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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, FORTY-TWO BLUE MOONS

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

Fran Lock, LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, …that summer was just about over

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

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

Clare Shaw, Return to the Wild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, It meant allotment to me

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, May Listopia 2026

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

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

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

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

I learn that nostalgia is a kind of grief. 

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

Sharon Brogan, W.W.W. Nostalgia

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

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

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

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

Dale Favier, On First Looking into Fitzgerald’s Homer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Eve Joseph, Dismantling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

burying the words, finally

o how long it takes

under onto

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

“o how long it takes

       under onto” entering the field

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

black bird                         black bird
ch-                      ch-                             ch-
meutgghhhh

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

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

Later in Nelson’s poem we read:

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

Then Matti Spence’s ‘Walk And’ opens:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Three Pamphlets and a Boustrephedon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Realistic war poetry from the 1640s

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Gibbins, The Bilgestruck reimagined

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

Robin Gow, 5/31

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

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

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

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

Leanne Ogasawara, Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚

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

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

Anna Chilvers, Confessions of a Moss Widow

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

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

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

Quick’s complete poem is available at this link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Editing music as if it were writing

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

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

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

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

Jan Noble, Nº66 Finding Fanny

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Something understood. How to read poetry.

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Second Spring Wedding

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

It looks like a trace fossil.

Sarah Lada, Trace

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Interviews

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

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Anguish is like Laundry

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, Getting Resettled

This week: becoming a living ghost, getting football fans to recite poetry, advocating for stupidity and vagueness, letting chaos turn to insight, and other adventures. Enjoy!

Here is the garden
where all our sins are remembered, where
all the embers are numbered, where the fires
join hands and sing across the Gorge: a canticle
for rain forests that were never meant to burn.

Dale Favier, A Compost Prayer

let’s wait for the accident to get cleared out let’s lie about our diagnoses let’s watch amerikka’s lunatic leaders preach like Aimee Semple McPherson back from the dead in a white shirt flapping her wings I dropped the script on the floor they gave me a loaded gun I slithered on my belly toward my car then stopped in the marram grass don’t forget your permission slips don’t forget the right side of my mouth all my teeth aching

Rebecca Loudon, Deconstructing the panic

In March, traveling in Ireland, our guide mentioned almost in passing that the Irish were proud to have had a poet lead them. She meant Seamus Heaney’s friend Michael D. Higgins, the poet and sociologist who served as President of Ireland from 2011 to 2025, and who was known to quote Neruda in speeches and has written movingly about the duty of the imagination in public life. Our guide said it with a kind of quiet satisfaction, as though this fact alone said something essential about Ireland’s values.

I have been thinking about that remark ever since, more urgently since Air Force One landed in Beijing.

Consider the contrast. In the United States, the executive branch has long been dominated by two professional tribes: lawyers and business executives. This was true when I delivered a paper at a remarkable conference on the spirit of cities in Shanghai many years ago — a transformative experience that left me with a question I have never quite been able to shake: why does one of the world’s most powerful democracies hand its government to lawyers and businessmen?

Leanne Ogasawara, How To Rule The World

In 2020 I wrote a considerable number of posts, both prose and poetry, for a series I called “Musings in a Time of Crisis.” Below, the twentieth post in the series, is one of the poems I wrote (I wrote another about George Floyd, who was murdered on Memorial Day that year). It seems more than fitting to post the poem again.

The poem references “the man in the White House”; the same one currently occupies “the People’s House.” That fact alone defies all reason, continues a crisis I could not have imagined would define the state of our country in the last third of my life.

Today, I also remember my father, who received an honors burial at Arlington Memorial Cemetery, where he has lain with two infant children since his death in the summer of 1990. Beside him now is my mother.

I honor my father today. He served in World War II in the famous all-volunteer group Merrill’s Marauders (a Time correspondent suggested the name), who were deemed “expendable” as they fought, commando-style, behind enemy lines in China, Burma, and India, who, lacking medicines, fought disease of all kinds, suffered a lack of food, and generally experienced all the horror that is war. It was a time my father did not talk about. My father would be appalled by the crisis his America faces today.

A tiny American flag marks every grave in Arlington on Memorial Day. May wherever it’s flown have meaning.

Maureen Doallas, Memorial Day

the museum felt like it was holding its breath.
clean. white. guards with ear pieces.
i wanted to see the declaration of independence
mostly because of the movie, national treasure.
i hoped it might have a golden map.
instead, the document stared back at me
from behind its glass. i asked in a whisper,
“is that it?” a piece of skin & a tissue box.
dull & worn. not like an elder fish’s gills but
like old stockings. like polyester thrift store bras.

Robin Gow, declaration

It is seductive, this selective time travel. The perfect weekend with the imperfect lover whose ineptitude at love you didn’t yet know would break your heart. The languid summer just before the diagnosis, the disaster, the death. The time you were ten pounds lighter and ten choices freer and ten mistakes less marred in the mirror of the mind. Over and over, the hand of memory reaches back, grasps for the bygone moment when life was simpler or brighter or more redolent with aliveness, forgetting that the only thing for the keeping is the naked now, vulnerable as a newborn, total as eternity. The great challenge, the great triumph, is to make of memory an instrument of presence.

That is what Diane Seuss offers in her splendid poem “Weeds,” found in her altogether vivifying collection Modern Poetry (public library).

Maria Popova, How Not to Dwell on the Past

I chose this poem because it represents that feeling of holding on a little too long to something you know you should let go of. At its essence, Dream Logic is a collection about heartbreak, but with a lower case ‘h’. The poems are quiet and long-suffering.

It is also about the way the mind can split off and begin rewriting the story, creating a kind of “what might have been”, blurring the lines between memory, nostalgia and dreamscape. I have always had an overactive imagination, and writing has been a healthy way to express that. I am often haunted by Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations, waiting all those years and becoming a kind of living ghost.

Drop-in by Satya Bosman (Nigel Kent)

I wrote this poem in 2022 in Vamvakou, Greece, where I was introduced to the hawk moth (also called sphinx moth) after running from planter to planter thinking I was watching a rather drab hummingbird at work. Its caterpillar form is called a “hornworm.” None of these delightful facts fit comfortably into the poem, but I wanted you to know. I also—up until six months ago—had a grammatical error in the poem (dangling modifier) that no one had brought to my attention. Thank goodness for the copy editor that caught it.

Maya C. Popa, Four New Poems

Much-needed rain has arrived, and therefore I’ve been inside all day instead of out in the yard and gardens. I thought maybe I would feel motivated to send some of my poems out into the wider world. Turns out that the motivation was a decided maybe, leaning toward lethargy. Instead, I curled up with a cat and Jeff Burt’s collection The Root Endures (Sheila-na-Gig Editions).

Actually, I read this book a week ago but decided to take a closer look so I could post about it, because I like it a lot. Jeff Burt’s poems contain nature-images and close observations of creatures, plants, and weather yet keep reminding the reader that there’s a decidedly human component here, an interior character who speculates about what human beings are doing here, thinking about, recalling. And how the world is constantly in flux. The rural Wisconsin of the speaker’s childhood feels vividly authentic, and I learned about lime bogs and de-tasseling corn. (I love it when I learn things from poems.) The book seems autobiographical in narrative but never becomes as specifically personal as a memoir would.

And frankly, I guess I might identify more deeply with this book than other, perhaps younger or more urban readers would. I grew up in the mid-Atlantic suburbs, but I spent all my childhood summers in the Midwestern small towns where my parents’ extended families lived. I infer that Burt is pretty much my peer, age-wise; some of his remembered details conjure up a kind of resonance I enjoy. What I’d like to learn from this collection is how to sustain a longer poem, which he does quite well. Not a strength of mine, though I’ve attempted it once or twice with some success. A poem that has numerous short stanzas and travels several pages needs to keep my attention, whether I’m reading it or writing it. Burt’s title poem (the last poem in the book) does this, as does the poem “As If Copper Wire Sang the Unleashing of Time” and “Into the Standing Grain.” Maybe studying writers like Jeff Burt and others can teach me how to write better medium-long poems when a longer poem seems necessary to whatever I’m trying to express. I don’t think I’m interested in writing really long poems–think A. R. Ammons, C. K. Williams, Robert Lowell–but I’d like to explore length a little more.

Ann E. Michael, Rainy-day reading

Vasiliki Albedo & Lucy Holmes – Sardines (Dialect Press)

“but we hesitated at the prospect of jumping out of our tenuous

skins, of dampening the fervour to sample the oily salmon curve

of yet another Bandol Rosé.”

My goodness, I am a bit of a fangirl of these two. Singularly, of course, but together is also something different and quite special. Sardines is a gorgeous exploration of artistic friendship and collaboration. It’s brilliantly put together, with the email exchange between the two poets being just as fascinating as the poems themselves. Being let into these two minds at work, and at play, riffing off each other and their influences, felt like a real treat. It is, as they call it, both intimate and expansive, and it has made me look at collaboration in a new way, as well as introducing me to Frank O’Hara.

Victoria Spires, The thing is… books!

Sze writes measured, considered poems with a focus on the natural world and nature’s ability for re-growth after winter or human-made disasters. Humans here are ciphers, following orders or keeping to a narrow path without deviation. Nature follows different rules with respect for natural cycles, seasons and the ability to bloom after loss. There’s a quiet assurance here too. The tone is unjudgmental, even when observing that humans are the authors of their own misfortune.

Emma Lee, “Into the Hush” Arthur Sze (Penguin Books) – book review

I was very struck this week by an early poem by Tennyson which I don’t remember ever reading before, ‘The Palace of Art’. This poem is — rather brilliantly, I thought — the very final poem in the superb New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (OUP, 1994), edited by Jerome J. McGann. McGann’s anthology prints a very rich mixture of verse dating from between 1785 and 1832, in chronological order, under the year of publication. ‘The Palace of Art’ was first written and published in 1832, in Tennyson’s Poems — a collection that also included ‘The Lady of Shalott’, with which it has some obvious similarities. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is much more famous, of course, and on the whole I think deservedly so, since its fable of solitude, the soul and the insufficiency of art (“I am half-sick of shadows”) is so much tighter, mysterious and self-sufficient.

All the same, ‘The Palace of Art’ is an extraordinary poem. Tennyson started out as a romantic poet, and this poem is his leave-taking of it: a sort of peak-romanticism that is also the end of it. McGann aptly describes it as his ‘hail and farewell’ to romanticism. It’s a little bit like Milton’s ravishingly lovely imitation of Virgil in the Epitaphium Damonis, a poem that similarly ends by bidding farewell to the style it has so perfectly inhabited.

Victoria Moul, I have found / A new land, but I die.

I take the 75 bus, the service from Withernsea, back to Hull. The automated announcer says, ‘Next stop: Hull Prison.’ Do not pass go. The delightful 1932 East Hull Fire station has a motto painted above each of its three arched vehicle doors: ‘Ready Aye Ready’.

I get off at the interchange, next to Hull Paragon Station, location of both the well-known statue of Larkin and the Royal Hotel featured in his Symbolist-ish poem ‘Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel’, completed in May 1966. In his biography of Larkin, James Booth claims that the atmosphere of the hotel is largely unchanged since the poem was penned, despite a major fire in 1990 and subsequent restoration.

It’s a sonnet, of course, with the turn coming after the ninth line. Although far from being the only poem in his oeuvre to prominently feature light, it starts with ‘Light’ and includes the word ‘lights’ twice, as though hammering the point that this hotel is, and maybe hotels per se are, very brightly lit: ‘In shoeless corridors, the lights burn.’ I love hotels, and I love poems, novels (e.g. Troubles by J.G. Farrell) and films (e.g. The Consequences of Love, Some Like It Hot and The Grand Budapest Hotel) which are at least partially set within them.

A curious part of ‘Friday Night’ is ‘all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds, / Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.’ Few of Larkin’s mature poems mention smoking – is ‘Essential Beauty’ the only other? – even though he smoked throughout adulthood. In a dissection of ‘Cut Grass’, in which ‘Mown stalks exhale’, Tom Paulin conjured the perfect phrase, ‘the anxieties smokers know’; not all smokers are necessarily anxious (do Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ever get anxious?), but the overlap in a diagram by Mr Venn must be very considerable. All of this is a roundabout way of declaring my surprise that Larkin didn’t touch on smoking in his poetry more often.

The part of the poem which is undoubtedly the most intriguing is Larkin’s pressing-home of the point about the hotel being a bastion of ‘loneliness’ by adding the curiosity ‘How / Isolated, like a fort, it is’. Was he thinking of Fort Paull here? Or maybe Bull Sand, one of two Great War forts built in the Humber Estuary, visible from the end of Spurn Point, which is implicitly featured in ‘Here’ .

Matthew Paul, A bit of psychogeography

Mid-May is college commencement season here in the United States. It seems fitting, then, this week, to feature a poem about graduation. And our readers may remember George Moses Horton (1798–1883), whose “On Summer” appeared last July, as a poet whose own biography makes for the sort of triumph-over-adversity story so often embraced by commencement speakers.

Born into slavery, the sixth of ten children, on the plantation of a William Horton in North Carolina, George Moses Horton was an autodidact, teaching himself to read through hearing the Bible read aloud. He was the first African-American writer since the nation’s founding to publish a book of any kind (Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral had been published in London in 1773), the first writer to publish a literary work in North Carolina, and the only writer in American history to publish a book with an American press (J. Gales & Son, of Raleigh, North Carolina) while enslaved.

As a young man, sent from home to sell fruits and vegetables in nearby Chapel Hill, Horton began to make pocket money by composing love poems for students at the University of North Carolina. The students in turn supplied him with books for the furthering of his education. Today’s Poem, while not a love letter written for a college student, instead constitutes something like a love letter to the idea of The College Graduate and more: to the bittersweet appropriateness of leavetakings.

The verse itself, in abab quatrains of two tetrameter lines bracketed by trimeter, feels forced in places, with syntax inverted and the passive voice resorted to, to make the rhymes. Yet even where the poem strains to fulfill its form, there’s something compelling and charming in its voice. Adopting, at least in the first stanza, the persona of The Graduate, but inevitably conscious of the gap between that graduate’s future possibilities and his own, Horton writes of graduation as a kind of transcendence, as if the departing seniors were bodily assumed into heaven. One day, they’re at college; the next day they’ve simply vanished, “here to be seen no more.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Graduate Leaving College

Réka Nyitrai is a spell, a sparrow, a lioness’s tongue — a bird nest in a pool of dusk. A Romanian-Hungarian poet, she learned English (her primary language of writing) later in life, moving fluently between prose poems, haiku, and free verse, often channeling the feminist surrealist currents of Leonora Carrington, Aase Berg, and Aglaja Veteranyi. In 2020, she released a bilingual (Spanish and English) collection of haiku known as While Dreaming Your Dreams (Mano Ya Mano Books) which received a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. She then released her debut full-length poetry collection, Moon Flogged, in 2024 through Broken Sleep Books, and recently released a chapbook through Ethel Zine called With a Swan’s Nest on Her Back. Her second full-length poetry collection Split / Game of Little Deaths will be out with Piżama Press in May 2026.

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

My first book, While Dreaming Your Dreams, is a collection of poems written in the haiku genre. A small independent publishing house in Spain published it in 2020, when I was already 43 years old. Even though my life did not change in a material sense, this debut proved I was resourceful and capable of turning abstract dreams into a tangible reality. Winning the Touchstone Book Award validated my work, but it also introduced an immense pressure: from that moment on, both publishers and readers expected nothing less than exceptional poetry. While writing a haiku seems deceptively simple, crafting a truly resonant one is a difficult feat. I realized quickly that I might not surpass the specific quality of the poems in my debut volume within that same form. Consequently, I put haiku on hold and transitioned toward short, lyrical prose, first in collaboration with my good friend Alan Peat, then independently. In essence, I have integrated a fragmented narrative arc into the surrealism and lyricism of my haiku roots. In comparing my recent work to my previous, I find that while the form has expanded, the core remains unchanged. No matter how much I experiment with structure, lyricism remains my second skin. Brevity and conciseness continue to define the sinews of my style.

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

Poetry is an intrinsic part of me. I wrote my first pieces —if I can even call them poems— while in grade school, writing in Hungarian, my mother tongue. At the time, I found them utterly silly, yet they must have possessed some merit as they were published in a children’s magazine. However, following a single rejection letter, I retreated from writing for a significant period. I briefly resumed during my university years, still in Hungarian, but abandoned it again, sensing my work lacked authenticity; I was merely attempting to mirror the voice of a well-known Hungarian poet. For a long while, I set poetry aside to focus on reading—interestingly, primarily novels rather than verse. Then, on a snowy day in 2018, a fully formed haiku suddenly emerged in my mind, composed in English, my third language. That moment solved my dual dilemma: it defined both the genre I was meant to inhabit and the language in which I would finally find my voice.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Réka Nyitrai

I went to find poetry, or those who might inhabit poetry, at a football match. It was a Friday night in Hull. And Friday night in Hull is the last place you’d expect to find poetry which is precisely why I thought I might find it there. There was of course a poem, Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel by Hull’s adopted laureate Philip Larkin. Larkin went out of his way to disengage from what you might describe as a poetic life, living instead as a curmudgeonly librarian in a rather remote corner of England, writing of absence and detachment with exquisite precision.

My idea was to get football fans to recite his poem. The Royal Hotel in Hull is now a temporary home for those seeking asylum and has been the focus of protest from both sides, the send-em-backers and the let-them-stayers. I’ll let you use your own prejudice to decide which group you think football fans are more likely to fall into. I felt the poem, written in the 1960s about a hotel in decline from its victorian splendour, carried new potency, might add some nuance, allow people to think differently, consider this delicate situation poetically. Lines like “writing home / if home existed” and “letters of exile” took on a different significance.

I had imagined skinheads with bitten off ears weeping and switch bladed hooligans grimacing, all delivering lines of poetry with passion or menace or unexpected sensitivity. It didn’t quite happen that way. I recorded a lot of footage and the fans were generous but most of them regressed, became nervous nine year olds at school being told by teacher to read out in class. They’d all much rather be at the football than making fools of themselves with poetry.

WATCH FULL FILM

I knew there was something in this project, a film of a poem being read by those who inhabit a different kind of poetry. I asked an actor friend and Chelsea fan Mike Grady to help it along, to offer a more considered reading himself. Mike’s done a tonne of Shakespeare, movies, TV and audio books across the decades and has that voice, you know that voice, the voice you’d listen to even he was reading an itemised bill.

Mike is calm and gentle and delivers the poem beautifully. Although he’s spent his career on stage and in film I believe he’d prefer his life to be as drama free as possible, that a poetic life is not one that he has any desire to aspire to. I’m beginning to think that most people probably feel this way. On my poetry walks I find I’m drawn to the poets who lived gregariously, lives punctuated with spilled drinks and broken hearts, knife fights and mad houses. Perhaps I need to redraw my map.

Jan Noble, Nº65 Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel

This poem was a sort of whim I had, which I wrote down, then laid aside. I often saw the title when inside explorer, but didn’t open the file again, then called, “I Asked AI,” until this afternoon. When I read it again, I thought there was something there, and as I edited and rewrote, I ended up somewhere entirely different from what I would have guessed the poem would be. Which is what poetry is really, right? The journey you take while you move through it.

And I must say that my own ambivalence about the current conversations about AI certainly came out in this poem. I could write a long, long discussion about AI and I may one day, but for now let it suffice that I am a diehard Trekkie before all other things.

Here it is, thoroughly redone, with a new title. Let me know what you think.

Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

I asked AI
the price of milk.

She gave me a baby.

I asked AI
for breakfast.

She gave me
a potted plant.

I asked AI the time.
She gave me
a ball of string.
[…]

Rebecca Cook, Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

Adjacent to my current writing/ researching around memory, I’ve been thinking about the difference between intimacy and immediacy as both affective experiences and as literary/ artistic techniques. In the realm of experience the gulf between these two states feels immeasurably wide: the former is a slow foliation over time; it is predicated upon mutual vulnerability and care. One grows into the intimate. Immediacy, on the other hand, is a synapse-sparking collision in-the-moment. It’s the risk of exposure, the giddy high of arousal. Immediacy is instant and kinetic. Intimacy is profound. Both are vital components of what we might rather pompously call “the human condition”, but either on its own produces an emotionally and experientially lopsided life.

Within art and literature, things look a little different: inside of review-space, I see intimacy and immediacy used as virtual synonyms a lot (cards on table, I suspect I am as guilty of this as anyone), while stylistically, the former often feels sacrificed on the altar of the latter. In poetry – the one area I’m actually qualified to talk about – this appears as, but it not limited to: direct address, and a posture of unfiltered disclosure; a plausible musicality of language, often valorised under the rubric of “accessibility”, that presents little difficulty by way of intellectual assimilation and understanding. Immediate poems make a broad appeal to the emotions through the urgency of their themes and what I guess we might call the melodic “flow” of their delivery; they excel, I’d say, at their best, in evocative moments of lyric phrase-making. They tend to centre a stable-speaking lyric subject, and are often concerned with notions of embodiment and authenticity. Intimate poems, on the other hand, are slow-growers: they slightly resist readerly efforts to enter and understand; they might take a little time to parse, to locate who is speaking, where, and to what purpose. Which is not to say that all intimate poems are “difficult” or “obscure” – Michael Donaghy’s poems are intimate, but they also operate within tightly turned and self-contained conceits – I mean only to suggest that we cannot make the same kinds of ready assumption about authentic and unfiltered writer-to-reader disclosure within an intimate poem; there’s masking, play, a teasing-out required to identify a speaking voice and its relationship to ourselves. These poems are not necessarily in or of the moment; they posit other places that we have to work to access. I think the best intimate poems are those less concerned with the “flow” or “beauty” of their lyric phrasing, than they are with judiciously weighing each word and its placement within a line; this often produces slightly strange syntax, and a feeling that pressure is being applied to language in some way; that language is being thought about as substance and structure, not only as a delivery system.

To be clear, this list of tendencies is not exhaustive, neither are these two toolboxes mutually exclusive: there are plenty of amazing poets living and dead who deploy both sets of technique within their individual poems and across the broad corpus of their work. I’m not picking a side here either. I read both. I write/ have written / written with both. I like both. Ascribing a moral or political value to a set of stylistic and structural techniques is limited binary thinking that serves absolutely no one and is impoverishing to poetry as an art. What I will say is that we are at a place, in Space Year 2026, when the immediate is in the ascendency, that is, as a dominant style on page and on screen, and as the signal nature of our experience under late-stage blah de blah.

Here I do have a problem: because immediacy is a condition of capitalism. It is manufactured by capitalism, and it serves the aims and interests of capitalism. What is immediacy, after all, but a denial or a loss of mediation? A desire for the frictionless assimilation of ideas and experiences without the necessity to collide with opposing and obstructing otherness. I follow Hegel and Kornbluh here: the world – of things and ideas – only becomes what it is through its relationships with and to (the) other/s.
Knowledge and understanding require a process of moving through and bearing with difference and contradiction – it’s dialectical, duh.

And this is self-evidently true, isn’t it? No one is legitimately going to argue that abdicating thought and choice to an algorithm has enriched our lives or experiences of art, or that the ceaselessly scrolling echo-chambers of social media have benefited anyone but ket-cooked billionaire tech bros, are they? Okay, fabulous. On some level, then, we do acknowledge that social conditions replicate themselves in consciousness, profoundly shaping the ways in which we relate to the world and ourselves. Immediacy as a poetic/ writerly technique can be a useful tool; when used consciously it can also perform a critical reflection of neo-liberal conditions. A problem appears only when this particular technique is granted an undue supremacy (which, to be clear, it has been), owing largely to the dictates of a publishing marketplace driven by demand for zeitgeisty and easily-assimilable dreck – by capitalism’s endless cool hunt, and its race-to-the-bottom populism. So far, so icky, but so much worse than a prevailing style is when immediacy becomes a manner of reading, the dominant manner of reading, the way in which editors and publishing professionals are now trained to read – this, for the practice of art and literature – is absolutely fucking disastrous.

Fran Lock, “GRANTAGATE”

I’ve become lately very wary of ways of reading poems that assume an overall meaning, or that the poem has established images in it. I need language and articulation to play a role, almost from a dugout. This stanza really answered that need this morning.

A syllogism relies on simplified language, reduced vocabulary, simplified acts. Then it can assert a truth claim and test it logically. But this stanza isn’t doing that. I can spot bathos in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, for example, because the images, argumentation and narrative are clear, so it’s more like a farce, with twists (the clown unexpectedly doesn’t fall, the vicar does). In Pope, the play of etymology is clear and the diction under control so much that it’s like maths (vide D Davie). In this late Hill stanza, Hill is recognising that he has collected vocabulary in order to make Hill Poems in perpetuity. But he catches himself doing it, and throughout the sequence advocates for stupidity and vagueness. Hence the metal detector line. Showing what rings true, and also too automated. And then there is a sad sense of age throughout the sequence and in this stanza, hence that kind of career-bathos. The theme throughout the sequence is “life is a dream”, and so there are hallucinations and sour wakings and also glad wakings, both still alive and ailing.

Ira Lightman, Brief note on late Hill

I blame these threads on Roland Barthes, and his “rustle”, that sound of fabrics swishing against each other within a sentence or phrase, the position that welcomes friction, as he puts it in The Rustle of Language (italics mine):

“I am putting myself in the position of someone who does something, and not of someone who talks about something: I am not studying a product, I am taking on a production; I am abolishing the discourse on discourse; the world no longer comes to me in the form of an object, but in that of writing, that is, of a practice; I’m going on to another type of knowledge (that of the Enthusiast)” . . .

Elsewhere, Barthes mixes his musings, always imagining that projected work (ultimately, the Proustian novel that never happened). Under the title of “Book projects”:

Incidents (mini-texts, wrinkles, haikus, notations, playing with meaning, everything that falls, like a leaf).

What does that mean?

A non-book could be conceived: one which would relate a thousand incidents, by keeping itself from ever drawing one line of meaning . . . 

Incidents kept throwing palimpsests before me, to double the trouble of my overly-entangled interpretations.

Alina Stefanescu, The two-faced self-portrait.

It was only a few years ago that I first read Anne Carson’s The Beauty of a Husband. She writes at the end, 

“Well life has some risks. Love is one. Terrible risks.
…
On a June Evening
Here’s my advice,
hold.

Hold beauty.”

When I was in undergrad, back in Miranda House, I hated men so much that my friends gave me the nickname of spinster. Before Carson, it had never occurred to me to think of men as beautiful. These past few weeks, my Instagram algorithm has been showing me reels of a woman handing out compliments to men and I thought I have been called beautiful so many times in my life but I have never called a man beautiful even though I have seen the beautiful Flemish painting like hands of men making espresso behind coffee bars in Rome, or the statuesque pose of waiters in Parisian cafes, or Michelangelo’s David, their noses and day old beards, Caillebotte’s paintings of men rowing boats or working a wooden floor, their strong forearms seducing women. Their faltering voices over phone calls, their shy disarming smiles, their bicycles, and new sneakers, their excuses to have conversations or to hold a woman’s hand, their new crisp cotton shirts, or summer haircuts, jackets, and watches, their heads turning in corridors, or attempts at making witty charming comments. Their eyes full of weight and sadness, having seen life pass them by, the undereye bags after a night of insomnia, or throats almost choked with tears. Their fear, cowardice, and exhaustion. Their helplessness and repressed anger. They, too, were children once. Their restless fingers and nails and mouths that sometimes say things I barely hear. If one looked at them long enough, they seem almost as beautiful as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. 

Saudamini Deo, On seeing men

I imagine the shape of air, the way the air moves with the wingbeats of birds. How the air vibrates when it is moved by birdsong. I imagine how the air might remember those movements it was once made of, that it was once the medium for. Lost birds. Birds that once were. Their flight, their song. The geometry of a place: its birds, trees, voices, rocks, water, air. I imagine as scaffolding for time and space as time as space are scaffolding for those things. The air is and stands in for possibility. What was possible in the past, what is possible now, what might be possible in the future. What we still have and what we have lost. How might I consider it as an instrument to play, an archive to explore, and medium to live in. I frequently consider Walter Benjamin’s angel of history and the wind of history that blows it away from history. But I think also of the entire space it is in. The wind that blows the angel back into the future is somewhere. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but in a somewhere. I think of this somewhere as having multiple dimensions: time and space, certainly, but also memory, and possibility. This is the place where I find myself. Like the self, it is both a medium, a concert hall and a harp to play.

Gary Barwin, Ghost Birds: memory and the shape of life

Shield of Mnemosyne is not my first extended, large-scale poema (Russian term for such things). I’ve written around 10 of them over the last 40 years. What is the primary, underlying literary impulse here (aside from all the other forms and phenomena of motivation)?

I am traveling a path opened by Hart Crane. His path, in turn, was opened by Walt Whitman. Hart followed Walt down that Open Road into America… and built a Bridge for it. I am trying to build a poetic House (or Temple, or Church) – a way station along, or at the never-ending end of, that cosmic trail.

There was another modernist “epic” poet, who like Crane formally announced his Whitman affiliation : Ezra Pound. And a few of my few though very fit readers have noted Poundian echoes in my efforts. But it is the gift of Hart Crane, not Pound, which has offered me the closest aesthetic model and deepest poetic inspiration. My long poems are buildings. Humble shacks, homes, temples… made with song.

I have been an outlier in American literature for so long, it’s become second nature. But I think our literary and intellectual culture simply does not know how to pigeonhole, bracket and brand me to suit its (generally commercial/ephemeral) purposes. I’m not so easy to read : you have to climb into the rafters. You have to put two-&-two together. But my idiom is music – which itself comes to me from a deep well of air, a basic joy of breathing. I mean this in very a literal sense : because when I was four years old, back in 1956, I contracted GBS (Guillain-Barre Syndrome), a rare disease similar to polio. I was paralyzed up to my neck, and kept alive by a breathing apparatus called an “iron lung”. So I’ve had a special appreciation for the breezy river of air that is poetry ever since.

As it happens, I composed my first known poem later that year, in 1956 : a brief ditty about work vs. play, addressed to my father. He scribbled it down on a little cardboard key card, on his way out the door to work. My mother saved that little card; she put it in the mail to me, sometime around 2006.

Henry Gould, Behind the SHIELD OF MNEMOSYNE

I have a broader idea around what a ‘successful’ writing life might constitute for a poet. To have five or six poems that last a hundred years already includes you in the highest rung. Three or four, is sustained brilliance, and far beyond your generation. One or two, is the goal for the most of us – to have made the hours, the life’s commitment, somewhat worthwhile. Auden is very clearly of that second group. But I cannot help but now see an infecting slackness to the majority of his verse.

Before collaborating with Stravinsky, Auden also worked with Benjamin Britten on the operetta Paul Bunyan (1941). What rigour did he bring to the project? First, let me show the rigour he demands of others. Here is Auden writing on Hamlet:

Hamlet has many faults – it is full of holes both in action and motivation. The sketchy portrayal of Fortinbras is one. We hear early about his plans, when Claudius sends word for him to stop. Fortinbras agrees, but wants permission to pass through Denmark on his way to Poland. We see him pass across the stage on the way to Poland, and he returns when everyone is dead. This subplot is needed, but it is not properly incorporated into the play. The action involving Laertes also poses problems. When Laertes returns from France the second time, why hasn’t someone told him Hamlet killed his father, and when he storms the palace, why is all the excitement over in a few moments? Polonius is secretly buried. Why? Polonius’ death is necessary to get Laertes back to England, but again the subplot is not really knit into the action. And why does Claudius delay in killing Hamlet and make elaborate plans which could miscarry? Ophelia is a silly, repressed girl and is obscene and embarrassing when she loses her mind over her father’s death. But though her madness is very shocking and horrible, it is not well motivated. She was not so wild about her meddling Papa, nor was she tremendously interested in Papa.

We have arguments about the deftness of sub-plot integrations, plot inaccuracies, and, of special note, issues with character motivation. In fact, Auden’s series of Shakespeare lectures display numerous instances of sensitivity towards character actions and motivations – those of Iago and Othello a particular standout.

How does this compare then to his self-critique of his own opera, Paul Bunyan:

Babe, the blue ox who gives him [Paul Bunyan] advice, remains a puzzle; I conceive of her quite arbitrarily, as a symbol of his anima, but, so far as I know, one explanation is as valid as another. Nor have I the slightest idea why he should fail to get on with his wife, unless it signify that those who, like lumbermen, are often away from home, rarely develop the domestic virtues.

Here, we have the librettist confessing an ambivalence as to both why the characters exist and, also, why they act in the manner that they do. How do we begin to square the discrepancy between the two stances? On days that I am feeling unkind, today is one such day, I think that Auden felt the latter statement was allowably, flippantly brilliant because, well, it came from Auden.

On more objective days, my relationship with Auden is similar to my thoughts on Hugh MacDiarmid. Admiration tinged with a weary dissatisfaction. Yes, yes, there are those wonderful few pieces, but look at the lazy slagheap of dashed-off dross… Countered by: yes, yes, look at the lazy slagheap of dashed-off dross, but there are those wonderful few pieces.

I wonder what the community thinks. Does all the poor work even count when we consider a poet and their legacy? Or does this not matter, and do only the brief heights that a poet reaches count?

Niall Campbell, Being Frustrated With One of the Greats

Spring cleaning seems like an obvious metaphor for revision and assembling a poetry ms. It’s not unlike casting a hard look at the poems you’ve accumulated and clearing out the debris that clogs their pipes, whatever elements might interrupt their force for a reader: cliché, unproductive digression, wordy moments.

I’ve done some beyond-the-ordinary cleaning this year, too, as a person on sabbatical tends to–and maybe a person winding up the whirlwind of a book launch, too. First ritual is clearing junk out of the office, which is both helpful (what have I lost track of?) and restless procrastination (I think of a dog or cat circling around before settling into a comfortable position). I also clean, literally and metaphorically, between hard writing pushes. For a few weeks I keep my head down and focus; then I get tired and fuzzy, unable to see the project, so I do a variety of chores. This includes professional stuff like reference letters; personal stuff like getting a haircut; and home tasks such as tackling a closet that suddenly looks dysfunctional. Visiting my kids as they struggled also meant tackling cleaning tasks that overwhelmed them–hard work but genuinely helpful, unlike some other parental behaviors in face of crisis. While I sorted and scrubbed, I thought a lot about cleaning my mother’s home during her final illness five years ago. Sort the pills into a dispenser, throw out expired foods and buy new, and shine up the sink because you can’t shine up the future or make medicine actually cure a person–that sort of desperate labor standing in for all that I could not do.

While polishing poems is a good and necessary step, though, I’ll make a case for dirtying them up first. At least for me, first drafts usually hide something important. It’s hard to dig into the real mess of my thinking and feeling. That stuff is ugly, burdened with shame, jealousy, misdirected anger, lazy illogic, and other emotional and intellectual habits that make me look bad. But poems become more valuable to others when I’m willing to do the work.

Lesley Wheeler, Getting dirty for poetry

Then I was right in there
amongst bouncy pond weed, 
straggly ribbons of leaves
and those shades of brown and black in close-up.
Oh, the depths of it.
I was so cold amongst the stale green smell
but happy.

They shouldn’t have ripped me from it
just to wrap me in a stranger’s dog blanket.

Sue Finch, FINDING THE SHAPE OF THE GARDEN

Poetry in part is a way to impose order, or find and highlight order or patterns. It is skill of finding significance and meaning, but if you try too hard, are too attached, remember that meaning isn’t hard to confer randomly. Try “he’s such a ___” and add a random noun. {cucumber, cummerbund, paper cut}. Meaning isn’t hard. It’s near unavoidable with our meaning-addled brains.

The danger in poetry is to hard-close, to soothe too soon, to give a satisfying shape before the work. It is to speak like a bland or witty horoscope containing no actual thought, but flattering appearance of it, thereby manufacturing a patronizing poet voice of authority.

A risk is to make the work the packaging words and poetic devices, the hook and the resolution, instead of the deeper work of changing self, disturbing system defaults, growth, depth, letting chaos turn to genuine insight into systems or witness the discomfiting. 

As hard as it can be to be published, with 1% to 3% acceptance rates, the hard part of writing, the most active time is the making, the improving, the shaking up your own practice, the expanding or leaning into the weirdness of your brain. The sporadic hurry-scurry of pitching poems is work but is not The Work.

Pearl Pirie, The Work

I am not being dishonest when I say I don’t like waking up at 6am.  It makes me negative. I hear stories of high-achieving friends waking at sunbreak to write, to lift weights at the gym …different species.  It’s only the leaking of the sun through the blinds that stirs me – I take in the morning’s emanation, all objects like clay just thrown and still wet in that bluish light, waiting to be fired.  My nerves, like theirs, also quiver… 

If I have no obligations, I will drift asleep at 7 into a savage world of my own interior, my dreamer standing at the glass, eavesdropping and observing myself with such precision I am often aghast.  I have dreams that enact social satire about our tourist class – ‘What actually IS a Rhode Island?” – to appalling tests of motherhood – I’m really eating live flesh?  – to surprises of who’s in bed with whom in what country – the full screen of entanglements.  Then there’s the Russian doll metaphor.  Walking into a Banana Republic while living in a Banana Republic — oh images on the screen, how crisp and precise!  Get out your pith helmet, your jeeps, your fake smiles….

Jill Pearlman, Savage Truths of 7am

I’m planning for a writer’s residency and thinking about what makes for a successful residency – crunchy snacks? comfortable pants and shoes? Inspiring reading material? A set of goals? I want to work on my book that I’m still sending out and write some new work – either essays or flash or poems. I haven’t felt very creative the last few months for some reason.

So I’m hoping this time away will give me some new perspectives, some time away from social media, television, and the routine.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Green Herons and Goslings, AI Lit Mag Scandals, Planning for Writing Residencies

It’s been a long time since I did a guest slot reading – my own fault, I withdrew following a now-long-ago (first) heart attack – but I’m really pleased to say I’ve been pencilled in for the excellent Buzzwords in Cheltenham on Sunday, February 14, 2027.

Yes, it’s a long way off but that shows just how popular the Buzzwords set-up is – held upstairs at the Exmouth Arms in Bath Road on the second Sunday of the month except, if memory serves me well, for August.

I’m already looking forward to it. I read there years ago and tried to contribute to the open mic session when I could, but as I said, fell out of the habit.

Now, with the publication of Poems In The Key Of Aardvark (see image of cover below), I have a responsibility to get off my behind and do readings again and anything else I can to promote it.

I’ll get out to do some open mics where I can. It’s sad that Stratford Literary Festival no longer caters for poetry – ancient or modern – but I’ll see where the new determination to socialise leads. It’s brought back fond memories of reading at a variety of festivals, poetry groups etc over many years, so this, I suppose, is something of a comeback.

Bob Mee, OF POETRY READINGS AND MINDLESS FOLK WHO STEAL CHICKENS

It feels like the first week of summer, although it’s hard for me to pin down when summer starts precisely.  The last day of in-person class feels like a demarcation line, as does turning in grades, as does graduation.  I want to spend some time this week planning for ways to get back to creative writing, the non-seminary, non-sermon writing.  I want more poetry.  I also want to remember that this summer is the time I planned to put a new poetry collection together.

Here’s what I wrote in a December blog post:  ” I’m going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly. I’m going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground. The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.”  That blog post reminded me that I had looked at past manuscripts–do I want to use one of them as a skeleton/scaffolding or start by looking at files of individual poems?

I also want to return to my New Year’s resolution, which was also my 2025 resolution:   “I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I’m also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead.”

Here’s hoping for some white hot writing streaks this summer!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Summer Writing Intentions

The cusp of summer always means summer projects, which, despite my not being beholden to academic calendars any longer, still seems like a nice time to try to get some things done, although not with as much fervor and doggedness as that which comes with autumn. This summer, after I finish a couple of play scripts that are in various stages, next up will be my next installment in the Antiquities series. I have only been in research mode of late and made a few collages a couple years back, but I am determined to get at least a good first draft by September on a series of Calypso-inspired poems. Considering one of the first unpublished poems I wrote in my very first year of writing seriously in the late 90s, a poem called “Plentitude” that is probably way too bad to share now, it seems fitting this is where I go next. […]

My other goal for the summer is to start dipping my toe into submitting plays to theaters and contests once I’ve built up something of a body of work to actually show off. Things have been going well, and just this weekend, I was able to put a bow on the final version of my Macbeth witches retelling, as well as get the first act roughly rendered of something else that mixes 90s culture, teen dieting, and demonology that’s turning out to be a lot of fun.

Kristy Bowen, May Paper Boat

I have to say that the research I’m doing on the novel I’m writing about libraries and card catalogues and the future, is so much fun and taking me to the coolest places. In the old days, I’d probably share some of that here, but it’s the new upside down secretive world of writing that we now inhabit I suppose and it seems folly to speak about one’s projects. But one essay that pops out is by Umberto Eco, on censorship. He wrote it in 2009 and it feels like he knew what our times would be like, because it was a lesser version of the noise filled world then. This is when the world began filling with digital noise, “an excess of information.” He says, “This great need for noise is like a drug: it is a way to avoid focusing on what is really important….” He refers to Saint Augustine and “Redi in interiorem hominem,” return to the interior (hu)man.

The thing I find most interesting is that he also says that even when people are oppressed by “the most censorious tyrants” they have been “able to find out all that is going on in the world through popular word of mouth.” And this is why he says that the biggest “ethical problems we face today is how to return to silence.” He calls for a study of semiotics of reticence, a semiotics of silence in political debate, in theater, and in other forms of communication. He asks us to consider the long pause, “silence as creation of suspense, silence as threat, silence as agreement, silence as denial, silence in music.” […]

We are in an imagination battle, as adrienne marie brown has said in her book on emergence. We need to invent new ways to see, to write, to be. Or maybe it’s a reclaiming of the old ways. I’ve been embracing my film camera, I always write with a fountain pen. I’m going to be on social media a bit less, I swear lol, or at least be there more on my own terms. I’m planning a reset time, turning it off for a week or so here and there. Maybe even a month at some point in the near future.

O’Donohue talks about the imagination. It is like a lantern, “it illuminates the inner landscapes of our life and helps us discover their secret archaeologies.” How to see the mystery and beauty ever-present?

We can cultivate the “grace of innocence” and tap into our “passion for freedom.” Our hearts are wild, naturally. We can still answer the call to a creative life for we know instinctively what that is. The imaginative life is one of mystery, ecstasy, joy, possibility, delight, revelation, and with some perseverance, perhaps transcendence.

Times are always changing; let us use this time, we creative souls, spirits, to reinvent what creativity is even. Let’s find new ways to share our work, new ways to create, perhaps more secretly or word of mouth. Let’s share with those who approach with reverence. The others never wanted our offerings anyway.

Shawna Lemay, Let’s Talk About Word of Mouth, the Unforeseen, and Delicious Trouble

When I have created art that denies my authentic self—whether by erasing my shadow self, over-extending anchors, over-clarifying my interiority, self-questioning my patterns and symbols, or cleaning up language so that it doesn’t feel “too obscure” for the reader—I have felt a primordial sting of shame.

But when I’ve generously translated the creative currents within me without diluting them, I felt an existential, euphoric liberation.

What I have learned is that the writing doesn’t need to come with a map or key. Trust that the human heart will know its way. Indulge the mystery. Bend time. Let blue be green be garnet be gold. Resist the need to hold everyone’s hands, & to have your hands held. Let the underbelly speak. Get lost in the process. Push past the illusory. Relish in the lostness. Quiet the noise. Descend and translate. Look for the big fish in the deepest of waters.

You also never need to explain or justify your process. It’s not really about you or me. It’s bigger and deeper than us all. We are a splendid conduit when we get out of the way.

Lisa Marie Basile, The poetic permissions of dream logic & otherworlds

I keep trying to break
language into patterns that will mean something

beyond myself. I think of the mulberries I picked
from a friend’s garden, how even as half of them

sank into swift ferment, their skin still gleamed.
Night, too, presses its blue bruise against

the house walls. Everything can fold back into itself,
and my ghosts slip back like leaves into the pages of

a book. After, the air feels like it does after someone
has said something so real, it becomes unrepeatable

Luisa A. Igloria, Veined

Because we’ve lived in our house for forty years, my garden has suffered many changes of mind. And because roots can be very persistent, sometimes my older ideas re-emerge. This poem is the story of one of those reappearances, told in the classical meter known as the Sapphic stanza, one of my favorite ancient rhythms. […]

Stand there still, O vegetable love. Grow taller.
Soar and soften out to a ferny greenness
feathered open, branched to adorn these hoped-for
armfuls of roses.

Maryann Corbett, Asparagus

It’s the toadflax that gets me; those clusters of tiny violet flowers, pushing through gravel and tar. It’s the plaintain and horse tail ferns too, the black merrick, its optimistic puffs of yellow; it’s the dandelion, stonethrift, wild clary. It’s the beautiful bright things growing where they are not valued, or wanted; which insist on existing. A single purple Columbine, tall and conspicuous: I think of my trans friend in the Church reading hate mail signed In Jesus’ Name. All the people I have known who have grown in hard land, who flower, who were sometimes cut down much too soon.

I think of what lies under the tarmac; a cool world of roots, roots reaching to mycelium, a fungal network stretching far beyond the reach of each plant. I think of community, interconnection, mutual aid – the plants and mycelium network exchange sugars and minerals, water; how the network protects the plants from drought and disease. I think of pesticides and diggers: the best way to kill a flower is to take away sunlight and rain. The flowers will grow regardless of what laws are passed, what anyone thinks of us.

I think hard times are upon us and ahead of us. But we are flowers. We will continue to bloom.

Clare Shaw, Wildflowers and transphobia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Gould, Message in a Battle

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

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

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

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

Lesley Harrison, Bees: an Equilibrium

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

Dale Favier, Already Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Cow-Inspired Calming Practice

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

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

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

Then she smiles:

— Hurry, give him a poem!

And she leaves for her tuba lesson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, like silver dollars dropped in the deep end

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

R M Haines, Einstein was a Pisces

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

PF Anderson, Day of Visibility

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

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

Kristy Bowen, the bone palace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Pulling your own oars

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

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

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

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

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

Beth Adams, Care

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, A Pindaric ode for Louis Bielle-Biarrey

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

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, New Poems Up

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Lee, Reviewers deserve better than the Gutter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Meischen, “I Am More”

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

Sarah Lada, Sprout Became a Woman

My head

pushes from
the mud, the primordial

churn, seething,
thick with salty
activity.

Shit or fish sauce?

Call
it March.

Jill Pearlman, March: A Sooty Skin

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

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Review of MY HEART IS NOT ASLEEP

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

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

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

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

It’s the fall that ungods me. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Interregnum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, assembly required

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

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

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

Jan Noble, Nº56 The palace of misfortunes

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

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

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

Suzanna Fitzpatrick, The Deeper Read 11

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

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

Mat Riches, Pull the Uther One

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

Lori Witzel, Cultivar

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Gould, Poems Beautiful and Useful

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Like to the falling of a star

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

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

1. Find a Root System (The “Why”)

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Against Language as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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

drivers both of change and loss.

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

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

philosophers to think; the scientists, surmise.

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

Maureen Doallas, In Greenland, Glaciers Fall

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

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

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

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

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

Dylan Tweney, Finding your flow as a writer

returning the water
from the vase
to the flower garden…

waiting in the wings by tom clausen

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

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

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

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

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

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

londubh buí
I measc na gcrann
séideann an gaoth

yellow blackbird
among the trees
the wind blows

(my translation)

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

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

one small bird
whose note’s heard
sharply pointed
yellowbill

whose notes fly
on Loch Laig
blackbird’s branch
yellowfilled

(again my version)

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

sheets of rain
a robin shelters
inside a thorny bush

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

Billy Mills, Two Irish Haikuists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josephine Corcoran, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

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

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

Letter to Hamrick from the Century of the Invalidated

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

Charlotte Hamrick, A poet once wrote me a poem

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

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

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

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

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

フィッシュアンドチップスに塩風光る　庄田ひろふみ

fisshu ando chippusu ni shio kaze hikaru

            salt
            on fish and chips
            the wind shines

                                                Hirofumi Shoda

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, My Prima Donna Rat Hermit Era

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

Rich Ferguson, Green

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

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

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

Ama Bolton, Poems of Kindness

This week: glitter on our fingers, the heaven of the moon, Emily Dickinson’s 195th birthday, the buzz of numbness, and much more. Enjoy.

Chatting about beachcombing with a poet/accomplice the other week, she mentioned finding Aristotle’s lantern on an Orkney beach. I’d never heard of it – the boney, five-sided mouthpiece of a sea urchin with its fearsome, self-sharpening teeth, designed to eat through stone, which in his History of Animals Aristotle described as ‘… like a horn lantern with the panes of horn left out.’ A mouth that carries light? Light that can gnaw through stone – how would that work? […]

At age 6 our entire class had our silhouettes drawn as some sort of weird gift for our parents. It was definitely me, that black-paper other half, but a two-dimensional outline, cut from shadow and therefore expressionless and blind. This is what is left of us after consciousness has been removed, turning aside in shame. I tried to write a poem about it years later, but it had already moved beyond poetry, into significance.

John Glenday, Aristotle’s Lantern – Twenty-Four Digressions on Light

Yesterday I went to the secret woods which Nick owns/ is the custodian of, and which he shares with me and Alice Wolfe and the other people who work to protect and restore this small, injured section of land. A former tip built on ancient woodland, the site is characterised by rubble, glass, and poor, loose soils; scarred by the pits and trenches of illegal bottle diggers who show no respect to the land and have even felled its trees. We’re slowly clearing and healing it, removing rubble and glass, heavy metals and plastic, filling trenches, planting saplings. […]

And the shards. Some are so startling, or so meaningful, I bring them home. A picture of Santa! Where the pottery breaks, trees and birds, flowers, faces – even words – are taken from their usual context, liberated, perfectly framed. Most shards I place in a big bag for Alice, who transforms them into exquisite mosaics representing the wildlife who have survived, or who are now returning, to the woods. We sit together on the bench and watch the birdfeeders – crowds of coal tits feeding, a nuthatch, a tiny wren. Alice is especially pleased with the gold shards, the green, the mosaic of cracks on old white pots which she sees as the feathers of a barn owl.

But we both agree that there’s not a single shard we don’t love: how even the ubiquitous, common-as-muck Blue Willow gives itself up in infinite variations when it is broken. A manic gang of long tailed tits pay us a visit, a lone squirrel unhurriedly gathers nuts. Let that be my story for today. I am a broken thing, and I am beautiful. I am a white feather in the night, I am a leaf. I am a broken woman stroking a dog, a girl with no face, an animal, a broken King. I am a tree, a series of flowers, I’m a river.

Clare Shaw, Broken Things.

Scratching her cursive
into the soil,
she scribes a language
of talon and hunger.
Upturning stanzas,
syllables of soil
fall apart and scatter.
Our yard is raw and quiet with her.

Sarah Lada, Donna

The wind of the world blows through me, and every bit of me shimmers like leaves in the sunlight. That’s not some advanced meditative state: it’s the state of my ordinary daily walk under the sky. It is often breathtakingly beautiful, it’s true, but it’s also normal, ordinary, regular. I don’t have to fetch it from far away. I just have to step out of my door, and it fetches me.

Dale Favier, Fetch

Dick Higgins calls this form ‘leonine verse’ in Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature, but I can’t find reference to it anywhere else. In fact, Wikipedia has an entry for ‘leonine verse’ that describes a totally different form. Whatever you care to call this, it looks more complicated than it is — each stanza is really a couplet, but the second and fourth (or, alternately, the first, third and fifth) metrical feet of each line in each couplet are identical, these are placed in a third line that sits between them. Effectively, the lines are woven together.

Also, if you read it across diagonally from just inside the top left corner, it goes snow, snow, snow, snow.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Icy Advent Calendar #6: Another Labyrinth

The third poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Batool Abu Akleen.

This is how I cook my grief, by Batool Abu Akleen, translated by Yasmin Zaher.

Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes thereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others.

She is the author of 48Kg. (Tenement Press, 2025), translated from the Arabic by the poet, with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher. 48Kg. is a Palestine Festival of Literature ‘Book of the Week’ / A Palestine Festival of Literature ‘Bookshelf’ choice; A New Statesman ‘Book of the Year’ 2025 / ℅ Jacqueline Rose; and was awarded the The Jean-Jacques Rousseau Fellowship / ℅ the Akademie Schloss Solitude.

You can read an interview between Batool Abu Akleen and Claire Armistead on the Guardian website.

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 3: This is how I cook my grief by Batool Abu Akleen

When I was little I loved an annual. To me it was a book of delightful snippets collected together to be enjoyed in a period of time that involved a break from routine. I can picture myself reading in my pyjamas, the seemingly bottomless sweet tin, and the advent calendar that left its glitter on our fingers with all its doors open telling me that it was indeed Christmas Day. This week’s photo is like the cover of my 2025 annual.

This blog has been my way of building a good relationship with Mondays, and the fact there have been 114 episodes since September 2023 tells me that I have definitely adopted this as a habit. Singing as the Darkness Lifts (this blog’s title) comes from my love of three things:  the sound of birds welcoming the dawn, the feeling of darkness lifting, the moments of joy that make my heart sing. And writing each entry is a grounding in the changing of seasons when I take time to sniff the air each Monday morning and note its scent. In some ways it is also a setting down before moving on with the new week. It is a simple place to reflect, and it is a place to find joy as the darkness lifts.

Sue Finch, MY YEAR IN REVIEW

Most of my slightly mad ideas (16 days of activism last year which included 16 poetry events, January Writing Hours) have at their heart this belief that (cheesy as it sounds) community and being together, and creating space for conversations and poetry and inspiration is important. They are my acts of self-care and self preservation.

This year we decided to make all of our written content available for free, which I hope is another act of community. We are running monthly events for our paid subscribers – another much smaller type of community. And of course there is January Writing Hours, which is approaching fast.

Kim Moore, Day 16: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

i do not want to fight myself & call it football.
put my brain in a helmet & run
at the sun. instead, i want to be
something else. it is exciting that i am not sure
what else i can be. the football tv will,
like any hole, shrink from lack of use.
maybe one day be smooth & soft.
the last little man digging at the earth
in search of himself. what if that is me?

Robin Gow, football tv

When I was seventeen, I discovered that a close friend had just broken up with another girl. Their parents had discovered they were sleeping together and, horrified, had decided to put a stop to it. My friend was devastated, and sometimes sat outside the other girl’s house in her car, crying. Amongst the many details which impressed me was that fact that they had sent each other poems. My friend told me that one of them, ‘The Good-Morrow’ by John Donne, was the most passionate love poem ever written. A while later, she gave me a copy of ‘The Good-Morrow’ along with some of Donne’s other poems. She had fallen in love with me. I was in love with a lanky indie boy pining for his previous girlfriend, and could not reciprocate. One day in the sixth-form common room I, too, passed him a copy of Donne’s poem to read.

John Donne, then, is for me intrinsically linked with all the dramas and intensities of my teenage years. As we were discovering our sexuality, my friend was pointing out the double-meaning of Donne’s ‘country pleasures’. As I gazed on my crush in tiny, grubby clubs, I was thinking: ‘For love all love of other sights controls, / And makes one little room an everywhere.’

Of the seven poems published in John Donne’s lifetime, only two were authorized by him, and they were instead written to be circulated in manuscript form amongst a coterie of his admirers. It seems fit that in Turton High Sixth Form in 1996 they were also circulating in handwritten form or as dog-eared photocopies; passed from lover to love-object.

Clare Pollard, Reading John Donne’s ‘The Flea’

Bridge over the Aire is a singular achievement in the same way that Briggflatts is; a poem unlike anything that Tebb’s fellow Children of Albion have, or could have, produced. As with most long poems, there are some flat moments, but overall it is a poem of great accomplishment as well as being a remarkable document of a world that has melted away before our very eyes. There is much to admire in this Collected Poems, but this poem makes it a book to treasure, a book to return to. Tebb is, above all else, a survivor of a gone world, a world of hope based on a firm sense of community and of social democracy in all its messy glory. Read it.

Billy Mills, Collected Poems 1964 – 2016, Barry Tebb

Last week I wrote about the pioneering doctor and scientist William Harvey, and since then I’ve been reading his wonderful second work, De generatione animalium (1653). Unpicking in crisp and patient Latin the precise mechanics of reproduction — including a great deal about how human reproduction, described in comparison with that of deer — I have found it a strangely moving read. […]

Harvey was not a poet himself, but his friend and successor, Martin Lluelyn (sometimes Llewellin, 1612-1682) was. Lluelyn, who became the doctor to King Charles II after the Restoration, wrote a prefatory poem for the English edition of De generatione, and he was probably also its unacknowledged translator. Here is his description of Harvey’s achievement in matters of the heart:

There [in the dissected animals] thy Observing Eye first found the Art
Of all the Wheels and Clock-work of the Heart:
The mystick causes of its Dark Estate,
What Pullies Close its Cells, and what Dilate.
What secret Engines tune the Pulse, whose din
By Chimes without, Strike how things fare within.
There didst thou trace the Blood, and first behold
What Dreames mistaken Sages coin’d of old.
For till thy Pegasus the fountain brake,
The crimson Blood, was but a crimson Lake.
Which first from Thee did Tyde and Motion gaine,
And Veins became its Channel, not its Chaine.
With Drake and Candish hence thy Bays is curld,
Fam’d Circulator of the Lesser World.

There is a moment in the mid-late seventeenth century when the passion, complexity and rhetorical extravagance of the baroque (or ‘metaphysical’) met the precision and optimism of the new science. We see glimpses of this in late Cowley, and you could take his remarkable (and remarkably conflicted) ode to Harvey as a kind of analysis of the two elements. In Cowley, though, they never quite combine — or, perhaps rather, the combination never feels entirely natural.

Other poets, though, did see how to put it together, and Lluelyn is one of them.

Victoria Moul, The running of the deer: celebrating Christmas in 1644

The latest from Vancouver-based writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt, a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta and Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar, is the poetry collection The Idea of An Entire Life (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2025). “How we exist in the world / depends on how we describe it.” begins the opening poem in the collection, “AUTOFICTION.” The poems in this collection are quietly gestural, earth-shaking, precise and performative, offering a layering of direct statements, narrative storytelling and subtle truths. “Picture the women waiting at the forest’s centre,” Belcourt writes, as part of the poem “20TH-CENTURY CREE HISTORY,” “their hands / folded into little coffins. // Not even the snow falls with such imprecise hunger.”

I seem to be a few books behind on Belcourt, having missed A Minor Chorus: A Novel (Toronto ON: Hamish Hamilton, 2022) and Coexistence: Stories (Hamish Hamilton, 2024), the two most recent of his growing list of titles that includes the full-length poetry debut, This Wound Is a World (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2017), a book that made him the youngest winner-to-date of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here], as well as his non-fiction debut, the rich and remarkable A History of My Brief Body (Columbus OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2020) [see my review of such here]. There is a way that Belcourt has of stitching together the present moment with threads of memory and history, writing declarative details of and around Queer identity, family history and survival, utilizing factual details as building blocks into something larger, deeper. As any poem might require, in that particular moment. “I want to call attention to the dead,” he writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CRUISING UTOPIA SONNETS,” “to the barely / living. I want to remind you of the gravity and / the challenge of responding to the world, of simply / being in the world.” There is a dream-like quality to elements of these poems, blended with concrete realities, each side complementing the other in quite striking ways, hitting all the right notes of lovely, of devastating, of loss and heartbreak and wonder. These are poems of witness, of memory; of documentation; a book of the whole world, the whole body, an approach that seems to be how he approaches the books of his I’ve seen to date, including elements of his entire world in that particular moment into the work. This is, arguably, what the best work is supposed to, each poem and line offering a different facet, a different fragment, of something far larger and more expansive as a unified whole. A book of an entire life, indeed. 

rob mclennan, Billy-Ray Belcourt, The Idea of An Entire Life

I was spelunking some digital archives recently and came across Bob Hicok’s “A Primer,” which I loved to bring into classes at assorted Michigan universities. Apart from Frost, excepted for his titular role in this publication, I’ve been trying to not repeat poets, but in the days that followed my rediscovery I couldn’t stop laughing whenever I thought “I live now / in Virginia, which has no backup plan,” and so it occurred to me that perhaps my dumb little rules are less important than, well, enjoying life.

What’s to love? The ability of a poem to have an entire room of twenty-something-year-olds in stitches is a ringing endorsement in my book, though my book is titled Make Poetry for People Again and yours may well have a smarter title, like Something Nice I Saw Today. With Michigan in literal eyesight just a five-minute stroll from the desk where I am writing, I find the seasonal hyperboles are pleasingly apt. As much as I dislike small talk—try asking me some time “What’s new?” and enjoy the cold sweat it engenders—I consider weather a topic of extreme importance, an enthusiasm partially born of the perpetual endurance sports–based need to know when it might next be kind of warm outside, but mostly of the simple fact that what comes from above comes for each of us in kind. It’s always our weather.

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Primer” by Bob Hicok

In the heaven of the moon, Dante meets the humblest of the blest. When Dante asks one of them – Piccarda Donati – if souls like her desire a ‘higher place / to see more and to be yet more beloved’,

…She and the other shades first smiled a little –
and then she answered me with so much joy
she seemed ablaze with the first fire of love:

She explains that it is impossible for them or any of the saved to desire more than they have because that would be discordant with the will of God:

 ….And in his will is found our peace: it is
that sea to which all beings move that are
by it created or by nature made.

This last tercet is often quoted, whether in Dante’s Italian or in different translations. What quiet power there is in the simple phrases, both in terms of their psychological and metaphysical meanings. What I find most stunning, though, is the imaginative reach that unites these vast ideas to the delicate humanity of ‘She and the other shades first smiled a little’. Love in the most absolute sense, the creative love of God, is brought together with the simple human joys of shared knowledge, shared feeling, and the ability to communicate these things, so that we feel how such emotions in this world offer glimpses of the divine. […]

I’m no Dante scholar and can’t judge [D. M.] Black’s version on purely scholarly grounds but I have enjoyed the Paradiso in several different translations, and wrestled with it in Italian. Black’s version is the one that’s given me the most intense imaginative experience and sheer reading pleasure. This is because he writes as a poet translating a poem into poetry for a wide readership, less concerned with word for word accuracy than an academic Dantist needs to be.

Edmund Prestwich, Dante’s Paradiso, translated by D. M. Black

From the first word of the comprehensive new Poems of Seamus Heaney, Heaney writes in a familiar voice.

Hushed
And lulled
Lay the field, under a high-sky sun.

Hushed and lulled could have been the title of this volume. Heaney’s voice often is hushed and lulled, both his writing and his reading voice. There is much “hushed and lulled” imagery in Death of a Naturalist: “The squat pen rests, snug as a gun”, “Hunched over the railing”, “Snug on our bellies”, “Drifted through the dark of banks and hatches”. This hushed hunching is found in the earliest uncollected poems, but also in some of Heaney’s later work, such as Seeing Things: “Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb”, “that sniffed-at, bleated-into grassy space”, “Firelit, shuttered, slated, and stone-walled”, “claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof/Effect”, “all hutch and hatch”.

This hutch-hatch snug-nested manner is the heart of Heaney’s forms as well as his tones. Like the poet who had the greatest-but-least-acknowledged influence on his work, Robert Frost, Heaney enjoys tightness—not the neat tightness of form in which Frost specialized, but the sort of tightness we associate with being hushed, slated, lulled, or stone-walled: his poems are packed, slotted, with meanings couching, crouching, bunching.

Henry Oliver, Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.

The poem’s speaker moves from victim to survivor. The sequence “Surviving” uses animals as metaphor, in part iii, “Isolation: Giant squid”,

“I shared my body with the swelling sea,
flowing in freedom, salty and edgeless.
We cephalopods have been shapeshifting
in these depths for five hundred million years,
to the rhythm of our three hearts pulsing.”

Letting go of the abuse and shifting into a shape that feels like home, enabled the speaker to adapt to life free from that abuse. It’s also a place from which the speaker is able to consider the abuser, in “Faceless”, “He was a needle, not sewing to join anything together/ but because he enjoyed the holes that were left behind”. The journey continues, an abecedarian in “A-Z gratitude list”, has some seemingly random items, “G is for gusting wind”, “River’s brown windows”, “S is for shingle”, until “Zips. Keeping a child warm/ by closing metal teeth with my fumbling fingers.”

Emma Lee, “Full Body Reclaim” Caroline Stancer (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

My last review of the year, of Andrew Neilson’s fine Rack Press pamphlet, Summers Are Other, has been published today, over at The Friday Poem, here. My thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie.

This week also saw the excellent news that Blue Diode Publishing will be publishing Andrew’s long-overdue first full collection, Little Griefs, in 2026.

I should also mention that I very much enjoyed Andrew’s essay on Seamus Heaney in the latest issue of The Dark Horse, which is available to buy here.

Matthew Paul, Review of Andrew Neilson’s Summers Are Other

My pamphlet Cry (Valley Press, 2025) is all at once a delving into the ego, a rumination on the difficulties of accepting one’s suddenly-changed identity as a creative mother, and a heartfelt expression of love for one’s child. The subjective viewpoint is that of a woman who tries to carve out time to maintain her ‘writer self’ alongside the newly acquired ‘mother self’, and she wends her way between the mundanity of chores and the space needed in order to write. The poems veer from warm love for her child to frustration to exhaustion to annoyance at a husband who doesn’t consider the mundane aspects of parenting to be part of his role. Freedom and space are craved.

The poem ‘Floating’ appears almost half-way through the collection, just before the central crux, and I have chosen to offer it here for all its metaphor, psychology and symbolism. As a poet, I find it hard to escape the metaphor; indeed some things are better said through it. It lends an “otherness” which can encourage a freer voice, more immediate language, and something concrete on which to base an idea or feeling. For otherness, think of the patient’s chair facing away from the antiquated psychoanalyst to garner honesty and openness, or likening a person or feeling to a piece of fruit to detach them from yourself and describe them better: hard skin, pith, juice… One can really have fun. In ‘Floating’ I give you water.

Drop-in by Katy Mahon (Nigel Kent)

I keep writing, but I also keep falling behind at staying organized. And then there is the issue of technology constantly updating, so that a method I used in, say, 2015 is not available anymore…unless I invent a bunch of work-arounds. (My long-standing backup method is PAPER, and I still employ it, but I hate file cabinets and folders and don’t use them.) As for spreadsheets? I avoided learning to set them up during my entire career in academia because our department had a brilliantly capable office assistant who did that stuff for us, bless her heart.

All of which means that now and then I cannot locate a draft, a poem I want to revise or to send to a friend, or consider putting into a manuscript. Frustrating. And when I bought a new laptop, I had to decide what files to move from my old desktop; how far back do I want to go? Those poems from 1987, for example–eons ago, as far as computer system lifespans. Yes, I have hard copy from dot-matrix printers. Files originally in AppleWorks and Claris, files that lived on 3.5″ floppy disks. Copies I typed out on various typewriters through the years! Although I’m complaining about it, I realize that in some ways it’s really cool that my poems have undergone so many iterations in terms of tech. It means I have been around awhile and confirms the reasons I think of myself as a writer…and not as an efficiency expert.

Ann E. Michael, Systems

We watch other writers making best seller lists, winning awards and feel like we could have had that if only we’d set up an instagram account and promoted our books, or made lots and lots of contacts that we could pull in for favours when we needed them, if we’d set the alarm for five am and pushed out 2000 words fuelled by caffeine before shuffling the kids to school and keeping house, not forgetting making time for health and happiness, reconnecting with nature and reading fifty two books a year. We have this pushed at us from every corner of the internet. The dream writer life can be achieved if you do more than other writers. If you fight harder you will achieve more. If you push harder you will be the one that makes it. Added to this, we crave the validation of our peers, naturally, and as a species we are drawn to the idea of a hierarchy, that there must be a way to attain the top tier if not the top position. If we knew what the key to it all was, we could make it. If we took the right course, the right workshop, if we made the right friends we would, finally reach the golden summit of being successful. There are many people making money selling writers a key to success that doesn’t really exist. If you can’t physically fight, will you drown? If you can’t keep up, will you disappear? This is one of the fears that comes up the most when I am mentoring. I have that fear in me too. But our perceptions of what the writer life looks like, and about success are skewed by that fear.

Wendy Pratt, I don’t recognize the writing road anymore, or even the creative landscape my mind is waking up to.

What a lovely event it was at The Brunswick in Hove on Sunday, at the awards event for the Brighton & Hove Arts Council Poetry Competition. Jeremy Page had kindly invited me to read alongside him (he was the adjudicator) and the audience was very receptive, especially given that they were no doubt there to hear the results of the comp! One of the poems I read was ‘She offers her defence’ from The Mayday Diaries, not one I’ve ever included in a reading because it’s written in two voices and without having the poem in front of you it’s possibly a bit hard to follow. Then I had the idea of asking poet friend Jill Fricker to read it with me. I knew she would be there as she had been shortlisted for the prize. And I think our team reading went well!

Come the second half, when the results were announced we found out Jill won first prize for her poem ‘NW3’ – very exciting, and a massive co-incidence that she’d already appeared on stage in the first half. Huge congratulations to Jill. She’s actually a pretty successful poetry comper. I must ask her what the secret is.

This week I was contacted by Rebecca Leek, whose podcast The Ditty Bag is a lovely thing: she records a new episode every week, featuring five or six poems that she has chosen, sometimes on a theme. This week there’s a fair bit of water, and Rebecca included my poem ‘Before the Splicing’ which was originally published in Prole magazine. She liked the poem because of its rope-making and boat-ish references, and actually explained what ‘splicing’ is. Very helpful! The poem is a sonnet spoken by a woman having doubts (or not) ostensibly about whether the rope she’s working on will hold tight, but also whether her impending marriage will work (the sense of ‘getting spliced’). I was delighted to hear Rebecca read it.

Robin Houghton, Readings, and a poem on ‘The Ditty Bag’ podcast

I live in a world of books, in the over-passionate, underfunded world of the arts. It’s messy and uncomfortable. But art is. The billionaires are in tech in the Bay Area. While thriving financially in the artistic sphere may be near impossible, reading enriches my life in every other area: it allows me to expand my mind, travel the world, imagine myself anew, be everywhere all at once.

As a publisher, I always think about who will read the books we publish. As a reader, I read all over the place, tumbling through genres, styles, poems, stories. I like to envision that we will all keep engaging with literature, whether we read books physically, listen to audiobooks, or consume bite-sized essays and poems throughout the day.

Kate Gale, Read to Me, America: For The Love of the Arts

Many poets seem to leave their book behind as soon as it’s published, but at that point I feel I’m only just getting to know it.

First of all, the reviews it receives (if the poet’s lucky!), provide an excellent sounding board. Which poems do reviewers highlight? What elements are cast into doubt? And secondly, what about the readers who buy the collection? These days, they often select a favourite poem or two from the book and post them on social media. Which ones are chosen? And thirdly, the poems that the poet might also decide to share. Which generate most traction? Which are most popular? Which garner most sales of the book? And then there are in-person readings. As mentioned previously on here, those events enable the poet to explore their collection again, to test which poems go down best in person, and which appear to disappoint.

And finally, the poet often benefits from time to weigh up all this feedback, to gauge it, to avoid dramatic, knee-jerk reactions to it, to compare and contrast it, to consider how it might (or might not!) contribute to the writing of their next collection. Of course, none of this process is possible if they turn their back on the book and immediately embark on another creative project as soon as a copy reaches their hands. The seemingly fallow period that follows publication is, in my view, a necessary pause, a pause that may be filled by the satisfaction of engaging with readers.

Matthew Stewart, Getting to know your own collection

My poetry book now lives in over 120 homes, across 28 states and 5 countries. I want to say these numbers are far beyond what I expected, but I don’t think I really let myself “expect” anything. Regardless, every time I try to picture it—these little blue books sitting on nightstands, tucked into bags, resting on coffee tables—my whole body hums. […]

I’ve learned that marketing is much less fun than writing, and I’m not really the type who can do both at once. So for now, I’m letting myself lean into sharing this book and finding my readers.

Originally, I planned to spend a few quiet months focused on online sales before moving toward in-person stores. I wanted room to breathe after the marathon of finalizing the book. But my ADHD brain saw shiny opportunities and sprinted straight to them. I ended up pitching shops almost immediately.

From everything I’d read, I expected a long string of no’s before even one yes. Instead, I got two early yes’s (woohoo!), followed by two no’s, and two that I have not heard back from yet. Of the six places I pitched, half were boutiques and half were indie bookstores. And incredibly, A History of Holding is now available at Golden Hour Goods in Ventura and The Bookworm in Camarillo.

I’ve already sold a few copies at Golden Hour Goods (in fact, the first copy sold before I’d even left the shop)! The idea that a stranger could wander in, pick up my book, and decide to bring it home? That still feels unreal. […]

Another surprise was just how time-consuming and expensive it was to sign and ship orders. Each packaged book included a custom sticker, bookmark, plastic envelope to protect the book, gold wax seal, bubble polymailer, and shipping labels. By the time all was said and done, I spent about $7 on materials and postage per book. Still totally worth it, in my opinion. There are cheaper options, of course (ahem, Amazon), but I loved sending out the highest-quality book, infused with special touches directly from me. I wanted opening my book to be the highlight of someone’s day.

Allison Mei-Li, My First Month as a Published Author

The early half of this week has been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on CLOVEN, whose release is pending just after the beginning of the year. The initial proof copy was lost in the mail or swiped from the package room (or has somehow vanished into a dimensional divide along with a bottle of nail polish and some air fresheners) so I had to order another. Given shipping times, I assumed [that] would set me back a few weeks on the release, but I there wasn’t much that needed adjusting besides some margin/gutter issues, so I was able to make those changes in the master file, get it approved by the printer, and place an order for my first stack, which given it’s the 10th, may guarantee me copies before Christmas.  It feels like a more wintry book than GRANATA, which was all spring/summer, the first book in the series, so this mid-winter debut seems perfect. […]

I was thinking the other day, when I had to order another stack of an older self-issued volume, DARK COUNTRY, how much releasing my own work has changed my view of what’s possible for so much the better. On one hand, the benefits are immediate, like control over timelines and the book’s launch into the world. It also feels good and more sure-footed to not be waiting on submissions and schedules and just feeling like there are blocks and bottlenecks that are ultimately a zero sum game, at least for me and my needs/wants. If I could go back a couple decades, as enjoyable as its been to work with other publishers, I’d switch to self-publishing much faster than I did (for zines and chaps, I’ve been doing it all along through the years, but I’ve only had the design/layout skills in the past half-decade or so. )

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | the final stretch

I am excited to say that I have just received advance copies of Polar Corona, my prize-winning ‘crown-of-sonnets’ poetry pamphlet, published by the Hedgehog Poetry Press.  

For further details: click here. 

From the blurbs:

“In Polar Corona, Caroline Gill offers a vivid and precise depiction of Antarctica’s landscape and wildlife, especially the seasonal rhythms of penguins’ lives, interwoven with a poignant exploration of human fortitude in this most testing of environments. Her marvellous ear for the music of a poem is evident throughout and the intricate pattern of mostly half rhymes cleverly accentuates the pervading sense of risk and unpredictability.” 

 – Susan Richardson, Author of Where the Seals Sing (William Collins, 2022) and Words the Turtle Taught Me (Cinnamon Press, 2018), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 

Caroline Gill, ‘Polar Corona’, my prize-winning poetry pamphlet on Antarctica

Are you surprised to see me so soon?—me too! I’m usually more of your every-so-often friend who arrives with poems and snacks, but I just got the word I could officially share this with you (and I wanted to share here FIRST before you saw it on social media, etc.—Accidental Devotions has its FINAL cover—and I’m trying (um, failing) to act casual about it.

But the day is perfect to share as today would have been Emily Dickinson’s 195th birthday and Emily D. is braided all through this next book (her and Darling Sue and even pressed jasmine)! So maybe this is not just a cover reveal, but also a little birthday offering to Emily’s altar of em dashes and devotion. (Side note: I recently read that AI is using dashes now, and I wanted to shout—Grrrrl, I got here first! I know there are a lot of dash-happy poets out there—maybe we need to start an Em Dash Society or at least wear t-shirts: The Em Dash: Because Periods Are Too Final).

Kelli Russell Agodon, Dropping in Briefly with Beauty

My Creative Retirement Institute class on Emily Dickinson’s fascicles wrapped up yesterday. The beauty (and the weirdness) of it was that focusing on the fascicles made it impossible for me to turn the class into “all of Bethany’s favorite E. D. poems.” In each class I asked, “What caught your eye? What do you want to bring to our attention?” As a result, we put a microscope to poems I’ve barely given a glance in the past. And everything we picked up gave us so much to talk about. It was ideal.

Today I’m having my writing group here, at my house. I’ll bake Emily’s Coconut Cake, and we’ll drink sparkling water, and read poems to one another. What could be better?

Bethany Reid, Happy 195th Birthday, Emily Dickinson!

Thanks to poet Jonathan Davidson for introducing me (and the other poets on the course) to the Sestude. This form (a poem of 62 words) was invented by John Simmons, co-founder of the ‘26’ writing group in 2003. The English alphabet has 26 letters and 62 is its opposite.

It started with a project ‘26 treasures’ in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s British Galleries. The creative community 26.org.uk is a not-for-profit organisation which still undertakes a range of creative projects.

I enjoyed playing around with the form and, going through my folders, came across a short prose poem that only needed to lose a few words:

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky.

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky. Soon enough, the clouds would get angry, address the spiders Have you no manners? Your offspring is just sitting around. The angrier the clouds got, the greyer they looked. It was a battle of grey against grey. Battles and wars always end in tears. The people below were relieved: Rain at last.

Note: Serbian proverb quoted by Vasko Popa, The Golden Apple, 2010.

Fokkina McDonnell, If there were no wind, cobwebs…

I woke up this morning thinking about publication opportunities as the year draws to a close.  There are book contests that seem interesting still, like the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press.  At one point in the last few months (see this blog post), I thought about revising the last manuscript of poems that I created in 2019.  I even printed the table of contents to see which poems have been published since I last sent out the manuscript, and I made a list of new poems to include.  I put question marks by the poems I might take out to make room for the new.  I thought I would change the title and have the manuscript ready by mid-December, so I could send it to a few contests.

But this morning, I have a different vision.  I’m going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly.  I’m going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground.  The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.  I’m going to let the idea percolate as I send out poems for publication and think about the larger themes of my body of poems.  I think it will be a much stronger manuscript if I take this different approach of creating something new, not grafting onto the old.

I am aware that I may only have a chance to publish one book with a spine when it comes to poetry, given my age and how long it takes to move a poetry book manuscript from submission to publication.  So I want it to be good work on several levels:  the best poetry that I have written, the poems that work as a cohesive whole in the best way.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

Perhaps it is my southern hemisphere background, but I find it hard not to feel gloomy in the cold, dark, dreary months of northern winter.

This December has been particularly depressing. In the part of southeast England where I live, issues with mains water quality led to a disruption in supply; ironically, given the fact that it has been raining for weeks. The lines from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner acquired a new context:

Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

There have also been reports of an alarming surge in flu cases, including advice to wear face masks in public settings. On a global scale, events seem to be increasingly turbulent, the background noise more dissonant, the outlook ever more chaotic and uncertain. In some ways it feels reminiscent of the pandemic: that sense, in early 2020, of flailing around, panic-stricken and directionless. Then there was the alien state of being in lockdown; schools, businesses, leisure facilities all closed, no physical contact with wider family or friends, daily announcements of grim statistics and ever more stringent protocols….

That was nearly five years ago, and it feels like another lifetime. We don’t talk much about that period of lockdown any more,  yet the repercussions continue to reverberate in deep and subtle ways. It features, directly or indirectly, in a number of my poems: ‘Post Lockdown’, for example, which was written in 2021, or, more recently, ‘Discontinuity’.

May we all survive asymptotic times unscathed.

Marian Christie, Asymptotic Times

the world is sky, lake, three men and a killing. it is winter.

deer flying overhead. branches delicate, vibrating.

veins of this world. blood splattered across the snow.

Grant Hackett [no title]

I must admit, these short, dark days are hard to take. Being more of a night owl, I miss part of the limited daylight we get in the mornings, then feel shocked and cheated when twilight approaches before 5 p.m. So unfair! 

How to cope? I try to appreciate merino wool sweaters, flannel sheets, and our wood-burning stove. And ignore the fact that spring is still months away—in fact, it’s not even officially winter yet! Still, it’s cold, dark and damp, and I struggle.

otter dusk
what’s left of the light
slips downstream

But it turns out that the worst is already behind us: yesterday saw the earliest sunset of the year here, at 4:48 p.m. From today on, the days will feel longer even though the winter solstice is not until December 21. So hurray for the return of the light!

Annette Makino, Glimmers in the dark

It’s cold in these darkest days of winter, the land having turned its face away from the sun. But you are warm here, sleeping heavily under your down quilt, your worries scattered lifelessly about the rug where your mind dropped them. In your dream, you are following a white fox who trots through the frozen forest, leading you further and further away from the safety of your cabin. Where is he taking you? The way he darts between the trees, his thick fur lit only by the moon, makes him disappear for whole minutes. Many times you think you’ve lost him and begin to panic, only to glimpse the soft plume of his tail leading always just ahead. And now, what is that singing in the distance?

A sound dissolves one dream into another as candlelight fills your bedroom. It’s the children who are singing so beautifully. Do you know them? Yes, they are the same ones who, during the day, bicker over toys and leave clumps of porridge on the table, but are now revealed as children of light. Leading them is a woman wearing a crown of fire and carrying a tray of coffee and yellow buns. The smell of saffron is the smell of the sun. She invites you to taste it.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Bringer of Light

I am sheltered on the second floor,
the house, when lit, is a fishbowl. 
Helicopters never quit whirling over Providence.
They clip the air, giant locust wings, clip
and clip and clip, over gardens, greens, 
sewers; when they quit, the silence of grief. 

In and out of the buzz of numbness. 
We live it viscerally but our experience, 
not yet cold, is already cliché. 

Jill Pearlman, Providence, Numb and Number

I wrote to my community this morning about the horrific shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island yesterday, and the horrific shooting at the Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney today. Over the last several years I suspect every rabbi I know has gotten better at finding words to say after unthinkable tragedy. A skill none of us wanted. […]

When life feels dark and overwhelming, Jewish tradition teaches us to come together and to let our light shine. Over the course of the coming week our literal flames will go from one tiny candle to the blazing brilliance of a chanukiyah full of light. When we come together, the lights of our souls become more than the sum of their parts. The best response I know to anti-Jewish hatred, or any hatred, is to bravely let our light shine.

That’s the best wisdom I have to share today. For those who about to be celebrating (or are already celebrating — hi antipodeans!), may this Festival of Lights be a time of joy even amidst this sorrow.

Rachel Barenblat, Light – even now

We have names for our dark forces.
We have names for things close to us.
Different names when they become distant.
We have names for our separations.
And names for the shadows that grow
when the moon rejects us.

I hold this evening up
against that incomprehensible design.
A cold front has crept down from the north.
Clouds obscure everything, even reason.
Even the light from Cassiopeia
that has been stubbornly travelling in my direction
for thousands of years.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, About two-thirds

It seems like a good time of year to remember the goal of Christianity used to be “peace on earth, good will towards humanity” and “love thy neighbor” and you know, welcoming the stranger and the immigrant because after all, Jesus was born in a foreign land and no one gave his family shelter—all that stuff that seems to have fallen out of fashion among too many who call themselves Christian. Whew! All right, maybe this post got heavy. I also lost another poet friend, the great Connie Walle, who was a fixture in the Tacoma poetry scene and a great poet besides. It made me sad I had not expressed my admiration to her more while she was still here—a theme of this year for me, as I cross the names of old friends off the holiday card list because they are no longer with us. We really do a bad job of this remembering to express thanks, love, and appreciation for those friends and family, writers and artists, who have made our lives better, our memories short, our ability to remind ourselves that even our lives are not “forever,” and even small things cannot be taken for granted. 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Dangerous Floods All Around, Trying to Holiday Despite

Brown eyes peer through a back seat window, gazing at the sparkling white powder on the city sidewalks. A small mittened hand swipes a red runny nose then dips quickly back into the pocket of the threadbare rumpled jacket from which it emerged. Festive shoppers with bulging bags walk gaily down the street as brown eyes watch in wonder. The family in the old red Chevy sits in the background of busy streets and merry anticipation, waiting at a red light as the sputtering heater blows hot then cold and the children sniffle and cough the carol of the hungry and homeless. Down the snowy street it chugs, straining on its last fumes to reach the red door of the shelter where warmth and food and one cold night off the streets awaits if the line isn’t too long or the shelter too full. Belief is a word pregnant with hope.

Charlotte Hamrick, Red

Some leave, some arrive.
Flaggers waving lit-up wands
before the train station.

*

For a few moments,
the silhouettes of trees pressed
against the sky’s burning throat.

Luisa A. Igloria, Dusk, December

Welcome to the Some Flowers Soon Christmas Poetry Quiz! Questions this week, answers next Monday. Then I’ll be away for a fortnight and back in the New Year.

All the answers, except the last one, are the names of modern poets. The usual rules apply: strictly no Googling, but you may consult poems learned by heart. Previous editions of Some Flowers Soon may also, in some cases, be helpful. […]

Which Swiss-Bolivian poet, who died this year, wrote a poem (in English) which begins:

snow is english
snow is international
snow is secret
snow is small
snow is literary
snow is translatable

[…]

Which poet wrote a “Christmas Card to Grace Hartigan” which ends:

Christmas is the time of cold air
and loud parties and big expense,
but in our hearts flames flicker
answeringly, as on old-fashioned
trees. I would rather the house
burn down than our flames go out.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Some Flowers Soon Christmas Quiz 2025

Sixty was the new sixteen in that night club among a diverse age-group of parents and teenagers: people living and reliving their youths. And even better, the day before I got to walk with Suzanne on the beach. We spent the afternoon in Aberdyfi in the clear November sunshine. It was the perfect, peaceful preparation…

… for the noise of it! The exultant, white, brash, crashing, strident, energetic noise of drums and bass and guitar and that voice (what a voice!) calling out the patriarchy, misogyny, injustice, racism, homophobia … and there was tenderness too, and joy, and hurt and crowd-surfing and an enormous mosh pit, and all of it LOUD and PASSIONATE and UNAPOLOGETIC! 

It’s the un-apology that mesmerised me. And when I opened my birthday card from my younger son yesterday, he framed the thought for me in a way I could apply to my day: Have a lovely day Mum, “doing what you damn well please!” Something about his turn of phrase, the love expressed, opened up my birthday to me in that moment. I’d planned, for example, to postpone my present-opening till the evening when his big brother would be home. “But I please to know what my presents are now!” I thought, so I damn well opened my presents over breakfast, and I’m so glad I did, and I knew my sons would be too. What I found was that there are people who clearly know and care about me. So much thoughtfulness in the givings. It made me very damn pleased.

I’d already planned to take the train (I damn well like trains) with my friend Paul (a damn good fellow) to Aberdyfi (thank you for the reminder, Suzanne, that Aberdyfi pleases me). Before boarding, I had damn pleasing coffee and a bacon roll at Shrewsbury Coffeehouse. I took pens and paper on the train and we did some damn writing and drawing.

Liz Lefroy, I “Do What [I] Damn Well Please”

All that I am
is the question of
a crow against the sky
on a cold morning
when it is too bright
to see,
too blue and white
to believe.
The tree against
the landscape. One thing
depending on the other.

John Siddique, A Wintery Poem

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Diaspora of Things

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

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

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

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

Carolee Bennett, We Don’t Have to Be Quiet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allison Mei-Li, My Slow Art Manifesto

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Illusions, connections

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

Dale Favier, September Comes Anyway

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

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

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

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

We need to have that in mind.

Kati Mohr, Things, Names, Expectations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Awkward in Life

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Birth of a poem

The dream is balance. Balance as we walk forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Boyle, CBe newsletter September 2025: In bad times

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Paint Patch Poetry Process

赤蜻蛉少し飛んでは考える　根岸敏三

akatonbo sukoshi tondewa kangaeru

red dragonfly

            each time it flies a little

            it stops to think

                                                Keizo Negishi

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, magpie brain and the next new shiny

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

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

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

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

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

STOP EATING THE LOVE HEARTS

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

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

Sue Finch, SNOWDON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Love, AI vs AI

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

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

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

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

John Glenday, A Bit of a Performance

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, August Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #46

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

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

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

            My brain dulls a little

            with each lost phrase.

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

The other influences I experienced that helped were:

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Jenny Hamlett (Nigel Kent)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Gillian Allnutt, “lode”

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

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

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

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

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

              —: Fragment :—
                          by Dick Whyte

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

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

       [ . . . ]

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Melanie Dennis Unrau, Goose

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

Marilyn McCabe, shifting uneasily under

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Crane, POEM: the rainbow I want to see

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

Robin Gow, nesting

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for an Uprising

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

word is wind. and sky, windless.

leaves give tongue until their skin burns green.

Grant Hackett [untitled]

This week: hard rain, thoughtful grunts, vagaries of the heart, a family of dreamers, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s been a while. I’ve been coming through things, and still am, but here I am, writing again. 

In the café at Wrexham General station, the kind barista is putting up the Christmas tree while I drink my morning coffee. I choose to take it as a sign of hope. 

It may snow before November is out. I will love again the way snow falls through the street light outside my living room window.

And I’m listening to Haydn’s first cello concerto on ear-pods. It drowns out the hiss of the coffee machine. Moderato – cheerful, adagio – poignant, then upbeat allegro to the resolution. Three movements. Three moods. Nothing authentic can be expressed in a singularity.

I move through things by sitting still, writing, going with the music.

Liz Lefroy, I Write Again

My circle has contracted to my family, my span of days to a decade or two. I want to walk attentively here. It is a rainy, windy Fall, and the turns of the future have become ever more wildly unpredictable: fretting my heart about the world to come not looking as I expected to look is not going to help matters. I’ll do my best to look after the people within my reach (and myself.)

I expected a gentler collapse of American civilization, but the writing has been on the wall all my life. When asked why he regularly went to make speeches at Hyde Park, to not many listeners, William Morris answered, “You can’t make socialism without socialists.” Likewise, you can’t make democracy without (small ‘d’) democrats.

Dale Favier, Contraction

The fact is that you cannot have a social democracy and support a massive military budget at the same time. You cannot have a social safety net for all citizens, and also have a corrupt government that’s completely enmeshed with, and beholden to, corporate, military, and special interests, including foreign ones. You cannot reward corporations and the wealthiest individuals with tax breaks, power, and influence while the citizens who keep the economy going through their labor become poorer, and increasingly feel that they have no voice. And you cannot wage endless wars that destabilize other parts of the world, or fail to deal with climate change as the global emergency which it is, and expect other countries to shoulder all the burden of refugees fleeing desperate situations.

Into that situation of growing inequality, instability, fear and discontent rode Donald Trump, with his promises and lies, his anger and threats, ready to say whatever played the best to his audience, willing to subvert the law, and democracy in the process. It makes me think of a marriage that’s been failing for years, but the husband has been so busy and satisfied with his outside life that he’s refused to see the signs. Then one day, the wife comes down the stairs with her suitcase, and tells him it’s over; she’s leaving with Mr. Right. He’s astonished: “You’re such an idiot. You can’t possibly think he’s going to take care of you or treat you better than me! He’s a liar and a cheat, and everyone knows it!”

“Yes,” she says, “maybe that’s right, but you’ve been calling me stupid and fat and lazy for years. I’ve worked hard forever. I’ve told you what we needed to do to keep our marriage going, but you wouldn’t listen. There’s barely enough to pay our bills, and you’re always giving money away to strangers I don’t even know! Now I just want to feel some hope and some pride again. He may be everything you say, but he understands me, he seems to like me, and doesn’t talk down to me. He understands why I’m so angry and scared. I just want to try it. I want things to change.”

The husband can’t believe it. “What about your commitment to marriage? I thought you believed in it.”

”That’s just a piece of paper. I want to feel better.”

”Wait and see,” he says. “You’ll come running back to me. And I’m sure we can work something out.” She walks past him, out the door, and then turns for a moment, “By the way, I’m taking the car and the keys, so you won’t be able to drive for a while.”

Beth Adams, The Price of Arrogance

The roofing guy last week, the night of the election, told us that a new roof will come with a 50-year guarantee.

“Well,” I said, smiling, “that’s nice, but we sure don’t need one to last that long.”

“What?” he said. “What do you mean?”

I smiled. “Oh,” I said, “I guess we’ll be dead before the new roof gives out.”

He laughed in the way people do when they are startled and uneasy and don’t know what to say. I might have said something to smooth the moment over, but even then, even before we knew what was going to happen later that night, I had become tired of the ways in which we all avoid uncomfortable truths. Cane and I have entered the stage of life where, increasingly, we know that we might be purchasing some things for the last time. It’s unlikely that we, personally, will need anything to last for 50 years now. That’s just a fact, one we are both making peace with.

*

It can be hard to know the true beginning of something. If I told you that the water leak and all that came with it was the beginning of the end of my previous marriage, it might seem absurd.

It might be absurd; I can trace the fissures in our union back to its very beginnings—can even trace them back to before there was any kind of union at all. But the breaking of it? I could make a case that it began with the water leak and how we each saw and responded to it.

By the time everything in the house was repaired, all evidence of damage erased, the kitchen nicer than it had been before that October day when we finally learned what the bump was all about, the marriage was too far gone to save. Hard things happened during the months of repair and reconstruction, and then more, different hard things happened (a home invasion, a friend’s terminal illness, major surgery, a grandmother’s death). Interpretations of those events and their aftermaths were shaped through a lens created by the water leak.

You know how people lately like to say of great changes that they happen slowly, then all at once? After the bump and the mold and everything that followed them, I became aware of all kinds of leaks in our life. I saw how quickly everything could change if we didn’t repair them, how a person could leave for work one morning and not return to the same home in the evening. We were all fine, in the sense that we were all physically safe, but it does something to you when you are told you have 15 minutes to gather whatever you think you will need and don’t know when (or even if) you might return.

It changes you.

Rita Ott Ramstad, It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

I still sometimes imagine your face rippling beneath the surface, peering at me from pothole puddles and glasses of whiskey – your lips lifting and lowering in ambiguity. Your freckles, miniature galaxies of melanin, spiraling over cheeks. Pale eyes pin pricks of confusion. 

Your sister and I skipped school together, hid on the floorboards of her rust-pocked truck, her fingers entwined in your long red hair as she held down your head, tires slinging gravel out the gate after the bell. We’d spend the day smoking weed and sketching, you showering us with Fritos and reading Moby Dick out loud. 

You were the perfect foil for our willful ways, the tether to our hot air balloons. We wallpapered those crumbling walls with our trippy imaginings and your favorite passages, wrote our names in decades old dust. But for you we might have ended up in a ditch somewhere, might have become the drowned ones.

They say shafts of sunlight set your hair afire even as errant strands languished in sediment, in a turbid haze of creek and twisted metal. Your sister  used to say,

“Be kind and the universe will take care of you.” – but it didn’t take care of you, the kindest boy I knew.

Charlotte Hamrick, Aqua Pura

I still believe in “keep moving,” the way I still believe—must believe—that we could make this place beautiful. We can, and we must, despite it being an uphill climb that just got a lot steeper. “Keep moving” is what we’ll do, because what choice to we have? Giving up isn’t an option. And—not but, but and—I also believe that taking some time to be still, to listen to one’s own inner voice and to listen to others who are grieving, is essential. I want to move forward with purpose, intention, and care. I’m giving myself permission to slow down, to keep the door to my heart open, and to see what steps inside.

I’m listening hard, the way I might after hearing a sound in the woods. My experience tells me that sometimes the answers to difficult questions are whispered, and I don’t want to miss them.

Maggie Smith, On Stillness

These past days feel to me, in some ways, similar to the early weeks of Covid lockdown. People (including myself, those immediately around me) seem raw, a little shaken and bewildered, like they’ve woken up to find the wind has blown their tent down on top of them, and they’re pushing and pulling to find the shape of things, to locate the pieces they need to prop back up their fragile shelter. 

Also the same: A common desire to reach out to those most vulnerable, to support those most at risk, coupled with the need to care for the people in our own homes, families, neighborhoods (sometimes these two groups are the same or overlap). 

What’s blessedly different is that we can, safely, reach out to each other now, rather than further atomizing in our separate spaces, behind our separate screens. We can hold potlucks and book groups and hiking trips and dance parties and teach-ins and game nights and funerals. We can stand or sit alongside each other. Hold hands. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Tangled in the Tent

I am
pulling the voices of people I desire
and love and trust and worry over
into me. I am inviting them into the bright
dark of my soul. I am gonna live forever
because all the money I touch looks at me
and says e pluribus unum, out of many,
one. I am the water Jesus drank in the desert.
I am god talking to herself. I am evicting
America from my body and making room
in the borders of my black bad bitch body
for everyone I was sent into this life
to love loudly.

Saeed Jones, “My Project 2025” A New Poem By Me

I dreamed that Trump had asked me to be in charge of the Department of Education.  In my dream, I thought, I don’t have the experience to do that.

I woke up thinking, well, I have been teaching since 1988, so there’s that.  And in the days since that dream, as various cabinet candidates have been announced, I’ve thought of that dream and who has qualifications to lead which parts of our national government.  I still think that I don’t have the right kind of qualifications to lead the Department of Education–that person should have K-12 teaching experience.

Of course, I will not be asked to be part of Donald Trump’s cabinet, and if I was, I would say no.  I hope to avoid that kind of toxic workplace going forward.  I feel incredibly lucky to be responsible for teaching, not administration, and that’s how I want to end my working days.  I am under no illusions that “I alone can fix it.”

In fact, in moments of despair, I have doubts that anything can be fixed (see hurricane in North Carolina mountains).  But then, through the magic of technology, I see good theatre, and I am once again inspired to write.

Last night, we watched Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, a play I read long ago in high school.  It was the 2019 London production with Sally Field and Bill Pullman, and what a performance!  The play, which was written in 1946, still feels fresh and also timeless. 

It also reminded me that I’m teaching the American survey class next term, and I am so looking forward to that.  In these days where there’s so much happening to upset us, let me remember how much joy we can still have:  good literature, good teaching opportunities, good theatre, and vegan creations that give us autumn in a casserole!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Friday Gratitudes Two Weeks Before Thanksgiving

What If We All Bloomed? is a perfect title for this book of meditative poems. Here’s a poet who can celebrate marriage in one poem, and claim kinship with frogs in the next. Another riffs off Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” beginning, “Praise God for damaged things.” Yes, life is messy, Doerper proclaims here, then offers praise “For mismatched mates and misdirected mail, / For bulbs of scarlet tulips, rising in a golden bloom, / For spackled spark of beauty in tender broken things…” It made me want to grab my pen and write my own poem for what’s broken.

Last week I began reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, but stopped when I came to this line at the end of the Introduction, a quote from her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”

Doerper’s poems encouraged me to return to Chodron, to muster at least some willingness to sit with all that is swirling inside me, to consider bringing it back with me “to the path” (Chodron, xiii).

Meanwhile, reading poems (and walking) are keeping me alive.

Bethany Reid, Victoria Doerper, WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED?

A few months ago, I had a meltdown. Societal and political discourse – not only where I live, but everywhere – has become so troubled, so vitriolic, so angry, so polarised and so polarising that I became overwhelmed by words. It felt, and still feels, as though everyone is shouting but no one is listening. No one takes the time to ask thoughtful, constructive questions, to examine assumptions or consider nuances. Humility and compassion seem to be absent.

I retreated from words. Silence, always precious, became even more so. I stepped back from social media, withdrew from poetry communities and book clubs, ceased tuning in to the news and consciously limited my reading. I cut back on social engagements. I stopped writing.

Instead, I sought refuge in the natural sciences. I turned to equations. 

Like passages of text, equations contain their own resonances, depths and layers of meaning. We can think of them as visual poetry. Yet they transcend the egocentric world view that preoccupies us much of the time. Their symbols, letters and numbers represent our efforts to understand, to seek coherence in a vast and complex universe.

Marian Christie, The Poetry of Equations

My college roommate, Tara Polek, who helped get me through Organic Chem and went to UC basketball games with me, who moved from Ohio to Seattle just like I did, who was the smartest, kindest children’s cancer researcher ever, passed away.

I feel like this is where I should have poetic thoughts, but I’m still mostly in sad mode. Tara had two young children and a husband, and I never heard she was even sick. In college, she was the friend who, when I caught pneumonia and the girl across the hall had to be airlifted to the hospital with even worse pneumonia, never even got a sniffle. She ran—for fun—ever since I knew her. She spent her entire life doing cancer research. I wish I had told her how much her 30-year friendship meant to me while I still had the chance. […]

One thing that the death of a good friend will do is make you reconsider your life and where you are in it. At 51, I have spent too much time in the last decade in doctor’s offices, not enough having adventures, traveling, seeing the world. The world seems to have shrunk, especially since the pandemic, and now, with the election, it seems more dangerous than ever to just elect the status quo.

So, I signup up for an online class called She Hits Refresh, about women over thirty moving out of the US, and I’m researching grad schools, cities, visas, vacation time, disability, and medication rules. It’s been my dream for a long time to live in France, and besides that, visit England and Ireland.

On top of that, I’m sending my next manuscript out to new publishers. I’ve got be braver with my art, and my personal life. I feel like I’ve seen my life shrink and I don’t want that to define the rest of my life, or my writing. I don’t want to live in fear.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, When You Lose Old Friends, Interventions at the Zoo with Snow Leopards, and Contemplating Changes in a Supermoon

It was a good run, better and longer than I could have imagined, and yet I’m still somehow surprised that it’s over. I thought I’d be the one to turn off the lights. 

Sorry, I’m not trying to be cryptic here. About a month ago, I guess, I changed my bio on the few places online where I post. I added a “Ret.” to “Senior Poetry Editor at The Rumpus.” I considered changing it “Emeritus” but that’s too academic both for The Rumpus and for me. Retired is the appropriate term.

I was with The Rumpus almost from the beginning. It was December 2008 and Amy and I were back in San Francisco for the first time since we’d moved away 3 years before. Amy had an interview at MLA and I met up from some old friends from my time as a Stegner and they told me I should meet a bunch of them later at a bar in the Mission to talk about this online magazine Stephen Elliott was starting because they were looking for someone to write about poetry occasionally. […]

We went live for real on January 20, 2009. Kind of a slow news day as I recall, though there was a bit of controversy on the internet about a poem by Elizabeth Alexander read during a ceremony that morning, a controversy that required (not really) a response from the new poetry columnist at this website that had just gone live. 

So that was the first thing I wrote for The Rumpus. Not a column of links, though many of those would follow. Nope, I wrote a response to the reaction to Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day.” (I didn’t even have to look that up.) I dug up the poem Robert Frost actually wrote for JFK’s inauguration (which is just goddamn terrible) as opposed to The Gift Outright, which he recited when the wind blew his papers all over the place. I looked back at the offerings from Maya Angelou and Miller Williams (who was one of my professors at Arkansas where I did my MFA) and came to the rousing conclusion that, as inaugural poems go, Alexander’s was pretty good, given the competition, and was certainly poetry no matter what some Impressive Critics had claimed.

It was published as the top story on the site for a little while. Maybe a day? Nothing stayed at the top for long in those days. And I have no idea how many people read it. But a day or two after that, I got an email from Stephen asking me if I wanted to be poetry editor instead of just a columnist. I’d be responsible for soliciting and editing book reviews and occasional essays and I’d still have my column and no we wouldn’t be publishing poetry yet but keep it in mind.

I almost said no. Seriously, I was torn about this. I’d never edited anything before, I’d never written a book review, much less solicited one. I had no idea how I’d even get books to reviewers. I’d never even heard of an ARC. So I mentioned it to Amy and she was like “Of course you have to do it are you nuts?” 

Brian Spears, Time and The Rumpus

So, in the video he talks about the Law of Assumption. This is different from the Law of Attraction, which, as I understand it, focuses on bringing something you desire to you. Positive thoughts attract positive experiences, etc. By contrast, the Law of Assumption encourages you to operate under the assumption that you have the thing you seek already.

Here is an example. You seek to have your poem published in The New Yorker. The next step would be for you to spend time envisioning exactly what that feels like. Close your eyes, picture a specific scene. Let’s say it’s the day the issue comes out. Imagine yourself holding the magazine in your hands. Where are you? Who is with you? What does the glossy paper feel like on your skin? How is the light falling across the page? What does your name look like in that magazine’s print?

In other words, the idea is not just to fantasize about getting your work in this magazine. (Or getting the fellowship, the grant, the teaching job, the dream journal acceptance, etc.) But really, go deeply into the specific moment of its occurrence. Live it out in your mind.

There is actually all kinds of neuroscience that explores how the brain does and does not distinguish between lived experiences and imagined ones. As one researcher has put it, “Neuroscience has discovered that imagination and perception rely on overlapping brain circuits.”

Anyway. I watched the video. Thought, Huh, that’s cool.

The next day, I was in the sauna at my gym (my thinking place). I thought, Hm, let me try that visualization-assumption whatever thingie. Can’t hurt, right?

What happened was the following. The simple act of trying to visualize what I wanted forced me to articulate what it is that I do want. As if my brain said, Okay, you have ten minutes to picture something. Anything. What is it you truly want to picture? What matters to you? Really.

I realized in that moment that the thing that truly matters to me as a writer is readers. Awards and acceptances are amazing when they happen. But to me, there is nothing like someone reaching out to tell you that your work meant something to them. To me, that’s it. That’s the gold star. That’s why I do this work.

For you, it might be different. Each one of us has our own path, our own vision. We all have to satisfy various demands and yearnings. But to me, in that moment, it was connecting with readers that I found myself focused upon.

I also realized, as I sat there, that I had not done a public reading of my creative work in a very long time. Could it be ten years? No. But maybe? Close? I moved from a big writing community in one city, had a baby, then there was the pandemic, then we moved again…and lo and behold it’s been maybe close to ten years since I’ve read my work in public.

I remembered that I used to love doing that. Hearing the laughter, the thoughtful grunts, the intakes of air, the listening. Creating something new, something alive, right there in the room with an audience.

So that’s what I pictured. I closed my eyes. I pictured the stage, the dark room, the rows of people in chairs in front of me. I knew the exact outfit I was wearing, felt the weight of my necklace, the white paper in my hands, the white glow of the spotlight. I heard my voice in the mic, felt the smile around my words, the excited jitters in my knees.

Then I left the gym and went home.

Two emails were waiting for me.

One was from a Facebook friend, not a writer, who used the contact form on my website. He was reaching out to me out of the blue. He’d found my stories online, wanted to let me know how much they meant to him.

The other email was from an old friend. She said she will be visiting my area in April. She wanted to know, would I be interested in doing a reading with her?

I kid you not.

This same day.

Less than one hour later.

Now, two things. First, some of you are thinking, well, that’s not a big deal. Writers get emails like that all the time. But I do not get emails like that all the time. Like I said, I have not done a public reading in nearly a decade.

Second, you’re probably thinking, well, that’s just a coincidence.

And yes. I agree. Obviously. It is a coincidence.

But I think perhaps that is the whole point. Visualizing very clearly what you want allows you to notice coincidences as they happen. Arguably, it is the noticing of these coincidences that allows you to feel that things are working for you.

Becky Tuch, Q: How woo-woo are you?

Turning to my own work, I wonder: what is the role of dramaturgy in a memoir in verse? How does the poet create the distance required to invite empathy, without eliciting pity, or demanding privilege?

I am looking to Schechner’s idea of “Restored Behavior”. While he analyses performance, I can see parallels to the written word: the ecstatic element in automatic writing, and the reconstructed events of first and second drafts. After all, aren’t theatrical rehearsals essentially sequential drafts?

History is not what happened but what is encoded and transmitted. Performance is not merely a selection from data arranged and interpreted; it is behavior itself and carries in itself kernels of originality, making it the subject for further interpretation, the source of further study. — Richard Schechner

A lot of dancers have said that dance itself is a language. But language is also a dance. It can move the spirit that would move the body.

I wrote about my Trauma Box last year, unpacking and repacking it after my cancer diagnosis. Some things become little more than artefacts, conjuring soft aches and compassion for the person who put it in the box for the first time.

Maybe the distance of time alone is enough to make a biographical work inherently a work of verbatim theatre.

I knew this person when.

Her narrative is meaningful.

But none of us owe her anything.

Ren Powell, The Trauma Box Redux

six thousand years we lay
face to face
in a fierce embrace

limbs twined together
as twins in the womb
we two entombed

with flint weapons
sharpened for the afterlife
arrowhead     dagger     knife

Ama Bolton, Contextual 31: a virtual reading

Among things from the intersections of yesterday’s notebooks, scribbled in a parking lot in Birmingham, Alabama, between pages of [Giorgio] Agamben’s self-portrait and the uncertainty of my own.

I have many times thought about writing a book that was only the proem or postlude of a missing book. Perhaps the books that I have published are something of this sort — not books but preludes or epilogues. (Agamben) I winced. Like blinking away the thought that hurts. As if to pick it up with a tiny pincer and drop it outside on the asphalt. The feeling of touching, not touching. Flamenco, and what the dance wants . . . is nothing like writing. The dance seeks to avoid the hand that could slow it or mold it; heat is the friction of what could happen. But you can smell the other dancer; they are not an abstraction. “Tangibilia”; from tangibilis, “what can be touched, is palpable.” On the object reduced, tamed, made familiar by the encyclopedic enterprise. Margins where semiotics creep in.

A writer’s secret lies entirely in the blank space that separates the notebooks from the book. Hypervigilance; hygiene of grammar when editing begins. Will do nothing with October’s Sacrifice to Priapus. So-called. As if naming itself provides evidence of its existence.

Alina Stefanescu, Agamben, and the self-portrait of notebooks.

“Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning”
Giorgio Agamben on poetry, When the House Burns Down.

What luxury, this rage! 
It keeps me hot and vital as any 
heart medication.  First the human project, 
then the sputtered failure of words.

Bereft; the minutes and hours 
of flame give way.  My desire fades, 
no rays of sun light the heartbreak.

Jill Pearlman, Continue to Speak this Dialect

And J T Gillett is still writing his last poem somewhere in the vicinity of Ashland, Oregon. And talking of J T people, I think of J T Edson and all those paperback westerns and I find a photo of him on-line with mutton-chop whiskers and the information that before he died at the age of 86 he wrote 137 novels from his house near Melton Mowbray and sold more than 27 million copies. When he was feeling good he would write a novel every six to eight weeks. Before he hit on writing for a living he was an army dog trainer for 12 years. His first book wasn’t a western at all. It was Hints On Preservation If Attacked By A War Dog. He also ran a fish and chip shop and was a postman. He said he’d never even sat on a horse and had no desire to live in the Wild West. All this stuff comes from Wikipedia by the way. I only remember the Corgi paperbacks that were everywhere. I read one once sometime around 1968. Thought it was crap. I like J T Gillett’s This Is My Last Poem though or at least the version of it that’s in a book called Ends & Beginnings edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti that I bought for six dollars second hand in 1999.

Bob Mee, THE WAKE AND OTHER SCENES FROM LONG AGO

Last night, I was thinking about Novembers past and all their pitfalls and was trying to remember what was happening in November of 2004, somehow impossibly two decades ago. I decided to scan through the most recent files and see if I could get a feel for that fall. Its tastes and textures. One thing that stood out to me was disappointment over the 2004 election and Bush’s re-election. Little did we know things would get ever so much worse. 

Also, there was, at the forefront, my book fever struggles. At the time I had completed what I thought was book #1 in late 2003, but I was also going through a lot of evolution and learning new things as an MFA student. Just reading a lot more contemporary poets who were influencing me in various ways. I was coming into a fall where I felt like people were just beginning to notice my work, having won a fairly large contest in the spring and starting to do more and more readings. That initial book wound up being just half of the mss. that eventually got a publishing deal a year later. The work itself was rough, but getting better. I was working on the errata project for a hybrid class, which was changing my basic style in new ways. The version I turned in was a little corset book that you unbound to read it. A year later I also issued a chapbook version. 

The book fever may seem, in hindsight that is 20/20, ridiculous–the poring over contests, the money and effort spent. I managed a couple of close calls and then found a publisher in a very old fashioned way. I queried, submitted, and they said yes. The result, the aptly named the fever almanac, was a beautiful book and a great start to my publishing career. Of course, all the handwringing about never finding it a home was bracketed by frustrations over suspect contest winners and bottlenecks. I was determined to self-publish if no one wanted my strange little book. Having both traditionally published and self-published these past two decades, its amusing to me that the latter is where I actually cast my lot these days, mostly due to control over when things are released and just making more income from my work than conventional royalties allow.  I also just write A LOT, which means finding that many publishers would be more exhausting than just issuing my own titles as they are completed. 

Overall, I was more trusting, more passionate, more enthusiastic in these entries, so they feel strange to have been typed out by my fingers all those years ago.

Kristy Bowen, from the long lost xanga archives

I needed some rest from exertion and from social media, so I’m re-reading Les Misérables. In which Hugo seems to be trying hard to convince readers that compassion and goodness can be awakened in the hardest of hearts through the process of gentle persistence and genuine decency. Radical decency, as a friend of mine put it. Well.

I won’t write that off as an impossibility, since lord knows many things that seem impossible are not. But yes, Hugo was writing fiction, and one turns to fiction for escapism but also for reference, and for understanding human actions and feelings, and for perspective, and for information. I just completed Richard Powers’ Overstory, which offers a vast range of perspectives on the above-mentioned and adds ecology and forest infrastructure and the psychology of groups into the mix. Novel-reading has been giving me a sense of overarching historical range that lifts me a bit from my too-close focus on my own small life and my ability to sustain hope and make art. That acts as a form of recuperation, if you’re me.

This week, though, happens to be full of poetry. Tomorrow, I’m attending a reading at a nearby public library, where I’ll see many poetry colleagues, the sorts of folks who create a community of local writers. Friday, I’ll be reading with Montgomery County’s Poet Laureate, my friend Lisa DeVuono, at the retirement community where my mother resides. Saturday, I’m heading down to Philadelphia to read with another long-time poetry community in celebration of Philadelphia Poets, a long-running zine established decades ago by the late Rosemary Cappello.

Ann E. Michael, Recuperating

I’ve been a keen poetry reader all my life, but one thing I still don’t quite get is the point of the ‘pamphlet’ (or ‘chapbook’). These are small collections typically of between 15 and 30 poems, not usually running to more than 40 pages, and generally — as ‘pamphlet’ suggests — simply stapled rather than bound. Publishing a pamphlet, either via open submission or through success in a ‘pamphlet competition’, has become a pretty standard way of launching oneself as a poet. Wikipedia quotes Jackie Kay as saying that a pamphlet ‘has always been a good way for new poets to reach an audience’. This seems to be the received wisdom — it’s a way of finding your audience. But can this really be true in any significant sense? I read — and, crucially, buy — loads of contemporary poetry in both English and French, as well as many poetry magazines, and even I almost never buy English pamphlets or chapbooks. For the first perhaps 15 years that I was reading poetry pretty seriously, I don’t think I even knew they existed. Pamphlets are hardly ever stocked in UK (or, I assume, US) bookshops so there are almost no chances to browse them and pick up a few on a whim, which you might think would be the point of a smaller, cheaper category of publication, and they are only very minimally reviewed.

Does anyone at all who is mainly a reader (rather than a poet themselves, scoping out the competition) actually buy the things? I would love to see some sales data, or even anecdata. (Do you buy them? Please let me know in the comments.) Or is publishing a pamphlet really just a kind of rite of passage, aimed only (really) at catching the attention of editors and judges. Perhaps it’s the tiny poetry world equivalent of the way in which junior academics are expected to publish at least a couple of articles in scholarly journals, which in 99% of cases almost no-one at all will actually read. Such articles may (though probably won’t) eventually be cited once or twice by other scholars working on the same extremely specific topic, but really they are there to establish that you are a bona fide scholar who has been assessed as such by several more senior scholars in a few bruising rounds of peer review. Publishing them gives you a crack at an academic job and/or a contract for a monograph or an edited collection.

As any academics reading this will know, the problem is that the skills and techniques required to write an excellent, or even reasonably good, article for a specialist scholarly journal are actually quite different from those that you need to write a good, readable monograph with an overarching argument or perspective — even in the case of monographs published by scholarly presses and aimed primarily at fellow academics and advanced students. 

Victoria Moul, What’s the point of pamphlets?

I’ve been happily giving away my writings for years to appreciative readers locally and around the world, but I’m sad to say I didn’t believe anybody would actually pay for my work. “Nice book!” I imagined them saying, followed by “Oh — you want how much? I’ll … I’ll think about it.”

Actually I don’t have a book, but recently I did make a little magazine and (smothering my doubts with courage) I hawked it at a small local poetry reading. I went with an attitude of objectivity — a market study of sorts. Would anyone be interested?

And the answer was … yes! :- D

The theme of my first issue is lo-tech — a nod to the unplugged life and to a time when “digital” referred to an LED watch and little else. The analog era was also a time where the only intelligence was human. The world was a simpler (though not necessarily better) place back then!

Bill Waters, This & That: A Creative Writing ’Zine (Issue 1: Lo-Tech)

I don’t know if you’re the same as me, but when reading a poet’s debut publication, you look for those qualities that have drawn the attention of a publisher. In the case of Desmond Childs and his The Vagaries of the Heart (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024), I believe it is his original perspective on one of the great enduring themes of poetry and his ability to produce economical, layered poems. In this chapbook of six poems we find Childs engaging with the nature of that elusive emotion that has fascinated and challenged poets through time, love. In the first poem, Verities Gown, he writes about the idolisation of the object of our affection and the inability to repress such powerful emotions. In Yield and Jig he brings alive the excitement and fulfilment of a loving relationship and in the aptly named Fracture, We’ll Meet Again and Stone he describes the effects of the end of love. […]

Jig, my favourite poem,  with which the chapbook ends, portrays a more complex picture of relationships through the use of the extended metaphor of the ‘jig’. The poem opens with the line ‘with her tune, she bound me/ her melody’. The comparison of love as music evokes its captivating, sensual quality, perhaps drawing on Shakespeare’s notion of music as the food of love.  Interestingly, however, Child, unlike the Bard,  uses the verb ‘bound’ to describe its effect. Not only does this suggest the compelling nature of his attraction, but it also implies loss of power or agency. The object of his affection is in control: an idea given further development in the remainder of the poem. We are told ‘she played the tune’, that she ‘subdued’ him, that he is metaphorically tied up by her (‘she wrapped heart strings around me’) and she brought him to his knees. These are not romantic images. He is totally subjugated by his feelings for her and there is something of a feeling of loss. This is reinforced by the poem’s concluding sinister lines ‘she drew the bow and slew me/ I dance a deathly jig/ to the tune that she plays me/ upon her violin.’ Whilst the bow is one for a musical instrument, it also references cupid’s bow and arrows, evoking the all-consuming love he feels for her that results in the death of self: she ‘slew me’. Childs suggests that love may be a jig, a joyful, wonderful, exuberant emotion, but it also, as one of the other poems suggests, necessitates ‘yielding’, a loss of control, the end of a former life.

Jig is a fine poem and displays Childs’ strengths as a poet. There is much to be enjoyed in The Vagaries of the Heart. At a time of crisis in poetry publishing, it is reassuring to find small poetry publishers like Hedgehog Poetry Press providing debut poets like Childs an opportunity to see their work in print.  Long may it continue.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Vagaries of the Heart’ by Desmond Childs

I discovered two of my favorite love poems in high school. The first is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. It is easily recognizable, and many people can quote the first line. I remember reading this poem in junior English with Sister Angele. (She used it as a cautionary tale about boys who say mean things about you behind your back even if they are nice to your face. I went to an all-girls Catholic school, and the nuns were always very concerned about our boyfriends. It was a little bit weird, yet a little bit sweet.) Shakespeare famously lists all the attributes of his mistress that do not match the beauty ideals of the time, yet uses the closing couplet to say she is valuable and rare. In this way, the negation in the main body of the sonnet turns from insult to inspiration.

The second is a little more obscure, but means a lot to me. It was given to me by a good friend who said that he saw me in the poem. […]

In [John Frederick] Nims’s poem, the negative aspects of the poem’s subject are alternated with her virtues, giving the reader a picture of a real human being with flaws, one who is seen and loved despite them. I am clumsy and awkward, and as a teen I was often unpredictable and felt out of place. (I still do in many situations.) But to know that someone recognized me as a person who was welcoming to others, kind, helpful and witty; as someone who exuded love for the world; as someone who brought laughter and joy to others? That was a gift, one that has stayed with me.

But writing a love poem can be fraught with worry. Will the beloved recognize the intention? Appreciate the images, the sentiments? Will the poem be interesting enough for anyone who is not the beloved? The concept of negation is one that is especially tricky. How do you ride the thin line between fact and insult? (This is something that the Nims poem does particularly well – even the negative aspects have an air of charm about them.) Well, you’ll never know unless you try.

Donna Vorreyer, From Dissing to Kissing

It’s been a while since I read Chris Edgoose’s admirable and enticing review for The Friday Poem, here, of Geraldine Clarkson’s second full collection, Medlars, available to buy from its publisher Shearsman Books here (with free p&p, might I add); and therefore about time I bought and read a copy. That I have now done, and what a deferred pleasure it was and is!

Mystifyingly overlooked for the major prize shortlists, Medlars is simultaneously both a state-of-England-post-Brexit collection and one which explores the nation’s folklore and psychogeography. It does so in rich, often tongue-twisting language; the wordsmithery of Shakespeare by way of Raymond Queneau and even, perhaps, ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin.

Matthew Paul, On Geraldine Clarkson’s Medlars

“Stories Told in a Lost Tongue” recalls family stories and heritage from ancestors along with the necessity of remembering in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide (1915-1917). “Morning Stories” starts with a speaker, a granddaughter, begging for stories from her grandmother,

Gram said, My grandmother made kufta
with me, and I carried lunch to my grandpa
when he worked in the fields. Sometimes
she rode the donkey, other times a horse.
Gram said never ride a horse, or a camel!
And we never did, in our Boston neighborhood.

I watched her story unfold in my mind.
Her final day home, when she and her sisters
returned from school and found the family murdered,
the locked church set on fire. A silent village now,
except for soldiers that gathered the survivors.

They walked from their mountain village,
part of the desert death marches,
thirsty, eating grasses and weeds,
anything they found.
Two sisters fell in the desert,
three trudged on to Aleppo
and onward from there, survivors.

It’s noticeable that grandmother’s story about taking lunch is in reported speech, a story actually told. But the story of the grandmother as a girl coming home to find her family murdered, is not in reported speech, but something the granddaughter/speaker pieces together and imagines. It’s a story the grandmother does not want to tell and it becomes a known secret with grandmother not talking about it and granddaughter not letting on that she knows. Or at least knows the facts and has to imagine the emotion.

Emma Lee, “Stories Told in a Lost Tongue” Elaine Harootunian Reardon (Finishing Line Press) – book review

Rob Taylor: The second section of A Family of Dreamers focuses on your life with, and loss of, your grandparents, to whom the book is dedicated. Near the end of the section you write about experiencing sleep paralysis, and sensing that something is staring at you from the corner of the room: “this is the dreamworld / entering the waking world, i know this is grief / coming to collect.” Could you tell us a bit more about that experience? What effect has writing about it, and your memories of your grandparents, had on your experience of that grief?

Samantha Nock: A lot of my poems tell stories of me learning to look at my grief and the grief of my family head on instead of avoiding it. That poem, “the lord’s prayer,” walks through me describing the immediate moments after my grandpa Johnny’s passing and my first time being confronted with a big grief like that. I feel like experiencing sleep paralysis, and connecting it to my buried grief, was a way for me to show the physicality of grief as its own being. I literally look at it and share a room with it. 

Writing about my grief in this way has helped me move through some of the more tough parts of grief and learn to work and live with it. It’s also served as a way for me to honour my grandparents, both the ones that have passed and the ones still alive. It has allowed me to show my family the ways we share in this grief. It’s also been a way for me to talk to my grandparents who have passed. I never read the poem “grandma on the farm” out loud because I’m truly not sure I could get through it without crying. It’s a conversation for me and my grandma. 

Rob Taylor, A Beautiful Constellation: An Interview with Samantha Nock

I was the guest for the Madrid Review podcast last week. Grace Caplan was the interviewer with all sorts of unexpected questions, leading to discussions on belonging and estrangement, on the difficulties of translation, and on the genesis of my new poems that are in Issue Two of the mag. And I even gave a reading of them! You can have a listen to the podcast on Spotify via this link.

Matthew Stewart, The Madrid Review podcast

What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ll never forget taking a workshop with Isaac Jarnot–we must have been reading excerpts from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson–and I introduced the poem I had written and was gonna share as having been written “after Charles Olson’s Maximus to Himself”–a poem I fell in love with upon first reading and still am enchanted by–and Isaac said fuck Olson. And I was like yeah!? Yeah! And I guess the advice I turned that experience into is that my poems don’t have to be like the poems I love of other poets. Or, that if I try to make my poems act like other poet’s poems, I could be strangling them to death. Also in a conversation with Jesse Pearson on the Apology podcast, CAConrad says something along the lines of dropping everything when they hear a poem arrive that needs to be written down. That’s advice I want to one day follow. Currently, I’m more like Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.”

I also hold near, “trust the people and the people become trustworthy” from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. There’s so much mistrust and cynicism in our world and I know this has seeped into me, and I know that for me, mistrust means no community and no community is death. So I practice extending it to others, knowing that it is a practice to extend to myself as well—of trusting myself—and this feels very connected to writing and staying with the process.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alex Cuff

It’s a book of statements by poets about poetry. I’ve added the below quotes and more to my Literary Quotes page

• “the concept of poetry … as self expression has always repelled me” (John Heath-Stubbs)
• “a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all” (P.J. Kavanagh)
• “The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses’ hooves – bizarrely impressive, but finally useless” (Craig Raine)
• “Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, contemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result”, (R.S. Thomas)
• “I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left”, (Peter Whigam)
• “In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards”, (Hugo Williams)
• “one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn’t get a lot worse”, (Hugo Williams)
• “Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match”, (John Hartley Williams)
• “Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves”, (Christopher Logue)

Tim Love, “Don’t ask me what I mean” by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)

I often say this in workshop, when you put something in a poem, even if you are describing a literal event, it becomes metaphorical. The reader might think of it as emblematic of something deeper.

This poem appears in Susan Rich’s book Blue Atlas, which centers around an abortion that the speaker of the poems had thirty years earlier. When I spoke with Susan on the podcast she said that originally this poem was titled “Self Portrait with Abortion and Beesting.” Even though the speaker doesn’t put it in the title or say it directly, I could tell that this poem was about more than just a beesting. The sting is a metaphor for other emotional hurts, the hurt of a losing a relationship, being coerced into an abortion, and about other hurts the speaker may not even be able to name. […]

The bee is bathing in a “galaxy of purple aster” when she accidentally elbows it. They accordion and then they seperate. But here the poem becomes about something else.

“We’re both shaken / by the brokenness of surprise.” This is about more than a woman encountering a bee or wasp. The phrase is about all surprises. It’s strange wording makes me wonder, are we broken by surprise? is a surprise just anything that breaks us? It’s an odd and intriguing way of describing the encounter and it elevates the experience from a singular instance in the garden to a more general meditation on life.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Self Portrait with Bee Sting by Susan Rich

I keep thinking about that scene
in The Morning Show where Chris
wrote ABORT THE COURT in pink pink lip
stick my house floor hort monster my abor shun
my aborted fast blood slipping out
of a woman’s sacred body I never write SACRED
it’s too

sacred

big or small or big tied with green garden wire
thump thump a war in the capital city is moving
SSslip sliding under my floors flooding out into

all you beauty
all you strong
all you sacred

women

bleeding for the land

Rebecca Loudon, red november

In my recent article about being a neurodivergent writer, I described finding it much easier to run – rather than participate in – workshops. When I teach and facilitate, I know what’s expected of me. I have a clear role, which I’ve practiced and finessed over years. I’m confident and comfortable – and I know won’t be bored.

I don’t experience boredom passively; it’s not the absence of entertainment. It’s an active state, akin to severe thirst. It hurts, physically – a sort of painful anxiety. When a facilitator stalls the start of the workshop to wait for late arrivals, when introductions drag on interminably, when the same voices are allowed to dominate, when the facilitator talks and talks, when there’s lots of theory and much less writing, when everyone reads out their work at length – my anxiety builds from pulse-racing alertness to sweat-drenched, frozen fear. Making the decision to attend a poetry workshop is a serious business for me.

As a participant, I absolutely have to be interested. And to allow myself be engaged, I need to feel safe: to know what is going to happen within the session, when it will start and end, when the breaks will be. Most importantly, I need to trust the facilitator – are they kind and authoritative, informed and prepared? Are they committed to the wellbeing of the participants, are they excited by the subject they want me to engage with?  It’s frustrating that my anxieties and hypersensitivities, my struggle to concentrate and keep still, can stop me from taking part.

That’s why I’m interested in learning from other neurodivergent learners how they manage to engage; and I’m delighted to hear examples of accessible and exciting workshops and courses – not least because workshops which are accessible to neurodivergent learners can be the most engaging for all learners.

I’ll offer you my own example: on November 9^th, I went to an online workshop run by Georgia Conlon –  Happily Ever After – which as you might expect, took fairy tales as its leaping off point. It’s part of a series of “Material Girl” workshops … with Georgia as the facilitator who supplies us with endless material for our poetry.  

I worked as a mentor with Georgia earlier this year. I’ll write more about the mentoring experience in another post – but in brief, it’s an intimate, committed relationship, so I only work with people I like, and whose work I respect. I admire Georgia’s work very much – especially how she tackles challenging subjects through form. She’s also an experienced teacher and tutor, with her own “Prompts for Poets” podcast series, which offers creative ideas and  prompts to help you with your writing. A quick scan through past episodes –  celebratory festivals through Nina Mingya Powles “Mid Autum Moon Festival”; magic realism in Richard Brautigan’s “Boat” – evidences wide reading and really interesting choice of poetry and subjects.  

It’s a rare workshop which keeps me engaged throughout, and Happily Ever After did just that – through Georgia’s ability to quietly yet firmly hold the space and guide participants through a series of really interesting prompts and discussions, in a workshop which felt rich and full, rather than rushed. In two hours I wrote five poems, two of which will be included in my next collection. Result!

Kim Moore, The importance of being interesting

You have a career background as a Clinical Psychologist. What inspired you to become a Clinical Psychologist? How has your career as a Clinical Psychologist influenced or inspired some of your poetry?

I was always fascinated with people and their lives. I could have become a writer, but it’s rarely a sustainable profession. Psychology was the route I took. I loved it. I see a lot of overlap between those two choices, so one fed the other.

In your book Sea Trails (Lummox Press, 2009) you include poems based on your 1977 sailing trip in your 22-foot sailboat and you include portions of Lognotes and charts. Where did you go sailing on this trip? What initially inspired you to become a sailor? 

I loved the ocean and wanted to be out on it, riding the waves and wind. It takes skill and courage, at times, and that appealed, too. We stopped at multiple harbors. Best to read the book for details, still on Amazon, but we left from Boston and ended up in Florida. We anchored out, except for bigger grocery runs. I loved secluded harbors. Some of my favorite non-secluded stops were Newport, Block Island, out to Nantucket (rich people’s haven, and breathtaking), City Island before the run down the east river past Manhattan, including a day in Manhattan, all through the Chesapeake Bay- such beauty, and then into the waterway with such exciting places as Albemarle Sound, Savannah, St. Augustine, and all the interesting places in-between.

Jacob D. Salzer, Pris Campbell

その奥に梟のゐる鏡欲し　正木ゆう子

sono oku ni hukurō no iru kagami hoshi

            an owl resides

            in its deep place

            I want such a mirror

                                                            Yuko Masaki

from Haiku, a monthly haiku magazine, March 2018 Issue, Kabushiki Kaisha Kadokawa, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 16, 2024)

Iris Murdoch—you know I love her—said that a bad review was about as interesting as whether it is raining in Patagonia. I tend to think about rejections this way. (Except: isn’t it interesting whether it’s raining in Patagonia? Shouldn’t it be, to a poet? Anyway, anyway…)

But here is the thing: I think about rejections as uninteresting when I am at my healthiest: mentally, physically, spiritually. When my chronic pain in under control, by some seasonal miracle/existential lottery. When my mental health is bobbing along like a rubber ducky in relatively calm bath water. When I’m not dwelling, to quote one Anne of Green Gables, in the “depths of despair.”

Roll back the camera to 2022, when I began trauma therapy, and found myself wildly outside my window of tolerance. I was hypoaroused after therapy sessions, which basically translates to a numb or dissociated state, which required (for me) a lot of processing time spent listening audiobooks and sewing. This whole year was not a good time for me to be submitting and receiving rejections on creative work—the emails literally made me flinch, and I deleted them as swiftly as possible—so I stopped sending work out. My inbox became peaceful, and my mind with it. I safeguarded myself, as much as I could. I wrote a little, but mostly I listened to audiobooks a LOT: Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker—books I could not have read before the therapy itself.

Consequently, in the year following this intense therapy (2023), I published a single poem. It was in a small journal (shout out to River Mouth Review), with editors I knew and trusted. Which brings me to my first point: I was in a survival state in 2022, and I reeled myself back and in, made my world smaller. It felt safer. For those of you coming back to writing after an absence of any kind, it might feel good to start with smaller journals, or a journal with an editor you know and trust, OR you might feel great sending your work out to a wide variety of journals. Do what feels best to you at that time, and be open to the fact that you will feel differently at different times in your life: moving, changing jobs, having a child, elections, health events, new school—any life events also affect how you feel about your writing, yourself, who you are, what it means to be you in the world, sending your work out, sharing it with others. Be gentle with yourself as you recalibrate, as your life changes. It is yourself that you revise.

Han VanderHart, On Rejection and Dwelling in Possibility

I find myself connected to the physical land around me through the interface of my body, and that gives me the same thrill as being connected to the fast, organic rush of writing a poem. Perhaps they are the same thing. […]

There are lives here
that I will never know:
the hand that cut the tangle free
the fish that witnessed its descent
the people walking past
on the beach where it is washed up
in blues and greens.

It is too heavy to remove.
I leave it where it is
and worry about its dangers
for days afterwards.

I become a part of its story.

Wendy Pratt, Found Poem/Beach Walk/Found Poem

Everyone is shell-shocked from the recent election. I kind of expected it, but to be honest, I can’t summon up much emotion towards its aftermath. 

I’ve been on this slide into disbelief, dismay and depression after most elections since the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014. Even the Tories being ousted this year felt hollow as I knew Labour wasn’t going to do anything differently, and the SNP faced significant losses. 

Now, I just kind of hang around in the numb depression area when it comes to politics and society. I can’t summon up hope in the run-up and don’t feel the raging disappointment others feel when it all goes badly. 

I don’t have the energy really, my personal plate is full. I’m balancing so many things for my kids, my own four and the sixty-plus I care for at school. Their needs are my full-time job, my focus is always turned towards them.

And then on the way home from work last week, I received a phone call that dropped another weight onto the pile. A small bump on my nose was found to be skin cancer. I’ve had it for years, but it was beginning to grow and change so I wanted it removed as it’s ugly and annoying to me. Both the doctor and I were surprised by the results. […]

So with all that’s going on in the world, selfishly I’ve turned my thoughts inward even more, towards the people I care for and even towards myself for a change. I just have to keep moving forward, holding so much afloat, as if there is a future for my kids worth moving towards. To give them the foundation and the skills to keep moving forward themselves. 

And poetry is left to fall between the cracks of all that. In the summer, my editor said we would try to get my book out in November and, of course, I haven’t heard from him since. After 5 years, I can no longer summon any enthusiasm for his promises. My other collections have been declined by 15 other publishers this year, yet I submitted to another publisher this week. 

Gerry Stewart, Turned Inward But Moving Forward

After I sent the book off, I went downstairs in a daze, and sat on the sofa and poured a glass of wine and watched the US election, or perhaps we could call it another episode of the end of the world as we know it. Then I got a phone call from Holland that a very dear friend and big sister of mine died, just as they started calling Trump the winner. I felt it, all of this, at once, letting go, saying goodbye, the changes and shifts, happening out there and in here, all at the same time. Needless to say, I finished the bottle of wine, and wept with you and the rest of the world.

We have so much work to do, to continue to do, but we know that. The work is continuous, the work is the journey, the work is the point, the work is what we were born to do. I cannot ever imagine thinking that all the work is done out there in the big world and in here in my world of words. We live in a work in progress, we are a work in progress, growing and learning and loving.

As for the book, this grassy new-born foal trying to open her wet eyes and stand on her wobbling legs, the new book ‘The Life of Life’ will be published in 2026 with Canongate Books. It feels so far away and in a future world. Who knows who will be here then? Who will read books, who will keep fighting the good fight for books, who will keep championing libraries and indie bookshops and find funding and platforms for all of our beautiful poets and story tellers and for literacy and humanity … and who knows what happens next to our worlds and words and hearts.

Salena Godden, The End … which is a beginning

The best advice we have for anyone else is always advice to ourselves, honed on the sincerity of living, learned through life’s best teaching tool: suffering. Otherwise it becomes that most untrustworthy of transmissions: preaching. It is in speaking to ourselves that we practice speaking the truth — the unflattering truth, the incongruous truth, the truth trembling with all the terror and tenderness of knowing ourselves in order to know the world, of loving ourselves in order to love the world.

That is what Native American novelist, poet, and children’s book author Louise Erdrich offers in “Advice to Myself #2: Resistance,” originally published in a special edition of Orion Magazine — a poem evocative of Derek Walcott’s classic “Love After Love,” of Leonard Cohen’s lyric reckoning with resistance, and yet entirely original for the simple reason of drawing from the freshest spring of the universal: the most deeply personal.

Maria Popova, Louise Erdrich on the Deepest Meaning of Resistance

It is a small miracle we can still hold
gatherings around the kitchen table,
share meals of soup and bread and rice
piled on breakable platters. Here are
perhaps the first of those days we thought
would never come— war at every window,
drought kindling fires through evergreen
forests; men in suits and ties trading
our bodies and freedoms for a world
shrunk to the proportions of their minds.
But here we are, offering prayers to our dead,
sharing what they taught us of ritual and
remembrance—fruit for sweetness, water and
oil for balm; garlic and onions for strength.

Luisa A. Igloria, When We Gather

2 AM: a completed poem
a sated silence
a full moon in the sky, a full moon in the lake
only the poet –
empty, awake

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Fifteen lines is one quintain two many

This week: a voice the size of an acorn, a seahorse on a dander, dancing foxes, singing earthworms, and much more. Enjoy.

The breath scent of mother fig

under the chuppah of life

time got sucked up into a late-summer straw

fully enjoyed, fortunately, but fast fast fast

leaving us reeling – never ready, breathless 

standing under canopies of scarlet leaves, 

in wind faster than the mind, among unheard cries, 

before doors of the open ark

leaning face to face with All That Is

Jill Pearlman, Shanah Tovah

The autumn rain last night
left the earth boggy, trees dripping, 

sky fog-murky and chill. My dog 
doesn’t brood over this. He sets off […]

Sarah Russell, Sharing October

It’s peak leaf-peeping season in Maine, where I’m spending a week visiting my eldest at university, taking in all of the crisp autumn air and the morning sunlight through the pines. There’s something about being in the land of Hawthorne and Longfellow and more that moves me to write. I’ve missed this weather and this work — focusing on my writing life, committing the time to the writing habit, to the “peace of the writing desk” as David Huddle calls it in his book, The Writing Habit.

Perhaps I am also writing out of sadness, for recently I learned of Lewis Putnam Turco’s passing. I had thought about visiting him during this most recent trip to Maine, yet I learned a day after his funeral that he had passed before I arrived in the area.

Lew was a force in the poetry world and a meaningful part of my writing life — I knew him mainly through one chance meeting at the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative around 2008 and via correspondence afterwards. He was witty, playful, irreverent, and at times cantankerous, but generous and kind and willing to accept me into his world of formalist poets. I’ll be ever grateful to Lew for corresponding with me over the years, and for including my work in the fourth edition of The Book of Forms when I had only had a few publication credits under my belt. In fact, it was at our first encounter, washing our hands in the mens restroom at the West Chester Poetry Conference, that we struck up a conversation about textspeak and how it was being used to write novels in Japan.

Scot Slaby, A Maine Post: Remembering Lewis Turco

I want to be autumn’s secretary in soft
corduroy and velvet, shades of russet,
saffron and auburn. I am burnt caramel,
warmed chocolate in a tight toffee skirt
and heels.
[…]

It is pouring with rain as I type this, the sky is grey porridge. I’m at my desk and racing to finish the new draft of the new novel this month, it’s so close now.

I’m at the stage of writing where I have no idea why I am doing this and who cares, but I know I care and therefore must keep going so I will be where I want to be with this story, and say what I mean to say, which is a very big and scary thing. Right now writing hurts, it is a bit like stirring a risotto, you think you made a mistake and you have pot of weird raw rice soup, but you keep slowly stirring, and very slowly adding the stock, and then all of a sudden the risotto thickens and comes together and the rice is cooked perfectly and it is the right consistency and so delicious and creamy and you cannot believe you made it.

Salena Godden, Autumn’s Secretary

I started this blog post almost two months ago. I’ve always admired people who can write dispatches from life when it’s moving at high speed, and for that matter, I’ve always admired diarists. That’s never been my way. I can move and think fast, but I write slow when it comes to my personal creative work. In less than 24 months, I have had to try on several lives for size. One was too small; one was too big. The good news is that I’m working at a nonprofit that feels humane and sustainable, with room to grow, and the skills I’ve used in teaching for much of the last decade are also a great match for being a director of communications. But still, it’s a lot of change! Bruce Feiler is just one of the thought leaders in talking about “lifequakes,” and his work has helped distill what I’ve been processing. And will need to keep processing. 

Sandra Beasley, Goldilocks, and Beyond

I do miss the ease of working for copywriting agencies, but times have changed and I’m hopeful that for now at least AI cannot write bespoke wedding poetry! The privilege of helping people express their love, sorrow and joy is beyond measure, and the fact that people trust me with such milestone events is a wonderful thing. This year my poetry prints have helped celebrate numerous weddings, milestone birthdays, anniversaries and two new jobs! It means the world to have my words as part of so many occasions knowing the prints are on people’s wall is an honour. As I move into writing poems that will be gifts for Christmas, this feeling of being part of significant moments in people’s lives continues to grow.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Autumn – a time to prepare for renewal

The only scary hurricane I’ve never ridden out was Wilma. This was the same year as Katrina, which in Fort Lauderdale came through as a category one that did plenty but was a baby compared to what it became. Wilma was a fading category two when it hit us, but the eye was 70 miles wide and the storm bands pretty much covered the state. We lived in an old Florida apartment, low to the ground, walls made of cinder blocks and rebar, with hurricane shutters and strong doors. We thought about leaving, but where would we go? With regular traffic, it’s a ten hour drive to Georgia and we didn’t know anyone there we could have stayed with. We didn’t have the money for an extended hotel stay, not for three humans and two cats at gale force wind prices.

We hunkered down, got supplies, put blankets on the floor of the most secure interior closet we had in case we actually were going to try to sleep. The rains came and the winds picked up. Every once in a while I’d ease the door open to see what it was like outside. The wind bowed the palm trees and I thought about Victor Hernandez Cruz’s poem “Problems With Hurricanes” and the lines “How would your family / feel if they had to tell / The generations that you / got killed by a flying / Banana.” I shut the door. I thought about the one person killed during Hurricane Charley, a guy who stepped outside while in the calming eye of the storm to have a smoke only to have a tree fall on him. The winds calmed and I looked out. The table on our porch had come over the fence and wedged itself between my car and Amy’s truck. The winds picked up, blew directly at us, and then the water was coming in under the door, and we were mopping it up with towels and trying to push it back.

Brian Spears, Running from a storm

It has been a day, no, several
days now. The animals have fled through
the torn brambles. People watch as houses
topple: their chicken legs bow in the swell
of water, and windows fold like postcards
on a revolving rack. A voice the size of an acorn
comes out of the dark. What will you surrender—
your comb, your pillow, your blue thread and needle?

Luisa A. Igloria, Eye of the Storm

As I’ve thought about all the hurricane poems I’ve written, I’ve gone to the blog to see how often I’ve posted them.  So, rather than repeat one, let me offer a new one here.

In the Asheville area, we’re in a time period where lots of folks are applying for FEMA assistance.  I will likely not apply; we haven’t had any damage, after all.

But in part, I won’t apply because of how past hurricanes have shaped me.  We’ve had damage that wasn’t covered by insurance, so I applied for FEMA money.  Each time, each hurricane, we were turned down because we had insurance.  Different administrations, same result.

In 2017, after Hurricane Irma, we applied for assistance, and even though we were turned down, I still had an exit interview.  My memory is that it was a phone interview.  Did I know it was an exit interview?  Did I complete it hoping there was a chance of some money?  Probably.

It was later, after seeing how the poet Oliver de la Paz transformed screening questions for autism into a poem, that I thought about doing the same with the FEMA exit interview.  I probably gave a simple answer to the question that begins the poem, the lack of money and supplies answer.

I have other hurricane poems that I like better.  But this one might be one of the more honest hurricane poems I’ve ever written.

FEMA Exit Interview

“What factor has been most important
In your inability
To fully recover?”

a. Lack of money

b. Lack of supplies

c. Your inability to find a contractor or other workers

d. Your insurance company has been non-responsive

e. Your mortgage company is a cosigner and has unreasonable requirements before they will release the funds from the insurance company

f. Not wanting to invest any more resources in this house that has betrayed you

g. Your exhaustion

h. Your irrational fear of the phone

i. All of your friends have decided to move and you cannot make any decisions because of your mournful state

j. You realize you have made a dreadful mistake by moving to the coast in a time of sea level rise

k. This house was the cornerstone of your retirement plans, and the storm has made you realize that these plans are untenable and you don’t want to invest more into this sunk cost, but if you don’t invest the money, you will never sell the house, and your sunk cost will be lost forever

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, FEMA Exit Interview

“shore-bound by force ten gales we dream about the ones that got away… far from any dimly recollected grasp… a compass misplaced forever…”

I’m very pleased that my video Preening will be streamed on-line as part of the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival on 15th October. I’ve had work there before and they are always really good programs, covering a diverse range of topics and styles.

Preening is a strange, slow meditative piece, using a single sequence of seabirds (Crested Terns, Thalasseus bergii cristatus) waiting out a storm on a beach at Marion Bay, South Australia. As they quietly preen, they wonder about their increasingly imperilled future in the face of climate change.

The footage has been slowed down using a frame-blending algorithm that occasionally creates interesting distortions. The sequence was then overlaid on itself with a time shift of several seconds using a complex composting procedure so the birds appear to be interacting with themselves.

The text adapted is from Lessons in Neuroscience, Lesson 1: Phantom Limb, originally published in my 2012 collection urban biology.

Ian Gibbins, “Preening”

Something to think about . . . do some of us still cling? . . . obediently and thoughtlessly . . . to beliefs such as

                I can’t / poets can’t     understand mathematics
                                or
                I can’t / math people can’t     understand poetry 

Current interactive teaching/learning processes are helping to revise those negative attitudes — and my thoughts on the subject were brought to mind by a poem that showed up recently in my email.  It is Poem 15 in the Poetry 180 project, an activity initiated in 2002 by Poet Laureate Billy Collins in 2002 — a project that provides a poem for students for each day of the traditional school year.  (Each Sunday subscribers get an email that provides a link to a poem for each day of the coming week.)

    Poem 15 is by poet Tom Wayman and entitled “The Poet.”  Here are several of its lines — not words I agree with but related to the ideas expressed above and possibly useful for provoking classroom discussion!

        Has difficulty classifying and categorizing objects
        Has difficulty retaining such things as
        addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables
        May recognize a word one day and not the next

Tom Weyman’s complete poem, “The Poet,” is available here.  Another Weyman poem, “Stacking Chairs,” was featured in this 2021 blog posting.  

JoAnne Growney, Classroom Difficulties with Mathematics

Happy National Poetry Day to all those who worship at the altar of words. This year’s theme is ‘counting’.

In November my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, will be published by Nine Arches Press. I can’t wait to share it with you.

Blackbird Singing at Dusk by Wendy Pratt is a bold exploration of place within nature through themes of rural working-class identity and the female body, alongside explorations of loss and the repetitive nature of time. 

Today I want to share with you one of the poems from the collection.

As the theme of the day is ‘counting’ I’m sharing a poem called ‘Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Blackbird’.

My intention with this particular poem was to embed myself within a group of poetic observers, poets in particular, who had written ‘thirteen…blackbird’ poems, and other series of polaroid-like observations of nature. Poets such as Wallace Stevens, who wrote Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which influenced RS Thomas’s ‘Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man’, which used to be available to view online but doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

There’s an interesting article here, if you can access it, about that connection between Wallace and Thomas: An Abstraction Blooded. I’d be interested in your thoughts around that connection, and other poems that you think fit into this observed, short poem canon.

Both the poems play with the idea of observation and perception. Both of the poems play with haiku style poems rooted perhaps in the Japanese artist Hokusai’s ‘Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji’. Hokusai was influenced by other artists viewing landscape from different perspectives, and he in turn influenced future artists to do the same. I wanted to be influenced by these artists and in a very small way take up space in that lineage. I wanted to add to the observed stances around nature and landscape. The beginning of that process was looking back through my life to times both significant (the blackbird at the hospital window) and seemingly insignificant, to build a picture of the blackbirds existing, living, dying, singing around me oblivious to whether I was experiencing a significant life moment or not. I wanted to capture these tiny moments of interconnectedness, of noticing. And to recognise that the lives of animals are not significant because they are attached to our lives. They are significant in their own right.

Wendy Pratt, For National Poetry Day: A poem from my new collection

The poem I’m posting here, in English and Spanish, refers to a news report from June 2018 about a Salvadoran single father and undocumented migrant who was deported back to El Salvador while his six-year-old daughter remained in US custody. The poem incorporates details from the news story and text from Catholic liturgy. I’m sharing ‘Six’ today because it’s National Poetry Day here in the UK and this year the theme is ‘counting’. My thanks to Lorena Pino Montilla for translating my poem into Spanish – her translation is published below. Lorena and I will be reading poems from my zine, in English and Spanish, on Saturday, 2 November at Walcot Chapel, Bath, at 5pm.

Six

Papá, when
are you getting me
out of here?
asks the small voice
on the telephone
¿Cuándo?

I am counting the days
How old are you now?
holds up six fingers
Where is my beating heart?
¿Dónde?
Silence replies

Her little bed
a small country of songs
now a lonely place
Where are you, Papá?
¿Dónde?
Is my voice small?
[…]

Josephine Corcoran, A poem for National Poetry Day

Someone remembers the voices of the dead. / Remember the voices of the dead.

It is unacceptable to take a life.

Someone remembers the laughter of the dead. / Remember the laughter of the dead.

It is unacceptable to take a life.

The smiles of the dead. The joy of the dead. / The smiles of the dead. The joy of the dead.

It is unacceptable to take a life.

The dead are dead are dead are dead. / The dead are dead are dead are dead

It is unacceptable to take a life.

War spreads/ Wars spread.

It is unacceptable to take a life.

Bob Mee, A LITURGY FOR GOVERNMENTS EVERYWHERE

Academic and artistic life have been a whirlwind, as is usual this time of year, but luckily there’s been lots of art in the mix. On Tuesday Rena Priest gave an inspiring reading on campus. Wednesday my spouse and his collaborator talked about their new book, Revising Reality. On Thursday a colleague, Emma Steinkraus, delivered a fascinating artist’s talk about a new campus exhibit of women botanical artists, “Impossible Gardens,” and we drove to Charlottesville on Friday to see another exhibit by a friend, painter Carolyn Capps: “The Ocean: Vastly Empty, Infinitely Full.” A LOT, but I wouldn’t have missed any of it.

This weekend was mostly grading, but I also went to a panel put together by a new local arts organization, MidMountain, about murder ballads and the southern gothic–there’s a linked concert on 10/12 that I’ll miss. I need to tip life balance back a few degrees toward resting-thinking-writing time, but teaching and art eruptions aside, when you’re closing in on a book launch, the to-do list is long. I did see a gorgeous cover design for Mycocosmic this week and spend many hours on the second round of interior proofs, so the big reveal and digital ARCs are coming soon. […]

The news is hard right now–war, election fear, catastrophic flooding not far from here–but as Rena said, poetry can be a “secret medicine,” reminding us that we’re all connected. I’m grateful that even in my small town, art is so abundant.

Lesley Wheeler, Impossible, improbable, and infinitely full

Foghorn

I blast my splintered words
into storm-tributaries
 
 
and
 
 
           maybe
 
 
a seahorse on a dander
senses a faint splash.

Karen Macfarlane

My own poem from the Wee Gatherin workshop in August. Inspired by the tiny foghorn at the foot of the lighthouse. You can read more about my poetry here.

Karen Macfarlane, Foghorn

This week I took the Eurostar to London for just 24 hours, to attend a few meetings and — of all things — a school reunion. Every time I go to England these days I find myself just a little farther removed from the country, just that tiniest bit more “French” (even though however fluent I become, I will never sound like a native speaker). […]

While in London I passed through Westminster Hall (part of the Houses of Parliament), where a plaque in the floor commemorates the trial of Thomas More, who was condemned to death in this room in 1535. Westminster Hall is also where Queen Elizabeth II lay in state following her death in September 2022.

That’s not to say that there isn’t English poetry of comparable sophistication at this period, but just that the great majority of it was still in Latin — Thomas More’s very popular Latin epigrams, for instance, were published as an appendix to Erasmus’s 1518 Basel edition of More’s Utopia.

Victoria Moul, Crossing the Channel in 1526 and today

I tried my best to get to grips with Kay Ryan’s Odd Blocks – Selected and New Poems (Carcanet, 2011), and liked her quirky, playful poetry to start with; but as the book wore on, it felt like I was reading a weird mixture of Lorine Niedecker, Anglo-Saxon riddles, the Martian Poets, Dr Seuss and the utterances of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.

Ryan was one of the poets new to me in the truly excellent anthology, Women’s Work, subtitled ‘Modern Women Poets Writing in English’, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, published by Seren in 2016 and available here. It’s a chunky book, divided up by (loose) themes, and is as readable and enjoyable as any anthology I’ve ever read. Come to think of it, I’ve rarely read an anthology all the way through like I did with this one. Other poets featured whom I was aware of but had never really read before include Dorianne Lux, Ruth Fainlight, Sarah Hannah and Olive Senior. I’ve since bought collections by some of them to add to my TBR pile. It reminded me that the purpose of an anthology should never be an attempt to be fully representative of a cohort or period, because that would be impossible; but rather to shine spotlights, however brief, on poets and poems as little known as some of the others are well-known. It’s that rubbing of shoulders which provides the delights for seasoned readers. That’s not to say, though, that Women’s Work wouldn’t make an excellent introduction for readers who haven’t read much contemporary poetry because it most certainly would.

Matthew Paul, September reading

Verso de Medianoche is a pseudonym of a writer, now settled in Spain, who chose to publish these poems under a pen name because “some stories are better told at midnight”. There’s a content warning in the book for “dark and sensitive themes, including intense emotional distress and heartbreak”. The title is a mash-up. “Más” is Spanish for “more”, “cara” is Spanish for face or look (depending on context) but the second “a” has been struck out and the word becomes the English “caring” (“caring” in Spanish is “cariñosa/cariñoso”.) Readers are being asked to look beyond the surface, look beyond the brave face someone may put on their trauma or distress.

There are images drawn onto photographs interspersed with the poems (the images on their own pages so don’t interfere with reading the poems). A striking one shows a lounge in grey monochrome with a drawing of an elaborate birdcage in green with a woman’s figure sitting on the interior base, hunched with one arm hugged her knees pulled to her chest with the other holding her head. Long brown hair spills over her shoulders with red marks on her cheeks, possibly from crying, possibly from being slapped. She has a yellow top, yellow socks and blue jeans splattered with yellow. The implication is that life is grey, the cage is organic from herself and the yellow perhaps an attempt to brighten herself or bring some sunshine into her life. The poem that follows it, “The Essence of Unforgotten” is apt.

Emma Lee, “[Más] Caraing” Verso de Medianoche – book review

Today I turn my attention to the work of the well-known, prolific poet, Margaret Royall. 2024 has seen her author not one but two publications: Owl Fetish, (Dreich), and her full collection Toccata and Fugue with Harp, (Hedgehog Press). I intend to focus this review on the latter: almost a hundred pages of intensely personal poems that reflect on an engaging and varied life.

The collection is split into three parts: the poems in each part have a distinctive character and focus. In part one, Toccata, which makes up almost half of the collection , we find narrative and character driven poems that focus on Royall’s early life. We meet her parents and her extended family, featuring such unforgettable characters as Nanny Buttle, Grandma Browning, her great aunts in Louth, and Aunt Jessie. We also experience with her what it was like to be alive in a very different time to that now, when houses were heated with coal, when man first stepped on the moon and when London was swinging in the sixties. In these poems Royall demonstrates the ability to create a strong sense of place, time and person through well-selected sensory detail and imagery. Take for example, her characterisation of Nanny Buttle in her poem Nanny Buttle Sings a Hymn to the Tune Cwm Rhondda. She writes: ‘That all-pervading scent of Pears soap/ caught in her aura, the pungent kick of/ Amami setting lotion from Friday night’s/ shampoo and set; loose overalls baggy across/ shrivelled breasts that mourned the pert nipples/ of a lost youth…/   moulded from local clay/ from daisy chains    from May Day revelries/ Harvest suppers   first communion/ sunsets that gobbled up the sky.’ Royall describes her characters with such economy. Yet there is more than enough here to enable the reader to pick Nanny Buttle out of any crowd.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Toccata and Fugue with Harp’ by Margaret Royall

Movement by Suzanne Maxson
The poetry world tends to celebrate the emerging artist, the young promising writers who come into the writing world in a whirlwind. I have been finding, however, what an over-looked treasure older poets may be. Movement is Maxson’s debut collection, and, judging from the back cover, she has to be at least…well it would be rude for me to guess her age, but maybe as old as my grandma. And I’m no spring chicken. Age aside, there’s a depth of wisdom in these poems that you just don’t find in most debut collections. Much of her poetry asks questions concerning privilege, wealth, the brevity of life (she doesn’t have a website, but I found some of her poems HERE). A good example and one of her shorter poems is “The Shoes in My Closet,” where she utilizes rhyme to create almost a chant-like rhythm, culminating into asking “Is it right that I own these many shoes / for every possible weather, work / or celebration, while so many / have no shoes?” So if you want a collection that will make you slow down and consider life for a moment, I highly recommend Movement.

Renee Emerson, Maria Parr, Poor Bishop Hooper, and, my new hero, Suzanne Maxon

You just need to say this with feeling to feel its power. Phrase after phrase, line after line seems to nail intense feelings in a way that combines extreme concentration and focus with expansiveness. The metaphor of winter and the flatly relentless tread of the opening swallows you into the poet-lover’s present depression but ‘the pleasure of the fleeting year’ cuts through that gloomy stillness like a momentary flash of joy and light, simultaneously here and gone, like an afterimage on the retina. Gloom tightens its grip again in the next two lines, the images of freezing darkness reinforced by repetition of the ‘ee’ syllable. In the following quatrains, when images of summer’s abundance wrestle in vain with the poet’s sense of emptiness, it’s important that they do put up a real fight against it – the swelling syllables of ‘the teeming autumn, big with rich increase’ make one feel how much summer offers, if only the poet had been more receptive.

Edmund Prestwich, Note on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 and Nashe

I love the shapes of the two sentences that form this poem. I love that it’s stretched over two distinct sentences across ten 3 line, two feet per line (mostly) stanzas. The first sentence is all spiky shapes and angles akin to the “isosceles triangle” of the first stanza. It’s the “angles” that cause the issue, the possibilities pointing in many directions.

The second sentence is softer in some way, more rounded like the “protractor” mentioned at the end. The first stanza is pointing, the second is “flapping” with “bunting” – already more decorative than the practical elements of the first sentence (“backgammon boards, / boat sails, / the hands of a clock”. The degrees in the protractor speak of multiple possible jumping off points, more confusion, where as the triangle is pointing in three directions…(I’m making this up now).

Mat Riches, The Elbow of Barnsley

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

Nearly every poem in Where Babies Come From, like Mr. Peanutbutter’s memoir in Bojack Horseman, “just fell out of me”: beginnings, parallel worlds, childhood (which is a parallel world), alternate realities, anxieties, and strange explanations for how we live in a time that’s simultaneously magical and mechanical. I’m still looking for explanations for how we live, but now rather than finding an unexpected feather to treasure, I get into the dirt and comb through it, like someone who has stopped dreaming of flying and instead falls asleep to burrowing.

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

The first words we understand must be a poem. It’s always been there. But then there were so many stories: Aesop Fables, Blueberries for Sal, and the tales of Chelm read to me by my parents, and Taran the Wander, read to me by my brother.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Some poets set themselves to write a crown of sonnets about how 14th century Slavic puppeteer Vladimir Richevski losing his leaf-stuffed kupalo in a fire foreshadowed the triumph of morality over superstition in itinerant minstrel shows, and each word and each day is a step towards completion. Every poem is a leaf caught falling from a tree: I tend not to be able to grab more than one at once, but I do like making a pile.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ori Fienberg

According to the critic Cyril Connolly, in the early years of the Second World War, newspaper columnists often asked, “Where are the war poets?” The idea of war poetry as a kind of public service had become established after the First World War, when Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other combatants sang of the new horror of trench warfare. Connolly’s answer to the question, given in the middle of the Blitz, was: “under your nose”. “War poets”, he wrote,

are not a new kind of being, they are only peace poets who have assimilated the material of war. As the war lasts, the poetry which is written becomes war poetry, just as inevitably as the lungs of Londoners grow black with soot.

The poetry of the Second World War, as Connolly saw, would be more diffused — like soot — among the population than that of the Great War, composed on the home front as well as overseas. It would also prove to be much more dispersed across time. In January 1945, the anthology War Poems from the Sunday Times returned to the question “Where are the war poets?” and suggested:

We still await the masterpieces of war poetry, and it may be a lifetime before some village Hardy finds his powers summoned forth by the events which we know only too well and he knew not at all.

Like browsing a bombed library, anthologising the poetry of the Second World War is a matter of digging out what survived.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Lincolnshire Carried Through London

The zipless portion of the old black suitcase, the most important space in my packing, is reserved for the selection of books that will accompany me. Clothes are the things forgotten, left behind—I don’t remember what I wore in Seattle, Burlington, Demopolis, New Orleans—- I recall what I read, the shape and feel of the words that accompanied me.

I dress in books as if each trip is another wedding, feet feeling their way down an aisle with the sounds of strangers rising from the space around me, the silence of not turning to them and saying: “We are here for different reasons. This means something different to each of us.”

The formula disciplines my tendency towards overlarge desirousness; it tames my book frenzy. After decades of travels, I limit myself to the bridal idiom: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And so I packed for the wedding of New Orleans with the following:

The old was Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.

The new was Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful.

The borrowed was Kenneth Burke’s Counterstatement.

The blue was Osip Mandelstam’s Noises of Time.

Alina Stefanescu, A train, Ada, and recitations in New Orleans.

Now that the contract has been officially signed, I can announce that Megan Volpert and I are co-editing a Stevie Nicks poetry anthology for Madville Publishing. The call for poems will go out on Halloween (of course!) and the anthology will be published in 2026.

Many of you will be familiar with Madville, since they published the Mother Mary Comes to Me anthology that Karen Head and I co-edited back in 2020 and the Dolly Parton anthology Let Me Say This co-edited by Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke.

If you’re a Stevie fan, get busy! We can’t wait to read your work.

Collin Kelley, Stevie Nicks anthology coming in 2026

some in the water
some in the boat:
falling leaves

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: October ’24

I’ve known Kevin Craft a long time. We were colleagues at Everett Community College, beginning in 1998, and our bond of poetry drew us into friendship. He was always the star, with awards and grants and travel—including to France each summer to teach. He had a knack for making opportunities for himself that I (frankly) drooled over. But we had other, more home-bound threads connecting us as well, including many of the threads found in these poems: parenting, adoption, navigating the intricacies and interstices of family. Who do we belong to? Who belongs to us? Sometimes this theme plays like a lament, as when he echoes Emily Dickinson with, “My life had stood me up one too many times” (“Only If You’re Feeling Better”). In others, it’s a messy celebration: “Into gravity a history of spontaneous alleles” (“Game Theory: A Primer”).

I love the way the poems in Traverse aren’t linear (not usually), but always complex and witty and woven. The first poem, “In Extremis,” launches with: “One man skis alone across Antarctica. / Another pulls morning glory // off a rotting backyard fence.” One world, multiplied. In another poem, a daughter rescues a ruby-crowned kinglet; in another poem, two daughters rescue a father. (I have to add, birds are woven throughout the book, too—snow geese, an Anna’s hummingbird, red-tail hawks, hermit thrush…). I had a sense, reading this book, of circles within circles where human varieties of existence and all of nature nest together in contiguous if uncomfortable relationship. Like they do. 

Bethany Reid, Kevin Craft, TRAVERSE

When I read Robbi Nester’s book, Narrow Bridge, I found so many poems that speculated on the creation of the world, that made out of everyday modern life a kind of mythology to explain our surroundings. I settled on discussing this poem because right now it is early morning as I write this, and this poem seems an appropriate companion for someone up early in the morning at the beginning of a new day and a new week in a new season. […]

Throughout the poem the speaker is making a mythology about the world, going back to the beginning of time, and showing how she connects with the origins of the world, but also how the world continues to change. There’s darkness and light sparing with each other. They are hot, and angry, and sizzle up close, as looking at the stars or sun would feel like witnessing a sizzle. Far away though, this sizzle become the stars. The clouds, says the speaker, are both solid and liquid and she is their kin.

Everything in this world seems to be in flux, holding the possibility of being gentle, or becoming violent and overwhelming. Everything in the world seems hungry, able to consume or be consumed. This might make the world feel frightening and unpredictable, a difficult place for a person to live in. Yet the speaker begins the poem by saying “Call me an optimist.”

Tresha Faye Haefner, Fried Egg as Philosopher

a poem gestates and names the boat dylan
it is willed to sail the oceans until it rests
amongst every like-minded smoke-wreathed breath
that drew the rising tide of some dark ire for
his penned finger pouted and pointing out
the damned words that dragged that tide
across the moon sea’s road to stay afloat
clinging to that broken-leaded pencil talk

Jim Young, the estuary at laugharne

In Seattle, I had the pleasure of being a featured poet at the Fall Convergence on Poetics, an annual symposium of experimental writing hosted by the University of Washington Bothell. There, I was grouped with the amazing Ronaldo Wilson and Mita Mahato—artists whom I’ve admired for a long time—for presentations and conversation. The theme of this year’s Convergence was Connection, and the greatest pleasure of participating in the event was the connections I made with artists whose work I already knew (Mahato, Wilson, Ching-In Chen) as well as those who were new to me and whose work I’m excited to delve into (Jeanne Hueving, Eleni Stecapoulos, Juan Carlos Reyes). Appearing alongside these writers also felt like a gift because although our work and backgrounds are very diverse, there seemed to be a shared language, a shared rangy approach to genre, a bravery about trial and error. It was a place where I didn’t feel the need to explain or justify the hybridity of Feathers (though I don’t mind talking about this with people who aren’t familiar with hybrid genre literature). The conversation could begin a couple of steps forward from the starting line.

And connections there were. In the conversation portion of my time on stage with Mahato and Williams, I asked Mahato—whose gorgeous new book Arctic Play comes out next week—how her imagination works: whether it usually begins with a linguistic, visual, or material spark. She answered that it’s not one of these, but rather her imagination engages as a result of a weaving between these elements, when she experiences the connections or overlaps between seemingly separate things, or, as she described it, “metaphor as hallucination.” For example, glaciers in Arctic Play are “played by” pieces of light blue plastic that indeed look, hauntingly, like glaciers.   

This answer resonates deeply with how I approach my own work, and especially my composition process for Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal which relied heavily on juxtaposition as a method of thinking/feeling my way through my enthrallment with bird hats. When asked about how I brought the different modes and forms together in the book, I’ve made analogies to collage, which uses spatial relationships to bring forward unexpected connections, and to musical composition, where a composer might bring in a certain instrument to create a particular effect.   

Wilson, too, is so deeply tuned to the links between embodiment and language and the present and past that his “readings” are most often improvisatory performances. He seems to arrive on stage with a small menu of possibilities, or something on his mind/heart, but follows his intuition and body once he’s there, riffing, changing direction when needed. For example, at the Friday night reading at an art gallery, he pulled out his iPhone and played a recording of an “opera” he’d improvised that afternoon while walking through the airport. The song was about a tense interaction he’d had on the airplane with an older white couple who were behaving badly, and who he eventually decided to “read for filth.” While playing the recording from his phone over one mic, he improvised back up vocals on another mic, while also hanging a couple of rubber (“white face”) halloween masks around the stage. At Saturday’s performance, he showed a poetry video while dancing in front of the stage and wheeling around his roller bag suitcase on top of which he’d put one of the masks and around which he’d wrapped a jacket, creating an eerie dance partner. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, What Moves Us

Last night brought immersion in words and the company of good poets at a visit to Port Sunlight for the Wirral Poetry Festival. It was good to listen to some poems I had heard or read before and enjoyed as well as many that were new to me. Five poets at two events, time to talk with like-minded people, news of events I might enjoy, and a jar of honey. I loved hearing Martin Figura and Helen Ivory referred to as ‘the king and queen of poetry’. And I loved being there for their superb readings.

Sue Finch, BE MORE JAGUAR

Most of us don’t think of reading as a communal pastime, so much, but why is that? Yes, you still need to sit down with the book and read the pages, or listen to an audiobook version, and that is usually a solitary act — though I have one friend who has read books aloud with her husband every night for years and years, and loves to read this way. During the pandemic, I knew of transatlantic couples who read to each other daily, via phone or zoom. I was part of several memorable online events where the participants gathered to read a novella or a play aloud, taking turns and passing the text to each other over and over again, like a baton, over a period of hours. In our group, we often read passages aloud. I suspect there is something powerful and even primal in human beings about animating the word, and hearing it out loud.

Beth Adams, Reading Can Be Difficult

I’m uneasy about the way my children and their friends talk about world-building. They prize it highly; too highly, it seems to me. Thorough elaboration and consistency are virtues for an engineer, not for a storyteller. When it was pointed out to Ursula Le Guin that she had created two different planets named Werel, in different stories, she was entirely unconcerned. So what? These are fictions. We’re making them up. They’re for visiting, not for living in.

—

Meditating on that, I realize that I’m engaged in the same thing as my children. I’m holding Milton to standards of realism he never undertook to honor. He’s writing a poem, and he’s drawing shamelessly on all the literary traditions and devices he knows. He is not engaged in world-building. Arrogant as he is, he’s not that arrogant. He’s a man writing a poem, that’s all. He’s not pretending to be anything else. The problem is not that he’s unsophisticated, It’s that I am. My kids are just a bit further down the dead-end of realism, where the literary ideal is a novel so huge that you never need to come out the other end, and so consistent that the author has not changed at all between the writing of volume 1 and the writing of volume 83. Everything will be exactly where you expect it to be; all the pieces interlock; you will never be ejected into your own lived experience. You will never have to fend for yourself.

—

I have Milton’s Sonnet 19 by heart, so it’s not true that he’s never spoken to me. Someday I hope to be able to receive from Paradise Lost more of what he was sending: I’m old enough in reading to know that its not Milton’s deficiency but mine that I’m dealing with here. Maybe not this year, or this decade, or this life; but I’ll leave the door ajar. You never know.

Dale Favier, Milton and World-Building

I love to travel, and I am lucky to have a husband who is the detail guy – finds the hotels, researches what to do, books the flights, etc. We plan our trips before we leave, but when we are engaged in the actual place, we try to be open to whatever adventures or sidebars or unexpected pleasures may arise. For example, a road closure in Iceland on the way to a waterfall in the west led us on a detour through one of the most gorgeous landscapes we’d ever seen. We eventually arrived at our destination and fulfilled our plan, but the sidebar was pretty astounding.

I tend to use both planning and intuition when I write. In drafting, I try to let the writing go wherever the language is leading, even if I’m not sure what it means. I still draft long-hand (I’m even typing this post from notes I already took in my journal), and I often don’t read back what I’m writing until I reach a stopping point. I find that this leads to more surprises. (It also leads to a lot of nonsense, no lie, but so be it.) It’s only then that I switch on my planning brain and tend to turn methodical in revision. Cut, add, change the order, tighten the language, hone the sound and diction. Even though this seems like an intellectual process, intuition is important here as well. A feeling about a word. An instinct to go against what seems logical. Both the head and the heart have their place, which is why my first draft of a piece is NEVER the way it ends up. Editing puts the head back in play, and then the heart needs to decide when a piece is “done.”

In making visual pieces, I find I lean more heavily on intuition. I almost never plan a piece of artwork beyond having materials at hand. I start and then go with whatever looks right to me at the time. I’ve found in the past that, when I make something I’m really pleased with, it almost never works when I try to recreate it. Whatever it was that was happening in that moment is gone. Maybe I can get close, but usually not.

Donna Vorreyer, Head Versus Heart

I’ve been working steadily on the vampire poems and a little on some flash fiction experiments. Also a little on plotting out and the first portions of the thrifting and writing book I’ve been saying I’m writing, though it’s much less writing and still more getting my ducks in a row (I guess I have “concepts of a plan” at this point, lol). Like all things, planning only takes me so far and really I should just dive in and see what happens.  

I’ve been buried in freelance work otherwise, working this weekend steadily on what will likely be some of the last of the Halloween specific things I will be asked to write as we move further into the month. Thankfully, the few Christmas pieces I was assigned have paused. They were causing a whole lot of temporal whiplash, especially the days I was sitting working on them with the A/C humming behind me. I am also hung up again on some chaps that are a bit more difficult in layout, so have been working out the kinks on those and getting the final versions prepared to start printing.  They’re a handful of last season’s books to get out, as well as the beginning of this year’s list. Plus submissions from the summer for the next round that will begin next fall. I’ve fallen behind on some content things I hoped to make for my own stuff, so will hopefully be able to chip away at them–including some reels I want to make for #31daysofHalloween.  

I am trying not to let the more shortened days make me feel like I am rushing to get things done, but they always do. Meanwhile there are still little bits that are not work—quiet breakfasts, plays, lots of horror movies to get me through a busy month.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/6/2024

Thank goodness for writing residencies! I’d been in a bit of a funk lately, and what I really needed was a chance to change my focus (I almost wrote foxus, and you’ll see why later) and think about my project in a new way. The residency is at a marine wildlife center on Friday Harbor. There’s no television or radio (or guarantee of electricity all the time,) but it’s right on the harbor and perfect as a place to write. In fact, I wrote two new poems, sent out two submissions, and reconsidered my next manuscript in a way that I hope will make it much better. But it wasn’t really about productivity – it was about not listening to the news, but listening to the ocean – not looking at screens, but looking into fields for foxes – about paying attention to the light instead of listening to my anxieties.

Besides spending time in nature, I ended up talking to people on trails, nature photographer hobbyists like myself, grandmother-aged skinny dippers. Besides leaving me wishing for a better zoom on my camera (almost everyone there had a more expensive, better zoom lens than I did, which allowed them to get better fox pictures! Jealous!) I felt like I was part of a community. Loving nature is something I had in common with these people – all so joyous. And I got to witness the coolest thing ever – fox dancing! A black fox and a red fox both got up on their hind legs, put their paws together, and twirled around for about four minutes. My pic isn’t spectacular, but you have to realize it was so amazing to see.

So in the five days or so I was away, I took a look at my manuscript not poem by poem, but the big picture – how do the sections hang together? what’s the trajectory of the book? what’s the story behind the story? So it was time for some reshuffling, some deletions, some additions, and focusing on the story. And also, something about taking photographs – and waiting for the light – got me thinking about the right timing in books, the right light, so to speak. It takes time to see your own books – the shifts in tone, the difference in cadences – in the right light.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Away at a Writing Retreat on San Juan Island, Chance to Rethink My Manuscript and My State of Mind

失ひしものは戻らず蚯蚓鳴く　宮谷昌代

ushinaishi mono wa modorazu mimizu naku

            a thing I lost

            will not return

            earthworm sings

                                                            Masayo Miyatani

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

Fay’s Note:  “mimizu naku” (earthworm sings) is an autumn kigo.   An earthworm doesn’t sing, but the ancient people believed it obtained a singing voice from a blind snake by giving up its eyes.   

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (October 6, 2024)

I’ve just returned from the task for announcing the results of the competition to a hybrid audience which included nineteen of those longlisters. There was nothing like seeing the faces to bring home the responsibility of judging. It’s something I’ve felt keenly from the outset, and by time the results were announced, I’d developed a personal relationship with each of the longlisted poems. But that’s not true for every one of the 1956 entries – how can it be? It takes over 65 hours – around two working weeks – to spend just two minutes reading each poem.  That’s excluding the time you spend consulting with organisers, and the hours you spend on the shortlist, let alone the awards ceremony, or feedback.

How to choose? Well, first of all – it is fairly obvious when a writer doesn’t go to workshops, or seek feedback, or is entirely unfamiliar with contemporary poetry – self-consciously poetic or archaic language, clunky rhymes, use of abstractions, an absence of imagery, for example. And whilst it’s true that with talent and aptitude, passion and dynamism, someone who has never read or studied contemporary poetry can write good poetry. But it’s going to be flawed. And with 1956 poems competing for 25 places, there’s almost no room for flaws. Poetry is a craft as a well as an art, and you need to learn it to be do it consistently well.

As I worked through the huge pile, I sifted out a pile of poetry which needed a slower, second reading. At this point, I had to say goodbye to lots of poems which showed real skill. Sometimes, it was because I couldn’t see that the poem had another life beyond itself – a fluent or vivid description is not enough. Sometimes, it was because of the ending. A frustrating number of really strong poems were forced into a neat endings.  Be cautious about logical, tidy endings. Try to leave some looseness: some space for the reader, and for chance and magic. Some poems just needed a little more editing. And some poems are just not born to stand on their own – they need the company of a sequence, or a themed collection, to be their brilliant selves.

Kim Moore, How to Pick a Winner

we find oyster mushrooms blooming
like ancient ears on the shoulders
of an old tree. i like to point out to you
the smallest mushrooms. orange ones
& even blue ones. what i really want
is to walk until i become one.
until my gills stretch & my veil pulls back.
this is a fantasy of escape. instead,
i apologize to the forest for leaving.

Robin Gow, (de)forest

I think I gave up on the idea of being famous a very long time ago. These days I’m grateful for that. Grateful for the previous failures that didn’t catapult me into Susan Sontag’s living room (as was vaguely promised to me so long ago—when I was “promising”). It all fades away, so I am glad I am trying to write in the present, not for posterity. I have little stories. But stories so deep that they will sink into the mud like stones under boots, and become a tiny part of the earth itself.

I’m amused by the arbitrary artefacts of humanity. Ancient Greece thrived for over a thousand years. And we have but 44 plays, written by a handful of men all living in the same few decades. Shakespeare, who is a marketing ploy (among other things). What of Fletcher, Marlowe, Jonson? My students know who Shakespeare is. But not Roswitha, not Aphra Behn. And any and all of it is nothing but artefacts, the stuff that dreams are made on, but not the dreams, not the dreamers. I believe I’ve lost all sense of reverence, and have found an enormous peace in doing so.

Today Egil and I walked with the hiking group. Two hours up past the tree-line, then over along the sheepback and the mires. Another two hours down, trying not to slip on the black lichen. I kept an eye out for lemmings, but didn’t see anything moving except the sheep. No eagles this weekend. No wasps. No insects at all.

There was only us, the sheep, the sedges, the bog cotton, and the spots of red lichen that sometimes look like blood.

I like walking with groups, but prefer to walk just the two of us. I want to go slowly, watching the wind pushing the heather. I want to take it all in.

Coming to the end of the trail, a gentler slope toward the parking lot, I had to step carefully to avoid a dead mountain pipit on the ground. I think I made a small gasp, or sigh of some sort because the woman next to me asked what it was and looked around. She’d nearly stepped on it. This perfect, recently dead bird.

Ren Powell, Writing in the Present

Matt Licata says in his book A Healing Space, the “healing will always surprise us.” He says falling apart is a “sacred process.” And this falling apart is “evidence” where in which “the known crumbles and disintegrates, revealing important and lesser-known dimensions of our experience not available during times of clear reflection and “holding it all together.”” Our old ways and ideas of who we thought we were “just can’t contain us any longer; they’re not subtle, nuanced, or magnificent enough.” Transformation is surprising he says, and I can’t disagree given all that I’ve witnessed these past years.

There’s a lot of rubble out there. From which you are required to make something beautiful. There you go — I worked in the tagline for my blog! I really have loved staring at wounds, yours, mine, the wounds of anyone who shows them to me. (I’ve seen so so many!) I think we’ve been changed, many of us, and haven’t we learned things we never would have otherwise? Good for writers, perhaps. Reminds me of the well-known poem by Rumi titled “The Guest House” […]

Shawna Lemay, Repair Shop – Staring at our Wounds

Sally Abed, a Palestinian who is one of the leaders of Standing Together, says, “We need a new story. Our mission is to build a new majority around peace, equality for all, and ending the occupation.” She acknowledges that, “peace right now is a very, very radical word. But it’s also the only option. I think in very deep crisis, you also have great clarity.” 

I keep returning to this short poem by Mahmoud Darwish: “She said: when do we meet? I said: after a year and a war. She said: when does the war end? I said: after we meet.” Genuinely meeting may feel impossible – but it doesn’t have to be. Not for Israelis and Palestinians on the ground there; and not for us.

It is easy to get caught up in where we feel different: one’s focusing on a ceasefire, the other’s focusing on the hostages, so we feel like we’re in opposition. We divide into camps based on where we place blame and with whom we feel kinship. I encourage us to go deeper and plumb the Jewish values at the heart of our yearnings. The one who’s grieving for this side and the one who’s grieving for that side actually have a lot in common, if we can let ourselves feel it. Trying to feel-with each one of you has been my profoundest spiritual practice this year. 

Rachel Barenblat, Rosh Hashanah 5785: Many Views, One Community

what started as rapture
may write itself as pain
what started as unbidden grief
could spell a simile for joy
the poem expands in all
directions like the mother void

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The fifth poem is a prayer

This week: diligent dreaming, a forager of sound, the island of witches, silence as a canvas, taking off Billy Collins’ clothes, and much more. Enjoy.

The other day I learned of a new procedure:
they peel your prostate like an orange, removing it whole
rather than slicing it. I don’t know how they get it out,
or if it leaves a hole.

The yellow leaves are brilliant in the sun,
the birch bark’s white puts cadmium to shame,
the sky gets pale closer to the ground,
the tide runs back the way it came.

Dale Favier, Round Like An Orange

The Wee Gaitherin poetry festival has fast become a highlight on Scotland’s poetry landscape, with three days of grassroots poetry events taking place in the east-coast town of Stonehaven every August. This year, I had a great morning facilitating an outdoor writing workshop based on Poems on Public Art.

We started with some inspiration on ekphrastic writing about the sea from one of Mandy Haggith‘s poems, Towards a Book of the Sea, written in response to a ceramic piece by Lotte Glob, we headed out into the sunshine of Stonehaven’s boardwalk. Along the boardwalk are several metal sculptures. One is an official piece of public art by a pre-Kelpies fame Andy Scott; the others apparently appeared one at a time overnight, installed by a Banksy-like local artist who never owned up to being behind them. (Although, Stonehaven being a village, it didn’t take long for everyone to know exactly who it was.) The local council had a dilemma but eventually decided to leave the rogue sculptures, now much loved, where they were.

The workshop group spent a bit of time each with our chosen sculptures, then had a few weeks to work on the notes we had made. A couple of extra ‘disruptors’ were thrown in to expand the stories we found in the artworks.

Karen Macfarlane, The Wee Gaitherin 2024

I’ve gotten to do a couple of readings recently that were both very special to me.

The first was the Poetry in Ocean event held at the San Diego Public Library. I read poetry alongside a photographer, a surf podcaster, and fellow poets, and we all shared about the importance of the ocean in our work. There was an open mic, a raffle, music, pizza… it was a very lively and fun event! Thanks to Michael Klam and the SDPL for having me!

This week, I also had the honor of reading my poem “Con Pane” at the 25th anniversary event for Con Pane, my favorite bakery (and favorite place). Some of the employees came over one-by-one to tell me how much my poem meant to them, and it felt so beautiful that we could affirm the importance of each other’s work. It was also special to get to share the celebration with my son, who might love Con Pane as much as I do.

Katie Manning, Poetry in Ocean & Con Pane!

It’s a bright sunny afternoon, tropical by Plymouth standards, i.e., not hosing with rain. ‘I’m deciding if we need the windows done.’ They look great to me, I say. ‘The back,’ she says, ‘they’re filthy.’ She says it again: ‘I hate this time of year,’ and walks off down the road.

It’s nothing I haven’t heard myself say over the years. Along with: ‘I can’t wait for Christmas to be over’, ‘I’ve got a terrible week this week’, ‘At least I’m not being shot at’, and ‘I had a perfectly happy childhood.’ I made a vow some time ago not to use these frames to describe my experience because, and I have learned this the bitterly hard way, they do not describe who I am and what is happening now.

What is happening now is that I am really, really tired, and have a heavy cold. But Tatty has got the heating to work and we are watching a favourite police procedural on the telly. What is also happening is that is it now hosing with rain. Some poems were rejected. But another was accepted. So it goes. It is complicated.

Also not quite happening now but in my recent memory of what I did hear myself calling ‘a really terrible week’ (so much for consistency), I have listened to talks and podcasts on the cheery subjects of what might happen if Trump wins the 2024 US election and the climate collapse. In the same time-span, I re-re-read this article on James Schuyler and came across this one, on his line breaks, for the first time. These things do not distract me from Trump and climate collapse, nor do they ‘sweeten the pill’ of the realities of those things. I’m learning (very slowly) that not everything is binary. More likely, things are both/and: rejection/acceptance; sunshine/rain; Trump/James Schuyler’s line breaks.

Anthony Wilson, ‘I hate this time of year’

I found the experience of ‘publishing’ my own zine/mini-pamphlet really empowering and I think there will be more self-publications like this in the future. I’m not sure that Six Poems, with its glossy cover featuring one of Pauline’s intaglio prints, can accurately be described as a ‘zine’ which I associate with punk poetry (nothing against punk by the way, I love its ethos!). Mike at Seren Arts Gallery in Bradford on Avon worked his magic on my publication with his beautiful design and reprographic work (I recommend).

Although Trump withdrew his zero-tolerance policy a few months after introducing it (with no proper arrangements for returning separated children to their parents), the current rhetoric about immigration remains de-humanizing, and not just in the United States. In particular, I find it shocking that children’s lives are treated with such disdain, as if childhood is a state of being only afforded to the privileged – one of the topics I endeavour to engage with in my six poems.

Josephine Corcoran, Poetry, art, and translation, in collaboration

I’ve never been a refugee, an exile, an immigrant. I have met quite a few, though–often very young people, students I encountered at the college where I worked, students from Haiti, Dominican Republic, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Mexico, Venezuela, Pakistan, Eritrea, Kenya…and my husband’s stepmother, who arrived at Ellis Island from Austria between the wars. And a colleague who was stranded at college in the USA when the Ayatollah took power in Iran, and a fellow employee from Cambodia, who lost her entire family except for one brother to the Khmer Rouge. Whenever I hear about the politics of immigration (which is often), I think of them: how hard they work, what they sacrificed to get here, how hopeful they are, how challenging their lives have been and continue to be. And their grief. […]

One by one we let things go, abandoned
in shallow caves with other people’s
remnants, plastic bags and t-shirts,
books, candlesticks, so much trash after all—
even our skins can barely hold what
we need anymore. We arrive shriven,
numb as feldspar, having walked so long.
May we have water? May we rest, with our
children in our laps, and sing the songs
our parents taught us not so long ago.

Ann E. Michael, Northern stars

I think in the abstract, the idea of being there when someone opens up the bag of ash inside an urn and it explodes all over them is one of those scarring-for-life moments. Just as a witness to it, as the person who has to help clean it up or soothe the person covered in cremains. I can’t even fathom what it would be like to be the kid here, but what saves the moment from spinning into horror is that the kid is so innocent, unaware on some level of what’s just happened, that it allows room for the humor of the moment to take over. There’s this cathartic release of energy that starts as laughter and moves to keening, lamentation. But never to sadness.

Then we were silent.
I helped my son sweep his dad
off the chairs, the stairs, emptied
the inside of his shoes and collar,
but the gritty gray bits
of bone and ash wouldn’t fit
back inside the plastic urn.

I really like the tone here, the matter-of-factness of it. The reader needs to breathe after the explosion/realization, but also there’s a sense that after this terrible moment, we still have to get on with life, and that means cleaning up the ash and trying to put it back.

Brian Spears, My Box Wrapped in Velvet

My grown-up children were babies once. That’s not so hard to believe–what is harder to grasp is the dizzying passage of time. I still remember my daughter’s weight in my arms, gradually heavier as she fell asleep. The scent of my son’s baby hair after a bath. Night feedings. Holding their heads up for the first time. Crawling. Their first steps. And many other singular moments that emit their own light in my memory. My daughter and my son have made our family’s universe infinite. The joy of bringing them into the world has never abated, it has only expanded to include more love and wonder and appreciation for who they are and what they dream about. Everything in this poem–written by a new mother more than two decades ago–continues to ring true. […]

She pins the stars to their place
in the sky, shapes mountain ranges,
fills craters with diligent dreaming.

Look how she’s etched
her own image onto my heart,
how she’s filled the empty
caves of this life with purpose.

Romana Iorga, Shadowlight

After a couple of weeks of sunny weather, and mostly warm breezes, autumn slammed into this weekend. Walking Leonard, my shoes soaked through because the little creek has spilled over its banks. The fields are mire after this morning’s rain. But now the sun heads toward the horizon and the clouds are discrete once again. Grey-blue, and dirty lavender. Everything feels in-between. In between the blue and the grey, between the sickness and health, between ambition and resignation.

I started the wasp project last year, when I had so much time on my hands—and so little energy. Now my schedule is bursting at the seams again. I couldn’t be more grateful. Still, I’m realising how important it is to put—and keep—everything in containers of time, and of attention. Saying no when asked to make exceptions is difficult, but I can recognise the dangers now: when I’ve played helpless when I give in and shove aside my own plans to please others. I imagine myself tying myself to the railroad tracks in a parody melodrama. Secretly relieved to be helpless.

Cancer comes with lessons. The first of which may be that we don’t have unlimited time to do what we want to do, or to be with who we want to be with. I’ve had a deep impulse to do “all the things”, but also a sense of disconnection. Most days, I hover somewhere in-between.

I need to stop researching the wasps, and settle into the writing. I’ve collected all the facts in a notebook, and will pull bits out as I write the poems. All of this is one container.

Ren Powell, Juggling Projects

What am I but the forager
of sound:
listener, voyeur, shoreless
sea absorbing verse like light.

My turn may come.
My words may come.
My sound will flood the narrow
back alleys of the emptiness.

But today is not that day.
The third poem is not my poem.
The syllables coalescing inside my head
are not my syllables.
That sky that holds every poem is not my sky.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, There is no third poem

You with your flash flood grudge and storm surge curse. Around your neck, a locket filled with a tombstone’s baby teeth. In your back pocket, a scuttlefuss of ghosts. You, with your cyclops eye of destruction, the only rules you play by: evacuate or shelter in place. Somewhere in Atlanta, there must be a trumpet that can bring you to your knees and blow a little tenderness into your soul. 

Rich Ferguson, Hurricane Helene

Sometimes your mouth won’t form words;

sometimes you forget to get into the bed
& you sleep on top of the covers, cold.

Hard to even look at the calendar
when the days slam down all the same:

hard to get up & hard to stand.

Katharine Whitcomb, Remembering My Father –“After-Apple-Picking” from HABITATS

First of all I would like to thank Nigel most sincerely for inviting me back to talk about my new collection, Toccata and Fugue with Harp (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). I am grateful for everything he does to support the poetry community so tirelessly.

To choose just one poem has been difficult, as the collection is arranged in three parts: Toccata, Intermezzo and Fugue. Each part reflects a different aspect of the overlying theme, which is ‘ Nature or nurture, which has the greater influence on who we become?’

Toccata deals with childhood and the strong influences there, post-war ambiance, religious beliefs, conformity and parental expectations. Intermezzo reflects on how this made me feel, how my view of life was coloured; feelings of being out on a limb, never being quite good enough, over-anxiety about competitions. Fugue moves on to the present day and seeks to reflect my current interests and pursuits, hopefully explaining a little of who I’ve become. One thing unique to my collection is the linking of poetry in the Fugue section to music and colour…. Hence the choice of title Toccata and Fugue with Harp. I provide suggestions for listening before or after reading. These are mostly classical music pieces but do contain lighter music choices too. A colour for each one is suggested too, reflecting the colour dominant in my mind when writing each poem. There is a suggested playlist on my website.

Drop-in by Margaret Royall (Nigel Kent)

Oh, that withering term, “dabble,” insinuating that a “dabbler” isn’t serious, flits about like a cabbage butterfly, and abandons things when they get difficult. It’s right up there with “dilettante,” “amateur,” and “superficial,” related, both in meaning and in sound, to “doodle,” another activity that sounds suspiciously frivolous. 

In spite of its bad reputation, dabbling is actually an important, even crucial activity. In looking at the work of several artists, I would venture that they might engage in a good bit of dabbling. The work of Picasso, for example, includes paintings, sculpture, prints, ceramics, and theater design. Picasso also had famous “periods:” Blue, Rose, Cubist, Surrealist, and Modern. It’s not too hard to imagine that some of these were the result of dabbling, or experimenting with a new practice just to see where it would lead.

Many artists don’t confine themselves to just one artistic expression. Lesley Dill incorporates language, specifically the poetry of Emily Dickinson, into her art. She works in sculpture, textiles, photographs, opera, and other forms. Mickalene Thomas works in paint, photography, sculpture, collage, video, and installation art. Experimenting, trying new things, yes, “dabbling,” is a necessary part of growing an art practice.

My chosen art is writing, but I’ve learned how to play piano and guitar, made videos, tried photography and watercolor. I’ve absorbed lessons from each of these, gaining an appreciation for the dedication of musicians and artists who devote their lives to perfecting their craft. 

These artists not only kept the inborn creativity we all possess as children, but continued to grow, change, and explore new ways to express themselves. They prove that growing up doesn’t have to mean giving up what makes us most human: our capacity to create art. 

Erica Goss, It’s ok to dabble

I’m thrilled to announce that next month, I’m launching a quarterly ginko (haiku walk) series around the Soulard neighborhood. The first event takes place on Saturday, October 26th at 9:30 a.m. It’s free, family-friendly, and open to anyone in the St. Louis area.

I’ve wanted to start hosting ginkos in St. Louis for over a year now, but with everything else I have going on, it kept getting pushed to the back burner. Finally, though, I realized I could start hosting them in conjunction with the Soulard Restoration Group Community Involvement & Events Committee.

Here are my goals for the series:

1. Provide free haiku education in a digestible format.
2. Provide space for people to practice writing haiku without worrying about critique or judgment.
3. Create a family- and beginner-friendly event.
4. Explore Soulard and learn about its unique history.
5. Recognize that haiku can be written in any environment, and that urban spaces are just as legitimate haiku spaces as pastoral ones.

We will meet at the Soulard Community Garden and spend 90 minutes learning about haiku, walking, exploring, and writing. The event concludes at the historic Soulard Market, a great place to explore at the conclusion of events.

If you have any haikurious friends in the St. Louis area, forward this post along to them!

Allyson Whipple, Soulard Haiku Walks Launch in October

I am kicking off the month with the first zine of the month, MORNING IN THE WITCH HOUSE, a collection of prose poems and collages written in the darkening days of last October. You can read the e-version here. […]

I have been obsessed of late with New Orleans “casket girls,” young women and girls who were brought over on ships in the early days of the city and may or may not have been vampires. I’ve mostly been doing research, but the first piece came this week, with many more following.

Kristy Bowen, October Paper Boat

You asked me if I had been to the island
of witches, of shamans, of shapeshifters—

and I had, but only once, but for less than
a day. We rode a tricycle along the dusty

seawall to a waiting motorboat. The waves
were brisk and choppy, but we saw flying fish

as the municipality came into view. I remembered
reading about firefly colonies in the molave

trees, and how Spanish explorers thought they
were on fire.

Luisa A. Igloria, Siquijor

I return, then, to this place, with my notebooks and pencils and a list of subjects I might be interested in and I wait for the thing that happens in libraries. I am no longer too shy to lift books from the shelves. I gather them to my desk, my little space, where I have claimed my seat with bag and pencils. I stack the books around me and I dip in and put like a wading bird. I wait for the insistent tug of a story wanting to be told. I fall into books of maps and the maps lead me to the people of a particular time and place and feel these long dead people clamour up against my ears like ghosts drawn to a spiritualist. I lose myself in their quick bites of life for a few hours and end up taking a sackful of books, a tote bag of books away with me. This is a thrill that has lasted my whole life – the thrill of the heft of a book bag on the shoulder, the sheer weight of stories waiting to be explored.

While I am reading, note making, building a picture of people and place in my head, the real, live people of Scarborough are passing through this room on their own quests – a man is searching for a photo of a long wrecked shop, a librarian is opening books for him, has on the tip of her tongue the reference he might need. A woman is searching for two names in her family tree. She is shown how to use the microfilm to look for newspapers, but she is panicked by it, can’t work out the tech and the librarian sits patiently with her, making the notes for her. Another woman comes in to fill out forms, take ID photos against the pale wall of the library reference room, she makes phone calls, ties up a job interview, submits an application. And in the corner a woman with a little bairn is being given advice by a charity about nutrition, feeding routines, bed times. I am sunk in my own stories, searching for the treasure and all around me the library with its infinite uses, its infinite places of safety is being an active, living place of security, strength, knowledge.

As I am booking my haul of treasure, my stack of books out – no longer with the satisfying stamp of the librarian, but rather a fascinating, clever device which you simply stack your books on – I spot my own book, The Ghost lake, on a shelf, bound with paper and a note – for the book club- and I realise that my book is now part of this story. I think about the safety I experience at the library, the sense of refuge, and I think about all those people coming in and out, and how all these knowledge points – the books, the computers, the staff themselves – are the bricks that make up the shelter of the people using it. This place is a church or a temple, a place of refuge, a place to come and worship your ancestors, and find out who you are and how to be, and now, my book there, on the shelf, a brick in the building, a footnote in the story of this place.

Wendy Pratt, The library is a church, a temple

A break with routine:
I’ll forego a shower
so as not to miss
the sound of the rain.

I waited till the small hours
to close the bedroom window —
preferring a damp carpet
to the loss of the waterfall.

Since I was a kid
I’ve loved the car wash,
the sense of enclosure,
of safety in the flood.

This pre-dawn morning,
my bed is my transport —
from its shelter
I adore this world of water.

Jason Crane, POEM: Tonight, My Heart Is North

animal insistence turned my velvet body to leathery grit arms & legs clammy skin a breath off corporeal temperature shivering dog calm trudge pant & blunt I ate mercury as a child broken thermometers bright pools on the bedroom floor gums not yet black not yet turned a grand tolling into children’s rectums removed it from a velvet lined case passed it with Jesus care one child to the next & I dropped it shattered globs silver animals wriggling toward a fairy-tale center I scooped them into my mouth I am about to die or win a great award a shivering dog inside you life swings onto the gridded macadam as my mother in the driver’s seat turns smiles & waves she holds a cigarette a bottle of gin & a gun

Rebecca Loudon, Bone

One part of growing up in a small town with five cemeteries (one where there were more dead people than live ones) was that we often rode our bikes on cemetery roads. The ones closest to our house were old with few new burials and were therefore quiet and safe. They had almost no traffic and lots of interesting statues to study. And I loved everything about the statues. Their stillness. Their idealized faces. Their draped garments. The feathered wings of angels, the skinfolds of cherubim. Flash forward to today. I still love public statues in fountains and parks and business plazas. Statues in museums, of course. Religious statues (Buddhas, Giant Rio Jesus, altar pieces and icons, etc). And yes, cemetery statues. (Honestly, the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires has some of the most beautiful statuary I’ve ever seen.)

A statue seems to me the height of remembrance, a stoic, lasting memorial to the beauty of what once was, a way to honor that which we deem most important. Stillness and Remembrance.

But stillness and remembrance are concepts in opposition. Memory is an act. Stillness is an absence of action. Perhaps this is part of a statue’s appeal —that in its “frozen” position, it is keeping some feeling or idea alive. That in representing life or belief in action, it creates a sense of calm.

Donna Vorreyer, Statuesque

The poem also has a mirror image in greyed-out, upside down text, indicating its theme is reflection. Being a product of a chaotic, perhaps abusive, drama-laden childhood does not mean that those children have to grow into equally destructive parents. The cycle can be broken. It’s not an easy thing to do but necessary, otherwise children repeat their parents’ mistakes. But it is possible through reflection, through acceptance that healing is non-linear and might feel as bad as living through the hurricane.

“Vision So Bad That…” starts with a ten-year-old narrator failing to hit a soda can with a BB gun and so realising he needed glasses and ends,

“I now understand where I lie in this poem,
that shrapnel is a seed, and masculinity is a metal.

I was the coke can, once standing by
watching the chaos, failing to realize
that I became just another part the problem.”

The glasses don’t just bring visual clarity, but help the narrator see he has a choice between repeating the problem or being the calm after the storm.

Emma Lee, “New American Monarch” Marcel Fable Price (New Michigan Press) – book review

The scenes I observe daily in the metro should have tipped me off that things had gotten this extreme – I’m often the only person in the car without headphones on, or a phone in their lap; the only person who’s looking around and observing my fellow human beings, apart from people traveling in groups of talkative friends. Yes, sure, sometimes I watch or listen to something, check my mail or read, but generally, I don’t. I didn’t realize that, for many young people, anxiety about silence and being alone with oneself extends even to the idea of taking an ordinary walk. I knew that many weren’t doing it — so many people on the streets are either absorbed in their headphones, or talking on their phones — but I didn’t realize how much was due not to habit, but to anxiety. So rather than scoff or dismiss what’s being described here, I’m happy that some are noticing what’s going on, and trying to do something about it. The author of the article goes on to talk about the longtime spiritual practice of silent walking meditation (which, Ms Maio’s self-described “flow state” aside, is rather some distance from a regular walk) and then speaks about the research that shows how good walking can be for you and your mental health. Reading this left me feeling sad, a bit stunned, and wondering what, if anything, I could do about it.

Many, if not most, of my friends of a similar age still enjoy long quiet walks, swims, car drives or commutes, or time spent cooking, knitting, playing an instrument, or doing other non-passive activities that allow their thoughts to roam freely. We grew up before our devices took over so much of our lives and our mental space, so we know what it’s like to be quiet, without music or podcasts or even a tv or computer in the background.  But many of us, too, have left that quiet behind, and with it, our true solitude. We know what it’s like not to scroll endlessly, not to be addicted to social media, to write real letters or blog posts, but…we’ve joined in, and our minds have been shaped and changed by it. Is it any wonder? Not only have the devices practically become part of our bodies and indispensible to our functioning, the world they bring to us has become so much more fraught, so much emotionally noisier and more anxiety-producing, and delivered in smaller and smaller bits, that of course many of us can’t concentrate on anything longer than a few minutes, and of course we seek ways to escape not only the inputs, but the resulting chaos and distress in our own minds.

Beth Adams, The Silent Walk

Before packing the cars and heading off for our weekend adventures I spent some time thinking about silence last week. I have thought a lot about silence as a poet and as a coach. I know for example that work I have done to develop my voice means that I wouldn’t now be able to write my poem Silence. That poem was a moment in time that needed setting down, and my relationship with silence has evolved since then. It is still evolving and that in itself is a joy.

Listening to a conversation on The Coaching Inn Podcast between Claire Pedrick and Oscar Trimboli opened up my thinking even more and began to bring the two sets of thinking together for me. My thoughts started to unfold as I listened in and I found myself transported to standing on the path in the forest at Loggerheads, three o’clock in the morning waiting for the dawn chorus, waiting to hear the first blackbird sing. I found myself visualising silence as a space with complete width and depth. I saw it as a darkness about to be lit up.

That image of silence being a space and width that enables things to emerge got me thinking about the times in a coaching room when something similar happens. Silence as a canvas for thoughts and feelings. When I feel that kind of silence in front of me in a coaching room it gives me a tingle of excitement and curiosity as I wonder what is going to emerge. When I am gifted it, I can feel my thoughts being given a welcome, open space. There’s a real joy when this is created between two people and the very essence of it can be felt. Palpable silence.

I have a poetry workshop that I wrote called “Can You Hear it in the Silence?’ and I can see now that this also relates to my thoughts around the silence of a blank page and the silence between words or lines.

Sue Finch, CAN YOU HEAR IT IN THE SILENCE?

Rather than going for a provocative hot take, I’ve waited ten days since returning from the U.K. before posting my reflections on the trip. A total of five readings in six days was certainly an intense experience, and it gave me a real feel for the poetry scene right now.

First off, it served as a timely reminder that 99% of U.K. poetry exists beyond social media and isn’t even aware of many trendy self-publicists. This is especially true beyond the big cities and festivals, at readings above pubs or in arts centres in provincial towns, where people attend and buy books through a pure love of the genre. These people, of course, are my readers.

Secondly, I was struck by just how many remarked on their disillusionment with the direction that many major journals, festivals and publishers have taken in recent years. In fact, there’s clearly a sizeable chunk of poetry readers, purchasers and aficionados who feel disengaged with current fashions. And I’m not just invoking embittered white male OAPs here. Event after event, I encountered varied members of my audience coming up to me at the interval or once the reading finished, champing at the bit to discuss the issue, expressing deep frustration. 

Matthew Stewart, Where do we go from here?

E-mail and social media has increased the amount and speed of interaction between poets. In the old days a fashion might dominate a nation for years. Nowadays the turnover so fast that no single style has time to take root – less fashionable styles are frequently re-integrated. This could lead to homogenisation. Fortunately, the improved communication also gives people a chance to find like-minded people, so sustainable niches are more common now, ensuring variety.

Looking back, it’s tempting to label poetry eras – “The Movement”, etc – but of course many style of poetry were present in those eras. Nowadays these unfashionable styles are more visible than before.

Tim Love, “So Tim, here’s my first question – What actually is poetry?”

A few years ago I read Billy Collins’ poem “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” and immediately knew I wanted to respond. I was in a workshop and without thinking about it too hard, I wrote a reply that was both a mimicry of Collins’ poem, and a response to it. I called it “Taking Off B.C.’s Clothes.” I felt so confident in it that I sent it out after just a few more edits, and eventually it got picked up by Up the Staircase Quarterly (thank you to them!). Just yesterday USQ informed me that they’ve nominated it for a Best of the Net, so I thought I would share it with all of you.

Below are the Billy Collins poem, plus my response. Enjoy and, if you have a response poem of your own, (meaning a response to the Billy Collins’ poem or any other famous poem) please share it in the comments.

Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, by Billy Collins, Published in Poetry

Taking Off B.C.’s Clothes, by Tresha Faye Haefner, Published in Up the Staircase Quarterly

Tresha Faye Haefner, Taking Off B.C.’s Clothes

This weekend marks the bicentenary of one of the most influential editors in the history of English poetry: Francis Turner Palgrave. Born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, on 28th September 1824, he is remembered for an anthology that has never gone out of print: The Golden Treasury (1861) — or, to give it its full name, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. […]

At four and a half, he began to learn Latin vocabulary; by the age of ten he was memorising the first book of the Aeneid; and one of his favourite games to play with his brothers was to re-enact scenes from Homer. He also spent happy seaside summer holidays at Bank House, his grandparents’ home in Great Yarmouth. His daughter, Gwenilian, later remembered how

he was keenly alive to Nature’s sounds, and delighted in reading Lucretius or Virgil within hearing of a trickling stream or the breaking of waves on the shore

So it’s perhaps not surprising that his masterpiece was a book of poems to learn by heart. But the success of The Golden Treasury was also due to the rise of English Literature as an academic subject in the Victorian era, displacing the Classics at home and across the empire as a founding text of national identity and an instrument of soft power. Schoolchildren recited poems from Palgrave, and soldiers took him to the trenches. In Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948), the British intelligence agent Edward Wilson reads poetry “secretly, like a drug”, carrying The Golden Treasury with him through colonial Africa, to be “taken at night in small doses”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #22: A Golden Treasury Treasury

[Cecil] Day-Lewis was the UK poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. Despite a hefty complete poems published in 1992, his poetry has now, I think, fallen almost completely out of circulation — perhaps partly for the depressingly simple reason that very few of his poems can be read easily online. This neglect seems to me rather unfair, as he wrote a lot of lovely lyrics.1 (If you want to speculate on which, if any, of the subsequent UK poet laureates will prove to have a lasting reputation, here’s a complete list.)

‘Walking Away’ is actually not a very typical Day-Lewis poem, but you can see why it has become an anthology piece. Recalling it as I sat by an actual pitch, watching my own ‘half-fledged’ son embark upon a new activity and discovering a new aspect of himself, I thought that the power of this particular poem derives partly from the way it combines such a recognisable parenting experience with the distance of time. Day-Lewis is not writing in the poetic present, but recalling an experience, albeit at the same time of year: ‘It is 18 years ago, almost to the day’.

Hovering beneath the surface of the poem, I think, is Yeats’ best known poem of autumnal nostalgia, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, set nineteen (rather than eighteen) years after its initial occasion and also an attempt to articulate how — as Robert Frost put it — ‘nothing gold can stay’.

Victoria Moul, On rugby and metre

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?

Dance has shaped more of my life than anything else except maybe growing up in the country. Ballet, tango, contra, country-western two-step and line dance, country waltz. The attendant somatic practices (Feldenkrais and Pilates), physical therapy and cross-training, and bodywork are all techniques for increasing bodily awareness and self-presence, so that you know what you are feeling and what you are doing: a dancer is a way of being, like a writer is a way of being, only dancing for me cultivates enormous curiosity and joy that happen almost entirely outside of language. Like dancing, writing comes from deep attention, curiosity about what is, and joyous moments of not-thinking. For me, times of not-writing and not-talking sponsor being-in-words on pages.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Julian Carter (rob mclennan)

I hate to admit this, but Flare, Corona (a finalist for the WA state book award) failing to win hit me a bit harder than I thought it would. I tried not to get my hopes up, telling myself I was lucky just to be nominated, but there it is—my emotions said otherwise. My MS symptoms were also acting up as I was running a small fever all week with a cold, so I had to reschedule my covid antibody infusion (which might have been too much this week anyway, with all the tooth stuff). Unexpected expenses, wasting time on not-useful appointments, and just feeling like “why do I even write poetry?”—all capped by a terrible hurricane that hit areas where I had family harder than we expected (luckily, they are all fine, but a lot of people aren’t) and more war in the news. Let’s not even talk about how close this election is. I am not usually a depressed person, but I certainly struggled with getting anything done this week, or even feeling like it was worthwhile getting anything done.

I tried to do some things to cheer myself up, including getting out in nature and visiting a newly opened local pumpkin farm, McMurtrey’s, which also had beautiful u-pick flowers like dahlias, zinnias, and sunflowers. I tried to write but had more success reading—especially interesting articles in, of all places, the New Yorker—an article on Ina Garten’s success (for instance, she gave her first cookbook’s publisher $85,000 for half the print run, and then spent $200K more on PR and photography) now she makes millions on her cookbook contracts. So that’s how to be a successful book writer, LOL! $285K!) plus an article on AI and antibiotics which was fascinating. And I got my contributor’s copy of Mid-American Review, in which I had a new poem.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A New Poem in MAR, A Rough Week, More Pumpkin Farms, and How to Cheer Yourself Up

3 poets, 4 books of poetry today! I had just started reading American poet Morgan Parker’s There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé when books by Canadian poets, Lynn Tait and Margo Wheaton arrived in my mailbox. This afternoon, I sat outside and re-read them, spending a bit more time on the dogeared pages. The thing about poetry is that one tends to read it over once (or at least I do), and then re-read, then, go back to the dogeared poems. And the cool part is that say, 6 months or a year later, you back, and different poems will stick out for you, grab your attention. I think part of the reason I wanted to persist with this “poetry club” is just to model a behaviour of reading, one possible approach. We don’t read poetry like we do a novel. And you know I love novels, but poetry is a special thing, a special gift. One needs to learn their own flare for reading poetry.

We read poetry to resist, to rebel, to come into our hearts. We read poetry because poets, as W.S. di Piero says, “want to say small things intensely.” He says, “Empty heart = empty head” and I’m inclined to agree. Poetry goddamnit teaches us the terrain of our decrepit hopeful broken hearts.

Shawna Lemay, Poetry Club – Wheaton, Tait, Parker

In his Afterword to Nada Gordon’s The Sound Princess, Drew Gardner describes her work as being ‘punk rococo burlesque’ and draws the interesting, if somewhat broad brush, notion that Rococo, while being aristocratic in origin, was ‘the beginning of a historical shift toward the enlightenment and, eventually, socialism’. While this certainly opens a doorway into Gordon’s exuberant style, my own moment of realisation came in these lines from ‘The Mess’:

the mugwump
        who never stops writing
        about writing cuz all
          is hypertext

Which, ‘by a commodius vicus of recirculation’ brought me back to these lines from ‘tales from the crypt’, near the start of the book:

I am a secretary,
therefore I secrete.
I am a secretary
therefore I am secret.

The poet as one who secretes recirculated, hypertextual language in secret is, in a sense, the primary figure in Gordon’s work as I read it.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading September 2024: Part 2

This is a book, a text, a way of speaking inside a designated context. But texts are not separate from the world in which they are written. Unlike the borders of nation-states or the fences announced by private property, the mind is continuously permeated by the world. Thinking, itself, is an act that involves being altered by thought.

Maybe “this” also refers to the conditions under which this book originated, particularly the coincidence of its proposal in the week following October 7, 2023, as well as the conditions under which it was written. To begin under these conditions is to admit the instability in our ways of knowing so as to inhabit the particular contingencies of authorship. To admit is not a negative thing. Admitting permits us to think into the difficult and to ask hard questions about boundaries, borders, and ethics. In this sense, to admit gives us permission to transgress the facile line between “right” and “wrong” and explore what is destroyed by such lines. We can ask who stands to benefit from administering them. We can use mirrors for something besides self-affirmation. A mirror can reveal the gaps between the way we imagine ourselves and actuality. “Co-creation” turns a monologue into a dialogue that makes creative use of discord and misunderstanding. I make the book as the book makes me; we make each other with every encounter and conversation; we make the world in relation to the ways we know others have made it. The hardest part for humans is that there is no way to know (or control) what others will make of us. Or: what Others will make of Us.

Alina Stefanescu, Excerpts from ‘my X’s’

Wet, windy and dark, we’re properly into autumn, but it’s been so delayed this year which hasn’t been a bad thing. The lingering heat is very welcomed. The leaves are starting to turn, maples first and then the birch. My garden covered in gold flakes that I will have to rake and rake, but I will never stay on top of them. 

Seasons cycle and I fall into the same routines, with my gardening and in the house, my moods. Even in my poems, I find myself caught up with the same images, the same thoughts.

Gerry Stewart, The Wet Dark Slips of Gold

きんいろのひかりのなかの秋の蜂　対中いずみ

kiniro no hikari no naka no aki no hachi

            golden light

            inside of it

            an autumn bee

                                                Izumi Tainaka

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 25, 2024)

This week: trusting the unsaid, questions for trees, beautiful birds of thought, hearing singing through the walls at night, and much more. Enjoy!

A scattering of airborne seeds, like baby dandelion fluffs, float over me when I’m coming home and walk back up the drive. And early in the evening Vega is still right overhead, still presiding. Yes. This remains my favorite month. I don’t hate the summer any more, and I look forward to the cold and the rain less than I used to, but it’s still, to me, the month of promise. It’s the month I used to look over my new school books, and anticipate understanding new things and meeting new people (living and dead: new to me.) Mysterious names will fill with meaning; eyes will fill with light.

Dale Favier, September

[I]t was the last day of the Butterfly House being open, so we snuck in a quick visit. The snow leopard cubs were hiding while we were there, but we got to visit with their beautiful mother.

Going to the zoo is one of the summer rituals I didn’t want to skip, even though the weather is getting cooler, and the timing was hard. It’s important to squeeze in the things that matter to us—even if it’s just watching butterflies—in between paying bills, doctor appointments, work, and the busy work that is too big a part of our lives. To be a writer is sometimes to prioritize the butterfly watching.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Fall is Here, Sign Up for a Spooky Season Zoom Class with me and Kelli Russell Agodon, Zoo Visits and More

i will never make real peace with
the fact that we live in a world where
the soil is cut up like a tray of brownies.
here is your citadel. here is my porch
& the dead spearmint bush in a row.
once a week or so i see them. the deer.
they peer into my apartment
the way i gazed into their house.
always startle me with those reflective eyes.
the mirror keepers. i open the front door
to try to tell them they can come
live with me. i am desperate for anyone else
to talk to about the house i did not get.
they are not there. just ribbons
of early autumn wind.

Robin Gow, for sale

This morning there is a tang of wood in the cool air. It is the kind of scent that might come from opening a little used cupboard door or how I imagine the very centre of a conker smells. […]

Even though I knew the sun was a star,
that the shine had something
to do with immense pressure
changing hydrogen to helium,
even though I could have told you
that there were hundreds of billions of them out there
I didn’t.
All I was actually sure of was that
I needed to stand in the darkness
with you.
Will you lift your eyes and look with me?

Sue Finch, ANGEL OF THE NORTH AS DANCER

On the TV, images of British wildlife appear and disappear: blackbird, goldfinch, roe deer, hedgehog. I’m glad of it. I’d rather have random images of animals and birds than some awful gossipy morning television show. On the walls, two long distorted images of the Yorkshire moors add a sense of peace and expanse to what is in fact, I notice, a windowless, hot room.

Two and a half hours. I’m quashing my panic. I tell myself if there was something wrong they’d let me know. But all the time my mind jumps back to the time around my daughter’s death, when we made assumptions it can’t be an emergency if they are still treating us as a non emergency. It can’t be that bad if no one is calling for an ambulance. I pick up the book again and highlight a quote with my highlighter:

We do not have to choose one story and run with it.

My stories are converging here in the blue-sea-storm room, the too hot room. The past story that I keep retelling, keep putting to bed, only for it to rise again and keep circling me is running into the story of today, the story of a capable, intelligent woman taking her mother to a routine hospital appointment. I am trying too hard not to feel the stories of myself. I remind myself that all stories change the landscape of self, that I am a a landscape that has been changed, but that I am still here, still working, still habitable.

Wendy Pratt, The story resurfaces and I let it flow through me

Let us gather our words.
Pretend is no longer a game. It is a meadow
where the sun is shining, where nothing is amiss.
Look, there is Van Gogh painting the ripening
wheat, golden under the green Cypress trees.
Does it really matter if he has one ear missing?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Ugliness does not become verse

Unsaid: The dreams that follow me into the kitchen, the ghosts that grab my chin and force me to look at them, the way the world whirls away mid-conversation when unsaid things run their goosebumps over my arms, my legs, the whorl of their Listen. 

“Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning,” Giorgio Agamben says of poetry in When the House Burns Down.

And there is something lucid hewn from the possibility preserved by the unsaid. The best way to describe it is by looking at how much is said, how much is spoken and communicated across alienating mediums and disguises. 

Agamben urges us to trust that moment when we look at one another without posing words, screens, and Beauty between us. 

Trust the unsaid that doesn’t fear being read in simultaneity, amid the absurdity of dailiness—- the demands of those roses.

Trust a stone to keep the whole story carved into it.

Trust the bark of a tree in Tuscaloosa.

Alina Stefanescu, Unsaids.

what is it like to grow     from the ground     up into the air
     why do we break              dawn                        what about
              dawn    deserves breaking          and why

on the white branch         of the birch tree                a crow

Romana Iorga, questions for trees

Earlier this year, a group of artists in The Netherlands set up the Ongelezen Boeken Club (Unread Books Club). It is a sad fact that many library books are never borrowed. Currently, there is an exhibition in a public library in Amsterdam featuring some of their unread books. […]

The artists have declared Thursday 19 September as the first Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag (National Unread Books Day).

There is the concept of the anti-library: a collection of unread books as a research tool, as an ode to everything one wants to explore. Related to that is Tsundoku, acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up. Many poets I know feel somewhat guilty about new poetry books piling up.

Fokkina McDonnell, The unread book

A little over a week ago, we were in Ireland, and my husband and I visited The Old Library at Dublin’s Trinity College, one of the oldest and most impressive libraries in the world. The main gallery of the Old Library is the Long Room, which is approx. 213 feet long. The Long Room normally houses over 200,000 of the libraries oldest books, but at the time of our visit, a huge restoration project was underway on these precious books. […]

One of the biggest draws now, while the restoration is in progress, is an enormous, illuminated artwork, titled Gaia, by artist Luke Jerram, that has been installed in the Old Library. The installation features NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface, showcasing the planet floating in three dimensions as it might be viewed from space. It’s a stunning thing to behold.

In lieu of the books in the stacks, visitors can watch large format film loops of the book restoration process, from the handling and packing of the books, to rebinding and cleaning. […]

  A visit to the Old Library is included when you buy a ticket to the “Book of Kells Experience,” which you also do not want to miss. At the end of the Book of Kells Experience, illuminated on the wall is the Jorge Luis Borges quotation: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library” in English and in Gaelic.

Katharine Whitcomb, Letter from The Old Library at Trinity College, Dublin

Herbert’s ‘Aethiopissa’, which is so different from any of his famous English religious lyrics — and has surprising elements even if you know his Latin verse well — was written for Francis Bacon, and sent to him, with a dedicatory English poem, as a kind of thank-you in return for a book (described as ‘a diamond to me you sent’), probably part of Bacon’s grand project, the Instauratio Magna, the first portion of which (the Novum Organum) was published in 1620, but which Bacon had been working on for many years.7 All of the early manuscript copies of ‘Aethiopissa’ contain the English and the Latin poems together. Bacon was a family friend of Herbert’s, they had known each other for more than a decade, and several of his other Latin poems in praise of Bacon’s work also had a wide manuscript circulation.

Since English literature written from the perspective of a black person is very rare in this period, the poem has attracted a fair degree of scholarly attention and speculation, not all of it, however, displaying much sense of its cultural context. (Sometimes the fact it was written for Bacon isn’t even mentioned.) Other scholars have interpreted the poem as a kind of formal ‘courtship’ of Bacon by Herbert — in a social or patronage-related way, rather than a romantic one. This doesn’t seem quite right, given their well-established friendship, but there does seem to be something distinctly personal and playful about the combination of the English and Latin pieces. The conceit of the Latin poem is probably inspired by Song of Songs 1:5 (‘I am black, but comely’), a very fashionable text for Latin verse imitation and response at just this period. In addition, though it has not to my knowledge been remarked upon, several of Bacon’s scientific works address the question of why some people have darker skin than others, pointing particularly to the heat of the sun (as mentioned in the Latin poem); since Herbert knew Bacon well, it is likely that he was aware of his interest in this question and they might even have discussed it. Overall, though, Herbert seems to be using the girl’s ‘blackness’ and her characterisation as a shadow to comment on the relationship between public office (as held by Bacon) and the relative obscurity of Herbert’s life of scholarship. Indeed, many of Herbert’s Latin poems are concerned with the choice between a public and a more private career (whether of scholarship or, later, of ministry).

Victoria Moul, Stay lovely boy! Why fly’st thou me?

Up late – or at least late for me –
I lie on my stomach reading Galway Kinnell,
wondering at the lives I could have lived
if only I’d run away at 14, or
gotten on that plane, or been more
comfortable alone, or finished that degree,
or kept any one of a number of jobs, or
done the thing people thought I should do,
rather than what I did which was often
weird – you have to admit – and which
finds me up late, reading Galway Kinnell,
wondering at the lives I could have lived.

Jason Crane, POEM: Up Late Reading Galway Kinnell

I’ve taken to making of my first cup of coffee a little be-here-now meditation, to try to ground myself for the day not in plans and lists of tasks, but in a few minutes of taking notice. I’m not sure how long it lasts, the effects of this practice, as I pretty quickly end up flapping around in body and mind in my usual barnyard way. But still. For a moment I’m still. I’m giving the day’s world my attention. I hope that’s enough for the world, for the day. As Rilke wrote, “Maybe we are here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate…”

This poem by Betsy Sholl, called “Poem in which Emily Dickinson Scolds Me,” struck me not because of the Emily Dickinson nod — I confess, I rarely understand what the hell Emily Dickinson is talking about. Don’t judge me. — but because of this couplet: ” What are you but two weak eyes/and too many shadows inside your head?”

Marilyn McCabe, A little terror can see a long way

The interweaving of memory and art, the poet’s art, is typical of [John] Levy’s work and what’s striking here, as elsewhere, is the careful construction of what might at first glance seem almost careless form. Look, for example, at the use of line and stanza breaks, with words and phrases isolated so that they look backwards and forwards at the same time:

I remembered. What it was

I was going to do
doesn’t matter

The pivot here between second and third line slows us down; life is full of us doing things that don’t particularly matter other than we intend to do them. What matters is the sense of coherence that memory brings, and from that, for the poet, a shape of words to express the extraordinary ordinary.

Which is why, for a poet like Levy, the accidental or coincidental has such weight; a dog barks as the poet types, or a typo is integrated, again via an enjambment, as a means of expressing love:

what fills my life with with worth. Ah, a
typo, the doubled with, as if one with isn’t enough

when I’m thinking of you.

Reading these two reminds me yet again why I love the pamphlet as a vehicle for poetry.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading September 2024: Part One

There is an irresistible vibrancy and immediacy about the poems in the first section of All About the Surface that draws the reader into [Karen] Macfarlane’s world. Take for example, her description of open water swimming in When you need courage for the year ahead (A swimmer’s perspective).  It begins with the lines: ‘It’s going to be cold./ Bloody cold./ Squeal when it reaches your oxters cold./ Fecking freezing./ The cold will take your breath away;/ you will take it back/ and exhale, slow and loud/ like an old seal.’ The syntax and line breaks convey the speaker’s hesitance and her anticipation of the imminent pain. The use of the vernacular creates an intimacy with the reader, as if it is a friend talking to a friend. The humorous, self-deprecating image of the ‘old seal’ suggests someone who doesn’t take herself too seriously, yet it is cleverly and originally appropriate for its context. As a consequence, we share the moment, as if we are alongside her. We see the same qualities particularly in Tightrope ridge and Flying down the hill at Clachtoll. In the latter poem she writes: ‘I run, dodging thistles,/ and sheep’s purlies, (but not them all), / lowping fast, down and down/ breath bumped out of me/ streaming hair, more and more/ air between each step’. This time she skilfully imparts the jolting rhythm of her run, the breathlessness, the sense of speed and the lack of control so that we feel we are running with her.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘All About the Surface’ by Karen Macfarlane

There’s a note from the poet, “Seeking joy”, which starts, “I was in my late teens when I was assaulted, but I’ve only started talking about what happened to me in the last two years.” It goes on to talk about “Following my joy is now my habit.” However, it’s a joy that allows acknowledgement of how women’s bodies are treated through sexual assault and childbirth. There are contact details for PANDAS Foundation (for new mothers needing mental health support), Rape Crisis, SARSAS who support victims of sexual assault, Samaritans and resources that helped the poet. The sexual violence is not explicit, but it’s a welcome acknowledgement that reading this collection may not be easy for some. The collection’s focus is on the aftermath and living with that aftermath as the assaulted teen grows into a woman and later becomes a mother to daughters. Healing is not easy but possible.

Unsuprisingly then, the first poem, “Venus de Milo speaks”, takes on the male gaze, observing that,

“Either way, I define
the ‘classical woman’ for you.

A quiet one’s air
of aloofness. Tried,
now passive, with this
hairstyle and marbling of flesh;

it evokes the very kind of woman
likely to stand before a kitchen sink”

and concludes,

“Just don’t reach for my hands,
never seen or touched.
A touch of mine, never felt.”

The Venus de Milo statue shows a woman, assumed to be Aphrodite, with a bare torso, but her lower body covered in drapes, standing. Her arms have been lost although a fragment found near the statue when it was discovered in 1820, shows a hand holding an apple. In the poem she’s not just a classical woman but also one cast into the classical role of a woman: to serve, provide a family and provide for and nuture the family. But she has no arms so cannot respond to the gaze which puts her in those roles. Men project their wishes onto her but she cannot comply or rebel. 

Emma Lee, “Feeling All the Kills” Helen Calcutt (Pavilion) – book review

In workshops I often see writers try to write about a feeling, but then back away from it. They say “I feel this sometimes, but I know I’m being melodramatic,” or “I feel this sometimes but not always.”

But one of the tasks of poetry is to help us express a feeling completely, without backing away from it, without reasoning our way out of them, or overanalyzing them, or dampening them down with qualifications, . What I love about this poem is that it takes a feeling and amplifies it to the nth degree.

Another job of poetry, to quote Shakespeare, is to “give to Airy Nothings a local home and a dwelling place.” (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, scene i. Oberon). This poem takes the emotion, which has no form, and ties that emotion to the physicality of the speaker’s own body. This is appropriate because sometimes feelings are so intense it seems like they take over your entire body. 

Tresha Faye Haefner, “Blatant Blister” Analyzing Kim Malinowski’s Poem, Inspired by Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Rajinderpal S. Pal is a critically acclaimed writer and stage performer. He is the author of two collections of award-winning poetry, pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read and pulse. Born in India and raised in Great Britain, Pal has lived in many cities across North America and now resides in Toronto. However Far Away is his first novel. 

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

My first book, pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read, was released in 1998 by TSAR. The attention that this poetry collection received completely exceeded my expectations. As well as winning the Writers Guild of Alberta award for Best First Book, the publication received a couple of mentions in the Globe and Mail and allowed me to do readings across the country. I have been working on a New, Unpublished and Selected collection, working title The Lesser Shame. I really wish I knew then, at the time of writing my earlier poems, what I know now about craft and structure. Writing and editing my debut novel, However Far Away, I have gained a discipline and rigour which has previously eluded me. In some ways, I am covering similar ground to what I covered in my two published poetry collections (themes of family and tradition, love and commitment) but the novel feels very different in terms of scope and reach.

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

My father was a published and much-admired poet, and poetry readings were a regular occurrence in my childhood home. He wrote in Punjabi and Urdu, both languages that I do not read or write. My father was only in my life for a short time before he died of a heart attack. I was ten at the time. In my late twenties I was desperate to understand my father: his life as a soldier, a headmaster, a poet, what led him to move our family across continents, why he wrote, and what he wrote. Poetry seemed to be the natural medium to examine this man and try to understand my relationship to him.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rajinderpal S. Pal

I don’t know if poems are conversations
           with God, though I tell my students to think
of poetry as a way to enter a conversation 
           that has been going on through the centuries,
but one in which they can add their voices. 
           At this point, I try to think of a party
analogy, but I have never been very good
           at parties. I would likely be among
those who sit on the edge of a couch pretending
           to nibble thoughtfully on an hors d’oeuvre, 
one among a rapt circle listening to the life of any 
          party pulling out one brilliant silk square 
after another from inside his sleeve as beautiful
          birds of thought flutter in the air.

Luisa A. Igloria, Conversations

Students on Creative Writing courses, and other writers too, are sometimes invited to events at which they will meet ‘industry experts’ – literary agents advising on how to pitch your work, and editors advising on what kind of writing they are looking for, and marketing people advising on how to use social media to promote your work. Few literary agents, in my experience, know anything about how books are actually sold, and few editors in mainstream publishing: that’s for the guys down the corridor or the IT crowd in the basement. Few editors of literary magazines, few reviewers, few authors, few journalists covering the ‘arts’. Books simply appear – by magic – in bookshops or on online retail platforms. I don’t claim expertise here myself, but I have a little more understanding than I used to and a lot more confusion.

I blame the public schools. Going back a bit, I blame the Greeks and the Romans, whose celebration of the life of the mind and disdain for manual labour – plenty of busts of emperors and philosophers, none of the engineers who designed the aqueducts (300 in the province of Gaul alone) or those that built them, mostly slaves – was incorporated into the English public schools. While claiming to instil self-reliance these schools turned out generations of men who couldn’t boil an egg or wash their own clothes, for which they too required slaves (women), including a succession of prime ministers whose ability to quote a Latin tag was perceived as intelligence. The class division enshrined here still prevails in much of UK life, publishing included. (So no, this paragraph is not irrelevant.) The media run interviews with authors and sometimes editors, people from the sexy side of publishing, but not with sales managers and printers.

The above is prompted by CBe’s problems with the listing of its titles on Amazon. Some CBe titles are not listed at all on Amazon; some are listed but don’t appear when you type the author’s name in the search box; some are listed inaccurately (the Francis Ponge book is not a ‘French edition’); some are listed but only available from third-party sellers (though the books are available to Amazon to stock if it chooses); some are listed but at vastly inflated prices: the Amazon mark-up on the cover price for 10 CBe titles is between 300 and 500%.

Most readers of this newsletter probably don’t buy CBe books from Amazon, but other potential buyers might. The authors would like to reach these people, as would I. I’ve been told that my problem is that I don’t have ‘control of the metadata’, and this is true. But even if I did have that control – transmitting data in a specific program standard to the various listing and selling parties – I’ve been told by ‘industry experts’ (them again, but here I do mean experts: people who know how this works or doesn’t) that there are interface problems between the several parties sending and taking the data (Nielsen, Gardners, distributors, Amazon and holders of vendor accounts with Amazon). If you are a bestselling author published by Penguin Random House then the Amazon will probably work for you, because they will make it work; if neither, not. You are cannon fodder.

Charles Boyle, Cheaper from Amazon: really?

(extracts from my most recent rejections)

Thank you for entering
what can I say
and thank you for your patience
we received 1,800 poems
Your entry has helped
After much deliberation
Unfortunately, we didn’t
We are sorry to say
we have not shortlisted
your poems did not make it
on this occasion
can be very disappointing
please don’t be discouraged
Please, don’t give up
keep going
hope you’ll trust us
again in the future
next time
Best wishes

Ama Bolton, Found Poem

How will you live like an artist today? This is the question I keep asking myself and I try to throw it out there into the wilderness too.

We all know the answers, but we need to hear them again and again. We need to listen to the work, our life’s work, most of all, because it tells us what we’re required to do.

I’ve written a few of these posts on living like an artist by now, but maybe this whole blog leans toward demonstrating how to live like an artist. The over and over of process. The repetitions, the ego, the lack of ego, the doubt, the joy, the humility, the humiliations! Living as a civilian, as I’ve pointed out in a book called The Flower Can Always Be Changing, is at some point no longer an option.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – The Work of Art

[Mary] Oliver was born in Ohio, so I like to claim her as a fellow Ohio poet. She lived in Provincetown, Mass., from the 1960s until the death of her partner, Molly Malone Cook, in 2005. She was living in southern Florida at the time of her death. Though the bulk of Oliver’s poems are set on the northwest tip of Cape Cod, I can’t help but see in them so much of our shared Ohio landscape: the deer, the birds, the grass, the water, the trees, the light, and the darkness. 

“I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up,” Oliver said in a 2011 interview in O Magazine. “I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.” 

I, too, spent much of my Ohio childhood walking among trees or with my nose in a book. Like Oliver, I started writing in my teens and published my first book at 28. And, yes, my work is concerned with place. It is full of deer, birds, fields, rivers, trees, light, and darkness. 

In a sense, Mary Oliver, and another Ohio poet, James Wright, gave me permission to write about Ohio’s flora and fauna. It was only natural—no pun intended—for me to write about what I saw every day, and to build metaphors using my surroundings. It did not surprise me to learn that Whitman, Emerson, Keats, and Rumi were some of Oliver’s favorite poets. These are poets of big ideas, poets who used metaphor—often based in the natural world—to build a bridge or open a door. 

I learned from Mary Oliver how attention is a kind of love, how shining your mind’s light on a thing—a grasshopper, a bird, a tree—is a way of showing gratitude. I learned that poems do not need to be “difficult” to be intelligent, that poems can be both inspirational and investigative, that poems can be tender without being soft. I learned from her to own my wonder and to stay open to uncertainty. 

Maggie Smith, On Your One Wild and Precious Life

I don’t really go through old rough drafts that often.  I was surprised to find some polished poems hiding in that rough draft file.  I started a new file so that I don’t have to dig through the rough draft file each time I want to polish a poem.  I fought off the why should I even bother blues–and I put that line in the abandoned lines document.

As I was cutting and pasting, I remembered the poem I had planned to write.  Back in early August, we had a professional development day, and one of our options was a stop the bleed workshop, where we learned how to tie a tourniquet and/or bandage a wound.  I thought back to my Girl Scout days where we learned how to tie a tourniquet using only our bandannas and sticks found in the yard–while being severely cautioned that this technique was a last ditch effort only because it would lead to a lost limb.  One of my colleagues remembers being taught to cauterize a wound with a lighter–not a technique recommended by the workshop leaders. Ah, the joys of growing up in the 70’s!

I’m still puzzling over the possibilities of that poem.  But here’s an unexpected joy.  As I was sorting, cutting, pasting, writing, I came up with a new poem, about living in seminary housing, seeing people cross the parking lot, hearing singing through the walls at night.  It’s not finished, but I have enough that I’ll remember what I was doing when I come back to it.

I’m getting a lot of writing done these days, but I have to be intentional to get poetry writing done.  I’d like to do more poetry writing.  It’s good to remember that puttering can lead to poems.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Abandoned Lines and Poetry Puttering

Maybe I relate to wasps because I saw an exhibition at the museum with all the social wasps singled out under glass bell jars, each hovering over the earth on the blunt end of a stainless steel pin.

Sometimes I can’t eat at restaurants or other people’s houses because I can taste the metal of the fork’s tines, or of the edge of the spoon’s bowl when it’s rough from use. I always have to push away the thought that it’s some kind of hex.

It tastes like pain.

If I were to paint pain, it’d be a metallic silver. Like mercury. The astata species of wasps are sometimes silver. The males, at any rate.

I have no idea if this is some kind of synesthesia. Transference. Free association.

But this is a true thing in my life. Sometimes I think the truest things in my life are the experiences that strip down to nothings. I think that’s why I’m drawn to poetry. Its witches’ work: lashing the elements of the world together to create meaning—and motion. I don’t know if belief can move a mountain, but belief in a mountain can move an entire community.

Maybe belief can resurrect the dead in pieces and in portraits such that no one can dispute, defend, or deconstruct them. You can’t deconstruct an alignment of memories. You can only shuffle them around. Like the gems in a kaleidoscope.

Ren Powell, It Tastes Like Pain

The definition of a good day
keeps changing. In “Metamorphoses”
the monsters began as beautiful,
or sometimes the reverse. The sun fell
in love, and what it loved, who it loved,
leaked thick droplets of pain. There — the end.
At least, that was the end of something.
Today was a good day. 

PF Anderson, Want (#BlogElul 6)

My long weekend is drawing to a close. It’s wet and moody out, bringing dusk earlier and earlier. The days are slowing down and I’m giving in to them. There’s never enough time, there’s still a sense of urgency different from what I get in the summer. To nest, to harvest, to prepare for what’s coming. 

I’ve made banana bread, apple cake and applesauce cake for home and school, two types of chicken with apples and applesauce. All trying to use up my apples from my cinnamon apple tree. I’ve wrangled my reluctant daughter into dinner, homework and taking out the rubbish, but not a shower. Compromise. 

And writing, I’ve managed a little. Sent out some submissions, one already declined. I’ve fought with a poem that I can see but can’t express. It’s coming, gradually. 

Gerry Stewart, Moving into Autumn, Moving On

at the sadness of a falling leaf
we call the wind felicity
it’s agreed
the seance ends
a broken butterfly wing knocks once

then silence

Jim Young, we call the wind felicity

This week: Amanda Gorman’s hollow place, a zone of ambiguous meaning, the next life like a footfall in the heart, a day without birdsong, the music of ghosts, and more. Enjoy!

My best poem of last summer…a winsome stranger.
When then friends asked about a line, I confided 

its secret.  I was so tuned.  Now Greece is far away,
another September song come. I lean in.  

As I stand by the window slicing tomatoes and bread, 
the inside of the chant gives….   

No shade between us then.  Pure radiance.  
Voicing summer’s depth. To carry into go-go fall.

Jill Pearlman, Inside the Summer Chant

I have made it through the Sealey Challenge, through 32 total books and out the other side of August (34 if you count Ravenna Press’s Triple as 3 chapbooks). I posted a photograph on Instagram of each cover with the day’s number, with the exception of this book. (For day 13, I posted another cover a second time.)

Let us admit that I got a bit lost at times. What book did I read yesterday? What book am I reading today? But, as these things go, each day brought stand-out poems, and — by the end — certain books loomed. Not necessarily that they were better or worse than others, but their impact on me, at the particular time (and mood) I found myself in, created a greater impact.

A literature professor once said to me, and to her class of graduate students. “I know it’s a lot of reading, but when the wave recedes I hope you’ll be able to tell what flecks of foam have stuck to you and left the greatest impression.” That’s how it feels this morning.

So.

Carol Frost’s Honeycomb (TriQuarterly Books, 2010) was one of those impactful books. The poems in this, her ninth collection, address her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, a journey I’ve also undergone. It’s hard not to quote the description on the cover, because it’s true: she writes “with unflinching sincerity and courage.”

Her mother’s memory loss is only one theme. The other, woven throughout every poem, is the decline in the bee population. Flying insects of all kinds are growing endangered, and the loss of our native pollinators is a disaster that really can’t be countenanced or compensated.

As is the loss of one’s mother. The poems are a perfect marriage of spirit and humanity and nature.

Bethany Reid, HONEYCOMB, poems by Carol Frost

Last week Cane returned to school, and I was reminded that for me, September will likely always be the start of a new year, one of my favorite seasons. I love new beginnings, the return to milder weather, and the lack of formal holidays. It is the time of year I feel most energized and hopeful. For me, it’s a much better time than January for new routines and intentions. I need them this year more than ever, as we’re forging a new normal. It’s the first time since I retired from full-time education work three years ago that we haven’t had one of my children living with us.

As I’ve been pondering what I want to bring in and let go of, two recent reads have been so useful.

Diana Strinati Bauer, in “The beauty that is aging,” suggests that the important question to ask ourselves isn’t how we can somehow hang onto youth (because we can’t) but is instead, “Who do I want to be on the day that I die?” She writes about wanting to be her “best me,” and doesn’t that sound like a great thing for all of us to be?

“Who do I want to be on the day that I die?” doesn’t feel morbid or gloomy to me, but clarifying. The more death becomes a concrete reality than a fuzzy, some-day abstraction, the more purposeful I get about living.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Spring cleaning and new year’s intentions

Lots of poets and literary types have been dismissive on social media about the poem Amanda Gorman wrote for the Democratic National Convention in the States. You can read the text of her poem here (you need to scroll down), but this is a piece of writing designed to be heard, so it’s probably better to watch or listen to her performance of it: [YouTube link]

I didn’t love Gorman’s poem — and I am certainly not its target audience — but I don’t think it’s terrible, and in lots of ways it seemed well suited to its occasion. It certainly seems silly to suggest that it’s not a poem at all (as some people have). It’s no more clichéd than a lot of published poems I see in top journals and winning prizes, even if the clichés it is dealing in — and the rhetorical tradition on which it draws — are quite different. This made me wonder what was so alienating or annoying about Gorman’s piece for many discerning readers of poetry, including many who are vastly more tolerant than me of the sort of prosy-introspection-with-a-couple-of-OK-metaphors that often passes for a prize-winning contemporary poem?

Victoria Moul, Amanda Gorman’s hollow place and the Carmen Saeculare

The marvelous chutzpah of Le Guin, to finish her career by writing a novel celebrating piety for an audience teeming with libertarian tech bros and lefty utopians! My delight in Lavinia grows and grows.

And having just got as far as Book VII in rereading the Aeneid, I’m staggered by a) how faithful she is to Virgil and b) how faithful she is to Ursula Le Guin. Her conversation with Virgil is a conversation between equals. 

The model of the book, maybe, is the intimate conversations in the sacred grove between Lavinia and the sending of Virgil: a girl speaking on equal terms with the incarnate Western Tradition. Just a conversation, between a girl and a dying poet. 

Le Guin is aware, no one better, that he is dying, and that we need to bring his lares and penates to a new shore.

“But what is piety?” asked Aeneas.
That brought a thoughtful silence.

Dale Favier, But What Is Piety?

I don’t have as much time for writing this morning–I spent some of my writing time making a peach chutney for dinner tonight.  I am remembering the first time I made a chutney–there was a recipe for a complete Indian meal in Mollie Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest Cookbook, and I tried the whole thing.  It was a revelation, the way different flavors combined in a way I had never tasted and would never have thought to put together.  It was long ago, and we didn’t have Indian restaurants in Knoxville, Tennessee where I lived.  The most exotic food we had was Chinese, and it wasn’t exactly authentic.

This morning’s chutney making has led to an interesting poem that I’m in the process of writing:  peaches that cling, a woman who has dropped her youngest off at college, the passing of the seasons, the growing up of children.  It may be done, but there may be more, so I’ll let it rest and see.

I am amazed:  two solid poem ideas in two days.  I have spent much of the summer wondering if I can even call myself a poet anymore.  I have written down a line or two each week, but that hardly makes me a poet.

Let me lace up my walking shoes and let this poem continue to percolate.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Peach Chutney and Poems

Listening to a Giles Peterson podcast the other day I was catapaulted back to a night  upstairs in a London pub listening to saxophonist Lol Coxhill and poet Bob Cobbing. I didn’t know anything about either of them, although I’d heard Cobbing’s name from a lecturer on my degree course. But the point of this is that Peterson’s podcast and the experimental jazz he was playing could have been from the early 1980s. Except we didn’t have podcasts. We went to the pub. I’d been going to the pub to hear music in fact since I was 14. It was allowed in those days. I started with a folk club in Crondall, where I also saw Alexis Korner. 

I couldn’t tell you the name of either pub but those gigs of Coxhill, Cobbing and Korner have stuck in my mind for decades. Experimental jazz takes listening and concentration. As does sound poetry like Cobbing did. And I was led to Peterson because I’d been listening to an improvised session my son did and it was brilliant. 

I’m creating very little right now. The demands of caring overtake everything. I earmark pockets of time when I might squeeze out a poem. I compensate with time travel. And a reminder to be open to the new, which may not actually be that new, but is experiment, improvisation and keeping going. Which is what I witnessed in that upstairs room. An absolute belief in just getting on with it. 

Jackie Wills, The mirror of the present and getting on with it

My thesis is this: there is value in broadening how you define your craft. Every new genre or form can school us in what we see as our “true” calling, and enrich it. When I joined my MA program for Creative Writing, I was a staunch anti-poet. Couldn’t see the point in it; all that spare, high-minded opacity. I was a Short Story Writer dammit, could spare no time for stanzas. But I needed to complete the poetry semester to pass. Spoiler alert, I now adore the form. It’s taught me to be brutal with word choice and concrete imagery, hammered home the value of understatement. Reading about William Carlos Williams’ “plums that were in the icebox […] / so sweet and so cold” was a revelation. Here was a rich tableaux of yearning and place, short as a tweet but achingly powerful.

In the job market there’s a phrase beloved by suits: transferable skills. It applies to the arts too. The better I got at poetry, the more vivid my stories and essays became. I have since written 200 poems, whole megabytes of them complete garbage fires, but each one a stepping stone. For better or worse, poems come quickly to me, which means I can look back at things penned just months ago and say, I am better now.

The better I got at poetry, the more vivid my stories and essays became.

Daniel Seifert, Swim Another Lane: Why You Should Write Outside Your Comfort Zone

Nothing is as relaxing as sustained concentration. Work is its own company. Unlike face to face conversations where responses are interpreted, weighed, collated and applied to new information, in poetry, reading or writing, you can just be while the poetry is. It’s like covert mind-melding. Intimate yet clinical or casual. Did I mention freeing?

Every book has a bit of that feeling of meeting in the equalizing blank face of font. Sure, typography is a clue, justification gives a read or cover aesthetic, paper weights, thickness, margins, gloss, sentence shapes, but largely it’s plugging into a brain through text. That’s freeing. That decluttering of identity to what is typed, that reach past circumstances of geography. That invisibility of reception so you can take your time absorbing, rereading, reflecting. It’s cut off from some of the complexity.

We can live in the time-sensitive, instant everything. You can research every node, build context from each thing mentioned into tangents to extract meaning. It can be a slow delve or intense as you want. Like people you meet once or twice a year for decades, building a picture in time lapse. And you can just not respond. Take it in, tuck it away or discard it. It can exist in a zone of ambiguous meaning, simultaneously in parallel mutually cancelling categories without being called out for not judging decisively in adjectives.

Pearl Pirie, Community

Drumroll, please…after four finalist nods, one runner-up designation, and many rejections, my manuscript Unrivered was accepted at Sundress Publications for a late 2025 release! This one is important to me. Stay tuned for lots of information as we roll things out. We are currently beginning the editorial process and I’m dreaming big for sharing this book—my last collection came out during lockdown, and I’m ready to support this one as well as I can.

What did I learn from this? To persevere if I believe the work is worth sharing. To not give up on myself, even in a publishing landscape that is PACKED with writers who all believe just as firmly in their work. To celebrate my successes. To keep going.

Donna Vorreyer, It’s Been A Summer

This was a magic night. I’m so happy it was captured, recorded and broadcast on the BBC this weekend. Tune in on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds to hear this wonderful and uplifting poetry gig.

I performed some pieces I haven’t performed before: two ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ poems, a rousing version of ‘Tell Good People Good Things’. Plus the gentle and surreal ‘Umbilical’ and a glorious sharing of ‘My Heart Is A Boat’ with a united and soft singing chorus at the end, singing in solidarity.

I felt very emotional, vulnerable and privileged to share my new work and these particular pieces on this stage and in this space and time. I also think this is the first time that I have had a whole set aired on BBC radio – it isn’t often as a poet you have much time, let alone a whole set, if you listen to this you can really get a sense of the performance energy, the beautiful human connection in the heart of the room. My lovely mum, sister, friends and family are in the audience at The Purcell Room on the Southbank — So I particularly love this gig memory. Thank you to Ian McMillan and Joelle Taylor for the stunning introductions and my fellow star poets Imtiaz Dharker and Rachael Allen, thank you to all the brilliant Verb and Outspoken crew and the generous Southbank audience.

Salena Godden, ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ LIVE on The Adverb at Outspoken

When I could see the publication whirlwind approaching, I was a bit worried I’d go into overdrive and burn myself out, which has, previously, been a way of being in control of the anxiety. It’s taken a while to work out that it is much more beneficial to find moments of existence, of peace and ‘being’ in the whirlwind. It’s those small pools of connecting to the world that really help and allow me to regain my energy levels and be the best I can be.

1. Walking. I’ve made time to walk and made sure that I saw that as equally important to my promotion work around the book. Yesterday I got caught in a light, late summer rain shower and stood under the trees listening to the water running over the leaves. Those ten minutes did so much for my sense of peace and belonging.
2. Reading. Not just stuff that I know I should be reading for events, research etc, but joy reading, comfort reading. Currently I’m re reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. There is something gloriously peaceful and nourishing about stacking yourself up with pillows and sitting on the bed reading while the world turns.
3. Gardening. My garden is out of hand. But just taking a few minutes daily to deadhead the roses, or trim the ivy, this is also a place of peace, of making sure my hands are in the earth, on the green leaves, in direct physical contact with the seasons.

This is success.

Wendy Pratt, How I’m defining success this week

We have salt from sieving sea water
through singed husks, charcoal, and ash.

We have stars because a woman took off
her adornments to pound rice in the mortar.

We have pineapples because a child
couldn’t find anything she was asked to find.

What of the origins of fire or flood, drought or war?
Centuries ago, boats with cannons landed on our shores.

Luisa A. Igloria, Fables

Earlier, I wrote a draft of a general post that encapsulated the past week, but I lost it when blogger glitched out on me before saving. In it, there were awesomely disturbing movies, new tattoos, and the usual ramblings about weather. But I don’t want to write it all out again, so instead I thought I’d write about books and seasons. How mariana feels like the perfect project to be working on now, with all its sea and salt-drenched monsters. How my final edits on ruinporn, which will be coming as soon as September arrives, is a very fall project filled with decay and crumbling houses, just as much as the carnival poems I just finished earlier this month felt very summery and swampy. 

Looking back, the fever almanac, though it was published in the fall was always a summer book, while in the bird museum was very winterish.  girl show and major characters… were definitely summer, but shared properties…was more spring.  salvage, with all its mermaids was summer, while sex & violence and little apocalypse were definitely autumnal. In newer titles I would say dark country, collapsologies, and granata are pure summer, while feed, automagic and animal, vegetable, monster are definitely winter or fall. 

Sometimes it’s about subject matter and imagery (Victorian inspired books def have a colder weather vibe while things like the Persephone book are more sunlit and Mediterranean.) It doesn’t necessarily have to do with when it was written, but I suppose timing also may have some impact, since I tend to like to work on summer-ish projects during warm weather months.  This fall, I have plans for a couple things that may be winterish in nature, so will probably wait til November to start them. 

Kristy Bowen, books and seasons

The last few years have led to a substantial backlog of poems and manuscripts for me, and I’ve wondered about the best way to handle these. While I’ve released my work through Dead Mall Press in the past, I’ve decided that further cluttering up the catalogue with the editor’s books would do a disservice to the other writers published there. After some reflection, I’ve decided to launch a new “Bookstore” feature here on the blog. There, you’ll see approx. half a dozen chapbooks of my own appear for sale across the next several months (unless I lose my mind in the process). All books will be $10 flat, shipping included. And if you pledge a paid subscription, the books will be heavily discounted (you’ll just pay a portion of the shipping).

RM Haines, A Dark Address (Redux)

Just like chess, sports and the arts can become our refuge from reality too. When we ware caught up with the Olympics spectacle, we could stop watching the massacres in Gaza and Sudan. The inclusion of Myanmar in the Games normalized junta rule in that country. Sporting rivalry could potentially defuse political and military conflict—fight on the soccer field, not on the battlefield—but it doesn’t.

Poetry, which is the form of art I know best, could be deployed to socio-political ends, and it is. Our press Gaudy Boy has published some of the best political poetry in Jeddie Sophronius’ Interrogation Records, Jhani Randhawa’s Time Regime, and Jim Pascual Agustin’s Waking Up to the Pattern Left By a Snail Overnight. But as a practitioner of the dark art myself, I know intimately that writing about the thing is not the thing itself. When writing, I’m paying attention to, and enjoying, the sound and shape of words. I’m undisturbed at home, and not out on the streets, protesting. 

The best political poetry, I think, betrays this guilty consciousness. Like all poetry, it is double-minded. It is an existential lesson underlined by Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. The novel never gives us the actual chess defensive strategy, and Luzhin finds it in the end only by—. You will have to read the book to find out.

Jee Leong Koh, The Luzhin Defense

John Burnside’s swansong Ruin, Blossom was too full of Catholic theology for my taste, but did also include some memorable poems, chief among them ‘The Night Ferry’, which reads now like a death poem, in the Japanese tradition, with this ending:

Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now, with the chart.
The ferry at the dock, lit
stern to bow,
the next life like a footfall in my heart.

The repetition of ‘done’ and the mention of ‘the compass’ in the same breath must be a nod to Donne’s great poem ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’.

Matthew Paul, July–August reading

But There’s So Much DIY to IVF That We Can’t Be Sure by Toby Goostree
This collection of poems is an up-close look at what it is like going through IVF to conceive a child. Many of the poems directly connect Old Testament characters with the writer and his wife’s personal journey through IVF (one of my favorites was “Moses,” which you can hear the author read aloud on his website). Another of my favorites was “The Blessing,” which recounts in brief the story of Jacob wrestling, connecting it to how one may wrestle through prayer, and ending on the question “Why did we close our eyes if / not to be vulnerable?”. I’m going to be honest, sometimes the poems told me MORE than I wanted to know about IVF, but, as someone who has read Sharon Olds, nothing shocks me anymore.

Renee Emerson, Who Eats What?, the Borrowers, Works of Mercy & more

“Ox and Mandarin | Wayfaring Strangers” is subtitled “A Counterfeit Zodiac” and uses two characters, Ox and Mandarin (and here the latter is the fruit, not the language or bureaucrat) […] The poems follow a reliable, hard-working character and his opposite, a story-teller, go-with-the-flow ball of sunshine. The poems meander across the page as both try to find their way through life, dancing around each other, circling but not quite meeting, leaving plenty of space for readers to complete the blanks.

Emma Lee, “Ox and Mandarin | Wayfaring Strangers” Milla van der Have (Hareific) – book review

Clare Goulet has apparently written a whole volume of poems devoted to lichen. I love this. I’ve ordered the book on the strength of encountering this lovely poem. It’s not grand in its ambitions, rather it gives an ear to the ear-like “elf-ear” lichen to hear what it’s hearing down there on the wood shelf.

I’ve been charging around mumbling about the meaning of life of late, wandering the roads of my rooms and neighborhood blind to my step. I’ve stopped short of flinging my arms about, but only just. Thanks heavens I was stopped in my tracks, however briefly, by the moment held in this poem.

The poem reads nicely in the mouth — full of r’s and hard and soft ch’s with some flicks of k. Read it aloud yourself, you’ll see. The poem asks us to slow the hell down, to look down, to crouch down, take a breath, give an eye, lend an ear. Wondrous things are everywhere around us.

Marilyn McCabe, You must reshape yourself

The latest from San Diego poet Rae Armantrout [see my review of her prior collection here] is Go Figure (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024), adding a further heft to an already heft of multiple award-winning poetry collections going back decades. There is something intriguing about how the poems in Go Figure cluster, offering Armantrout as less a poet of single, self-contained poems than sequences of gestural sweeps that cohere into this meditative book-length suite, threading through numerous ebbs and flows as she goes. Her poems interact with each other, including poems that end sans punctuation, suggesting a kind of ongoingness, beyond the scope of the single page. As the opening of the poem “SHRINK WRAP” reads: “An idea is / an arrangement // of pictures / of things // shrunken / to fit // in the brain / of a human.” Armantrout’s poems are constructed through extended lines of precise, abstract thinking, providing specifics that accumulate into something far larger, and far more coherent, than the sum of their parts. Armantrout’s poems throughout Go Figure offer points on a grid progressing a single extended sequence of thought, as the author addresses culture, climate and financial crises, as well as echoes and influence from her grandchildren. At the core, Armantrout’s poems articulate how our experiences are held by and solidified through words, the very foundation of language that allow shape and coherence, meaning and context to those very same experiences. As the poem “DOTS” opens:

Poems elongate moments.

“My pee is hot,” she said,
dreamily, mildly
surprised

There is something, too, about the openness of her lyric: if you haven’t read Armantrout’s work before, one might say that any book of hers might be a good place to start, but I’ll say this: if you haven’t read her work before, Go Figure is a good place to start.

rob mclennan, Rae Armantrout, Go Figure

For the last week I’ve been away in Scotland with my husband and daughter – it has been a week filled with rain and un-forecast sunshine, and lots of driving on narrow roads that wind along the side of lochs and past mountains with tops covered in mist and green everywhere – thick vegetation and ancient woodland.

We’ve been staying in a house in the Highlands, courtesy of a friend. I was very excited to find a copy of My Name is Abilene (Salt, 2023) by Elisabeth Sennit Clough, a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. I met Elisabeth on a residential voice coaching course that Ledbury Poetry Festival ran – this was many years ago. More recently, I saw her from afar reading from the collection at the Forward Prizes, as the collection was shortlisted for Best Collection last year.

On the back of the book, John Greening says that the collection is ‘almost a verse novel’ and I agree with this – both because of it’s page-turning qualities – I read it all in one go, cover to cover as if I was reading a novel, but also because of the way Elisabeth uses characters to hold what is a fragmented narrative together.

Kim Moore, Poetry Diary feat. poem by Elisabeth Sennit Clough

We went to see the Grit Orchestra this week and they played a piece called Karabach. It came out of Martyn Bennett’s experience working in refugee camps in Armenia, and before the orchestra played, they ran the actual recording which inspired the piece. A little girl is singing to herself, very beautifully, very unselfconsciously, while in the background you can hear the sound of bombs falling continuously in the distance.

This recording is not just poignant and moving. It doesn’t just inspire outrage that we can do this to people. There is no moral to be drawn about resistance to evil, or the beauty of the human spirit. It simply tells us that art is survival. We don’t just need it, it isn’t just therapy – though it can be therapeutic and consoling and inspiring, of course. It is simply the expression of who we are. Creativity cannot be regarded as a luxury to be indulged in when the real important stuff is done. Once human beings are physically safe, creativity – music, stories, visual arts, drama – is their next most vital need. It’s how we build community. It’s how we access spirituality. The self-righteous who complain about unemployed people having television, refugees going to poetry classes, the provision of music classes rather than job ready training see other people as less than human.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Between the Human Places

Where the tenth elegy ends, another
grief begins. How many times, have we,
unknowing, cried out to Rilke’s angel? How
many times has she called but we have
not heard? Have not understood? What
if that epiphany in which the visible
universe unscrambles into meaning,
never comes […]

Rajani Radhakrishnan, After the elegies

My family is in the thick of carline mornings, both parents working, cusp of fall. I find myself so grateful for the access to books, texts, reading recommendations—especially digital and audio, especially via library apps like Libby. I’m always listening to a novel on audiobook, now (Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie at the moment, Piranesi by Susannah Clarke and Witch King by Martha Wells before that, and all The Murderbot Diaries this summer!), and podcasts accompany me when I walk or do the dishes, laundry. I love reading something just before bed—James Tate, lately (highly recommend his Selected Poems), but that quiet time solely with a book is rather rare. Of course there’s the kind of neurodivergent attention which does WELL doing multiple things (hello folks who knit and sew during tv, lectures, audiobooking), so I’m happy to accommodate my busy life with audio.

Although my job right now is writing faculty tutor at Wake Tech Community College here in North Carolina, I have a kind and supportive boss who secured grant money for me to lead a (free for students!) Friday creative writing workshop, and that begins today. I’m really grateful for this—the job, the workshop. Community-making. Academia is a mess right now, and it’s hard inside and outside traditional professor jobs. I think I’m—well, really happy working at Wake, and having time for Of Poetry Podcast (Fall guests & episodes include Sebastian Paramo, Nicholas Molbert, Molly Peacock and Dana Delibovi, Carolyn Oliver, Abbie Kiefer, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, and Sarah Carey!) and Moist Poetry Journal. We’re just wrapping up our Deep Summer publishing period at Moist, and you should check out these lovely poems, including three new visual poems by poet and collagist Sarah J. Sloat, whose work I love!

Han VanderHart, The When and Where of Reading & Generosity as a Practice

This was my second festival leading the poetry workshops as a disabled artiste. I was lucky to have an accessible venue and a really lovely group of people attending, some of them regulars, others new people. Most attendees returned to all four sessions. Each session comprises a ‘hot penning’ warm up from a prompt line, followed by two detailed exercises, which often include notes and a range of stimuli. Some are especially appropriate to Whitby Folk Week, others more general. We have some silent writing time and some sharing time with feedback. Every year I am impressed by the quality of work produced. Our last session is always one exercise preceded by a hot penning, then the last hour is a readaround where every participant reads two poems (if they wish) and I conclude with a short reading of my own work. This gives a satisfying close to the four sessions. I had some fabulous attendees this year and I hope they will return in future.

Angela Topping, Whitby Folk Week 2024

I’m sharing the following poem because it’s breathtaking. It’s haunting. It’s complex. In the middle of it, “a woman slaughtered for wonder.” So, it’s devastating. I keep hearing the voice in my head, “are we not of interest to each other” from the Elizabeth Alexander poem and yes, this voice in this poem, this writer, yes, you are of interest.

Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – When People Say

A Facebook “memory” brought up something that caused me to do a brief life assessment—it was a blog post from about six years ago, when I was 45. The post was angry, frustrated, obviously a person who was struggling with many things in her life. Now six years later, I wonder why I was so angry. Of course, I had had a terminal liver cancer diagnosis the year before, and then an MS diagnosis—two things so devastating, and complicated by the fact that I have friends that still to this day have not called me since those two events (losing friends is tough, but I guess those weren’t real friends, as my mother would have said to me in eighth grade). The terminal diagnosis was wrong, at least a little premature, though I still have a liver full of tumors, and the MS diagnosis was wrenching, though years of physical, vestibular, speech therapies have helped a lot of the symptoms. I was frustrated by what I felt like was a stagnant writing career, full of frustrated ambition. (It could also have been the beginning of perimenopause, often punctuated by mood swings.) One good thing about blogs is that they capture a certain moment in time, in your life. Was I feeling lucky that we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic, that I could go to the movies or dentist relatively freely? No, I was not. Ah, hindsight. […]

At 51, I wish I could tell my previous self about what was to come: the pandemic and all it would change, the fact that I would make new friends (and renew old friendships unexpectedly), that my marriage would improve, that my writing career might not be rocketing towards stardom but feels like enough to me these days. (I did have a book come out to some success, some good reviews, appearances in Poetry Magazine and Poetry Daily that bolstered my confidence, among other things. But also, a shift in mindset about what constitutes “enough” success?) That I would build connections to my community (and a pretty decent garden) during the covid years. That though things aren’t perfect, I no long feel as frustrated in my daily life. My health isn’t perfect, but my dental hygienist commented on how much better I was doing physically than five years ago, which caused me to wonder—what is she noticing that I haven’t about improvements in my overall well-being? I’m no longer in a wheelchair all the time, many of my MS symptoms are less acute, I’ve been getting treatment for more of my weirdo stuff. I lost weight during the last four years and increased my bone density, not usual at 51! I feel grateful for these positive changes, though sometimes they’re so gradual you might not remark on them.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, September Begins: Changing Seasons and Life Assessments, Reunions with Old Friends, and Back to Work

Today, August 29, is the 19th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the New Orleans levee system. It’s an event that residents of New Orleans and the Mississippi gulf coast who experienced it will never forget. There have been essays, memoirs, books, songs, and all kinds of art made from this disaster. Today I’m sharing an essay I wrote that was published in Atticus Review in 2021. There are many more eloquent accounts than this but this is my story.

[…]

Days passed. The whine of patrolling helicopters and the growl of chainsaws were our only company. Have you ever experienced a day without birdsong? There were no birds. Or traffic noise? There were no buses, no moms driving kids to school, no one going to work. Or a city in total darkness at night? There were no streetlights. All but two homes on our block sat as empty as a politician’s promise. We were under curfew, but it didn’t matter. There was no place to go.

So, I blogged. I coped by writing about beauty, wonder, love—while bubbled in a suspended life. I researched and wrote about local history, about space and astronomy. Armchair visited other countries and cultures. I discovered other local bloggers who were sharing disaster relief information, dispelling wild myths circulating about what was happening, and raining hell on people saying New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt. These bloggers were the first writers—grassroots writers—I came to know in real life.

They wrote about the strange lives we were living, the collapse of the city infrastructure, the incompetent response of the government. They wrote about the growing piles of garbage, the stink, the coffin flies, nails in your tires, how to clean out rotting food from freezers and refrigerators or how to duct-tape them closed and haul them to the curb. They wrote about dozens of fires from leaking gas lines, the heroics of the NOFD who worked beyond exhaustion. They wrote about rich men planning to move our beloved football team to another city. They wrote about the lack of healthcare and the growing number of suicides and deaths by stress and grief. They tried to hold insurance companies and politicians accountable, swapped info about blue tarps, Red Cross stations, food lines, medication shortages. They gave me something to hold on to and kept me company in that long dark autumn. Despite the tragedy that spawned this network of bloggers, it was a golden era in the New Orleans online writing community.

*

Dreams can be warnings but also opportunities. Someone dreamed of an invisible superhighway, accessible to all, connecting all, creating community across time and space. In that way, the Internet is like a dream we are all having, a déjà rêvé of time and space and memory.

Charlotte Hamrick, DÉJÀ RÊVÉ IN THE GULF

earlier this year
there was a small earthquake
& books fell from all the shelves
in my house. you called me after
& said, “are you still alive?” you had been
in the woods & felt the ground tremble.
there are these little moments that
teach us urgency.

Robin Gow, instructions on finding a place to scream &/or being a sibling

Now that school’s back in—first year of middle school for my son, sophomore year of high school for my daughter—I have my days to myself again. I’m deep into a new writing project, which means some mornings I sit down with my laptop and then look up to realize it’s 2:30 in the afternoon, I forgot to eat lunch, and the kids will be out of school in an hour. I love that sense of flow, when you’re really in it. […]

I do want to heartily recommend Susan Rich’s latest book of poems, Blue Atlas. If you know her work, you’re one of the lucky ones—and if you don’t, you’re about to become one of the lucky ones. The opening poem, “This Could Happen,” is the perfect invitation, pulling the reader inside.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

It has been one year since I started this blog and my new relationship with Mondays. This time a year ago I decided to start a blog as a way of documenting my year and holding myself accountable whilst I started a new journey in life. I had handed back the keys to the primary school I had been head of for seventeen years, and I wasn’t buying new shoes for a new term or planning my first assembly of the school year. I decided to see what the air smelt like each Monday morning as each new week began.

I see now why I focus on providing time for people to ‘think, breathe and be’ when I work as a coach. I definitely needed time for those three things at that period of immense change. This is wonderfully illustrated by the fact that when I started this blog I didn’t immediately record it as a podcast. This came a few weeks later when I had begun to land in my new space and find the voice that went with it.

The title of the podcast, ‘Singing as the Darkness Lifts’, comes from my love of and gratitude for three things:

• the sound of birds welcoming the dawn,
• the feeling of darkness lifting,
• the moments of joy that make my heart sing

Start and keep going. That’s been a useful motto for me. I know that small things repeated will make a difference and I know that it is better to get started than wait to be fully ready. I think it would have taken me a very long time to feel fully ready for blogging or podcasting. In fact there is a distinct possibility that neither would have happened if I had waited for that kind of feeling. And, I knew that at the very least I would have a pretty impressive diary for my year even if nothing else came from putting my words into the world.

Sue Finch, A NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH MONDAYS

This morning, waiting for the dog to do his thing in the front yard, I saw a bee and two species of wasps hovering over the goldfinger blossoms. I realise how much I have changed in a year. In little ways like this. I’m calmer now when I meet them. […]

Earlier this week a woman struck up a conversation, telling me about how important it is for us to take care of nature. When I told her that I was currently learning a lot about wasps for a book I am working on, and that I had a new appreciation for them, she told me that they need to be eradicated from the suburbs where people live because they were too dangerous. I started to counter but stopped. I stopped because only the night before, I’d seen a theater production where the monologist talked about nature. Nature as a balm for all the stress we have in our lives. You know the trope: clouds, flowers, the sound of winds in the trees. That kind of nature. The kind of idealised version of things worth protecting because it is useful to us. Nature as kitsch. The idea of nature.

I’ve learned that there is a time and a place for real discussions, and it was not the time nor the place to try to scratch into something covered with so much varnish. Let her save the nature she holds at arm’s-length.

That matters, too.

During the 1800s, the Romantics created present nostalgia, with their soft monsters, and softer comforts. Ibsen went from Peer Gynt to Ghosts, riding the pendulum of contemporary art we saw in the 1900s. Naturalism: Antoine projected films of maggots in rotting meat onto bodies on the stage in order to “get real”. But it was the idea of real.

This week I’ve been thinking about “getting real” and what that means in art. Is it even something to aspire to? Anything filmed, photographed, staged, framed, is removed from what is real. Denis Dutton argued that this kind of special focus is what defines art as discrete from real life.

A wasp pinned on a specimen board is not—not really—a wasp anymore. Neither is a single memory, a real life.

At this point, I’m finding this thought freeing.

Ren Powell, The Illusion of Real

I belong nowhere.
Not in a fierce wind.
Nor in a month’s rain
in one dark day.

The music of ghosts,
their laughter,
the impression left
on the shroud.

Bob Mee, SMALL POEMS IN AUGUST

天高くなんにもなく青く　山本素竹　

ten takaku nannimo naku aoku

            high autumn sky

            nothing there

            and blue

                                                Sochiku Yamamoto

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 27, 2024)