb collection, and one to add to the shelf of keepers.
Kersten Christianson, Reading the Open Wound of War: A Review of Westheimer’s, A Sword in Both Hands

Roll the unconscious swimmer onto their back and hook their arms to the buoy so you can swim them to safety. Calm the angry panic of the swimmer who is shapeshifting, terror activated into flailing: keep them calm so they don’t take you down, too. If they start to take you down, hold on, but sink: they do not want to go down, they want to go up, they will let go of you and you can pull them to safety once they stop struggling. Watch out for the heavy forms, guard your face from their fists and fingernails, keep an eye on their breathing as they struggle and flail.

Do not let go, Menelaus, no matter what he does.

You need his prophecy:

will you make it home?

And where are all those you love whom you have lost?
JJS, Proteus

Several years ago, aided and abetted by Literary Twitter, I started gathering poems with joy in mind. It was 2017, and I needed more joy, and so did you. We all still need it. So here is a slightly updated and revised compilation of those poems shared by readers and writers in a very long thread. I’ve linked to some; others you’ll have to hunt down yourself online and in print. Feel free to share your own suggestions in the comments, and we’ll keep this work-in-progress going.

Because Mary Oliver was right: “Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
Maggie Smith, Poems that make you glad to be alive

Last year, for several months, I actually read for joy. Then I tried to twist it into something useful. That will kill anything that needs to breathe. My relationship with poetry has been one of continual deaths and resurrections. There is no good reason for that now.

I walked Leonard this evening and took a photo of a small tree stump. The bark is pulling from the wood, and there is a thin, nearly texture-less layer of moss covering the wound. I wrote Afterlife on the Instagram note. (No hashtag. I am trying to wean myself from all of that.)

Scanning the bookshelves for an entry point, I see Albert Goldbarth’s 2015 collection Selfish. Seems like a good place to begin. With the teacher who simultaneously drew me in and pushed me away from poetry. The poet who had a way with poetry, and a way with unwritten words. Looking back I suppose I could find new perspectives from which to view that semester. Maybe knowing that is enough not to have to.

This evening I heard the phrase fluid perception in connection with memory.

Auden said, “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” I have so many mixed feelings. Mixed perspectives.

I flip through the book to see if I had even gotten to it whenever I bought it. No.

But my eye lands on a word in a poem: Afterlife.

“[…] I’ve witnessed that come-hither prestidigitorial trick / ten thousand times. An afterlife – is there an afterlife […]”

The title of the poem is “The Disappearance of the Nature Poem into the Nature Poem”. So, yes. This seems a good place to begin.
Ren Powell, Where to begin again?

Plants that are normally regenerating by now are doing nothing, the apple trees showing no buds. I’m trying to establish a new herb patch, so I’ve moved feverfew and lemon balm, pulled up grass and transplanted oxeye daisies, dug up all the leeks because a couple of years ago allium leaf miner appeared on my plot. It’s a fly, maggot and pupae and it shreds the plants, attacking garlic, onions and chives too. So Bridget’s taking a break from leeks and I’m wondering what it’ll do to the chives in the herb patches. I’ll miss leeks, chives and onions. What’s an allotment without them? My diet’s built on them.

As I think about the old gardeners – what they knew and recorded, the books I’ve found with the gardening year illustrated in woodcuts, I realise I’m an old gardener too – two years off 70. It’s an odd time, acknowledging an absence of self in the world because age does that to a woman. Gardening is a way to respond to the feeling of loss. If nothing else, to note this March is cold, the plants are late and holding back. Around me people are struggling. The ground is all we have. We walk on it, grow on it, eat from it. Keep remembering this, I tell myself, think of Jamaica Kincaid, always interesting, always with something new to say about gardening. Let March be what it is. Be grateful for being here.
Jackie Wills, To be here and gardening

      In Virginia Beach, 4 dead humpback whales

have washed up on the shore since
      the beginning of the year— you could say

they are also a kind of lesson that hasn’t
      been learned. Necropsies show injuries

consistent with vessel strikes in waters
      thick with ship traffic. If the world is ending,

each cetacean body that perishes on sand
      is a falling leaf, a wound bled open in the middle

of a horizon of false starts. We keep saying
      there’s time, the window’s still open. Until it’s not.
Luisa A. Igloria, Ode to the Never-ending

I have a file on my computer titled “abandoned drafts” where poems go to die. I don’t look in there all to often, but today I did, and was shocked to see I have 84 poems in my abandoned drafts. 84?! And these are the ones that made it out of my notebook (my first drafts are hand-written) and to the computer–not all of them make it to Word.

Once I heard that Sharon Olds does not revise any of her poems. At the time I thought “Liar!” but now I get what she means. I rarely revise (though I’m no Sharon Olds!) because either a poem works or it does not. Either it has that something that is worth going with, or it is merely a writing exercise.

The poems that don’t make it–the writing exercises–are still worthwhile. I can look through these abandoned drafts and sometimes see an idea, image, or turn of phrase that I explore better in a later poem. It’s good to allow oneself to make mistakes, experiment, see what sticks.
Renee Emerson, abandoned drafts

I hesitate to let that last paragraph stand. To share any of this post, if I’m being honest. I have struggled to write it. I have struggled to find words that are neither sentimental nor simplistic, to convey truths more complicated than our usual narratives about long unions tend to be. I have struggled to find words that are both kind and true. Because the truth is: My childhood was hard. My parents suffered. My brother suffered. I suffered. My children have suffered as a result of the ways in which my suffering formed me. These words feel unkind, and how do I explain that even in the face of these truths, I wouldn’t go back and tell those young, dumb kids not to do it? It’s not just because, like [Sharon] Olds, I want to live. (Though I do. I want to live.) It’s because I want us to get to where we are now.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that all you need is love, or that eventual benefit outweighs earlier harm, or that our pain didn’t matter or wasn’t significant. It did, and it was. But our suffering is not the whole story, and while things that happened cannot change over time, our stories, like people, can. I want to get to the story I know now.
Rita Ott Ramstad, I go back to February 1963

carpe diem, life is a learning curve, what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, time heals, be the change I want to see in the world, the exhausting relentlessness of trying to be motivated, generous, at peace, forgiving in the presence of things happening for a reason, and lemons and fucking lemonade, because sometimes I don’t care that it’s over and I just want to cry because it happened, so it’s a good thing I can throw the latch on a small door in the corner of my mind and say hello to Robert Frost and ask him to tell me, again, in three words, what he’s learned about life: it goes on, he says.

things that happen
when I least expect
oak saplings
Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ clichés I keep living through

No one has yet tasted a sugarcoated bullet. Weepers and rough sleepers are still dreaming and don’t yet possess faces looking like they’ve been carved out by knives.

In these quiet moments, all you can hear is a faint ringing in early morning’s ears, a tinnitus of distant sirens.

Cemetery lawns are still dewy and green, unstained by sadness.

Soon, there’ll be car horns and alarms. A rush hour splatter of brake lights Jackson Pollock’ed across highways and boulevards.
Rich Ferguson, In these moments before dawn

How did you first engage with poetry?

I randomly found a book by e.e. cummings on the street when I was 14 years old. 100 poems. I was already a reader but this was a different species. e.e. didn’t title his poems. e.e. ignored punctuation rules. e.e. played games with the universe. I was almost as fascinated with this new world as I was with girls. Almost.
Jay Passer : part two (Thomas Whyte)

I realized the other day that I am coming up on 20 years of blogging–since 2005 here, and before that on the now defunct Xanga. […]

On one hand, I understand the need to commit to the process. To the journey. The experience of getting things out as a purging or meditative activity. I tend to use the blog as a way of thinking out loud about things mostly, but also as a record. Also to foster discussions, even if they are only just for my own ears and typing fingers.

I took rather easily to pubic blogging, and for a while, was determined to keep a print journal less for other’s eyes, but really, they wound up being similar. I decided that if there were posts I didn’t want to share, I’d just make them private, but even this I never really took advantage of. In some ways, making my thoughts coherent enough for other eyes, for whoever may be reading this, helps me be more concise and thoughtful of what I am saying, and by extension, thinking. I am probably far more personal in my poems than I am here, so maybe that is part of it. Private is a whole other thing when you use it as fodder for art.

I occasionally check the back-end stats and it does seem there is traffic, more than I would have guessed, but even writing here, like social media these days, seems like shouting into a void. So in some ways, it almost is like writing for a limited number of eyes. Possibly only mine and the few people who still read poetry blogs. But even if no one reads it, it’s still a record and a conversation. Both process and artifact.
Kristy Bowen, process and artifact

Publication means nothing. But it doesn’t mean that we’re doing nothing as publishers. For 20 years I’ve been publishing Rattle magazine, and that has value—but what specifically is that value? What service are we actually providing by editing and creating a magazine?

I’ve come to realize that what I’ve been providing for my entire career isn’t publication at all: it’s curation, from the Latin “curare,” which means to take care of. I’m not a publisher; I’m a curator. My job is to sift through thousands of submissions each week and highlight, in a respectful and meaningful way, those poems that others might enjoy reading. We have thousands of readers who appreciate the way we curate poems; they like our tastes, and know that if they open a book or click a link to the Rattle website, what they read will probably be worth their time.

In the abundance of the digital age, curation is a far more significant service than publication. More literature is being written today than at any time in history, at a scale that’s difficult to imagine. Millions of books are published each year. Millions of people are actively writing poetry and fiction right now. It would be impossible for anyone to develop any grasp of what writing is worth their time. Duotrope lists over 7,500 literary publishers—and that still isn’t enough.

The need for curation is immense. And that’s what the publishers and editors of the literary world are actually doing—building and providing access to an audience that appreciates their tastes.

But we still think of ourselves as publishers, and still demand that submissions to our magazine be “previously unpublished.” That phrase is what’s known as a term of art, something with a special meaning for a particular field or profession. And it’s become a damaging term of art.

Imagine how literature would thrive if we could share our art with our friends in the medium of the era. How much more fun would online open mics be if everyone knew they were free to share the poem they were most proud of—the one they just wrote yesterday? Rattle’s weekly podcast includes a supportive and enriching open lines segment, but most poets are hesitant to share and “spoil” their newest work. The joy of sharing what we create is one of the main things that sustains us as artists. We shouldn’t have to wait years wading through rejection letters to feel it.
Timothy Green, Uncurated: The Case for a New Term of Art

In my research (read: Googling) as I spent time with La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta (Nightboat Books) I came across the following lines shared by more than one Tumblr account:

There’s a weapon I wish
I could wield
when I feel the vomit of your gaze
hit the side of my face.
I want an education
in remembering
and I want an education
in forgetting.
I fast until the basket is done,
throw my maidenhead into the trash,
and relish the solidarity
of absolute feminine horror.

These lines come from the poem “Men Who Cannot Love” and serve as a solid example of Luboviski-Acosta’s poetic sensibility throughout this collection. The direct engagement with metaphor juxtaposed with the pathos of the speaker’s voice here make for an immediate and visceral reading experience.

And yet, for the dynamic flex of technique, the lines–here and elsewhere in this collection–feel relatable, biting but not bitter. I would call this a bright emotional range: bright meaning joyful but also illuminating, like flame. Just the kind of thing to share across the glowing screens of social media, a glow sought out for the intimacy it promises.
José Angel Araguz, microreview: La Movida by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

On the first morning of AWP 2023 in Seattle, I led a panel about teaching and writing risk with four amazing women who tell you the truth even when it scalds you: Jan Beatty, Destiny O. Birdsong, Erika Meitner, and Asali Solomon. Before the event began, Jan slipped me a present wrapped in purple tissue paper: a labrodorite stone to open my third eye. At the end of the panel, which had ranged over many topics and approaches, she whispered, “But we didn’t talk about It.” Then I got pulled away.

Later I saw Jan in the book fair and asked her what “It” was, and she gave me a good answer, but I was already spinning other possible meanings and kept doing so all weekend. What are we not talking about?

AWP always gets existential for me. Who am I to these people, the loudly famous and the incognito, the overhyped and the underrated, the shy initiates and gregarious elders?

Lesley Wheeler, Occult AWP

RM Haines: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Amalia! I first read your work in Protean, with the poem ,“PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD IN YOUR HOME” — a poem I really love. That one was published in December 2021, so how do you see your work developing from there to the pieces in this new book?

Amalia Tenuta: Several pieces in this collection were written around the same time as “PROTECT…” and in that regard are similar in their engagement with the lyrical “I” in a register of radical romanticism, their commitment to a type of totality thinking (“everything there is has everything there is to look at” to quote Bernadette Mayer), and are frustrated by lyrical experientialism, “leading me to believe you should never write a poem / about what you did not do”. Here, not much has changed.

I’m disinterested in poetics beholden to an inevitable abstraction of state violence, but this is – allegedly – very difficult to do in poetry, you know: poetry is supposed to be like the hospice of sentiment, and political poetry – we are told in poetry workshops – is contingently overdetermined (derogatory). So, in practice, I kinda ditched that scene, or at least began searching for poetics outside of “poetry”.

I mean I’m not a very good poet [Editor: Don’t believe her!] Most of my work I’m interested in, or working on now is in feminist political economy, data studies, STS, etc… and I think the poets I admire the most come from, or at least tend to that torsion between poetry and “theory” or w/e (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Andrea Abi-Karam, Jackie Wang to name just a few). But in this turn away from poetry I encountered critiques of representation, of metaphor and abstraction, of language etc… and in identifying these critiques in my practice I developed I guess what you could call an imperfect epistemic duty, right–who and what community am I accountable to and for, you know–what are the stakes here in writing this, on the ground?
R. M. Haines, Interview w/Amalia Tenuta

Partly due to the pressure of the old toad work, I’ve been in the poetry doldrums for much of this year, so it was nice to get a short piece up on The Friday Poem again, here – a 100-word response to a poem by Geoff Hattersley as one of a series of brief commentaries on ‘funny’ poems. The poem I chose is, as you’ll see, both funny and deeply serious at the same time, which is no mean feat to pull off. I could’ve chosen any number of his poems, in the same way that I could’ve chosen numerous Matthew Sweeney poems, but that thar Mat Riches got there before me, here. (I’m reminded at this point that, a week or two ago, I heard Paul Stephenson – another brilliantly funny yet serious poet, like Mat himself – read a poem entitled ‘Not Matthew’.)

Had Mat not quite rightly alighted on Sweeney, I might’ve chosen ‘Upstairs’, first published in the LRB – here – and collected in The Bridal Suite, Cape, 1997. It’s typical of Sweeney’s very quirky narrative style, moving from funny to very dark within a heartbeat. His poems and worldview were often described as ‘surreal’, but that’s a lazy label. It’s surely just a recognition that if you live life with your senses tuned to high-ish alert you will notice that it’s chocker with non sequiturs, which paradoxically make more sense than not.
Matthew Paul, On ‘funny’ poems

Sometimes in the business of reviewing you come across a collection that is so impressive in its quality and so layered and complex in meaning that it challenges one to find words to do it justice. The Keeper of Aeons (Broken Spine Arts, 2022) by Matthew M.C. Smith is one of those collections. This is a beautifully structured combination of prose and poetry that takes us through the rugged rural landscape of Wales, back through history to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods and forwards through time and space to an apocalyptic future when humankind has destroyed Earth’s environment. The writing is at times reverential, as he reflects upon the lives of our distant ancestors, and at times it is deeply disquieting as he imagines the future we are heading towards. Above all, however, it is informed by a sense of awe and wonder at the magnificence of the universe which we inhabit and by his desire to find meaning within it.

It is no exaggeration to say that Smith’s descriptions of the Welsh landscape rival those of R.S. Thomas. In both their writing the landscape is not merely described, it is experienced. In Sweyne’s Howes, Smith writes: ‘My feet grip moss-frayed rocks as my walk edges lurid clusters of purple heather, the stinging brush of yellow gorse on knees and calf muscles. A lizard flickers, skittering, Sun-basked stillness. I climb a cascade of barely submerged, stones, scattered footholds up steep uneven routes, stop and turn. The ocean’s gleam of gold tide-lapped, serpentine headlands.’ The syntax gives the description a breathlessness, the breathlessness of a man climbing a steep incline, but also of a man whose breath is taken away by the magnificence of the place, captured so eloquently in the culminating image of the ‘gold tide-lapped, serpentine headlands’ and in the finely observed sensory details: ‘the lurid clusters of purple heather’, the ‘stinging brush’, the lizard ‘skittering’.

For Smith, however, the landscape is not merely a source of delight, a source of ‘serenity and majesty’ (Mynydd Drummau), it is the custodian of the past, a keep of aeons, perhaps.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Keeper of Aeons’ by Matthew M.C. Smith

I went to States of Independence in Leicester today. I caught up with D.A. Prince and Roy Marshall (both as charming as ever), and went to some talks. Most interesting was one about AI and creativity.

Simon Perril looked at the history of creativity, asking “Is self-expression all there is?”. He mentioned Chatterton, Dada, Oulipo, Flarf, found poetry etc. I hadn’t seen “Tree of Codes” by Jonathan Safran Foer. Curation, recycling, and re-tooling have always been part of the tradition (moreso in pre-copyright times). What happens when writers put together pre-existing phrases rather than pre-existing words?

Prof Tracy Harwood followed this up by showing milestones in the progression of AI – Lovelace, Turing, Deep Blue, then concentrating on art and writing. The art examples especially impressed me. Some artists using AI describe the results as collaborations, which is fair enough.

Tim Love, States of Independence (2023)

So there we are (well, I am, and maybe you are too) in the ‘upper-second’ sector of the poetry world. There’s plenty of fluidity of course.

Scenario one: You get an email from The Rialto accepting two of your poems, or you win mid-range poetry competition, or your book is reviewed in the Guardian… HUZZAH, move up to position A on the diagram. You’re nearly there! Look how close it is to 1st!

Scenario 2: you haven’t written anything you’re happy with in months. The last six responses from magazines have been rejections. It’s been years since that competition success/big magazine acceptance/wildly successful reading you did. Go directly to position B and stay there until you pull your socks up. That Lower 2nd is beckoning you, and the bright young things are pushing in!

So that, my poet friends, is the game of snakes and ladders that we’re all playing, not necessarily knowingly, not necessarily willingly, in fact you might be thinking it’s a load of bullshit.

But for some reason I take comfort in this analogy. The open book, the invitation to read and write, and look! – the middle section is the most prominent, the most visible. That RECTO page is mighty big, with room for us all to be a little easier on ourselves I think, still with plenty of scope for ambition, some healthy competition … and the chance to be successful enough.
Robin Houghton, How to be successful…enough

Decades ago, I walked with friends along the beach at Sullivan’s Island. One of those friends gestured towards a row of beach cottages and said, “That’s the inspiration for a thousand bad water color paintings.” He wasn’t wrong.

But of course, it’s also the inspiration for the kind of paintings that people want to hang on their walls, for better or worse. It’s the view so many of us wish we had as we stare out at our surly suburbs. It’s no wonder that so many painters try their hand at capturing it.

As I drove back to my seminary apartment yesterday, I looked out over mountain vistas and had similar thoughts about poetry. I thought, I’m viewing the inspiration for thousands of bad poems. But it does seem worth capturing in some format.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Clouds of Snow, Clouds of Petals

We row a boat across the head of a sunflower.
It takes a long time.
Neither of us can see anything but the sunflower and the sky.
You say Shall we stop for a while, I’m tired.
We lay the oars in the bottom of the boat.
We lay back and doze in the afternoon sun.
We feel the sunflower swaying gently under us.
You say We could just stay here, it’s so nice.
I say, Maybe we could, yes, maybe we could.
We drift in and out of sleep.
The sunflower’s stem is drying out.
Soon its petals will wither and drop.
Bob Mee, THE SUNFLOWER, THE LOST WOMAN AND AN INDEX OF POETS

I was brought up in post-war Widnes, where bombed out and demolished houses created areas of scrub land where only tough plants grew. This included rosebay willow herb, sometimes called fireweed, because it can shoot up fast even where there has been a fire; coltsfoot, those tough-leaved, tough-rooted little plants that are rarely seen these days, and sunny dandelions, with their tooth-shaped leaf edges. My mum loved flowers, and I never missed an opportunity to pick any I saw growing wild, to take home. I must have been around 5 when I picked these. Some children nearby sang that rhyme at me, but I paid little heed, as I’d been taught to reject such silly superstitions. I took them home and she was very pleased to put them in water, saying they had faces like the sun.

In later life, when she had a terminal liver disease, her hair, which was often fretted, and by then snowy white, looked exactly like the seed-clocks of the dandelions we used to blow to tell the time. Her skin was yellow from her failing liver. She had died by the time I wrote this poem. She was only 69. I approach this age myself and I still think of her every day.
Angela Topping, Dandelions for Mother’s Day

For three weeks, I was a guest: to different showers
And toilet flushes in the West, to coffee houses, to apps,
to rosemary as box shrub. A guest to my suitcase.
To hot tubs and skin in the garden of my tiny cottage.
Guest to stretches of blacktop like a zip, Lily Valley Church and Rainbow Donuts.

Guest to the mirror: my daughter hosted me.
Hit me in the gut. Made me think of another paradigm: host/parasite.
I made a typo and wrote paradise.
Jill Pearlman, The Guest

My mind’s been wandering a great deal lately. This at a time when focus would be quite useful, and yet–I don’t mind a little mental meandering. I think that, akin to daydreaming, a lack of focus can lead to creative thinking. Of course, the downside is that it may also lead to lollygagging and a lack of ambition.

I’ve been thinking about the way contemporary Americans use the word “engagement.” Not as in marriage proposals–that definition hasn’t changed–but in statistics, marketing, self-help, and education. My department at the university has been directed to “foster student engagement.” Our administration wants us to find ways to engage students, but it seems what’s meant by that is simply to attract their attention amid the myriad distractions and attractions of modern life. In my area of the college, where students go to get a little extra assistance in their coursework or their educational plans, we have long been aware that we can’t reach everyone who needs help and that we cannot create enthusiasm or involvement. Apparently, engagement is supposed to lead to motivation. That would be a miracle. Like many young people when I was a young person, today’s young people are often rather undirected. Wandering. […]

I’m with Walt Whitman and the loafing approach to observation and creative thinking, but that probably won’t be sufficient for a nation with a population of 336 million people.
Ann E. Michael, Wandering

Yesterday MacMillan publishers and the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education announced the result of research done on poetry in primary schools – the first of its kind since a report by Ofsted in 2007.

The conclusions make depressing, but not entirely surprising, reading: teachers don’t feel confident teaching poetry, aren’t trained to teach poetry and there aren’t many books in the classroom. In response the organisations have launched a project delivering training to thirty teachers – MacMillan also have a new book.

Reading the article I couldn’t help but think of the huge brouhaha last year over the poetry curriculum at GCSE. The argument revolved around the removal of a poem by a certain poet called Philip Larkin, who found himself collateral damage in an effort to bring in more diverse and/or contemporary poets. I say huge: I don’t know how far it ‘cut through’ but there was a period where you couldn’t move for articles in political magazines decrying the decision as, in the words of the (now disgraced) Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, ‘cultural vandalism’.

At the time I found the whole debate frustratingly narrow, even damaging. I was no fan of the decision to remove ‘An Arundel Tomb’ itself, especially when there was still space for James Fenton’s ‘In Paris With You’ – great, sleazy fun but not the kind of poem which offers much on a second reading. Fenton, of course, is as pale and stale as Larkin by now (sorry Mr Fenton), so you wonder whether he kept his place partly made because the poem’s rollicking rhythms and repetition lend it nicely to the formulaic rubrics used in modern examinations.
Jeremy Wikeley, Other Worlds: Poetry in Schools

Hello from my post-AWP hangover. I don’t drink but that doesn’t seem to matter at AWP as it’s 3-ish days of nonstop poetry / tabling / reading / chatting / everything. I arrived home at 1am on Monday morning, exhausted from the trip, the flights, and the time change. I love AWP, I really do. It’s the biggest writing conference in the country and it’s guaranteed I’m going to see writer friends I haven’t seen since the previous year’s conference, I’m going to find and fall in love with new collections of poetry, I’m going to chat with new people and make new friends. This year was all that and more.

My newest collection of poetry, Her Whole Bright Life, published by Write Bloody, had its soft launch at the conference. The official pub date is 4 April but my publisher was able to have advance copies at the conference. And here’s the exciting news – my book SOLD OUT over the weekend! To say I was ecstatic would be an understatement. Holding my new book in my hands, doing three readings from it, signing it for people, and then learning every last copy at AWP had been snagged – well, that’s a high I won’t soon forget.
Courtney LeBlanc, Post-AWP Hangover

As my regular readers know I did not attend AWP in Seattle this year. Instead, I did the Virtual Conference.

The virtual conference for me this year was a flop. It was not worth the discounted price.

I did this weekend receive a SWAG care package from my friend and poetry author Marianne Mersereall AKA Wild Honey Creations. She knows how much I look forward to the swag at each conference, something that doesn’t come with the virtual Conference, I have to thank Marianne for this kind deed. Not only a selection of Conference swag but some personal notes on recommended publishers for my work as well Thank you so much! (((big hug))) […]

There was simply so much that was not available. I tuned into some streaming and pre-recorded conference panels. They were not the ones I wanted to see, and they were honestly not that impressive to me. Perhaps the subject matter had something to do with it, but again, I could just not get the panels I wanted.
Michael Allyn Wells, AWP 2023 From Home or SWAG in a Box

Three days after AWP, I got a head injury that landed me in the hospital (concussions and MS do not play well together), so I am literally and figuratively still in recovery, but I was able to get out in the sunshine a bit today, plant a few flowers. I’ve been trading e-mails, got a few rejections and acceptances, but generally feel behind. I’m very lucky to not have caught anything (knock on wood), although I was very nervous about catching covid (or pneumonia or strep or something) at AWP. I am so happy I met so many new people and saw so many old friends. Connection is really important to me – even though it’s hard at three-day conferences with 9000 people to really make those real connections with people – but I do my best.

I’ve also started reading through my AWP stack of lit mags and books, although not as fast as I hoped (head injury really slowed down my reading, but I did use audio books). So far, I really enjoyed Dana Levin’s essay on divination and poetry in the latest issue of American Poetry Review, listened to Sabrina Orah Mark’s book of fairy-tale theme memoir/essays, Happily, and sent two submissions to journals that asked for them at AWP.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Still Processing/Recovering from AWP (with Pictures), Spring Begins, Beginning to Read through my AWP stack, an In-Depth Review from Flare, Corona

from Taksim Square

through Istiklal street
to the Galata tower

how quickly
names and roads
become old friends

4.
returning from Konya

I buy 22 volumes
of Rumi’s Divan -i Kebir

nineteen
are still waiting
to be read
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 38

some nodding yes
some nodding no:
daffodils
Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: March ’23

Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 4

Dave Bonta — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:35:57 +0000

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week: digesting terrible news, labor vs. work, an ode to irritable bowel syndrome, Mandelbrot images, Scots poetry, ChatGPT poetry, and much more.

I feel I should say a few words about my decision to include Substack posts here, since I’ve just added the fourth feed from that platform to my roster. Although they wisely position themselves as a newsletter delivery service, they aren’t doing anything that you can’t do with WordPress, for example, or with any number of other home-brewed blog + newsletter delivery app combos; they’re just making it a hell of a lot simpler and more affordable. I also like the emphasis on making money for writers, though obviously I’m not going to include any posts that aren’t freely available. Critically—for my interest here—Substack blogs have RSS feeds, which means I can access them from the same Feedly dashboard I use for everything else.

If you do decide to start a Substack, please be sure to post about it at your old blog so I can find the link. (This may seem so obvious as to not need saying, but, well, I know poets. Self promotion is not always our first instinct.) Anyway, enjoy the digest.

I’ve been thinking how easy it is to write tragedy–and while necessary, how redundant: the cat plowed into her blanket fort beside us, purring; the first day of real snow unspoiled by rain and a thermos of cocoa; the secret languages and contexts lacking drama: those. Those deserve more poems.
JJS, Untrammeled: a sonnet

I meant this to be an upbeat blog post but it’s hard to feel upbeat and I want to be authentic in this blog. I was sick all week (hence the lack of selfies) and it was cold and foggy out, absolutely the kind of weather you don’t want to go out in. I had a strange harbinger—a beautiful juvenile red-winged blackbird at my feeder, which I thought was unusual (they don’t usually visit feeders). Then tonight I learned about the death of a poet/friend/editor of Menacing Hedge, Kelly Boyker Guillemette. She was also a Seattle poet, so it impacts this community that I live in. I was sad I didn’t get to tell her how much I appreciated her, or even get to have coffee with her, just to visit. This pandemic has been so isolating, I realize, that I’ve lost touch with friends I shouldn’t have.

The news has been pretty relentlessly terrible, too. Outside today we had some sunshine, and I had been in bed, barely leaving the house even to get the mail this week with cold, miserable fog every day, so I took a short walk, but in the end, it was too cold to stay out long. I noticed how fallow everything was—all my usual walks, usually with some flowers or greenery even in winter, looked unusually barren. January is a hard month for many reasons. Anyway, readers, hug your friends and editors, tell them you appreciate them, buy them a coffee.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Sad news about a Seattle poet, Red-Winged Blackbirds and Superhero Poems, and Some Vision Boards and Kitten Pics to Cheer Us Up

Don’t say apple or flag or Thanks-
giving. This country is becoming

the loneliest country in the world. It is
the smell of floors bleached after a rain

of blood, the blind heat of hatred
strung like lights in dance halls,

incandescent as bullets boiled
in a crucible of darkness.
Luisa A. Igloria, The Loneliest Country in the World

In a dream around 7, I was eating the soles of a pair of black leather shoes, peeling off pieces. These delicate shoes, full of eyelets, usually sit in my closet. After my first rush of radiance, ecstatically led by someone offscreen, the dream began to think: disgust side by side with beauty: the shit. Appeal and revulsion, beautiful and the monstrous. Nestled in. And the hilarity of pragmatism: would I walk like a bird, scratching out a steady path with half the shoe gone. Missing pieces. Was I practicing for starvation in Leningrad? During the siege in the 40s, they scraped off glue from shoes and tables. Also, I was observing my oral French. Somehow that mattered. A traveler’s exile ends in language. Wrens meet at the branches of a bush beak to beak, nose to nose as if mistletoe. Pebbles on a gray slate play with their shadows, not a cat and mouse game, one will always prevail. The open emptiness of cobalt blue. Pop pop pop.
Jill Pearlman, Blue, Gunshots, Eating Shoes

Even if you watch this country with the sound turned down, all the hate and hurt still bruise through.

So many derangements arranged in strange and familiar ways.

Intoxicated logic. Unmended melodies with not enough pills or winning streaks to take them to the finish line.

Even with the sound turned down, you can still hear a cry take hold in the throat and refuse to leave.
Rich Ferguson, A Gene for Tears

turning up Marquee Moon in the otherwise
quiet night of someone else’s house

wearing headphones because the world’s asleep
its madness closely contained in a thin layer
of clean-toned guitar riffs, slicing through

the flesh around the heart
no blood, so much blood
Jason Crane, POEM: for Tom Verlaine

whose sorrow heals as a wing

whose wound mourns the gun

when did my shadow first walk underground
Grant Hackett [no title]

Thursday was the first day of spring in the Hindu calendar, and I missed it. Saraswati is honored on that day, with lavender, saffron and turmeric. I wouldn’t have “celebrated”, but I would like to have known. There is something life-affirming in rituals, regardless of belief. There is something I envy.

A moment of envy can be an awesome thing. It is an admission – a recognition of desire. It’s humbling. It situates you clearly outside of the center of your own subjective concepts of meaning.

I just learned about the goddess Saraswati last month while talking to the theater director and artist Anupama Hoskere. (I am working on an article for Drama magazine, and will link later.) She explained the connection of education through the arts to the universal. She talked about means and desire, and about Dharma.

I am still letting all my thoughts bump up against each other. I don’t really want to put them down as sentences yet. Poetry, maybe. Poetry at the moment is an expanse of dark, open water.
Ren Powell, Calendars, Conductors, and 31 Dosas

You unwrinkle me on a table and try to understand the words but the ink is smudged into a language you cannot read. This is what you mean. The calligraphy of incomprehension. Meterless. Wordless. Endless.

A grave is a box. Death, a label. We must ultimately be nothing and everything and be labelled when we are not left to call. The herd of the dead in rows for the final migration.

This is what you mean. The inevitability of sameness. The primal stereotype. Beyond the pretence of resistance. The line. The blue river. The danger. The other side.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The box. The other side.

I had been thinking of a poem possibility before last night. In the wee small hours of the morning earlier this week, I had awakened to the sound of someone singing. Sounds travel in strange ways in this building, so I’m not sure who was singing or why. I’m fairly sure it was a human singing, not a recording.

This morning, I turned my attention to my prayer book, as I do every morning. I use Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours, which is rooted in the lectionary that comes to us from the ancient monastic tradition. One of this morning’s passages leapt out at me: “The Lord executes righteousness and judgment for all who are oppressed” (Psalm 103: 6).

It’s not the first time that a passage seemed chosen for our particular day and time, and I do realize that the beauty of the Psalms rests in the broad scope of them, everything from mourning/lament to joy to anger and all the emotions in between.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Time, and a Psalm, for Lament

The hills
are dressed

for morning prayer
shoulders wrapped in wool.

Their winter tzitzit
are made of ice,

turn to tchelet
after the last snows.

Do our houses serve
as their tefillin?

We’re the tiny scrolls
tucked safe inside.
Rachel Barenblat, Minyan

Hurray! Spring is on its way! Well, the days are lengthening at least….It’s been a busy start to the year although I don’t seem to have got any poetry written. I’ve actually mostly been reading and researching a story which might turn into (whisper it) a novel – I know, I know, and me always saying I couldn’t write fiction. It may just be a nice break from poetry, something different and even energising, at least, that’s what Peter said when I mentioned it on the podcast. Whatever it is, I’m enjoying the process. If you see me please don’t ask ‘how’s the novel coming along?’ I’ll let you know when/if there’s anything to report!
Robin Houghton, Why I missed the TS Eliot readings, plus the good and the bad of January

It is a gladness to be able to call one’s daily work a labor of love, and to have that labor put food on the table the way any work does, dishwashing or dentistry. And yet such labors of diligence and devotion — the kind William Blake called “eternal work” — are somehow different, different and more vulnerable, for they enter the world in a singular spirit and are recompensed in a singular spirit, distinct from dentistry or dishwashing.

That spirit is the spirit of a gift — not the transaction of two commodities but the interchange of two mutual generosities, passing between people who share in the project of a life worth living.
Maria Popova, The Vital Difference Between Work and Labor: Lewis Hyde on Sustaining the Creative Spirit

Honestly, though, I’m finding the distinction a little fuzzy. How can it not be, when money is what we need to survive in our current world, and some labor is paid and some work is not? Yet it is clear to me that writing a blog–this kind of blog, at any rate–is clearly on the side of labor, and not work. It’s a labor I have been feeling ambivalent about.

What do I have to offer here? Do I have anything to say that anyone will benefit from hearing?

It’s a challenge to create a gift to the world when my instinct these days has been to retreat from it. Until now, I’ve had no choice about engaging with the world; continuing my existence required me to live deeply with it. Grading papers, planning lessons, submitting book purchase orders: These are all acts of work, and one can, I suppose, do the work of being a teacher or librarian without doing the labor of being an educator. But I never could, and laboring as an educator requires full immersion in the world. Now, I have a choice. Now, I finally have the resources I need to give myself to labor of whatever kind I might choose, and all I want to do is hunker down in my little shelter from the world.

I’d like to think it’s just a seasonal thing. Winter is a time of hibernation, of course. Or, perhaps, it’s a recovering from burnout thing. It feels like something more or different, though. The world feels increasingly foreign to me, and something with which I can’t keep up. Don’t necessarily want to keep up. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve been wondering what it will mean to be a writer–or any kind of artist–in a world with ChatGPT.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Labor enough

An acronym close to that computer firm.
There are dress codes at IBM, I have you know.
Irritable? Yes, often. I’ve been pissed off,
imagine bowels as a curled-up, snarling cobra.

Syndrome is, I believe, where spectators
gather to see retired pilots take off
in noisy small planes. Banking
is a dangerous manoeuvre.
Fokkina McDonnell, Ode of sorts…

In the season finale of the Culinary Saijiki podcast, I talked with Mark Scott of Naturalist Weekly, which was one of my favorite blogs of 2022. In the conversation, I had the idea of spending 2023 investigating the micro-seasons around me. I decided that since I wanted to find a way to write more consistently in this space, I would make that my project for 2023.

Of course, the first month of the year is nearly over, and I’ve yet to get started! In part that’s because I’m balancing a full-time job, finishing my Pilates training, and my other haiku endeavors. But there was another challenge: it became clear to me that the micro-seasons Mark describes in his blog would have been developed over many years of watching and observing. An awareness of micro-seasons would also require one to be intimately familiar with the flora and fauna of their locale.

Having lived in Missouri for just over six months, neither of these things are particularly ingrained in my consciousness.
Allyson Whipple, New Year, New Home

skies that make islands
of familiar trees
and cause us to imagine
great waters in between
near and far

and so probability
yields to dreaming
and there are wings
Dick Jones, islands

I love it when I find a poet I haven’t heard of before whose collection absorbs me and keeps dragging me with it through three or four readings. So it is with Alexandra Fossinger’s Contrapasso, which I bought a week or two ago.

She works with the in-betweens, the unexplained areas of experience, so it takes some work to get to its layers. I hadn’t read anything about Fossinger and didn’t notice the short biography at the back until after the second reading but it fits my initial reaction – She is mostly interested in the spaces between things, the tiny shifts in time, the overlooked, the unsaid. She’s Italian, from the South Tyrol near the border with Austria, lives in Germany and writes mostly in English. She’s done the usual round of magazines.

I don’t know the specific details behind the poems because she avoids telling us and concentrates instead on creating an atmosphere of increasing isolation. The drama is cumulative. It seems – and forgive me if you see it differently, or think I’m way out – that she is writing for a lover now estranged in time and distance, imprisoned somewhere, and so lost, except to memory and these poems, which seem to combine to form a message that deals with the experience of continuing to be fond of someone it is no longer possible to see or speak to, of where that experience can take a person over time.

In that so little is explicit, she is a demanding poet, but not obscure for obscurity’s sake. There is a real sense that she is trying hard to examine a particular experience of loss and come up with an appropriate way of communicating it. Yes, she could have been kinder by offering more easily understood facts, but it feels as if it’s the emotional experiences and not necessarily the physical facts that interest her.
Bob Mee, CONTRAPASSO – A COLLECTION BY ALEXANDRA FOSSINGER

As contemporary poets invent more and more forms for their poetry, it is perhaps surprising that the sonnet is undergoing something of a revival. Last year saw the publication of Hannah Lowe’s superb, award-winning The Kids , which demonstrated so well how this traditional form can be used for current content and now we have Paul Brookes’ Shakespearian sonnets in is latest collection, These Random Acts of Wildness (Glass Head Press, 2023) , which treat a range of enduring issues such as our experience of being alive and the nature of the natural environment.. His use of the form is as adept as Lowe’s, often concluding in memorable rhyming couplets, such as: ‘We collect the wild as ornamental/ Domesticate, put on a pedestal’; ‘My hard weight tames the uneven and wild/ makes it all proper, gentle meek and mild’; and ‘The wild dance of the swifts amongst the dead/ reminds us life goes on restless to be fed.’ The sonnet is clearly alive and well and has much to offer poets today.
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘These Random Acts of Wildness’

I was very pleased to hear of Chicago-born poet Jessica Laser’s latest, Planet Drill (New York NY: Futurepoem, 2022), recalling how struck I was by the work in her debut, Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Seattle WA: Letter Machine Editions, 2019) [see my review of such here]. The poems in Planet Drill are predominantly shorter, lyrically-compact first-person examinations, each line constructed as a kind of self-contained statement, set as a layering of poem-shaped brick-works. In certain ways, she constructs her poems around the shape of what otherwise couldn’t be seen without staffolding, allowing the poem to exist as the absence around which her poem draws. Listen to this stretch in the middle of the two-page poem “PLUMBER,” that reads: “I kept along my secret, plumbing / for keeps. State-employed, / I’m hungry, have glory, now money, / now sadness, now none, concern, / joy, fear, grief, / humility, anger, pride, peace, / I’m happy stricken, afflicted / with so deep a burning / of which ice is and can’t help.” There is a playfulness to her lyric of indirect direct statements, one that offers wry commentary and tongue-in-cheek swipes. “Nothing in pride but a flower.” she writes, to open “POEM WITH LIES,” “Nothing in a stare but glass life. / No fruit but a spore / and silent nectar. To remember / this is to bear all things. Life bears / no fruit but of too much color, stands / for taste where sun and taste ally.” Laser’s poems blur between surfaces and depth, moving in and out of focus at remarkable speed, and employing a precision that both illuminates and contorts. “A sad girl a sad alas is.” she writes, to open the poem “CRENELATIONS,” “Best to forfeit disposition. / All exposure. Best / Not to make / A judge love you, / Particularly / You.”
rob mclennan, Jessica Laser, Planet Drill

Carolyn Forché has a new collection of her own poetry, which is always cause for joy. She has compiled anthologies and written memoir and essays, but her poetry collections don’t appear frequently–five collections since 1975, averaging one poetry collection a decade. This is not a prolific output in terms of poetry collections compared with some of her peers, but her books are worth waiting for. I suspect that her poems, crafted with such memorable pacing and imagery, which unspool so purposefully–even mindfully, though that term is overused–must take time to consider, revise, or compose. I have to slow my breath just to take them in.

In the Lateness of the World lies on the book pile beside my bed at the moment, and I read about three to four poems at a time. Savoring them, thinking about their implications; despair and concern and grief, and deep love for the world we inhabit and the people who labor through the days. Forché, because of her “poetry of witness,” often gets called a political poet, mostly because she never shies away from confronting, and writing about, the injustices and damages inflicted on people and on the planet–and implicating the perpetrators. But she also avoids ideology. The perpetrators are not easily pegged in her work: all of us can be implicated, and all of us are affected, a network no single person or nation can untangle or resolve. Forché’s poems resonate with a complicated love and a recognition of how much work we must be willing to do.
Ann E. Michael, Admiration

This pamphlet features two longer sequences, starting with the title piece, and four shorter poems. In a nutshell, “Lilies on the Deathbed of Étain” explores the life of a woman in youth, age and death through a lens of motherhood. The poem doesn’t flow in in chronological order, it’s a series of recollections from differing perspectives. […]

The two longer sequences explore multiple voices on a common theme while the shorter poems are more focused. All demonstrate a love of language, both of meaning and sound, not just as single words but how sounds build patterns and add texture to the poems.
Emma Lee, “Lilies on the Deathbed of Étain and Other Poems” Oisín Breen (Beir Bua Press) – book review

Finished reading Deathbed Sext by Christopher Salerno, 2020, Two Sylvia’s Press. This was a winner of TSP Chapbook competition. There are some remarkable lines in this poetry. It is rich with dissonance (something I love) throughout the book. Personally, I felt its strength was in individual poems and not so much as a cohesive manuscript, but that was just my opinion.
Michael Allyn Wells, January – Birthday – Fountain Pen

It occurred to me suddenly last week that next year, we are coming up on the 20th anniversary of the first dancing girl press chapbook. There is no way this could be at all possible, and yet, there it is. It also means that 20 years ago this fall, I was just starting my MFA program. While wicked alice existed prior to those years, the press is somewhat tied to that program, not really the poetry classes, where they all seemed slightly horrified I had the audacity to start a press (or at my audacity in general,) but a brief dip into the Fiction Writing program’s Small Press Publishing class where I created first a print annual of WA, then my own little chapbook project as a test runner for bigger things that fall. Granted, that class imagined far larger goals for starting a press than a tiny chapbook operation. I remember my classmates coming in with grand schemes and even grander budgets, none of which quite lifted off the ground. My tiny little print annual flew..mostly because my expectations were small..a saddle stapler, some cardstock, some paper, a word file. I did it all for less than a $100 for both the annual and my little chap. This was proper to social media, prior even to this blog (I was still on xanga at the time.) And yet, people found their way to the website, the crude little initial version I had built on Angelfire for like 10 bucks a month where I hosted other early sites (where it still lives, more or less, at least the landing page, which then gives way to the shop hosted elsewhere.)

The success of course, depended on the smallness. Keeping things manageable financially, with each book paying for the next. This is still the model that works, with other funds coming through from the shop goods in general. It’s a lot more solvent and in the red than when I rented the studio space, but it’s still very much a micropress. Occasionally, I entertain the idea of full-length offerings, which are do-able as my own self-publishing endeavors attest, but I still love the handmade factor, the smallness factor, of publishing chapbooks. It’s still a low-overhead endeavor, which makes it possible to continue even in times when many other presses and publishers went under. (Ie even if traffic is low and the economy shit, books can still make their way into the world, even if I am paying out of pocket myself.)

I also like that not much investment means that I can afford to take chances on authors who might be publishing their first work but aren’t going to be big sellers, at least not right away. Or strange little weird books no one but me may love. Or books by authors who release a lot of work, but because their fans are split across so many new projects, they might not sell well initially (I sometimes am this author, I know what it’s like) There is a pleasure in being small, but also really free.
Kristy Bowen, dancing girl press notes | january 2023

There was a lovely range of ages in my first workshop, a few younger siblings joined in, as well as parents, grandparents and carers. We talked about pattern, repetition, shape and rhyme in poetry, and how that might be represented visually. We also learned that George Crabbe wrote long narrative poems, predominantly in the form of rhyming couplets, and I showed the group some of my own visual poems, where I’ve used the same flower at the end of each line to represent a rhyme, and more recent poems using photocopies of fallen leaves.

Then the group spent time with George Crabbe’s herbarium, carefully handling specimens (all kept under clear protective covering to preserve them) and selecting the ones they wanted to work with. Hannah, from Trowbridge Museum, photocopied the chosen specimens, then the participants set to work, cutting and pasting photocopies of flowers, or drawing and colouring them, or making 3D models of flowers and a garden landscape, or a combination of all of this. One workshop member had a go at writing rhyming couplets in the style of George Crabbe. We talked about how Crabbe included common wildflowers in his collection and the group was very knowledgeable about the insect-enabling, pollinating benefits of flowers and plants, incorporating bees, butterflies and other insects into their creative work, a few samples below! [Click through for the photo documentation.]
Josephine Corcoran, Flowers, visual poetry and George Crabbe’s herbarium in a workshop at Trowbridge Museum

Thank you Matthew Paul for reminding me about The Iron Book of British Haiku. You can read his very detailed and engaging post about this book here – a real insider’s account of how this book came together. I’ve featured the poem on the back cover (above) [“Morning sneeze / the guitar in the corner / resonates” —Dee Evetts] as a gentle reminder to myself to get back to the guitar! It’s been a marathon month of blogging, and it’s really helped me focus on the poetry, but I’m well aware that it has also taken up some of the time I would normally have spent practising the guitar. My aim was to post every day in January, and we’re almost at the end of the month, so February should be, by rights, a month where I pick up the guitar every day. Let’s see how that pans out!
Julie Mellor, the guitar in the corner …

It’s Saturday morning and I’m doing everything except writing although my mind keeps going back to writing. I’m watching a documentary right now called “Laurel Canyon” on Prime but in the back of my mind I’m restructuring a creative nonfiction piece I’ve been working on for a while. […]

The main thing that impressed me was the mystique of Laurel Canyon itself, as a community, at that moment in time. I felt like I was watching a lost world that will never be again, a world more personal than the one we live in today. People trusted each other, didn’t lock their doors, wandered in and out of each others homes. Their lifestyle was free, innocent, expansive. It seemed it was a community that shared, without envy and competition. It’s hard to believe in our current world that this ever existed.

The landscape itself was verdant, moody, primitive, even dangerous in the way beauty often is. I can imagine being bewitched, living there at that time in such a richly creative, beautiful, and nurturing environment. It oozed creativity that came through in the old home movies and photographs. It really cast a spell on me for several hours. I can relate to how music and art is inspired by being immersed in the natural world, how the peace of it empties the mind of chaos, replaces it with wonder and a calm that allows creative ideas to grow.
Charlotte Hamrick, Creative Communities

The second poem for this week comes from Fergus Allen and his first collection, The Brown Parrots of Provedencia. I think I’ve mentioned his work before, and may have shared a poem, but if it’s taken me two years to get to Katie’s book, it’s taken me about 25 to get to this one. I’ve had this since my days working at Bertrams and have hauled it with me wherever I go, but if I have read it it didn’t land with me, or perhaps I didn’t have the tools to comprehend it, but now I”ve started it I am enjoying it. It looks like my three Fergus Allen books made it to the TBR pile a couple of years ago too, so I really am getting down into the sub-strata there. I’ve now discovered that a) he’s dead b) there are two more books I don’t have of his c) Brown Parrots came out when he was 70 (wither the definition of an emerging or developing poet argument) and d) this is an interesting interview with him.
Mat Riches, Attitudes, Anteaters, Brown Parrots, and early kicks offs for the Eliots

I’m so delighted to be included in the most recent issue of Eemis Stane, a primarily Scots language publication. The team is just brilliant and so helpful with getting the Scots in my poems jist richt. I’m still learning, so it’s been great to work with them and to be included, though Scots for me is a learned language, rather than a native tongue. The scope of the magazine is amazing and global even though it’s focussed on a minority language, from a sample of Catalan translations of a Scots novel to a whole collection of great Scots poems and a review of a book of Scots translations of Chinese poets. I feel like I’m a small part of a new vitalising movement.
Gerry Stewart, The Keeking Light

I’ve excited to announce that my next collection of poetry, Her Whole Bright Life, winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize and forthcoming from Write Bloody, is now available for pre-order! Books will ship in April, order today!

***

Her Whole Bright Life is a collection of poems that weave together the trauma and exhaustion of a life lived with disordered eating and the loss and grief of the death of the poet’s father. Love and hunger intertwine and become inseparable as the poet grapples to find, and listen, to both. With a distinct and feminist voice, this collection delves into a life now lived without a beloved parent, while trying to survive a pandemic, and battling demons that have lived inside her for most of her life. With both fierceness and tenderness, we see a woman trying to find her place within her own body and within an ever-changing world. This collection of poems is both an elegy and an anthem – praising both those who’ve been lost and those who remain.
Courtney LeBlanc, New Book Available for Pre-Order

I am amazed to see that I have yet another review of my new chapbook (The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants)! I think this is a testament to the hustle of my wonderful editor at Belle Point, Casie Dodd (thank you if you are reading!).

Erijo Edward writes, “The book is a moving masterpiece that allows for the author to mourn, for the reader to see through the most trying period of her life and also appreciate the essence of what life is, for it is in moving on and finding the will to survive we coexist with the planet and once again appreciate the beauty of nature and life in itself.”

Masterpiece?!?! I am really flattered!
Renee Emerson, The Commonplace Misfortunes, reviewed in The Poetry Question

I was thrilled to receive an acceptance this week for some poems I submitted to an upcoming anthology. I haven’t submitted work in a very long time, and I had forgotten the rush of good feeling it gives me to be granted a “yes” on my work: Someone thinks I’m worthy! Someone likes what I wrote! Approval is a powerful drug, and it’s been a while since I’ve gotten a good dose of it. Most of the time these days I go around seething to myself, “If you want to tell me about all of ways I’ve disappointed you, you’ll have to get in line behind everyone else.” So being given the Nod of Worthiness felt pretty darn good.
Kristen McHenry, Emotional Wins Hot Streak

One of the joys of social media (and there are plenty of aspects of them that are less than joyful) is that occasionally a notification pops up from an unexpected source and when you check it out there is something really worthwhile to be found. This happened the other day – via Instagram. Someone called Matt McGettrick had tagged me. I don’t know Matt, but he is a student on the BA course in TV and Radio Production at the University of Salford.

Matt’s instapost said he had recently created a soundscape based on a poem I published in 1990, in my first book from Enitharmon Press, called Beneath Tremendous Rain. It’s unlikely that the poem was found in that book itself, but I remember it was selected more than 10 years later by Sean Street to appear in an anthology called Radio Waves: poems celebrating the wireless (Entharmon, 2004). There, I was happily rubbing shoulders with the likes of Auden, Brecht, MacNeice, Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy. Sean – whose is a poet, broadcaster and recently retired Professor of Radio at Bournemouth University – had divided the anthology up into sections variously titled, Music Radio, Talk Radio, Weather, Listeners and Signals. My piece was in the section called ‘In the Car’.
Martyn Crucefix, ‘Air-Waves’: poem as audio soundscape

The thing I found fascinating about Mandelbrot images, was the way you can zoom in and in and in, and the same patterns emerge at every level of detail. That was the effect I wanted to portray in this poem. To my mind, a thesaurus behaves like that; you can look one word up and then find its synonyms, and then proceed to synonyms of those synonyms. As the poem imparts, spiralling and sprawling, spawning a myriad thesaurus points, and genociding a kaleidoscope of others.

Giving the name Julia to one of these fractal sets felt very anthropomorphic.
Giles L. Turnbull, Patterns Amid the Poems

it’s the fag isn’t it
chomped in the blown corner
making way for the mouthed words
exhaled frown yet to crease that young brow
where the fish words garner thoughts
that glow and fade
drop like blown ash
his mind as far away as the fields
in the tobacco shop on st helen’s road
Jim Young, dylan thomas in a chair with a fag

In the bright frosty days when rain paused I remembered how sparrows spring clean as nesting time approaches – sweep sticks and feathers from hiding places in the eaves. Foxes are mating and calling. Something of that fever got to me in the last couple of weeks. I’ve spent hours online rooting through names on my mother’s side of the family.

There are few narratives attached to these names, other than the streets they lived in, the churchyard they’re buried in (masses of them in the same one) and occupations on census forms – agricultural labourer, laundress, unpaid domestic duties. Interrupting these, a house painter, groom, a charcoal burner, gardener. Unsurprising handholds in the story that kept mum’s family in the New Forest for generations, mainly around one village. For a while they lived in Silver Street, which the New Forest Explorers’ Guide reckons is a corruption of Silva, meaning road to the woods. Whether or not that’s true, I’ll take the beauty in that name as truth. Just as I was delighted to find a female ancestor called Martha Candy.
Jackie Wills, The forest ancestors again

I hear of two so search for the third
as death always comes in threes
this is a hard and fast law
my mother steered our family by such stars
bad things can happen any time
tea leaves held clues
and she interrogated every cup for omens
but none were as accurate as
Coop Indian Prince Assam
Paul Tobin, TEA LEAVES HELD CLUES

The photos in this post were taken in Rome in November. And it was such an interval of pure play. At first I was disappointed that the carousel was draped in the protective tarp. But it started to seem a bit symbolic. The messages and words written on the plastic in the dust. Someone had torn away a bit of the plastic so you could see in a little but largely the carousel animals were a murky blur. The fun part was obscured. Still, the decorative top was a visual feast. I can’t tell you how many photos I took of this and Rob off to the side patiently just letting me do my thing. At the time I couldn’t even say what drew me to this but I was COMPELLED. Now it makes sense to me but I knew enough to just go with it and enjoy the play. To just delight. I remember taking some pains to line up the angels on the carousel with the angel on top of the Castel Sant’Angelo, and the bird perched on the lamppost. […]

As most creative people know, when you’re just playing around, goofing about, that’s often when neat stuff happens. You’re open to it, it’s open to you. Who knows. In the next two frames, a couple of birds began to play. You could tell they were riffing off of each other, taking turns perching on the horse. Delightful, yes?

It helps, anyway, is what I’ve found, to just go and play at something (in my case photography). Then when you come back to the day job or whatever work you have to do, it’s easier to find that comedic distance.
Shawna Lemay, Participate Joyfully

Like many people, I’ve been experimenting with using AI tools to write. In one way or another, AI has been part of my writing practice for decades. I begin using Ray Kurzweil’s “Poet’s Assistant” ages and ages ago after hearing Christopher Dewdney speaking about it. You could feed it a corpus of a poet’s work (I liked Blake’s) and then add another corpus (I’d feed it old manuscripts of mine) and then you could get it to generate entire poems, or, even better, to complete sentences. I found it particularly interesting to prompt it with words or phrases that confounded it. “Underwear” isn’t in the Blake poems, for example.

I’ve often used Google Translate, and an N+7 generator, running next through them multiple times and generally trying to exploit the strange corners of the software.

Lately, I’ve been exploring ChatGPT and GPT-3. With any AI, the trick is to figure out how to give it productive prompts which cause it to respond in interesting ways and hopefully generate something of use. I’m not a purist–I’m happy to take output and edit it. The first example below (and set to music in the video above) The Ocean was created without any significant editing — a couple of tiny nips and tucks. The second piece, The Leaves was more substantially edited and I merged two different GPT-3 prompts and results together. I love the idea that you give a prompt to an AI and then the result is kind of like a prompt back to you.
Gary Barwin, The Ocean, The Leaves and AI

How many times
do two words go

bump-bump
before it means

something,
the old monk asked.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (389)

How does a poem begin?

Sometimes with a ghost, sometimes with a joke. Although before that, before the immediate inciting incident, there is a slow and steady accumulation of fragments: overheard phrases, unbidden ideas, resonant texts, facts that scream to be made into metaphors. I spend my time moving through the world and collecting these little fragments, jotting them down in notebooks, suspending them from the rafters of my brain where they can sway and sing together.

And then, the inciting incident: A hypothetical question about eating your clone, for example. That gives the fragments something to coalesce around. It gives them a shared premise. It illuminates their similarities, heightens their differences. They all begin casting light and shadow on one another, melting into one another, gesturing toward other fragments, morphing into strange new entities with many faces. It’s all quite chaotic.

So what you need to do, then, is find that line or phrase to anchor them – like binding a spirit to a cursed object.
Matthew Kosinski : part five (Thomas Whyte)

but when I stop and listen

I realise I am not
the only interruption ~

a passing train, the cries
of children in the yard

of a school half a mile away
and then in the next moment

the peals of the school bell
calling us all to order

and I am a child
in another schoolyard

in another landscape
bouncing on my heels

turning towards this future
I have yet to imagine.
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ It is so still today

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Weeks 51 & 52

Dave Bonta — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:41:44 +0000

For this final wrap-up of 2022, with two weeks of material to go through, I had the proverbial embarrassment of riches. It was especially tough with those bloggers who had a good solstice or Christmas post AND a good year-in-review post, trying to choose just one. But in the end, I feel, both sorts of posts are well represented here, along with the usual off-the-wall reflections and reports. Enjoy! See you in 2023.

Gilded horses with wild eyes and gold-painted manes, real horsehair tails groomed to silk and fanning in the breeze. Riderless on their barley-sugar twist poles, gliding by, up and down on an invisible sea, the afternoon sheened with drizzle and yellow light as the horses pass, and pass again, Coco, Belle and Princess, fettered and unloved, evoking an image of childhood that never really existed.

chestnuts in a paper bag
we stamp our feet
to keep warm
Julie Mellor, Carousel

I find Christmas more enjoyable, whatever its shape, whoever I’m with, however the food turns out, if it’s accompanied by Handel’s Messiah. It’s often sung at this time of year because of its distillation of the Christmas story into quotations from the bible, the first part focusing on Unto us a child is born.

I listened to the first section yesterday as I ran round the Quarry Park in Shrewsbury for my 80th parkrun, sporting my Santa hat. I was somewhere behind Mr Yule Log, and amid 700 or so other Santas, Elves, Christmas Trees and even, I think, a Christmas Pudding. […]

This work of Handel’s has survived its own popularity. This is song that can be sung in any season, even this one with its ugly-beautiful mix of religion, commerce, greed, altruism, cynicism, hope, loneliness and partying. I do not experience this work as a sermon, but as a poem. Similarly, parkrun with its accommodation of logs, fast runners, walkers, dogs, puddings and all – I don’t experience it as a race, but as a temporary community with volunteer marshals encouraging us on every step of the way.
Liz Lefroy, I Snap A Picture

It’s become a private tradition to read poetry in this wintry span of time between the end of one academic term and the beginning of the next. I think it’s because poetry helps me center myself, dial down stress, and look away from my inbox. I’m definitely hit at the end of the calendar year by guilt at my to-be-read stack–but I think a craving for calm matters more. I’ve used books my whole life as a mood regulator, and probably built my career around them for similar reasons. As I put it in “Oral Culture” in my book Heterotopia, poetry is “work and joy and religion.”

I just posted at the Aqueduct Press blog about the speculative edge of my 2022 reading, noting that this was a difficult, distractible year during which certain books sunk in deeply and others skated past.
Lesley Wheeler, Poetry in 2022 (work & joy & religion)

I leave the house and walk to the train station. In the afternoon, I walk home from the station. I could live anywhere.

Except I don’t. I miss the city. Any city. The pressure of anonymous, noisy humanity. Like a weighted blanket.

It’s the individual voices, the steady, thin drip of snark, and the randomly-focused vitriol that hurts. Vitriol is an interesting word. I wonder why it isn’t used more often. It gestures, in a graphic way, to petrol and by extension to all things caustic.

In the fall, there are leaves along the edges of the trail that have withered into fragile lace-like structures. The midrib and the netted veins remain as a kind of mid-stage artifact of life.

I missed the fall this year. It seems I’m waking up in the middle of death. And it’s not quiet, as we tend to describe it. It’s the percussive slaps of melting snow, flung by the tires of passing cars. Browning from the edges, like a rotting artifact of hope.
Ren Powell, Post Long Covid Torpor

Shimmer and cyclone of snow-breath clouding off pine pinnacles tall as wild hope; this ridge will burn, sooner than we can imagine, but now it diamond-glints and showers sprays of spirit-shaped creatures who rise as often as they fall, lit gold.

Vermont says Vermont things, secret. Always held between the mountain and the flesh, what is whispered here. A single glove left behind, or maybe both. Soft, warm, the shape of what was once held. Breathless from it, the cold; from what was in hand.
JJS, contranym

It’s that time, when foxes appear on Christmas cards. There’s a path made by foxes from the hole in my hedge to the fence on the other side of the front garden. My neighbour, who has a webcam, has counted at least ten different animals, plus two badgers and a hedgehog.

I hear the foxes most nights, from about 8.30/9pm, chattering or screeching and of course the dog goes mad, throwing herself at the window. The cat doesn’t seem to hear, or doesn’t care. When I come home late, there’s usually one on the path. There used to be one that slept by my front door.
Jackie Wills, Time of the foxes

The slow unpeeling of a lemon
on a painter’s canvas will not convince us
to mind our decadence.
Time does pass — that’s why we celebrate.
Jill Pearlman, Mellow the Morning After

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (indie link) by Jenny Odell
The author reminds us our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. As she writes, “If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.” This book doesn’t rail at us to renounce technology and get back to nature (or our own navels). Instead it asks us to look at nuance, balance, repair, restoration, and true belonging. She writes beautifully. Here’s a snippet.

“In that sense, the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away—all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.”
Laura Grace Weldon, Favorite 2022 Reads

Even the glass frog, smaller than a postage
stamp and almost as gelatinous as a gummy

bear, still confounds science—asleep, its organs
hide the blood, rendering it if not completely

invisible, then barely perceptible. Pasted
against a leaf like a wet translucence,

an outline of itself; with nearly all cells
carrying oxygen packed into the liver’s

styrofoam box, how does it even
keep breathing? And yet it does.
Luisa A. Igloria, Portrait as Glass Frog, or as Mystery

A BBC website piece on the international appeal of Detectorists, available here, provides some instructive reading, in how superb writing can transcend supposed barriers: that, far from obscure cultural references being deterrents, they can actually possess intrinsic appeal because of their obscurity.

I’ve had similar thought when reading We Peaked at Paper, subtitled ‘an oral history of British zines’, co-written by Gavin Hogg and my friend Hamish Ironside. It covers fanzines devoted to all manner of obscure subjects, including, to my delight, A Kick up the Rs, about the mighty QPR. What’s evident is the passionate energy which the founders brought to their individual fanzines and it’s that which is important, surely, in enabling niche content to reach beyond those who might already be converted. I can’t recommend the book, which is beautifully produced and available here, enough.
Matthew Paul, On obscurity

It feels bad to be a downer. It feels bad to not participate. It feels bad to be there but absent. It feels very bad to miss these years of grandchildren growing up, miss getting to know each unique, amazing personality. I have had, and hope to have more, time with them. I cannot be a regular grandma, certainly not a storybook grandma, but to the extent I can I would like to know them and for them to know me.

But most of all, I want as long as possible with my friend and lover and husband while we are both able to fully appreciate our time together. This late romance was an unexpected gift. My illness is not its only burden, but so far we have held together. I hope we can keep doing so.
Sharon Brogan, Why I’m Not There

The list of books I read in the past year is the shortest in memory, partly because of all the things that happened this year to disrupt my reading time, but also because it contains three very long titles. Most of my reading was connected with my zoom book group, and we began the year reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. That occupied us during most of the cold months last winter, appropriately enough. It was my third time through, and I feel like I got even more out of it, especially by virtue of the close reading with astute friends. Among us, we read several different translations, and this also added to the depth of our discussions. I was the one who had pushed us to read it, and so it was a delight to watch the group engage with and, at length, fall in love with the book and its characters, and appreciate Tolstoy’s tremendous gifts as a novelist. The biggest gratification for all of us came at the end when several members who had been reluctant at first, or who had tried previously and never gotten through it, expressed their feeling of accomplishment and happiness at having met this monument of literature, which everybody agreed really does deserve its rating as one of the greatest novels of all time.

We then drew a deep breath, and decided to read a number of short works, of which the two by César Aira stand out particularly, along with Aristophanes’ comic play The Birds.
Beth Adams, Book List, 2022

I’ve been forgetting to post poems on the blog, as more people tend to read them via links on twitter or facebook these days, but here are the out-in-December ones I can remember (alas, I’ve had to rush away from home and don’t have access to all my records.)

New poem in First Things: The Mortal Longing After Loveliness This one not “about” but is oddly apt for the Christmas season. I wonder how many poems Xerxes has marched into…

New poem in Willows Wept: Summer’s End (page 53) I’d forgotten this one; poets are moody, it seems!

And if you have a subscription to print-only journal Blue Unicorn (they’re very rare, those lovely, melancholy blue ones), you’ll find one in there this month as well, thanks to a bit of delay on an issue.
Marly Youmans, Wiseblood, Seren, poems

The concerts are over – Sunday’s Lewes Singers event was a major thrill, and it was lovely and amazing to see Claire Booker there – of all my local poet friends, none has ever been interested in coming to hear beautiful choral singing, so Claire is a real one-off!

As the year closes out I’m reminding myself all the good things – as well as the music, there’s Planet Poetry which has just has just signed off for a wee break, although we’re back in January with Peter interviewing Mimi Khalvati. I’m really looking forward to it, especially as Peter and Mimi knew each other back in the day. […]

In the post yesterday came the long-awaited new edition of The Dark Horse. The front cover somewhat dauntingly announces it’s a ‘Festschrift for Douglas Dunn – Poems, Affections and Close Readings’, teamed with ‘MacDiarmid at 100’. Despite my initial reservations I soon found myself enjoying very much the various recollections and essays about both of these (clearly eminent, but in different ways) poets. I’ve already been persuaded to order a copy of Dunn’s Elegies. And already I’ve spotted some lovely poems by Christopher Reid and Marco Fazzini, the former’s ‘Breaking or Losing’ I read to my (non-poet) husband who found it very moving. I like the way The Dark Horse is both a serious magazine and also warm and real – heavyweight contributions abound, but it’s never overly academic or esoteric.
Robin Houghton, Festive reading and giving

As I look back on the past year, at first I felt as if I didn’t get as much accomplished as I wanted to—as I could say of all the pandemic years—and was weighted down with too many doctor’s appointments and not enough fun stuff. But productivity is only one way—and a narrow one—to measure a year. I made new friends at a beautiful new farm in Woodinville – where I spent a lot of time wondering through lavender fields – and started a book club at a winery—where I hope to make more local friends. I got to go to La Conner for the Tulip Festival AND the Poetry Festival, and caught up with old friends, and did my first live reading at Hugo House since the pandemic with wonderful poets. I did podcasts for Writer’s Digest and Rattle. And of course, I worked this year with BOA Editions for the first time, on copyedits, covers, blurbs, and putting together all kinds of information. So in some ways I accomplished important things. So I guess I’m hoping for more time in flower fields, more time with friends, and more time away from doctor’s offices.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Holidays: Solstice and Christmas Traditions, Flare, Corona Full Cover Reveal, New Kittens, Winter Storms, and Planning for 2023 Already!

Quite unseasonally perhaps, here is an image of a gazelle – gazella dorcas – the kind of one Rilke is writing about in my translation below, with that ‘listening, alert’ look. The other extraordinary image that Rilke includes here is of the hind legs: ‘as if each shapely leg / were a shotgun, loaded with leap after leap’. This is one of the New Poems, written by Rilke under the influence of the sculptor, Auguste Rodin. Rilke learned from Rodin’s insistence on ‘looking’ closely at a subject, as well as his impressive work ethic! […]

This is one of five new translations which have just been posted at The Fortnightly Review. Click the link below to see the others – ‘Departure of the Prodigal Son’, ‘Pieta’, ‘God in the Middle Ages’ and ‘Saint Sebastian’.
Five poems from ‘Neue Gedichte’.
Martyn Crucefix, Five New Rilke Translations in ‘The Fortnightly Review’

Over the past year, I’ve been experimenting with how I use this blog in conjunction with social media. My point of departure was a quick analysis of the differing temporal nature of blogs, Facebook and Twitter as a poet’s main means of communication with their readers. If a blog post often gathers pace over the course of days and weeks (and sometimes even months and years if Google takes a fancy to it), Facebook posts accumulate likes over a period of hours and days, while Tweets find audiences mainly in minutes and hours.

This is why blogs are losing impetus. But it’s also their possible saving grace. Rather than viewing my blog as a separate entity from my social media use and lamenting its decline as a fading anachronism, I’ve begun to realise that my blog posts could acquire a crucial function on Twitter and Facebook. And as a consequence, the viewing stats for Rogue Strands have increased once more.
Matthew Stewart, The future of poetry blogging

Forever and always books save me – they bring me refuge, they carry me away, they provide entertainment and escape. Books for me are the ultimate entertainment and because I don’t watch television, most nights you’ll find me curled up on the couch with my dogs and a book. In fact, Piper loves the smell/taste of books and will often lick the pages and try to nibble at them, and Cricket, in her obsessive, smothering love, will force me to maneuver around her to hold my book because her favorite spot to lay is on my chest.
Courtney LeBlanc, Best Books Read in 2022

I meant to stay away from this space until after the new year, thinking I’d want to spend my time in other ways, but this morning Jill of Open Space Practice shared an article on Facebook about the choices of a man dying of glioblastoma–which are the choices all of us make, every day, whether we know death is imminent or not.

This man, who chose to begin an important creative project (knitting a sweater for his son) even though he knew he might not finish it before dying, made me think of a conversation I had this week with an old (from college) friend. We acknowledged that we are moving into a new stage of life, one in which time feels short in ways that it never has before. “I find myself wondering what I want to do with what remains,” I said to her.

It brought to mind, too, a piece that Kate shared on her blog this week, The Satisfaction of Practice in an Achievement-Oriented World, in which the writer, Tara McMullin, makes a case for doing things for the experience of doing them–not for accomplishment or some byproduct that doing the thing might provide, but simply for whatever benefit we get in the moment of doing. She advocates for the value of practice over achievement.

This is a different thing, in some important respects, from the man who hopes to finish knitting a sweater, but it also isn’t. Both are about letting go of outcomes–starting the sweater even though you might die before it is done, taking up running because of how it feels while you’re doing it and not because you want to lose weight.

Talking about the article with Cane, I recalled how I felt the morning after my book of poetry won an award–how I understood, for the first time, that I would from then on write–if I wrote–for the sake of writing itself and not for accolades or publication. The accolade was nice, but fleeting, as was the feeling I’d had when I first held the book in my hand. It wasn’t enough to sustain me or the effort it took to write while parenting and teaching full-time.
Rita Ott Ramstad, The gifts of time

How does a poem begin?

Poems begin in my body. I’ve often compared it to the sensation just before a sneeze. Sometimes, a feeling comes over me and it’s luckily often combined with an opening or triggering phrase. I spend a lot of time hiking in the hills behind my house with my dogs, and I will often find that a phrase comes to me that leads me into a new poem. I find that if I pay attention to this confluence of feeling and sound, if I stop what I’m doing and write it down, a poem will flow fairly easily onto the page.
Thomas Whyte, Subhaga Crystal Bacon : part five

Yesterday, visited a place that I had always wanted to visit since I heard about it: Frida Kahlo’s Blue House, or Casa Azul. It was a beautiful compound of house and garden. The great paintings were not there, as they were scattered in the world’s museums, but the material remnants of one’s life were. The wheelchair in front of the easel in the artist’s studio. The mirror above the beds in the day and night bedrooms that enabled the artist to paint while lying down in excruciating pain. The artist’s ashes in an urn in the shape of toad, to recall Diego’s nickname for himself, the toad-frog. The corsets—medical and decorative—that held the broken body straight. The song written by Patti Smith, painted on the garden wall, inspired by Noguchi’s gift of a display case of butterflies to Kahlo. Famously, when Kahlo had to remove her gangrenous foot, she said, “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

After Casa Azul, we walked to the lovely neighborhood of Coyoacán, taking in the busy Mercado de Coyoacán and the street artists in a small square. I regret not buying a small painting there. An ink painting of a man and a woman entwined in sex, the woman sitting in the man’s lap, on top of the text of a poem by (?), translucently covered by a yellow wash.
Jee Leong Koh, Flying in Corsets, Dancing in Bars

For several days in December, 2022, Adelaide and surrounding areas swarmed with large dragonflies, that have bred in the very wet spring we’ve had this year. In this video, I’ve used a frame echo process to track and digitally illuminate the flight paths of the dragonflies as they fly around our garden in Belair, South Australia. […]

Dragonflies have some of the most accomplished aerial abilities of any animal, with both high speed and high manoeuvrability. Associated with this, they have an advanced visual system, capable of seeing a wide range of colours as well as polarised light with very high resolution. Moreover, the part of the eyes that look up towards the sky have different optical properties compared with areas that look down, as befits the different environments in each visual domain.
Ian Gibbins, Dragonflies swarming

Today in Portland we are hunkered down with temperatures in the 20’s, sleet on the ground and freezing rain in the forecast. We are fortunate. We have food in the cupboards, the electricity is still on, and all my family are safe, unlike so many around the world, especially in Ukraine.

May you use this season to reflect on all you have and be grateful for it. May you find it in your heart this season to help others who are less fortunate. May you appreciate the fleeting moment we exist and make the time you inhabit this earth matter.

And find joy. In the birds at the feeder, in the neighbor’s soup, in a child’s laugh, in a beloved’s voice, in the music we make and the poems we write.

My wish for each of us is to create a world filled with peace, love, kindness, good health. Be the light someone can find in the darkness.
Carey Taylor, Peace be with Us

I admire the achievement of Amnion as a sustained project, the way the author is able to bring to life and combine complicated histories with her own present-day story. Stephanie Sy-Quia’s book is an exciting advertisement for fragmental writing and the possibilities it offers poetry and hybrid literature.

Scenes from Life on Earth (Salt, 2022) by Kathryn Simmonds is also biographical in part, addressing the author’s experience of parental bereavement and parenthood as well as poems of the natural world. Reading both books in close sequence, I couldn’t help noticing my own reactions to the texts. I felt more of an emotional punch reading Simmond’s poems, and wondered if this was because I connected more with the book’s themes, or was it because the brevity of its poetic forms compresses extraneous information the longer line of fragmental writing allows? Is the condensed form more immediately powerful? Whatever the answer, several of Simmonds poems moved me to tears and thoughtfulness and made me feel foolish for not buying her earlier books.
Josephine Corcoran, My End of Year Books

For the holidays, I’m sharing the November recording of my reading with the fabulous Carine Topal and Cecilia Woloch. This was my first reading in nearly two years and features work from the forthcoming Wonder & Wreckage. Thank you again to VCP SoCal Poets for hosting us!

Speaking of W & W, the manuscript sequencing is complete and I’m just tinkering with a few of the ‘”new” poems for this new & selected collection. Early in the new year, I’ll be sitting down with my friend and go-to book designer to work out the final cover. I’m pleased with the selection of work I’ve chosen for this book, although quite a few favorites had to come out to keep the flow. Still killing darlings after all these years. However, I do have a plan in mind to compile the “discards” into a special, very limited chapbook. More details as I hatch this plan.

On Feb. 2, I plan to put in my first live appearance in over two years at the launch of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology at the Decatur Library. My poem “Roosters & Hens” is in there. Co-editors Dustin Brookshire and Julie Bloemeke along with Madvillle Publishing have done a tremendous job and I’m in fabulous company.
Collin Kelley, Wrapping up 2022

2023 will, I hope, be a more productive year. And a better year for everyone and everything. It’s hard to recall good points of 2022 when it all feels quite bleak here and abroad. I’m sure there are thing that will come back to me.

However, 2022 has been a year of less running and less submitting. The former has been because a mixture of injury and illness. the latter was partially driven by the first half of the year being about working on poems for the book, many of which have already found homes. This has, in turn, meant I’ve written less new stuff to send out. There’s also been a general malaise about me that I’m slowly emerging from. I’d also argue, and I don’t have the stats for this, that I’ve written more reviews this year and that has also had an impact.
Mat Riches, Charts (Hah) (What are they good for?)

So what does the new approach to writing goals look like?

I think part of the point is that I don’t need to know exactly. I’m simply going to focus on positivity and pleasure. I’m aiming for encouragement, support and satisfaction. I’m interested in building on what I’ve already learned about who I am and where I can imbue my process with possibility. […]

So much of this effort will be framed in “what is possible,” and returning to discovery mode — letting a process or project surprise me — is the perfect medicine right now. I can easily see that in any given day, the list of wants above will come in handy in a very practical way. I’ll just need to pick a small thing that supports something on the list… and do it. And celebrate it.

More to come on that once we get underway in January!

There will still be snow then. (Probably lots of it.) But also maybe more writing and art.

The kind that comes from joy.
Carolee Bennett, a new approach to writing goals

and here you are
rocking in the breeze
zero ballast

your shirt your sail
tack into the wind
above the pavement

there is now no rule book
all will become clear
Paul Tobin, ALL WILL BECOME CLEAR

It’s nearing the end of 2022 and I’m on Winter Break. I’ve spent the morning reading the newest SheilaNaGig Winter 22, Vol. 7.2 and am overjoyed to have a couple of poems included in this issue. I’m humbled to have my work included among the work and pages of such poets as George Franklin, John Palen, Marc Swan, Jeff Burt, Laura Ann Reed, SE Waters, Dick Westheimer, and more. Thank you to editors Hayley Mitchell Haugen and Barbara Sabol for leaving the lights on and offering writers such an amazing space to publish. I am quite sure the candle burned at both ends to send this out to the world on Christmas Eve and the reading is just the gift it was intended to be. If you like poetry with stars, this is the perfect issue to read. Dick Westheimer’s chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands: Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine is soon to be published by SheilaNaGig Editions, so of course I’ve pre-ordered a copy. Note that both editors have newly published collections this fall, Mitchell Haugen’s The Blue Wife Poems (Kelsay Books, 2022) and Sabol’s Connections (Bird Dog Publishing, 2022 and in collaboration with Larry Smith).
Kersten Christianson, Top 9 of 2022

Orbis magazine invites readers’ votes and brief comments. I never have voted, though I’ve been tempted to offer comments. I tend to assess in various contradictory ways. Over-simplifying, and depending on the situation, they include –

Bottom-up – I give points for various features (use of sound, etc) or (as in diving) combine degree of difficulty with performance

Top-down – I first decide whether I like the poem or not, then I list its obvious features showing how they support my opinion: e.g. if a poem has tight integration of form and content I can say that this reveals technical prowess (if I like the poem) or that the poem has stifling predictability (if I don’t). A poem may be understated (if I like it), or lacking verve (if I don’t).

Emotion – a piece may move me though I know it’s not a good poem – it may not even be a poem, or I know I’m moved only because it describes something I’ve experienced.

Learning resource – a poem may open my eyes to new poetic possibilities, inspiring me to write. It may not be good.

Best bits – it’s tempting to judge a poem by its best (often last) lines. Sometimes (“Lying in a hammock at William Duffy’s farm in Pine Island Minnesota” maybe?) the last line justifies the ‘blandless’ of the rest of the poem.

Good of its type – however good some poems are, they’re restricted by the type of poem they are.

Tim Love, Assessing poems

Born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa and then Washington D.C., San Francisco Bay Area-based poet Adrian Lürssen’s full-length debut is the poetry collection Human Is to Wander (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2022), as selected by Gillian Conoley for the 2022 Colorado Poetry Prize. As I wrote of his chapbook earlier this year, NEOWISE (Victoria BC: Trainwreck Press, 2022), a title that existed as an excerpt of this eventual full-length collection, Lürssen’s poems and poem-fragments float through and across images, linking and collaging boundaries, scraps and seemingly-found materials. Composed via the fractal and fragment, the structure of Human Is to Wander sits, as did the chapbook-excerpt, as a swirling of a fractured lyric around a central core. “in which on / their heads,” he writes, to open the sequence “THE LIGHT IS NOT THE USUAL LIGHT,” “women carried water / and mountains // brought the sky / full circle [.]”

The book is structured as an extended, book-length line on migration and geopolitics, of shifting geographies and global awareness and globalization. He writes of war and its effects, child soldiers and the dangers and downside of establishing boundaries, from nations to the idea of home; offering the tragedies of which to exclude, and to separate. “The accidental response of any movement,” he writes, to open the poem “ARMY,” “using yelling instead of creases as a / means to exit. Or the outskirts of an enemy camp.” Set in three lyric sections, Lürssen’s mapmaking examines how language, through moving in and beyond specifics, allows for a greater specificity; his language forms akin to Celan, able to alight onto and illuminate dark paths without having to describe each moment. “A system of killing that is irrational or rational,” he writes, to open the poem “SKIRT,” “depending on the training.” As the same poem concludes, later on: “It is a game of answers, this type of love.” Lürssen’s lyrics move in and out of childhood play and war zones, child soldiers and conflations of song and singer, terror and territory, irrational moves and multiple levels of how one employs survival. This is a powerful collection, and there are complexities swirling through these poems that reward multiple readings, and an essential music enough to carry any heart across an unbearable distance. “The enemy becomes a song,” the poem “UNIT” ends, “held by time.”
rob mclennan, Adrian Lürssen, Human Is to Wander

Some would scream in exasperation that this is not poetry. Well, the poetry police are everywhere, aren’t they? Often they don’t write it anyway, just yell that if it doesn’t rhyme in iambic pentameters, then it’s prose, or worse, just nonsense. For them I had fun writing The Poetry Hospital.

I love inventing narrators, situations, whole worlds, producing believable fakes like The Cholmondeley MacDuff Spanish Phrase Book 1954 and Ezra Pound’s Trombone In A Museum In Genoa – well, why not? I mix in real stuff too – as in the poem Autumn which is a careful recollection of the events of a day. Does it really matter which part is real? No, Ezra Pounds trombone is not real. Yes, I can and do skin and butcher a deer the gamekeeper leaves for me. What’s the difference, as long as each poem holds together and says something about how we cope with life?

The point of each poem, or of the poems as a group, is what lies beneath. Which takes us back to the beginning – to anger, love, passion, the sense of how absurd and lovely and dangerous and horrific the world is as we go through it day by day.
Bob Mee, WHAT DO YOU SAY WHEN SOMEONE ASKS ‘WHERE DO YOUR POEMS COME FROM?’

I once heard a senior British poet warming to a riff during a reading on the topic of the acknowledgements pages in recent collections of poetry. He had noticed that there was a ‘trend’ for these to conclude with long lists of thanks to other poets. ‘Whatever happened to autodidacticism?’ he asked. The disapproval in his voice was unmistakable.

My own view is that allies are essential in any walk of life. Why should poetry be any different? All that seems to have happened is that poets (though novelists do this too: look at the generous list of thanks in all of Ali Smith’s novels and short story collections) are now more transparently open about naming their friends and networks of support in print than was the case, say, twenty years ago.

The allies in my writing life are a really mixed bunch. Distance and time being what they are, I rarely see all of the people I am about to thank in the space of one calendar year. As the old joke goes, I see most of them around once a century. (Some, I have yet to meet face to face.) The key to my knowing the weight and grace of their support in my life is that, visible or not, they are there, somewhere on my shoulder, or just behind it, as I write. Some, I will speak to on the phone. Some, I will text. Some drop me the occasional email. However infrequently we make contact, they all need, in Robert Pinsky’s phrase, ‘answering’, albeit fleeting, and not always directly. What I do know is that I could not write (let alone do this) without the feel of their friendship.
Anthony Wilson, On having allies

Like clockwork, every once in a while someone dusts off the very tired mantle and declares poetry dead. It happens in little magazines, blog posts, facebook/twitter rants, and sadly on platforms for the normies like The New York Times Opinion Section. Suddenly, like a bunch of rats feeding on the corpse, we are all illuminated by a set of headlights for a moment, all of us who consider ourselves poets or poetry lovers, then we scurry back into the woods or behind a dumpster or into our notebooks and word docs until the next article comes looking for us. […]

But the thing is, and perhaps this why articles like the NYT’s one infuriate me, is that if you ask any one of us, poets that is, what is a good poem, we may have (will have) entirely different answers. This was a pivotal scene in a workshop I once took, where the teacher had us go around and tell everyone what we thought was most important in a poem, and I think with one or two exceptions, in a room of around 15 people, no one had the same answer. Also, young poets may be astounded that there really is no singular poetry world, but more like an overlapping map of constellations of aesthetics and influences and presses/journals. It might seem sprawling and chaotic, but it makes room for everything, including underheard and underrepresented voices. For visual poetry, for language poetry, for more traditional verse. For insta poetry and verse epics and strange word collages like mine.

Poetry, on one hand is Rupi Kaur and her innumerable fans that while not my taste, has brought “poetry” as a word to the lips of younger millennial and gen-zers. It’s also amazing poets who get some recognition like Ada Limon, who was finally a US poet laureate whose work I already liked. Or Claudia Rankine, who I was aghast one day when a friend who knows nothing of poets said she was reading Citizen on a bartender’s recommendation. It’s also me and my fellow poets who are writing their best work to date and have like 5 dedicated readers. While poetry is something like Poetry Magazine or the American Poetry Review, it’s also tiny indie presses and journals that are publishing (at least for me) the most exciting work. On the other, performance poets and cinema poets and open-mic poets. It’s also the girl writing bad poetry in her diary as much as it is the crochety “established” poet writing crappy poetry during his sabbatical already under contract with a major journal. Or the girl writing really good poetry on her tumblr and the guy who writes poems on his phone but never shows them to a soul.

So when you declare poetry is dead, I ask which poetry? Which beast?
Kristy Bowen, not dead, but waiting to be born

I saw him read this at Dodge Poetry Fest. The slow cadence imbued with humility and vulnerability.

These exquisitely tender moments, these carefully tended to everyday beauties given love syllable by syllable.

It seems much of American poetry is better at it, while Canadian poetry is more bent towards dissonant traumatized cacophony. Perhaps also it was more common in the previous century as an acceptable expression, to be timeless and bound inside a lovely moment.
Pearl Pirie, Loved Then, Loved Now: Early in the Morning

The journey to getting poetry published is hard enough as it is that to suggest there might be some benefit to having your work turned down may sound perverse. Increasingly, though, I feel as grateful to the editors who say no as I do to those who say yes.

That thought was initially prompted by something I read the other day and now can’t remember, but I was reminded of it by two recent blogs in which poets offer sideways looks at the poetry-publishing-machine. In Beyond Submissions, Naush Sabah questions just how much store poets should put in the validation of an acceptance from an editor they know little about. Some poems might be best shared by other means, without all the hassle and anxiety. Or not shared at all: it’s not an exact comparison, but think of the number of sketches a painter produces before the final picture.

In (Avoiding) Poetic Ecological Collapse, meanwhile, Jonathan Davidson suggests that a constant rush for publication may not only be unsustainable for our own writing but a distraction from all the other ways of engaging with words which the art needs to flourish. What happens when we see ourselves as custodians of the ‘commonwealth of poetry’, rather than toilers in our own private furlongs?

Writers sometimes see editors as gatekeepers and it is easy to see why. Rejections feel like being held back: if only they would let us through into the green pastures of publication! (You can blame Jonathan for the pastoral metaphors). But editors – and, increasingly, arts administrators, competition judges, mentors and funding bodies – also decide when to let the poet through, and in what form, and this inevitably shapes where they go next. Less gatekeepers, more shepherds. It is a big responsibility.

Sometimes I think it is a responsibility we don’t talk about enough. I have come across several books in the last few years – highly-acclaimed first or second collections from prestigious publishers – where I couldn’t understand why the editor hadn’t encouraged the poet to slim the collection down, or even wait until they had a stronger set of poems to work with. Perhaps they already had.
Jeremy Wikeley, Shepherds at the gate

I’ve always told myself that writing poems is how I process my emotions. But it’s more than that. If processing were all I needed, a notebook would be just fine. I do more than that, though. I post them on my blog, on TikTok, on Instagram. I put them in the places where the people they’re about might see them. And I do this even though a poem has never, not once, fixed any relationship I’ve been in.

Moreover, I post them where other people might also see them. People not connected to the situation, but folks who I want to have a good opinion of me, to think of me as a caring, expressive person with his heart in the right place.

I know next to nothing about Lord Byron, but I’ve always had this picture of him as a person who used his poetry to manipulate. To woo. To brag. To paint a larger-than-life picture of himself. And at the risk of a ridiculous comparison to one of the most famous poets in the English language, I do worry that I might be doing the same thing. Tainting the value of what I produce by using it the way I do.
Jason Crane, Deploying poetry

As if the universe slides
into the seat next to mine and pours a drink.
As if we clink glasses. As if the silence is raw,
like sand on skin, like hard shell against a
naked sole. As if there’s nothing but me and
ocean all around — the meaning of freedom,
the meaning of captivity. Again, we don’t say
anything. We have never learnt to speak each
other’s language. At this rate, we never will.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 27

So I’m tired of hearing people start their sentences with “So” on podcasts and the radio and TV, “so” a verbal tic, a word instead of “um,” which serves the same purpose but admits, more humbly, of uncertainty, which says I am pausing to gather my thoughts before speaking; whereas “So” sets up an explanation leading to opinion or argument, or so it seems to me.

So I’m sitting on my back porch even though it is late December, clouds gathering over bare trees. I hear woodpeckers deepening holes in trees, a rat-a-tat drill, and white-breasted nuthatches loud along the woodlot, and I ponder emerald ash borers and climate change and how to handle human aging in a capitalist society.

So what I wonder is “Am I afraid?” Some questions possess a looming quality, I guess this is one such. In my wicker chair, in my own backyard, no. Not afraid. The mood’s serene, no tightness in my chest no racing heart, not even facing death–as we all must do, though most of us refuse. Where are you going with this, Writer?
Ann E. Michael, Solo endeavor?

In her beautiful poetry collection, The Smallest of Bones, Holly Lyn Walwrath uses the skeleton of the body as a means of structurally shaping the collection. Each section begins with a poem of various bones, from the cranium to the sternum and beyond. The poems that follow explore love, sexuality, gender, religion, and death, among other aspects of humanity and the supernatural. It’s a gorgeous collection with crisp, clear, and lyrical language. […]

This is How the Bone Sings by W. Todd Kaneko is a stunning collection of poems centering around Minidoka, a concentration camp for Japanese Americans built in Idaho during World War II. The author blends history with myth and folklore to explore how the scars of the past carry through generations — from grandparents through to their grandchildren. The wounds caused by racism and hate continue on through memory and story. These poems are evocative and beautiful, providing an important memorial for an aspect of American history that should never be forgotten.
Andrea Blythe, Books I Loved Reading in 2022

we take the storm
and make our storm against it
pull away from its undertow
shoulder the thrusting
the rage of the pebbled feet
the split lipped salted rime
damn the bruises you you
come back here now you you
horizoned opinioned beast
here i am
steadfast
Jim Young, wild sea swimming

It’s the time of year when many people will be making resolutions and self-improvement plans. I am done with planning. After a year of constant pivoting, I am going to spend the next year basking in joy. That’s more likely than losing 20-50 pounds or running a half marathon/10K/5K or eating 5 servings of veggies each and every day. I will write poems, as I have always done. I will think about book length collections, while realizing this year is likely not the one where I put together something new. I will be on the lookout for new opportunities, new ways to bask in joy.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, My New Year’s Resolution: To Bask in Joy

I am satisfied with my writing accomplishments for this year–I ended up writing and publishing my chapbook The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants (Belle Point Press), an it turned out truly beautiful.

Doing the month long poem-a-day challenge in April really jump started that progress, and I think that I will attempt to do that challenge again in the spring.

I was also able to place poems in 14 different literary magazines this year, and I made significant revisions to my work in progress, WOB.

I think I could do more to promote my books that came out / are coming out this year, but I had trouble incorporating that in while still writing as much as I did and teaching some online classes (and homeschooling, and parenting, and and and…). Next year I need to work on promoting my work a bit more, though I am glad that I was able to do a reading this past March at Trevecca U, and I was lucky enough to already get a review of my chapbook, Commonplace.
Renee Emerson, 2022 Writing Goals Update

Before I settled in for the night, I spent some time with a book I’ve been reading about infinity—it’s taking forever to finish—and, naturally enough, it talks about transfinities, the infinities beyond infinity. I love that one type of infinity is aleph-null, a seductively Kabbalistic Borgesian science-fiction-y term. ( It refers to infinite cardinality as opposed to just counting forever, which is ∞) And that you can multiply infinity by infinity. Aleph null by aleph null, and, like multiplying 1 x 1, you get what you started with. What happens if, when you’re sleeping, you dream you are sleeping? This feels like another kind of infinity, another kind of sleep.

Sleep and infinity are related. Because you can never get enough of either? It’s more that they both have the sense of venturing into a limitless place. What is the shape of the place that is sleep? It’s edgeless, borderless, with no ground or sky. The composer Schoenberg imagined writing music that was like heaven—in this music, up, down, backwards and forwards would be the same because heaven had no direction and was thus entirely symmetrical. An angel has no upsidedown no matter how drunk it gets. I don’t remember if Schoenberg spoke about time, but music that is symmetrical implicitly plays with time. If it is the same backwards and forwards, it doesn’t operate in Newtonian time.
Gary Barwin, WIDE ASLEEP: NIGHT THOUGHTS ON INSOMNIA

Whole lotta life keeps happening. It’s the main reason I’ve been quiet here. Like today, my partner has been out with a migraine for the greater part of the day, now evening, and I’ve been in the silence that comes with caregiving.

Well, the not-so-silent because my cat, Semilla, is here with me.

I’d like to share some recent highlights and publications before the year is through:

I was excited to contribute a short write-up for Poets & Writer’s series “Writers Recommend.” I riff a bit about inspiration as well as shoutout the work of Karla Cornejo Villavicencio and Cristela Alonzo.

On the Rotura (Black Lawrence Press) front, I am deeply honored to have the book reviewed recently. Thank you to Staci Halt who wrote this insightful review for The Los Angeles Review!

Thank you also to Angela María Spring for including Rotura in their “10 New Poetry Collections by Latinx and Caribbean Writers” over at Electric Lit! Means a great deal to be included among such a powerful set of books.

And looking ahead, I am excited to share in this space that my debut creative nonfiction collection, Ruin and Want, was chosen as the winning selection during Sundress Publications’ 2022 Prose Open Reading Period! This lyric memoir was a revelatory journey to write, both personally as well as craft-wise. I’m excited to have it find a home at such a great place!

José Angel Araguz, dispatch 123022

2022 was a welcome quiet year for me, my family life largely keeping me from writing – no new books, and few poetry publications outside of haiku magazines. I was able to set time aside to write a number of essays on writing, though. It was something new for me, which I found I quite enjoyed. Essays appeared in the aforementioned Resonance anthology, EVENT, Canadian Notes + Queries, the League of Canadian Poets poetry month blog, The Tyee, The Tyee again, and Brick.

That last essay, in Brick, is the most personal for me – a reflection on what Steven Heighton taught me about life and writing. Steve’s sudden death in April shocked me, as it did so many, and even now hardly seems real. I was so glad I was able to talk with him in-depth about his writing for our Walrus interview, something I’d considered putting off for one more year until my time freed up (needless to say, it didn’t). The issue only just came out, and if you get a chance to pick up a copy, I very much encourage you to do so. (It also features a tribute to Steve from Karen Solie, which Brick has posted online – it can be read here. And a heck of a poem about swans from 2022 interviewee Sadiqa de Meijer.)
Rob Taylor, the 2022 roll of nickels year in review

To offer a prayer for the lost, a devotion to what is found and what lasts.

To write words of encouragement to ourselves on the palms of our hands with an ink that never fades.

To become one with the stars dazzling a carnival-colored night.

To embody equilibrium amidst insanity.

To sing for you, atom by atom, all the songs gathered within the oxygenated orchestra of breath.

To unbutton rainbows from the sky and forever wrap you in the many colors of amazement.
Rich Ferguson, For Doug Knott, RIP

I think I was seven or eight, and my parents were having a New Year’s Eve party in our tiny apartment. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen people, but it was crowded and festive. I’d been allowed to stay up, and to come to the party to pass around the cheese and crackers and candy, so I was feeling very grown up. Then someone said, “Well, that’s almost it for this year, ” and I suddenly panicked. I realized that soon I’d be writing a new year on everything, and that I had only a few minutes to write the old one while it was still true. I could write it later, but it wouldn’t mean the same thing. I set down the plate I was carrying, ran into my bedroom to get a pencil and paper, and wrote the year over and over until I’d covered both sides. I didn’t understand what I was feeling, I just knew it was urgent. Now I’d say it was an early glimmer of saving things by writing them down.
Sharon Bryan, Poems for the New Year

I’ve made some surprising discoveries. In the book my co-leader assigned, Jill Duffield’s Advent in Plain Sight: A Devotion through Ten Objects, the first object is “gates.” I love that—I did a little digging and learned that the word “gate” appears 418 times in the King James Bible. In my introduction to the poems, I talked about how a gate can seem to be a barrier, but it’s really an invitation. A gate marks a path to be followed.

Poems, too, are gates. In my college teaching career I often encountered students who hated poetry. They saw a poem as a gate with a “no trespassing” sign hanging on it. But isn’t a poem, like a gate, an invitation? Open this. Walk through. See the world the way I see it. The first poem I brought was Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Kindness,” and the study group climbed onto the bus with me. “There’s communion here,” one participant gleefully noted. And another: “it’s a story of the good Samaritan!”
Bethany Reid, Winter Solstice Greetings

This afternoon, while wrapping
gifts, I wept because my Uncle John
died three months before I was born,
and I’ve never heard him sing.

The barn cat hunts down the birds
that winter here. His coat spreads ropy
into the air. This year, he circles my legs,
grateful that I no longer have a dog.

In my head, we are slow-dancing
to Christmas songs in the kitchen. In reality,
you are cooking dinner, I am writing
at the table, and this is the loneliest I’ve felt all year.
Allyson Whipple, Some Terribly Sentimental Thing

In between reading work for Spelt, research papers and research books for my current work in project, journals and magazines, I managed to get through fifty poetry, fiction , narrative non fiction and non fiction books this year. In a year that was challenging at times as I dealt with grief around the death of my dad, books became my friends and my escape once again. Thank you to every writer who courageously puts themselves on the page, who creates something amazing out of the sparking of neural pathways in the brain, thank you to those who quietly wait for their books to be noticed, thank you to those who shouted from the roof tops, I salute you. You make the world a better place simply by doing the work that you love.
Wendy Pratt, I Like Big Book (lists) and I Cannot Lie – The 50 Books I read in 2022 and My Top Five

2022 has drawn to a close and I don’t really have a list of accomplishments to offer, but I do have a couple of highlights in poetry-world.

In February, the wonderful poetry journal Bad Lilies published my two poems ‘Brilliant cut’ and ‘Yustas’. They appeared in the journal’s sixth issue, entitled ‘Private Universe’, alongside a host of other great poets and poems.

A few years ago I first discovered the work of Julian Semenov (or Yulian Semyonov). He was a Russian and Soviet thriller writer who is little known in Western countries but whose impact in Slavic countries, and regions formerly in the USSR and its sphere of influence, was profound. Most famously, Semenov wrote a book called Seventeen Moments of Spring, which was published in the late 1960s and a few years later was adapted into a television series of the same name, which is probably the most famous Soviet TV show ever made. This spy show is really only known in Western countries to those who are deeply interested in world spy films, or in Soviet or Russian culture. My own interest came mainly from a curiosity about what the USSR was doing with espionage fiction and film in the early 1970s, but watching Seventeen Moments of Spring also led in a very direct line to my starting to learn Russian in 2020.

These two poems, specifically inspired by Semenov’s works, were published in late February. Less than a week later, Russia attacked Ukraine and beyond the fact that the news was shocking and overwhelming, it didn’t feel like an ideal time to be blogging about Russian pop culture (although “Soviet” is more accurate here than “Russian”, for what it’s worth) – hence the very long delay. Strangely, though, Seventeen Moments of Spring and Semenov’s books can genuinely be said to have slipped the considerable constraints of their origins. Today they are still relevant (even to the current moment), open to a wide variety of interpretations, and of course entertaining. The Seventeen Moments series was specifically intended as propaganda at the time of its release, part of a campaign to improve the KGB’s image. But the show’s surprising subtlety allowed many viewers to interpret it as a comment on the Soviet Union itself and the pressures of working inside, and against, a powerful oppressive system which keeps everyone under constant surveillance. Stirlitz, the double-agent hero, has inspired an endless stream of ironic jokes which continue to be instantly recognisable in countries formerly in the Soviet sphere of influence. And since February, I have often seen clips and quotes from the show online used as criticism of the Russian government’s actions.
Clarissa Aykroyd, Year-end: poems in Bad Lilies, and Best UK Poetry Blogs of 2022

If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you know that I struggle with the cold dark days at the turn of the secular year. In high summer I sometimes have to remind myself not to dread the winter that is always inevitably coming. And at this season I seek comfort in all kinds of ways, from warm-tinted lightbulbs to blankets to braises, but I still have to work hard to avoid the malaise of SAD.

The best mood-lifter by far that I’ve found this winter is… being terrible at Arabic. To be clear, I’ve never learned Arabic, though ever since the summer I spent in Jerusalem I’ve aspired to someday be the kind of rabbi who speaks some Arabic. (Someday. Later. You know, when I have time.) And then I read R. David’s Why This Rabbi Is Learning Arabic (And Every Rabbi Should), and I thought: ok, I’ll try.

It’s engrossing. It feels like it’s working a different part of my brain — learning new characters, trying to train my ear to distinguish new-to-me sounds. Maybe best of all is that I am an absolute beginner. I know nothing, so every little bit of learning is progress. Remembering the initial, medial, or final forms of any letter feels like victory. And maybe that’s part of what lifts my spirits.

I’m using Duolingo. And before anyone objects: yes, I know all the reasons why that isn’t ideal. I should take a real class. I should find Arabic speakers with whom to practice. I can’t do those right now, for all kinds of reasons. What I can do is keep a tab open on my computer, and instead of doomscrolling, work on parsing a new-to-me alphabet. (It’s also great instead of doomscrolling on my phone.)

I can practice sounding out syllables while my kid’s brushing his teeth. Remind myself of letter-shapes over morning coffee. Short digital bursts are not pedagogical best practice — and yet I am learning, bit by bit.
Rachel Barenblat, Arabic: a remedy for the winter blues

falling snow
beyond the window . . .
our cat
curls deeper
into himself
Bill Waters, Our cat