This week: a hell hole, relearning the world, wormy things from the sea bed, a single blue tree, and much more. Enjoy.

Three bullets fired. A poet shot in the face.

I read her lines. I read them again. How her poem begins with I want and ends with dies there. In one lilting tower, there is ovum, sperm, and wonder. I wanted, also. More of her lines. But I couldn’t find them, so I took a walk to Hell.

Hell, where like her body, it is cold. People huddle together now for warmth. Some tempt fate, balancing themselves on the frozen surface of the watering hole. Everything is putrid, being eaten, digested, spewed. A flute up the ass here. A pig guised as a nun there. I hide in the eye of a donkey skull and look about. A man’s body is skewered in the strings of a harp. Dark birds fly out of a man’s ass as he’s being eaten by a bird-man who shits out people into a hell hole. Into the hell hole, a man vomits his wine and another man shits out wafers.

Smoke wafts in from the faraway fires in the background. Nothing is good here. Not even the birds. Not the skin or earth or sounds. God is panels away and out of control of his creation. A shell of a man is bright in this hellscape. Poised on his tree trunk arms, he looks back at a ladder that leads up into his eggshell torso where people gamble in the darkness. He watches his own ruin, the calmest look on his face.

I slide down the nose of the donkey skull and land where the ladder is. Do I climb? Do I steal a brass instrument from a demon and make my own music?

Sarah Lada, In the Garden of Earthly Horrors

The poem knows that paradise has been lost – that’s a clear-eyed assessment.  It gathers evidence and clues without putting together answers or a coherent narrative.  Is it environmental destruction?  Malfeasance?  Incompetence?  But on the loss of paradise, it isn’t giving up. 

If anything, paradise is lost, then regained through poetry.  The poem’s title, “U-topias,” refers to the original meaning of utopia, no-place.  That could be a name for poetry itself.  Poetry is the place, and it is involved in restoring lost value in the world.  Restoration through humble things. The humblest of things.  The world of love and things of the earth.  Rebirth of paradise in the heart.

Jill Pearlman, U-topias

We are now out at the very, very edge of the textual record, and maybe the beginning of our cultural memory, when language and writing began to give us a notion of ourselves. The writing becomes the weather; whatever the runes are saying, their presence is as much a matter of this place as the weather or this lump of slate or anything else.

‘Sleep is the other half of us … It is us, in our absence’. (Marie Darrieussecq, Sleeplessness). These poems explore paths we’re not quite aware we are following; and the tracks we trace, half-consciously, into the future.

Lesley Harrison, Presencing

throw away the key. i will eat
with my eyes. pay an application fee
to look at the moon. they say it is withering
with each poet’s glance. that we must conserve it.
soon we will run out of metaphors
& we will have to start screaming.

Robin Gow, 1/15

There are very specific memories around the traumatic events of the day he died, which I intend to write about more someday (one poem I wrote in the thick of deep grief describes it, I still cannot read it aloud), but the day he died, he was very quiet. It was the quietness that was the most striking but probably, in hindsight, not the most surprising. His voice was near silent. He slept quite a bit. He looked at me with worry yet strangely far away.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Intuition. Connection. Voices.

There are two ideas that have stuck in my mind from my professors back when, which I still find unescapable. The first was my Milton professor, who claimed that Milton was the last man to know everything at a time when it was possible to know everything. I knew even then that the professor was very wrong (how much did Milton know of the ideas of the East, for instance?), but still, I envied the idea that such a thing could be possible. The second comes from a lecture by Mary Reufle in graduate school, where she was reading from the letters of Emily Dickinson, noting how there was no distinction between Dickinson’s poems and the letters—she had one mind, one voice, and it filtered all the world as poetry.

Of course, I want that to be me.

But I don’t speak in poems. And my work-a-day emails don’t bear a trace of lyricism. Does that make me less of a poet? Or, was Emily Dickinson just very lucky to not have a day job (and a 21st-century one at that)?

Carrie Olivia Adams, Opening & Closing Lines for Your January

In January 2021, during the second lockdown, I hosted an online discussion of the books on the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist that year. A poll at the end showed the audience favourite was the outsider choice: Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry). The judges agreed. Kapil’s sequence of vivid, compact free-verse poems about the violence of colonialism (figured as a house stay) is, to my mind, one of the best books to win the prize. A new book, Autobiography of a Performance (The 87 Press), presents extracts from all her work woven into scripts made with the multidisciplinary artist, Blue Pieta. […]

Kapil fans will want to know that she has a new prose poem in Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (Faber), the first anthology of nature writing by African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora poets in the UK, edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf. Another new poem in here that I enjoyed was Moniza Alvi’s “At Walberswick”, which considers the fact that some locals in the Suffolk coastal village claim to have seen two circus elephants ferried across the River Blyth, and yet no evidence for this newsworthy event survives.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #39: The Patter of Thaw

A few weeks ago, the Best American Poetry blog ended. And when it disappeared, hundreds of interviews and reviews and insightful posts by and about famous poets and writers vanished with it. I am still grieving its loss. But it’s not all bad. A new blog will soon begin—this one from Etruscan Press. There will be new posts on poetry and all things literary weekly as well as old posts from Best American and other places. I will keep you posted . . .

But before that happens, I wanted to post a review by Dante DeStafano that appeared on BAP, and of course, is now gone.

I admit that posting this review makes me feel a little queasy. It is so kind. So before posting it, I thought I’d post a picture from the book of me as a child. What I don’t say in the book is that I think I am holding a manure ball. I’m not sure, but it looks like it . . .  

Nin Andrews, Review of Son of a Bird by Dante Distefano

For the last few months I’ve been reading and re-reading the work of Souleymane Diamanka, whose work I mentioned briefly at the end of a reading round-up in the autumn. Diamanka is a French poet who was born in Senegal, before coming to France as a toddler. He started out in slam / hip-hop and his earlier printed collections are also available as recordings (this is not, I think, the case for this most recent book, 50 Sonnets pour mes 50 Printemps).

Shortly before Christmas I went to see him live in Paris. Diamanka recites all his poems from memory, many to a kind of musical backing. He also performed a couple of pieces in a duo with his friend John Banzaï. At the end of the show, he invited the audience to provide ten words and promised to improvise a poem on the spot using all ten of them as rhyme-words. The first person to call out suggested rhizome: he asked politely for a definition and noted it down. Some of the subsequent suggestions were more traditional ‘poetic’ words like amour (love), âme (soul) and chocolat, and someone asked for habibi (an endearment borrowed from the Arabic for ‘my love’). My favourite request was curcumasse, which at the time I took to be an obscure variant of curcuma (turmeric) but I think was actually the imperfect subjunctive of a verb I didn’t know existed, curcumer, ‘to add some turmeric’.

The poem he produced after perhaps 30 seconds of reflection had a narrative structure – it started with him arriving for the performance and meeting this audience and ended with him saying goodbye. So far I’ve only seen him perform once so I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that he often or always uses a similar structure when improvising a poem with words provided by the audience.

The improvised poem was funny and charming and the audience responded with whoops and applause after each rhyme-word duly appeared. This reminded me of Agha Shahid Ali’s description of how ghazals work in performance (he is writing here about the Urdu tradition):

The audience (the ghazal is recited a lot) waits to see what the poet will do with the scheme established in the opening couplet [. . .] when the poet recites the first line of a couplet, the audience recites it back to him, and then the poet repeats it, and the audience again follows suit. This back and forth creates an immensely seductive tension because everyone is waiting to see how the suspense will be resolved in terms of the scheme established in the opening couplet [. . .] I should mention that a ghazal is often sung.

Ali also describes the audience reciting elements back to the poet. Diamanka’s performance has aspects of this too: in several poems he encouraged the audience to join in with, and then finally to provide, a refrain.

Although he incorporates a little improvisation at the end of his performance, and expresses his admiration for le freestyle — a kind of rap competition which relies entirely on improvisation — Diamanka is not mainly a poet of improvisation himself: his poems are composed and then memorised. He is, however, emphatic about the centrality of orality and performance to his work.

Victoria Moul, On improvisation and the poetic occasion

–In my English 102 classes, I’ve been using Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel.”  I often use it as a way of talking about whether a piece is a poem, a journal entry, a very short story, or something else.  I did that this week.  But I also talked about Forche’s time as a human rights adviser for the U.N., and the situation in El Salvador when she was there in the late ’70’s.  I have concluded by making connections to Venezuela.

–It is strange how events have changed since I taught this poem in the fall.  Now we have invaded Venezuela.  In some ways, it’s not a surprise.  After all, the U.S. has inserted itself in many a country, especially in Latin America.  But this time, the surprise is that the U.S. has been very covert in the past.  Not this time.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Fragments–So Fragmented that I’m Posting Late

Among the new collections I’ve enjoyed and admired of late are Lady by Laurie Bolger (Nine Arches), In the Lily Room by Erica Hesketh (also Nine Arches), Lives of the Female Poets by Clare Pollard (Bloodaxe), and, at the moment, I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon). The latter consists of single-paragraph prose-poems. In their quirkiness, they remind me of the epigrammatical mini-essays by Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), which were really proto-prose-poems, I think. […]

In a letter dated 21 May 1919 to Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf described Pearsall Smith thus: ‘I think there is a good deal of the priest, it may be of the eunuch, in him.’ As a young man, he was a friend of Whitman’s in the latter’s old age, and they used to take (horse-drawn) cabs round Central Park following ones in which lovers were passengers to see how far they got, as it were. That incident apparently sparked Robert Lowell’s line ‘I watched for love-cars’ in his great ‘Skunk Hour’, available here, the last poem in Life Studies. Who knew? Well, I didn’t until I read the notes in the very heavy paperback I have of Lowell’s Collected. I’ve been reading Lowell off and on since I first read his poems at school, in the first year of sixth form, way back in 1983, and many of them remain among my all-time favourite poems.

Matthew Paul, New Year resolutions

I’ve been re-reading my Denise Levertov. She’s always meant a lot to me but her work hits differently these days. Which is likely always the case for a body of poetry, and/or reading anything over and over through time, measuring yourself and the surprising people (never just one really) you have become. Her longer poem in letters, “Relearning the Alphabet,” for example. “Relearn the alphabet, / relearn the world, the world /understood anew only in doing.” And doesn’t it seem like we’re relearning the world over again every day in these times?

Shawna Lemay, Flowers in the Dark

When the disembodied voice of Philip Levine comes to you in a desperate hour, Gerald Stern can’t be far behind. During my recent hospitalization I discovered my personal essential-texts test might be: Would I want this with me in the hospital? John Irving’s latest novel? I brought it to the ER, knowing I’d have a long wait to be admitted, and promptly regretted it; it remained unreadable even after I was discharged. This Time, Gerald Stern’s 1998 new and selected, which I bought at the Dodge Poetry Festival in September 2000? Twenty-five years later I asked for this book to be brought to me, on day seven of nineteen, as I underwent urgent radiotherapy for what pathology would eventually determine to be a rare recurrence of the rare cancer, a type of sarcoma, I was first treated for in 2011.

That day I was feeling, oddly, lucky, amid the whirlwind that had begun with a clinic visit on a Saturday morning for the seemingly innocuous sluggishness and what I took to be sinus issues that had lingered on after Covid and flu vaccinations and abruptly became suspected recurrence. I first had it in my leg, and was treated with radiotherapy and surgical resection that left a long scar down my left hip and took a healthy margin from several muscles: lateral hamstring, quad, glute medias. I went on to race bicycles and hike arduous distances and hit a one-rep deadlift max of 245 pounds. Too, to train for and run my first half marathon, just this past October, and so it remains difficult to get my head around the idea that I have two large tumours in my lungs, and that one is involved with my heart and my superior vena cava.

I don’t particularly want this to become a cancer newsletter. I’ve never written about my health despite various concerns thereabout being a continuous presence I mostly manage to forget about; I suppose I have found it uninteresting to anyone but me, and often uninteresting even to me, its captive audience. But I do believe that we keep poetry alive—and perhaps it keeps us alive—when we are reading and responding to it with our whole selves. When we are open to, and about, the truth of our lives, we are able to receive the truth of poems. So there’s no real way to tell you why “Lucky Life” came back to me, what it means to me now, without the context: I was in the hospital, adrift on a sea of uncertainty, and thinking of what was certain, of that which I have rarely, if ever doubted: my friends, the cavalry of happy warriors I reached out to with the news and who reached out to me with their best and most hilarious idiocy and cat pictures and funny books and treats and sticky-limbed ninjas that, when flung against a wall, climb down with a herky-jerky unpredictably, much to the delight of both humans and felines.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Lucky Life” by Gerald Stern

In 1934, Tristan Tzara released a major collection of prose and poetry, including both linear argument and surrealist fugues, called Grains et issues. It was a very dense work of combined poetry, poetic theory, and Marxist thinking, and as far as I am aware, it has never been translated in full—or even much in part. While I can’t promise anything close to a full version (it is close to 200 pages), I have started chipping away at one section called de Fond en comble la clarté, which can be rendered as “From Head to Toe Clarity,” “Clarity from Head to Toe” (alternately, “Top to Bottom,” or similar idiom). Here, I’m calling it “Clarity Through and Through.” The whole chapter begins in dream-like prose, shifts into free verse lines, and then turns back into prose for several paragraphs. Here, I’m offering only the free verse passage, as it stands alone quite well and shows an good example of Tzara in his surrealist era.

As always in Tzara, you cannot always tell what modifies what, or where one thought or sequence begins and ends. Despite title, nothing here is clear. He collides fragments and complete sentences with no concern for clarity or transition, and disorientation is a primary effect he’s after. (Or, more precisely, he’s less interested in “creating an effect” than on direct transcription of his imagination in its uncontrolled flight through language.) […]

bitter eye undivided
the fresh water longs to assemble
if only for a moment an image dissolved
on the path of survivors
cross-sections of membranes with the look of life
air melted to the root

R.M. Haines, BY THE SALAMANDER WALL

E. G. Cunningham is the author of several books of poetry, most recently the text-image collection Field Notes (River River Books, 2025).  Her work has appeared in The Abandoned Playground, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Fugue, The Nation, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, ZYZZYVA, and other publications. She received the LUMINA Nonfiction Award for her lyric essay “The Exedra,” and the Judith Siegel Pearson Award for her collection of lyric vignettes, Women & Children. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Edmonds College in Western Washington. […]

Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I try to be as aware as I can about the questions that the work is asking. Equally as interesting to me are the unconscious pulls and drivers that inform the writing itself. Only after the fact am I often aware of the questions being asked. As an example: when I began writing Field Notes, I knew I wanted to explore the relationship between the field as an historical site of oppression and the field as a kind of idyllic mythos; I was surprised, however, by how forcefully other inquiries, related to family history, memory, and the making of art itself, arose.

My theoretical concerns have to do with the nature of time and memory, the role of desire in both, the relationship between place and (personal, social, familial, political) identity, the loss of and role of nature, death, endings, the invisible and the unknown. These of course are questions that artists have always confronted; the difference now, as I see it, has to do with a shared awareness of a foreshortened future in a truly ongoing, accelerating, and global sense. All of the metaphysical questions, the epistemological and existential questions, are entirely rearranged by the exponential facts of climate catastrophe (which I’m using here as shorthand for myriad ills, including biodiversity loss, species collapse, soil depletion, extreme weather, etc., etc.).

For the painfully aware, even something as seemingly simple and beautiful as a walk on the beach conflicts sharply with the paradigms of decades prior. Once one knows, for example, that ocean spray releases more microplastics than nearly any other natural phenomenon, well, that quite changes one’s view of and relationship to and available means of expression for such phenomena.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with E.G. Cunningham

We got some rain on Saturday, which we’ve needed, and dismal cold rainy January days are perfect for settling down with a book. I’m reading The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture (1977) by poet, writer, farmer, educator, activist Wendell Berry, still working at 91–his book Sabbath Poems was published in 2024. I’m much more familiar with Berry’s poetry than his prose, though he’s written at least half a dozen novels and many books of nonfiction. This text, I’ve since learned, is one of his more famous–it’s been revised and re-issued six times. The copy I got from the library is the original version and features cover blurbs by Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Stewart Brand, among others; Publishers Weekly summed up the book as “a cool, reasoned, lucid and at times poetic explanation of what agribusiness and the mechanization of farming are doing to the American fabric.”

Which is a fairly good one-sentence précis, though Berry’s wording often strikes me as more passionate than “cool,” and agribusiness is only one aspect of his critique. […]

The sections of the book that most resonate with me are those in which he writes of nurturing and relationships, and points out that good relationships involve responsible actions and collaborative, mutual care whether they are marital, family, or social relationships or relationships with the soil, the flora and fauna, the whole planet. He predicts a future in which people live in their houses and not with the land, or even within their communities, and where wilderness is “conserved” so that it can be exploited for entertainment and scenic views. People in the US, he says, don’t feel responsible for the land on which they live; they don’t understand its cycles, its weather patterns, its waterways; their property is merely property–a commodity for convenience and investment. I’d say that future is already upon us.

Ann E. Michael, Unsettling

Today, as I worked on chapbook cover designs and poems in the swine daughter series that I am realizing more and more reflect the heaviness of my mood, J was in the other room, playing a video game over Discord with his friends (the same couple we play real-time D&D occasionally). It got me pondering how, while I was invited to play provided we get another controller, I really feel like all my free time (“free” meaning not writing for money or peddling away on press/shop things) I should be writing or making art. That those slivers of time can sometimes be the most productive. While I was once quite good at Nintendo games when I was a teenager, once I started writing in earnest, my free time was for poems–both from a vocation and a hobby standpoint. I enjoy gaming as a social endeavor–board games and RPGs

This doesn’t mean I didn’t have other hobbies. Though I make money from it now, my visual art endeavors were once a hobby, less a profession. I have always had a maddening/productive way of turning hobbies and interests into side hustles, which at various times have included collecting vintage, jewelry making, soap making, and other crafty things.  My other interests, like horror films and theater are more passive (though my dip into writing things for the stage may change that slightly.) 

I used to talk to a friend about the difference between consumption and creation. How, as artists or writers, you are focused predominantly on making things. On expression and creating worlds. While her hierarchy placed the consumers of culture lower than the creatives, I don’t think it’s that simple.  One, after all, needs to other to exist. While the audience for things doesn’t always rival the people making any given thing (especially poetry–where poets often bemoan the sadness of writing only for other poets) they still need to exist for either side of it to work. There is a lot of talk about the dangers of AI, how it takes away the creative and panders to the consumer but really doesn’t create anything new. Basically, every one becomes consumers but there is really nothing real to consume. 

But I also think creating can come in many forms […]. While my parents were not really artists, I think often about the ways they laid the groundwork for not one, but two children with artistic leanings. I’ve spoken before of the years my mother spent painting plaster figurines. Or about the surprising revelation that my dad, as a kid wrote horror stories when he was supposed to be paying attention in class. My mother also, like me, shared a love of decorating and setting the tone of a space. How my dad turned his love of betting on horses into a science and a little extra money. These were in addition to things like gardening and fishing and cooking that littered their time. 

Kristy Bowen, creation vs. consumption

I like the ability of the internet to connect people of like minds or experiences and far distance. I like the critical thinking skills of people who make rather than only consume.

I like the free exchange of ideas and people who are curious to learn. People who declare they “don’t want to be influenced” worry me for that alone and for the mindset of proprietary insular ideas instead of community and growing together in an interdependent way. Aren’t we each isolated enough without deliberately avoiding listening to one another? It’s never made sense to me.

Pearl Pirie, So glitchy

I have clear memories of 1956, the year my mother became ill.
A room in lamplight, curtains closed, yellow wallpaper faded to brown.
The computer offers me a drone tour of Almaty, Kazakhstan.
The computer tells me it’s freezing in Downham Market.
The president condemns a protester for shouting Shame, Shame, Shame.
His stormtroopers cover their faces, arrest a clown for dancing in the street.

Bob Mee, A LAYING BARE OF THE BRAIN, THE RHYTHMS OF HOPE AND OTHER BUDGERIGARS OF THE HEART

My husband reads physics books all the time, and most of his own novels are based on entanglement and quantum physics. He is fond of explaining the double slit experiment to new Red Hen staff people. If you aren’t familiar, light changes when observed, almost as if it’s aware of being watched.

We change when we are observed. Our lives change. Some of us are more anxious, some less, some fatter, some thinner. If I were single, I would live on air. I would always have sake and champagne in my fridge for emergencies; other than that, I would live on fruit, tuna, and arugula. Like light particles, I change through observation. I’m more civilized, less savage.

When I grew up at the Farm, I spent much of my life with no people watching me. I was always told, God is watching you, so I talked to God. “God,” I said, “Are you watching me right now? I’m going to do something dangerous. Watch this.”

Yet we do get married to live an observed life. We have families to observe what we have done, who we have been, to be known and remembered. This weekend, we are hosting a family dinner, one of thousands we’ve had at my kitchen table.

We live, now, in a society where we are watched all the time. In Washington, D.C., there are 44 cameras per 1,000 people; in New York, 10; and in Los Angeles, 12. Atlanta has 124 per 1,000 residents, a product of Operation Shield, a massive police surveillance system known to unfairly target Atlanta’s Black residents.

In Beverly Hills, there are 62 cameras for every 1000 residents. It’s a small town with a population of only about 30,000 people, but with an average home price of five million, that small town is carefully watched. The park where I hike does not have CCTV, and I go there to get away from electronics and breathe.

But the observed life we live with our spouse and our family is not surveillance. It’s a story, a long narrative. Alone, we are looking to achieve great things, yet we are in the dance together. Sometimes it feels more like we are lurching around the dance floor, but in our best moments, we twirl.

I am living in the gift of an observed life with the people who truly see me. This includes the family I have chosen.

Kate Gale, The Marvel of an Observed Life

first light
the frost on the hillside
is turning pink

Jim Young [no title]

The Little Review (“a new pocket-sized magazine for anyone interested in poetry”) has quickly become one of my favourite (little) magazines, not least because it really is designed to be carried about in your pocket and I do a good 50% of my reading on the tube. But also because they are committed to the art of the review, and know that poetry isn’t always the most interesting thing about poetry. You can subscribe to their newseltter, which includes gems like CG’s piece on Sylvia Plath’s prose, here on Substack.

They throw good parties, too. The review below, of Matthew Buckley Smith’s second collection, Midlife, was first published in Issue 2 last November. One cold, rainy Saturday, I went along to read at the launch party on a cosy old boat in Canary Wharf (a distinctly un-cosy area: the contrast was surreal).

How do you perform a review? We agreed I’d simply read something from the book, without any discussion, so I read ‘Object Permenance’, of which more below. I am glad to say several people came up to me afterwards to say how much they’d enjoyed it and asking to see a copy of the book itself (which was quite possibly the only copy in the UK at that point), promising to get hold of one. It was a strange, and strangely gratifying, experience. Though it has its pleasures, at the end of the day reviewing is always a strange and solitary task. I often find myself mentally distancing myself from a book, and the review itself, once I’m done. Suddenly, I was the book’s ambassador, enthusiastic about the poems all over again and basking in their borrowed glory. Perhaps all critics should be given the opportunity to impersonate their victims.

Jeremy Wikeley, The things you’ve said and done

wormy things from the sea bed
making ink from sediment
they are snapping at our heels

that one’s got money in it
an unsympathetic material
frozen in body and brain

Ama Bolton, ABCD January 2026

Eve Luckring’s Signal to Noise grows out of her own experience of progressive hearing disability to become a study in incomprehension, or failed comprehension, or random misapprehension, which is to say it concerns language.

The book is constructed in two complementary numbered sections, with the longer second part also bearing the title ‘A Lexicon’. The first part consists of a set of texts bound together by some formal, or semi-formal repetitions. One of these is a thread of five-line pieces that read like, and may well be, transcripts from a single-word speech audiometry test, though some of the vocabulary seems unlikely:

“Say the word ’Haint’…”
“Say the word ‘Strop’…”
“Say the word ‘Rift’…”
“Say the word ‘Lure’…”
“Say the word ‘Whom’…”

The refrain-like anaphora is picked up, with variations, in a second thread of four-liners (in two couplets) on the following pattern:

I hear a voice calling my name
I can’t tell from which direction or how close it might be.

I can’t tell if it wants to harm me or tell me something
important; I know it wants attention.

As we cycle through the iterations, the owner of the voice and the person addressed change, as does the uncertainty of the remaining lines. These uncertainties reflect the limitations imposed by hearing impairment, which are a kind of subset of the limitations imposed by language. Who amongst us ever really hears things clearly? Which is not, let me be clear, to diminish the impact of hearing loss, but to set it in a broader spectrum of human experience.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading January 2026: A Review

I think I need a bigger “leap” for the last image. I read about a hoax where an 17th or 18th c. woman pretended to give birth to rabbits (15 of them!) in order to gain money to feed her actual children.

not a sleepwalker’s hands
or the space between
but a rabbit in the womb
instead of capitalism

Nah! Interesting but not yet. So what happens if I change the opening two lines. There’s no reason to keep them, or for that matter the form — the four lines — though I’ve imagined the poem to be this Knott-like short text.

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon
where do they walk?
east then west
north then south

I like the question here, but the ending sounds good but doesn’t deliver an imagistic “zing.”

Maybe the whole thing would be better with just those first two lines, those are the ones that are working the best.:

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon

I kind of miss “the space between the sleepwalker’s hands” which is what occasioned the poem in the first place. Something mysterious and interesting about that space:

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon

not the sleepwalker’s hands
but the space between

Hmm. That has potential. I’m going to leave it for now, since I still have to prepare for the reading! If you have any suggestions or comments, I’d love to hear them.

Gary Barwin, Revising the Sleepwalker

Again (again?) thinking about that treacherous “about”-ness of poems, or of my attempts toward a poem. How seeking to write “about” some Important Thing makes my work flat and explainy and earnest in the way of a Hallmark card. Nevertheless, I persevere. I have been trying to figure out how to write a poem that informs, as I want to talk about Important Subjects in a way that Opens the Eyes, but I want to do it with grace, ease, play, subtlety.

But do I, as a reader, want to be informed? Is that what I want from a poem? No. Something else. I want the something elseness of poetry. The subtext and subtle unsaid and loud silences and momentary confusions that ease into — what? — a moment of wisdom, maybe, or of connection to an Other, or of perspective, insight, or something more visceral — the ah ha, the oh, the yes.

What I admire about this poem by Jennifer K. Sweeney is that she is committed to communicating information but also to the playful use of sound and language to carry that information out of the sometimes-tedious realm of explication. And also how the denseness and movement of it enact the subject matter. How it dams and flows, hurriedly gathers and lets loose.

I sometimes ponder the arcane information I have learned from fiction — I know to keep my heels down if I go off a ski jump (thanks, Nancy Drew), and how starfish regrow arms (thanks, Madeleine L’Engle), that the province of Quebec is a hotbed of organized crime (thanks, Louise Penny). But I have not considered all that I’ve learned from poems, mostly because what I learn is less arcane information and more like life. But hey, if a poem wants to slip me some info, well, bring it.

Marilyn McCabe, and stops the smock and linger of pond racket

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) was born in Saki, near Osaka, and as a teenager began submitting shin’taishi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) to Myōjō magazine, founded by Tekkan Yosano. Later, Akiko married Tekkan, and her poetry would go on to be a significant influence on both the shin’taishi and the shin’tanka movements, alongside her husband, and poets like Masaoka Shiki, Yanagiwara Akiko, and Kujō Takeko.

Akiko’s first solo shin’tanka collection みだれ髪 (Midare’gami; ‘Tangled Hair’) was widely read and especially popular among radicals and “free” thinkers of the time, particularly with regards to feminist discourses in Japan. This frightened the tanka establishment, who publicly attacked the book. Tanka poet and critic Nobutsuna Sasaki, for instance, claimed Akiko was “corrupting public morals” and “mouthing obscenities fit for a whore” because she composed tanka on the topic (dai) of breasts. Despite this—and equally because of it—Akiko’s work remained popular among radical poets and the general public alike, and she would go on to publish 20 tanka collections, becoming one of the most famous poets of the shintai’shi and shin’tanka schools.

Dick Whyte, Akiko Yosano – 8 Tanka (1901-1928)

My daughters play that the mud is soup,
the treehouse a boxcar. They tell me how
they came to be here, little women
growing wild as if sprung up from the dust,
or taken, gently, from a bone.

Renee Emerson, Dorothy Sayers, Mystery Writer

“Familiar Phantoms” are the gentle ghosts that act as reminders of people and things no longer in our lives that we don’t want to let go of yet. The familiarity comes from the repetition of memory, not necessarily the person or object themselves. While no one who witnessed it may have forgotten the karaoke performance from the curate, no one in the audience is likely to have been close to her. Sometimes the familiar is in something apparently trivial, a repurposed needle or a biscuit barrel, that has no financial value but an intrinsic one because of what it represents. Sue Forrester has created a subtle, multi-layered collection.

Emma Lee, “Familiar Phantoms” Sue Forrester (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

Why I Wear My Past to Work (Parlyaree Press, 2025) was written over three years and during that time, a friend of mine who I’d known since we were two-years-old, passed away. I’d moved from the village Simon and I grew up in when I was 14, but we were at the same school for a couple more years and later would meet up if I was travelling through the area.

We had many adventures, often in the Meadow at the end of our road. It was an old school playing field and fired our imaginations as explorers, often wanting to jump the fence into the farmer’s field beyond. I’m fond of Warwickshire and like many kids, we would spend what we could of weekends knocking on each other’s doors, playing street hockey, or cycling up to the Meadow, trying to find enough of us to have a proper game.

I began ‘The Meadow, Dugdale Avenue, 1993’ shortly after Simon’s funeral as a way to process his loss and the memories we shared. The collection explores the past and male and family relationships, and I admire Lewis Buxton and Luke Wright’s work on these themes. For me, great moments involved lying in the Meadow, exhausted from football, and looking up at the moving sky – clouds disappearing like days do now, more than 30 years later.

It’s not just long, sunny days I remember as a child, but looking out of my bedroom window before bed to count how many others still had their lights on. Simon and I joked it’d be great to have a walkie talkie at night, so we could discuss plans for the next day – which sport to play or trees to climb. I moved to the Cotswolds after that, and while I wouldn’t trade its landscape and stillness (which wasn’t always appreciated as a teenager), I always missed my friendships in Bidford-on-Avon.

The poem starts with a Meadow flashback. I remember Simon’s early support for Manchester United and opinion that strikers ought to be selfish to score goals. I felt quatrains worked best as the poem highlights loss and boyhood, and that provides space for different memories – the stages you go through when you lose someone close. It felt right to begin in the Meadow and the proceeding stanzas feel like the meet ups we had in the years after school.

Drop-in by Chris Campbell (Nigel Kent)

Last night I was reading at the Needlewriters in Lewes, which always feels like a second home. Despite the foul weather there was a good turnout. A warm and receptive audience including lots of friends, and a wonderful reading by Maria Jastrzębska from her forthcoming memoir. I’ve no more readings in the diary now until June. But who knows.

An exciting project that I’m currently working on is the long-awaited (by me, anyway) update to A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines. This was a wee guide that I produced firstly in 2018, then updated in 2020, and both editions sold out quite quickly. I’ve thought a few times about updating it and then a few months ago someone asked if it was still available. After explaining it was out of print, I got out my copy to review it. I was actually quite shocked how much of it needed updating, for example many of the featured magazines have folded. Not only that, but if you consider how the poetry landscape has changed there were a number of things conspicuous by their absence. As a result, I decided the new year was a good time to bring this baby back in to the present day. Once again, I’ve asked magazine editors for their thoughts and ideas. I’ve also asked a number of seasoned ‘submitters’ about their own learnings. I’m also going to include some information about competitions and pamphlet publishing. The end result, I hope, will be an informative and motivational guide for anyone who is aspirational about their poetry and either new to submitting to magazines or just needing a regular nudge to keep going and take it further. More on this soon!

Robin Houghton, New Year, new projects

The other morning I woke up singing – Try A Little Tenderness – remembering the first person switch, singing it as woman, as she, as I, just as Little Miss Cornshucks and later Aretha Franklin chose to, a bit like this…

I may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing the same shabby dress
But while I’m weary
Try a little tenderness

I may be waiting
Just anticipating
Things I may never possess
Oh, but while I’m waiting
Try a little tenderness

I make coffee and think about this one song and all it means to me. I watch a light snow fall outside my window, and then listen to it, again, the Aretha version and then an early take of an Otis version. I think about the meaning of this song to us, to me, and the lyrics. I ponder on what ‘tenderness’ could mean in that crazy violent world and what it means now in this crazy violent world.

The dictionary meaning: Tenderness, the quality of being gentle, loving, kind.

I sit with all the feelings this melody conjures, and notice how the song changes shape and power when sung in first person. the things I may never possess. Then I remember the lost Cornshucks version and recall what a tough and tumultuous life she was living when she sang and recorded her rendition of this.

So next thing I know, I find myself rummaging through my archives, boxes of discs and files and old computers to find this one documentary we made one snowy January in Chicago back in the day. Was it 2013? 2014? Of course, all of this is a great procrastination from doing my tax return. I know, I know … but I am glad to find this recording and now share it here as I think some of you might dig hearing this and the sounds of old Chicago too.

Listening back to this show we made maybe twelve-odd years ago, my mind floods with images and fond memories of that trip to America. I remember the thrill of travelling with my producer, the brilliant Rebecca Maxted, I remember the heavy snow in Chicago and seeking the jazz ghosts of Cornshucks. I can recall us sharing Chicago deep-filled and thick crust pizzas and beers, and then exploring incredible lively jazz and blues clubs. I remember with great fondness all the beautiful people we met and talked to. The wonderful Lester Goodman, then aged 98, sharing his stories with so much kindness and sass and soul. The gorgeous and generous family of Cornshucks who welcomed us with open arms and fed us stories and delicious food. It is with gratitude I remember them all here. As I listen to this programme it already feels as though it is a recording of a different me in another life in the old times far away from the here and now.

But the music is forever, the song is timeless, the story never changes.

Salena Godden, Try A Little Tenderness

a blue lake sleeps at the foot of a blue mountain. where my 

life is an island adrift. poems sail into a mirrorless day.

each end of the sky moored to a single blue tree.

Grant Hackett [no title]

In this sonnet-length pentameter stanza, many lines begin with the hammer-stroke of a trochee, as though to echo a burst of wind or the lashings of the rain. The rhyme scheme, ababbcdcdefefd, initially suggests a Shakespearean sonnet but begins to deviate from that expected pattern by line 5. This deviation reinforces the poem’s sense that although the Christian might expect to find comfort in that promise following the great deluge in Genesis, even in the light of that promise, reality and our perceptions of it do not proceed in any straightforward or predictable way.

The strangest moment occurs at line ten — where, in the chaos of the storm, and in possibly the closest thing to a volta in this poem, the language itself turns strange. The poem shifts its gaze from the scene outside to the interior of the cottage, from whose doorway the cotter has been peering out. Though “glabber” is a Scots word for liquefied mud, we seem to be, now, huddled around a fire, with “flaze” apparently signifying gazing at the fire — the people talking until a frightened woman hushes them to listen to the storm’s ferocity. Only when the wind has blown itself out, and the end of the world hasn’t happened, can anyone go to bed.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Nightwind

There are
things whose passing you’ll grieve,
sharp as a shard of laughter

floating in a hallway long
after the one who lofted it into
the air has left. Once, the shape

of the future was a mere speck
in a wilderness of tomorrows, but
now the light has shifted.

Luisa A. Igloria, Stay

Ah, January 2026—so far, not a month many of us will look back on fondly. This past week I did everything I could to get myself back into a better headspace. I changed my hair (back to auburn—the color I was born with!) I visited the Seattle Art Museum to fill my head with beauty instead of the awful state of things on the news, to wake up my inspiration. […] An installation of happy little clouds in the entryway ceiling made for a cheerful entrance on a gray January day.  Then, a new acquisition is right at the ticket takers—a Takashi Murakami 3-D piece called Flower Globe.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Change in Mindset: A Visit to Seattle Art Museum, A Friend from Out of Town, New Year’s New Hair

sanctuary woods
a scatter of feathers
under the pine

sanctuary by tom clausen

This week: wolf moons, egg-life, the voice of a middle-aged witch, a linear accelerator in a radiation bunker, and much more. Enjoy.

I feel the call of a deeper quiet.
A vibration. A murmur. If I stay still
and silence every thought, maybe
it will speak to me. If I dig my toes into
the soil, maybe tiny hyphae will tell me
secrets. If I learn to let go and rise in
the air, maybe I can test my ambivalent
faith. A pigeon with an iridescent green
neck is watching me watch it through
the window. As if we are both trying
to figure out who is on which side.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Window strike

On the first of January this year I did something that was very rare for me in the whole of 2025… I read a book from my ‘to be read’ pile from beginning to end. It felt good to make the conscious decision to slow down and devote time to simply entering the world of a book, and it also felt fitting given that 2026 is The National Year of Reading. I had already decided that as a nod to this year’s celebration of reading I would re-embrace the joy of reading song lyrics whilst listening to songs I loved. Often, I know parts of songs, but not the whole and I miss out on that full immersion. My ear buds help because they put the music right into the centre of brain (that’s unlikely to be scientifically correct, but that’s what it feels like to me) and I can hear things more clearly. But there’s something about reading the words at the same time as hearing them that sets them down for me.

When January’s wolf moon was nearly full I went out late at night and howled at it just because I could which made me laugh. It was standing under the wolf moon in January 2022 which had me scuttling off to my writing desk to form a poem which was brewing in my head. This then led to my desire to learn the names of each full moon throughout the year and a resolution to stand under each one before writing a poem for it. There was no poem in me asking to be written for this year’s wolf moon, but I took time to admire it rising and setting. Perhaps this is the year in which I just howl under each full moon, and embrace the moment.

Here’s to all the ways we find of being full, complete and whole.

Sue Finch, WOLF MOONS

2025 cost us so much. I almost gave up on writing this blog post—what has become my annual check-in to keep Chicks Dig Poetry from going dormant—but then that felt like just one more thing to be lost. So: hello! & Sal the Wonder Cat says hello, posing on the couch of my home office. (To be more precise, he offers his diffident gaze while awaiting kibble and pets.)

Here are some things that brought me joy:

-Reading at Bowling Green State University (making it despite blowing out my tire en route on the Ohio Turnpike—and using my extra day in town, once my car was repaired, for a quick sidetrip to Toledo), and as part of the Nantucket Poetry Festival (where I experienced the most welcoming, fun home-hosting of my life, and enjoyed a sandwich on the beach + unforgettable light). […]

-Having Made to Explode included in the inaugural selection of LitBox, a vending machine dedicated to books by D.C.-area authors. Though it has been a tough year to live in D.C., I am continually inspired by the makership of this community. I’m also thinking about American Poetry Museum, 804 Lit Salon, the Arts Club of Washington’s Queer Lit Salon, the mothertongue anniversary celebration, and the anthologies put out by Washington Writers’ Publishing House and Grace and Gravity. A huge highlight was the symposium on the life, work, and legacy of Sterling A. Brown, this city’s first poet laureate. Not to mention beautiful, unique acts of protest—from a “Free DC” message crocheted on a Southwest park bench, to the melting “D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y” staged in front of the U.S. Capitol. 

Sandra Beasley, Farewell to 2025

2025 has ended up as another amazing year for my videos! Overall, 22 different videos have been shown in some way in 17 countries around the world for a total of nearly 60 screenings. Four videos – Eviction, DEADEYE, WHY-EEELA and The Exclusion Principle –  won awards or were short-listed for awards at international festivals.

The year began on a big note with The Taken Path, a 6-screen installation made in collaboration with Catherine Truman, exhibited at Carrick Hill as part of the 2025 Adelaide Festival. A different single screen version was exhibited later in the year at the ANAT SPECTRA conference in Queensland.

While most of my work is shown internationally, it has been especially gratifying to have videos screened at different short film festivals around Australia this year, since it is rare for local festivals to encompass experimental film as part of a general program. I will continue to support these events, even if my work does not get selected.

Most of the videos deal with the state of the environment in some way or another: climate change, habitat destruction, and the consequential effects on the survival of plants and animals, many of which we do not fully appreciate. So the videos variously give voices to birds, fish, jellyfish, microbes or plants. An on-going interest of mine is the limits of language: in generating these new voices, I have invented codes, dialects, grammars and more. Nearly all of these works are informed by science.

As always, I’m deeply grateful to the organisers, curators and judges of these events for the opportunity to present my work to a wide audience. Even more importantly, I appreciate the incredibly supportive international community of video poets and experimental film makers that I am a part of.

Ian Gibbins, 2025: Another amazing year for my videos!

Happy new year everyone! I spent new year’s day working on this beautiful jigsaw depicting some of the Brother Grimms’ fairytales. I love fairytales, of course, and they recur throughout my books and poems – in many ways because they are full of such powerful and resonant symbols: towers, fur, hair, glass slippers, fairy fruit, poisoned apples, mirrors, houses with chicken legs, spindles, frogs, wolves in grandmothers’ clothing, tangled roses, spun straw, blood on snow.

I’m very excited to be going to see Stephen Sondheim’s fairytale musical Into the Woods next week at the Bridge Theatre, and will also be teaching a workshop called Into the Woods for the Poetry Business next Tuesday 13th Jan 11-12.30am online, if you fancy it. It’s £25 or £20 concession.

I’ve been looking at my favourite fairytale poems in preparation. What are your favourites? I adore Anne Sexton’s 1971 collection Transformations where she retells fairytales in the voice of a ‘middle-aged witch’, subverting them and bringing suppressed sexuality back to the surface. It must surely have influenced Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber? The poems certainly influenced me deeply – Sexton can’t resist witty, deliberate anachronisms for example, and they have littered my own work ever since. Here is Sexton’s deeply disturbing ‘Briar Rose’, that suggests a darker reason for Sleeping Beauty’s catatonic sleep.

Clare Pollard, Into the Woods

I’m trying to figure out if I need to revamp my current manuscript with the new bunch of submissions. Does it need to be re-written? I am suffering, if I’m honest, with self-doubt and self-criticism. I thought this was a really good book, but have rejections hurt my confidence? For sure. It’s also a book that’s squarely about disability, feminism, and survival. That may not be what all editors are looking for.  Urgh. I hate the part of writing – and it’s a large part – that is rejection, doubt, insecurity, poverty, obscurity. The waiting. The thinking “Maybe I should quit. Maybe I should write detective novels or advertising copy.” One of my goals for 2026 is to find the right publisher for this book, along with maybe a little more travel and (hopefully) better health. Think good thoughts for me!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! A Poem in the Final Issue of The Pedestal, New Year’s Celebrations but I Guess We’re in a War Now?

Today, CLOVEN drops into the world officially. You can get your copy HERE…

I have always been slightly obsessed with the Greeks. It probably stems back to a period of time in childhood, before horror films claimed the top spot, when I fervently loved Clash of the Titans on repeat (we didn’t have it on tape, but it was a popular film in HBO in the years we had cable. ) Later, we would learn about the ancient world in history classes, but the details of the culture were never as interesting as the mythology. By the time I got to college, I had a reasonable working knowledge of major myths and stories, but a burgeoning interest in theater and a many drama/ theatre history classes (where, of course, we spent multiple weeks on the origins of theater.   

One of the things we spent considerable time on was Agamemnon, when I first learned of the doomed daughter who was (or was not) sacrificed to Artemis to grant easy passage to Troy in a war spawned by the famously beautiful Helen. It’s something that stuck in my head like a kernel I would run my fingers and tongue over occasionally. The years passed and I wrote many Greek myth and legend poems, addressing many figures, either directly or indirectly. Daphne. Calypso, Cassandra, Mnemosyne. Ariadne. I even wrote occasional modern retellings, like my taurus project. which was another re-imagining of the minotaur story, but set in the rural midwest.  

I got in my head that I wanted to write a more female-focused epic shortly after leaving the library, at a time when much of the freelance work I was doing was centered on the humanities, including many lessons on theater, mythology, folklore, and Greek culture. GRANATA was born from that in the summer of 2022–what was initially intended to be just a bunch of poems about Persephone, but which snowballed  to include her unfortunate cohorts, the sirens punished for her abduction, It also grew to encompass visual art–over two dozen collages in 2023. When I released in in 2024, I had a vague idea there might be more books–perhaps an interlocked series. There were already a couple of collage series with mythological leanings, including several that dealt with Iphigenia’s story., something that was heavy on my mind, not just becuase of the Greeks, but we’d been re-watching Game of Thrones, and the tragic character of Shireen Baratheon. The young girl sacrificed for men and their wars. It was also on my mind because of, you know, rampant pedophiles in politics and the general disregard for the safety of young girls and women. 

The treatment was, of course, different. While Persephone and the Sirens would eventually embrace their darkness and monstrosity, Iphigenia is fixed in place. She can move a few inches either way and the outcome may be different, but it is still somehow the same. (ie even if Artemis swaps her for a deer, she is still endangered for a hist of other reasons–arranged marriages, childbirth hazards, ongoing wars. And yet she is also rife with power even in her powerlessness. That was the story i set out to write earlier this year, as I added a few more collages to the project and enough poems to turn the whole shebang into the next volume of what I am calling my Antiquities Series.

Kristy Bowen, myth and the female epic

A poem by Basho

(tr. RH. Blyth)

Toshi doshi ya
saru ni kisetaru
saru no men

Year after year
on the monkey’s face
a monkey face

“Mask” some have translated that second monkey face, and yes, sure, but I like the helplessness of that there-I-am-again-in-the-mirror sigh. The slight recoil from an unexpected self in the plate glass window. For are we not unknown even to ourselves?

Walter Benjamin sees in Klee’s “angelus novus,” its nervous eyes, an angel with the past wrecked at its feet, its back to the future. Because who can look at what the face becomes, the one coming, not the old frown-worn, judgey-mouthed, jowly-throated, the Dutch cheekbones broad as a tidal flat, mustache of my black-Irish aunt, but the wide-eyed terrored face of tomorrow, how the world leans on the face, making it a rumpled pillow, and then whatever’s next and its imprint.

Angel, don’t try to hide it with your infernal flapping wings. Step aside so I may see tomorrow’s monkey face, the past reflected behind me in future’s terrible mirror. We will laugh and laugh.

Marilyn McCabe, Toshi doshi ya

Lyn and I seem to have spent a large chunk of our Christmas evenings this year in the north of Ireland, Belfast to be precise, courtesy of watching Say Nothing (Netflix), the film Good Vibrations (2013, on BBC iPlayer) and Trespasses (Channel 4). All three are set during the Troubles; the series both star the brilliant Lola Petticrew; and Good Vibrations is a biopic of Terri Hooley, who founded the legendary Belfast record shop of the same name, starring the equally brilliant Richard Dormer, who was also so impressively fine in the first series of Blue Lights. It seems as though after years of neglect by television and film drama, aside from Kenneth Branagh’s dreadful Belfast, the Troubles have at last become a subject worthy of dramatic portrayal, and of exploring the question of whether all, or any, of that killing was actually worth it. Novelists, notably Anna Burns and Paul McVeigh, and poets got there first, of course.

Anyhow, all this got me thinking about – or, rather, even more about – my years, from 1985 to 1991, living in Portrush and latterly Coleraine. My first published poem, in Poetry Ireland Review in 1987 (I have eternal gratitude to the late, great Dennis O’ Driscoll), was set in Dundonald. My first collection included five poems directly, and two indirectly, about those times, and The Last Corinthians included three more. Of those 10 poems, one, ‘Pietà’, first published in Magma, dealt head-on with the killing of two RUC men in Portrush in April 1987. I’ve written others but never submitted them. I’ve got plenty more to say, if I ever bother to turn the tap back on – a visit over there would no doubt do the trick.

Matthew Paul, A Twixmas Meditation

We’re not robots. We can identify
traffic lights, cars, motorcycles,
stairs, the darkness that wraps
even obstinate monuments in burial
cloths when the sun goes down.
We get a scrambled-up word, a code
to authenticate in at least two
ways and we comply. But in this
kind of darkness, we’ve come to know
the difference between the explosion
of fireworks and that of vessel
strikes in open water, the heat
signatures of drones, their high-
pitched buzzing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Leaps of Faith

This year has been filled with its tender moments and quiet delights. 2025 has also been grindingly awful. Every day’s news packed with official lies, cruel slurs, new atrocities, more bridges to a bright future burned. Still, I am grateful for fervent and often playful resistance, brilliant science, awe-inspiring art, nature’s constant teachings, compassionate people everywhere. And of course for the way books help hold me together even when so much is falling apart. Thank goodness for the restorative, mind-stretching, soul-rejuvenating power of books.

Laura Grace Weldon, Favorite 2025 Reads

What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think writers help people feel invested in the world around them. It can be easy to develop a sense of apathy in our day-to-day lives, especially when living under the economic, social, political, and environmental conditions we are living in. It can be easy to feel like there are few individual actions we can take, or that those actions won’t matter in the face of large-scale climate disaster, fascism, genocide, and colonization. I think writers help us to be present. Even when we read books that take us out of our present reality, that are escapist or feel “light”, the act of reading and thinking helps us return to ourselves and remember how implicated we are in everything around us.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Vera Hadzic

My eldest child embroidered their way through this hard year, so for Christmas they gave me some of my favorite poetic lines on a little panel of violet cloth. They’re from Dickinson’s “Let Us play Yesterday.” “The o’s kill me,” Madeleine remarked about the difficulty of embroidering round letters. This detail seems poetic in its own way. Rhetorical apostrophe–address to someone or something absent or inanimate, sometimes marked by the letter O–can seem, as Jonathan Culler wrote, “embarrassing” and “pretentious” because it marks “invested passion,” an emotional intensity that can make readers and listeners feel awkward about listening in. (You can read his 1977 article “Apostrophe” on JSTOR–it’s worthwhile as well as clearly written, even if you’re not generally a fan of criticism and theory.) Apostrophe is also, he writes, “a fundamental gesture of lyric poetry.” It “makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself.” It presumes to invoke something or someone Other.

This puzzle of a poem by Dickinson apostrophizes someone (lover, friend, reader, god?) through second person pronouns; takes a left turn through politics; and ends in what’s certainly a species of prayer, apostrophizing “God.” The term from “Let Us play Yesterday” that I love most, “Egg-life,” comes to suggest, through a digressive meander of stanzas, imprisonment, perhaps slavery specifically as well as metaphorical captivity in nineteenth-century womanhood, silence, and other states of unfreedom. I’ve nonetheless persisted in taking “Egg-life” personally. I’m always falling out of reserve’s shell into writing what troubles me. I usually feel like a baby bird even at work I’ve been practicing for most of my life, weak from ignorance though ready to squawk. That’s one of poetry’s best qualities, after all. No one can “master” it. Hallelujah!

Lesley Wheeler, 2025 in reading (playing Yesterday)

On the 3rd day of the new year, we wake to sun glimmering snow and the neighbors next door are one part shoveling out the cul-de-sac, one part giving their young daughter time and space to run after days of cold snap and heavy snow. This is kindness in action, not to mention wise parenting. Soon after this post, I’ll venture out and clean my driveway as well in preparation for the scuttle of Monday’s anticipated storm dropping another 6-12″ on this outer coast.

Though my blog has been sorely neglected for several months, my writing has been prolific this year. There are copies of journals and anthologies on my desk from a year’s worth of publishing. Quick glance at my Excel doc shows I sent out work to 57 different submission calls and have placed work with 30 (so far) and received 15 rejections (so far). 47 poems were published in 2025.

One year ago today, I learned that Sheila-Na-Gig Editions had accepted my manuscript, The Ordering of Stars, for publication in 2025. This was wildly exciting news. Not only do I love publishing with Sheila-Na-Gig and its family poets, but the manuscript emerged over the course of two different residencies: Storyknife (2021) and Jenni House (2024). It will warrant its own posting once the copies land, but editing on the final proof was submitted New Year’s Eve and my launch via Zoom is scheduled for January 29th. Please attend!

Kersten Christianson, 2026, Snow, Much Writing

This morning is the time for me to set intentions.  I have four.  Careful readers of this blog might say, “Didn’t you have three intentions that you couldn’t keep for 2025?”  

I appreciate the power of New Year’s Day intentions that tug at me all year long, even if I’m not entirely successful.  This year, I’ll have 2 writing intentions and 2 health intentions.  

Writing Intentions

–I’m going to keep one of my intentions from 2025.  Here’s what I wrote last year:  “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.”

–Always hopeful about having a book of poems with a spine, I also plan to create a new collection of poems, with the title Higher Ground.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Intentions for 2026

I didn’t submit much this year, but publication schedules are on their own timelines, so I did have 14 poems appear in 12 different journals, had one poem accepted for the Stevie Nicks anthology White-Winged Doves, placed a favorite hybrid essay in Whale Road Review, and a piece of flash in Milk Candy Review made the longlist for the Wigleaf Top 50. And, of course, my fourth poetry collection Unrivered was released in October from Sundress Publications.

I placed visual art at Gone Lawn, Doubleback Review, Thimble Lit, orangepeel magazine, and San Pedro River Review. I sold my first piece at a gallery show, which was exciting and a little nerve-wracking.

I have completed hosting and curating the fourth year of A Hundred Pitchers of Honey reading series, although this year’s schedule was a bit more sporadic due to other commitments and responsibilities. We will ring in the start of Year Five on January 8 with Subhaga Crystal Bacon, Kathleen Flenniken, Nathan Spoon, and Cindy Veach.

Rachel Bunting and I completed editing the first year of our journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters. We are so grateful to all of the talented folks who took a chance and sent work to our new labor of love, and we look forward to starting Year Two with the launch of Issue Five on January 20. […]

I have placed no pressure on myself to take on a new writing project for the new year or even to increase my number of submissions. For now I am enjoying reading from Unrivered, trying new things in drafts, and not worrying about whether or not they fail. One goal I do have is to go back to pieces I love that have never been published and take a serious look at revision. What will happen will happen. (And, I will try to be here more regularly, even if it’s once a month… I can do that if I put it on my calendar…)

Donna Vorreyer, Out with the Old and All That

I’ve never seen her land, always moving as I do
from painting rooms and finding flooring
to battling sugar ants who found the kitchen
years ago and like it there. She is a friend in this city
where my children move at a tempo not my own.

The butterfly’s time is short, as mine will be—
just enough to make this last place home
until the day when decisions are made for me.
I’ve promised not to fuss when that day comes.
For now, with the butterfly, I’ll follow the breeze,
feel sunlight and dew, live free.

Sarah Russell, Butterfly

The complement to mindful living is mindful reading. 

I want to learn from what I read. I want to see what others have seen. I want to consciously read what is not standard culture fare. Something more offbeat or deep. I want to learn storytelling and cultural terraforming. 

I leaned more into sci-fi this year. Shocking no one, over half of titles read were poetry but less science and less memoirs, more novels this year. I completed none in French but 9 in translation.

I think I mentioned 49% of what I finished reading was free by library, little free libraries, free downloads, gifts or review copies. This tracking takes credence from the theory that elves sneak books in while I sleep.

Pearl Pirie, 2025 Self-Audit

I started this Substack over a year ago with a poem published by Ink, Sweat & Tears.

I had a second poem published there in September. “Watching, January 2021” is a pandemic poem, written as the second lockdown began to bite. I didn’t deliberately wait until January to post it but things have recently got in the way of doing much writing, so somehow it’s ended up here, now, almost exactly five years after I wrote it, just as the Wolf’s Moon makes another appearance. Looking back at this poem, the cyclical nature of time — especially the Groundhog Day aspect of the lockdowns — seems more evident than ever. A new year is often thought of as the chance for new beginnings, but the old habits are hard to break.

Ruth Lexton, Watching, January 2021

I was lying on my back on the steel table of a linear accelerator in a radiation bunker at the hospital on Christmas Day, looking up at the red laser projecting from the ceiling to align one of my four most recent tattoos with the treatment head, when I had the second auditory hallucination of my life. (I wrote about the first one here.) This one may well qualify as a memory rather than an hallucination: it was, unmistakably, the beloved voice of Philip Levine, speaking the last two sentences of “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”: “No. Not this pig.” I’d wager I heard him, live or in recording, read this poem at least once, but who can say; I know I first read it twenty-five years ago. I can say with certainty that the words came back to me when I may have needed them the most.

This is an unexpected opening for this publication, I guess. I certainly did not expect, when I last hit publish on December 19, that I’d be in the hospital and undergoing urgent radiation therapy five days later, but here we are; having been treated for cancer once, in 2011, the shock wasn’t that it was happening so much as it was that it was happening now. I’ve spent the last seven months learning, on a somatic level, the meaning of now, and the last five relearning my love of poems, and in some ways the timing is exactly right. Before this year I never so clearly understood how little we can control, nor how much we can do in the face of that fact, how simple it is to be present in our lives even if we feel them slipping from us, how meaningful it is to connect with each person we encounter, even when it feels too hard. This is what poetry, I understand now, has meant to me.

What’s to love about “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”? It’s a dramatic monologue in the voice of a pig, for one, and not just any pig, but a pig of absolute conviction in the face of what’s out of his trotters. He knows where he is headed, yet what pleasure he takes in the movement of his piggy toes and muscular body. He is fully awake to sensory experience, the olfactory imagery conjuring his grim surroundings and his dream life similarly clear-sighted. He knows as well what is expected of him: terror, denial, rage, violence. What he does instead is very simple: he claims his authenticity, he decides to be himself in his own time. In the world according to Garp, after all, all pigs are terminal cases.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives” by Philip Levine

When I first read “Lamb,” I was immediately drawn to the juxtapositions and associative leaps in this poem, which feel close to the child’s mind to me. The line breaks and use of punctuation in this poem slow the poem down, so the details unfold bit by bit. This feels intuitively right to me. When children tell stories, sometimes the relationships between details—the causality—isn’t clear. Near the center of the poem, for example, are these three lines, all and-stopped with punctuation, which slows the reader down:

My dad had a beautiful overcoat.

The lamb’s white fur got smudged.

My brother was a baby,

Here we get three statements, all simply structured (subject/verb: my dad, the lamb’s fur, my brother), but all are possessive, and a closer look reveals the links in the chain. In the speaker’s memory, the father’s “beautiful overcoat” is linked to the lamb’s coat getting dirty. The lamb getting smudged links to the baby brother being passed around to strangers. There is so much vulnerability in these images and scenes. The “one eye” brought up in line two is circled back to toward the end: the child putting his finger into the socket of the missing eye as he would fall asleep. Talk about a vulnerable image! (It’s interesting, too, that the advice about pickpockets in the second sentence of the poems, lines three through seven, is about being stripped of things that are conventionally valuable—money, a watch—but what the child is most concerned about is something sentimental and therefore priceless.)

Having a beloved doll or blanket as a child is visceral—we hold them close, and we remember those smells and textures—and it’s that is made clear in the final line of this poem. Here the lamb is nearly resurrected—brought back from the overhead bin, where we are told her had to go. (Certainly the child would have preferred to keep him close.) The lamb is returned, freezing, but safely back in the arms of the child, who kisses him. Not it—him. There is something so lovely, nearly romantic, in the closing. I’m relieved for both the lamb and the child, that they are reunited. The subtle end rhyme of “bin” and “again” is such a beautiful touch, too.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look

In Delmore Schwartz’s story, “The World Is a Wedding,” there is a moment when the protagonist, Jacob, thinks something during the course of an interior monologue that can be applied to poetry as well as fiction, namely: “You have to love human beings . . .if you want to write stories about them. Or at least you have to want to love them. Or at least you have to imagine the possibility that you might be able to love them.” Drawing that out a bit, I would argue that this pursuit of the imaginary conditions (whether accidental or contrived) for loving others that shapes our choices about speakers in poems.

Alina Stefanescu, For Lynne.

There’s a story about Steve Jobs meeting with an ad executive. Steve wanted an ad that highlighted a number of his new product’s new features. This was against Steve’s otherwise-firm commitment to simplicity as a guiding value. To talk Steve out of this idea (no easy task), the exec crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at Steve, who caught it. “That’s a good ad,” he said. Then he crumpled up five pieces, and threw them all; Steve caught none. “That’s a bad ad.” The story has a wider moral. Great Art is supposed to have a bottomless complexity, and Great Poetry is supposed (by some) to be characterized by neutron-star-level densities of meaning: more significance-per-syllable than any other form of writing. I admit to being against this. Put too much in, and all of it is lost. I’m against poetic compression, as a general rule, with exceptions as needed. Thus, the appeal of thought-rhyme, whose repetition is the opposite of compression. (In fairness, parallelism at its best is repetition without redundancy.)

Compression in poetry sometimes entails grammatical contortion: leaving words out, putting words in the “wrong” order (adjective after noun, say). These are sometimes done, I suspect, in response to a felt need to “signal” that one is writing poetry, a need one may feel when writing free verse. In this way metric poetry can be more freeing than free verse: if you’re writing iambic pentameter, then whatever else it is, it’s certainly poetry; you are therefore at liberty to sound as pedestrian, or as conversational, as you like. No need for fancy words, or to make everything a metaphor for everything else. This was Wordsworth’s idea, though he lived up to it poorly—Shakespeare is often better at ordinary-speech-in-blank-verse than Wordsworth. But it was Robert Frost who was truly devoted to this paradoxical ideal, of un-poetic poetry. While there’s a lot of Robert Frost’s poetry that I don’t like, this ideal I do like. It, and his insistence on writing in meter, while living in what he called “an age of mere diction and word-hunting.”

Brad Skow, Found / Things

While the shift from formal rhymed verse to ‘free’ and unrhymed verse in the late-1800s and early-1900s was important, even more significant was the shift from the ‘statement’ as the basic unit of poetry, to the fragment. In a poetry of statements ‘meaning’ resides in the poet, already completed, and it is the reader/critic’s job to decipher the ‘true’ meaning of the poem, in accordance with the poet’s ‘intentions’ (ala biblical exigesis). In a poetry of ‘fragments’, on the other hand, there are always multiple possibilities, di-verse potentials, and no one singular meaning. Sensible signification is abandoned in favour of suggestion. A fragment is always in-between and partial, and can only be completed by the reader in collaboration with the poet. A statement is already finished: a fragment invites the reader to continue, without stopping.

As Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space (1958): “Make of the reader a poet… the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost. At least the reader participates in the joy of creation that, for Bergson, is the sign of creation.”

Dick Whyte, Mary Brent Whiteside – 6 Short Poems (1925-28)

Lures by Adam Vine
Alabama Seamus Heaney. Need I go on?
I recently had the privilege of hearing him speak at a local writer’s weekend, and he told this story behind his poem “Coursing the Joints” (and how he wrote 20 drafts over years and years, burnt them all, then went back to the burnt down cabin to see it himself and try again). The dedication to craft shows – I associate him with Heaney because of his tilt toward formalism and love of where he is from, even though it isn’t a perfect place. I guess also the Southern in me connected with this to some degree – hearing him read reminded me of my MawMaw, and the stories his book tells are the kind of stories my dad and all those Tennessee and Mississippi aunts and uncles and cousins would tell – stories worth telling again.

Thin Glass by Christine Degenaars
I really enjoyed this debut poetry collection, a coming-of-age story set in NYC. It delves into love/relationships/mistakes, and the “thin glass” between us and others. That metaphor carries throughout the collection, as the speaker is watching and wondering about people she sees through the window, the separation between herself and others. I liked how her metaphors were often surprising and interrupted the typical narrative. This was my favorite poem in the collection – a fairytale-like poem about her father becoming a fish.

Renee Emerson, Lures, Tigers, Bears, oh my…

Kirsten MacQuarrie’s book Remember the Rowan published by Red Squirrel Press was unexpected. I’d heard of the book Ring of Bright Water, but knew nothing about its author Gavin Maxwell and I knew of the poet Kathleen Raine and had read a few poems, but her life was not something I had heard about. The book charts their volatile relationship. Raine was in love with Maxwell who was a homosexual. He became her muse for much of her poetry and she was involved with the Maxwell’s first otter which was the focus of his most famous book. Remember the Rowan is a big read, well-researched and covering decades of their inspiration and arguments. I enjoyed it, it’s very well written. 

The book is a real insight into the life of a woman who plays a midwife to an artist, not a muse, similar to Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, a woman who makes it possible for a man to succeed, even to the detriment of her own work and well-being. For that reason, I couldn’t feel good about the story. I felt caught up in Raine’s life and turmoil, so much so I wanted to take her for a drink to tell her to get out of the toxic relationship. It shows how intimate and believable a writer MacQuarrie is. […]

Poyums Annaw by Len Pennie is the second poetry collection by the Scots Word of the Day internet sensation. I first stumbled upon her during our Covid lockdown where she shared a new Scots word with a hint of humour and honesty. I love her poem ‘I’m not having children’ and her poem about the Daft Days, but I hadn’t read her first collection or her other works. Len Pennie is now an Scots language advocate, but she also has become a voice for survivors of gender-based violence after facing a lengthy court case of her own and constantly facing internet trolls on her various social media platforms. Her poems cover her own situation and fighting the patriarchy in general, mostly in Scots.  They are honest and acerbic, sometimes tinged with humour. They do not bury the punchline in metaphor, instead they often pack a mean punch. While the rhyming sometimes gets to me, I’m a free verse kind-of-gal, the poems carry the reader along without feeling they are reading literature with a capital L. They are the kind of thing you’d share with your non-poetry pals and the two poems above have been passed on to me from unexpected places. Len often shares recordings of her poetry on social media and her genuine joy of Scots and poetry are infectious. Her poems are really meant to be heard, so if you can get the audio book read by Len herself, I’m sure it’s worth hearing them in the author’s own voice. 

Gerry Stewart, Scottish Book Tour 2025

Literature works through a special force of language.

When he travelled the world on the Beagle, Charles Darwin’s favourite book was Paradise Lost. He thought of Milton as he watched the sea at night. The way the dark materials of creation are described in the poem echoes in The Origin of Species.

The theory of evolution owes an influence to Milton’s poetry, which inspired Darwin to reimagine the universe.

As Samuel Johnson said, poetry is a “force which calls new powers into being”.

Henry Oliver, Ten reasons to read great literature in 2026

as I pick up 
winter wreckage 
from our yard, it sinks in 
no card from her
this year

conglomerate by tom clausen

I’m trying to remember why I started this blog in 2011. I’m pretty sure it was because of meeting Ian Pindar, a poet, at the Bridport Poetry Festival in 2010 when one of my poems was given a prize (runner-up) by Michael Laskey and was published in that year’s anthology. Ian was the person who recommended having some sort of online ‘home’, although I can’t remember the exact reasons for this recommendation – perhaps to create an online presence and a means of showcasing work. Anyway, with my one published poem and a desire to engage with other writers online, I set about creating my own blog. WordPress’ interface seemed delightful to use in those days. […]

Them was the old days, folks. Blogging was fun and interactive. I shared posts on social media and people read my posts and chatted to me about what I’d written. Social media was sociable in those days, and more than a means to promote a book, reading or workshop. But most of us know the adage about all good things coming to an end – and I’m probably only peering at the past through rose-tinted specs, in any case. Eventually, I ran out of blogging steam. And now I’m once again trying to write prose, rather than poetry, and I’ve become older. Time is running out! I’m trying to put my writing energy into something other than blogposts.

Josephine Corcoran, Hello, China

I read a ton, stayed off social media for significant amounts of time, and no big surprise, feel better. That said, I watched this reel on IG of Freya India where she talks about the idea of online communities being a joke. Certainly it’s an important moment to reconsider the idea that social media is social. It feels generally that we’re just unpaid employees, sharing our content for others to profit from it.

It’s no wonder that I’m re-thinking the whole idea of the blog — maybe it’s so old fashioned that it’s worth hanging onto. Or maybe it’s so old fashioned that it’s ridiculous. I’m feeling a bit nostalgic about when I started blogging — the idea was to take up space, to connect with like-minded people, and to share things in the mode of the gift — we often spoke of “amplifying” each other, our work, of building community. (Weren’t we all excited by the ideas in Lewis Hyde’s book then?).

Looking for a link to the Hyde book, I come across Margaret Atwood talking about the book in The Paris Review back in 2019. She says, “One guarantee: you won’t come out of The Gift unaltered. This is a mark of its own status as a gift: for gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.”

I’ve generally thought of blogging as something that you give away. You share for free, and then the gifts magically return. And this is so often the case. Writing in this space has given me so much. But as I mentioned in my NY post, it’s time to re-think the enterprise, and probably most everything else we do online. What do we want to give up, and what makes sense to keep? Like, honestly, I’d miss saying, hey, read this you’ll love it!

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Two Books

The boy  stomps   in his boots
in his serious play     as he destroys
snowballs     as he lands two feet on one ball
spraying his lone lot 

with his snow-dusted gusto
his own top spins      so futile  so fun
as the adults inside
huddle     rubbing their so-so heads

Jill Pearlman, New Year’s Spin/Reboot

I’m working to find more time for my inner life. My New Year’s goals include reconnecting with writing and reading. The creative arts help us engage with reality. Writing a book is real—composing music, creating a film, choreographing a dance, penning a play or an opera, painting or drawing.

When we have our adopted grandson in the summer, we take him on outings and try to find ways to stimulate him creatively. We’ve taken him to the LA Zoo because he wanted to see the snakes. He’s at that age when he would like to wander from screen to sugar, but we intervene with books, and once he does a deep dive, he will read for hours. I believe this urge is in all of us.

I am going to remind my body to limit the doomscroll, to live in books, to write often. To remember that this is my one wild and precious life. I don’t eat much jam, but when I do, I plan to get a little jam on my journals, to lean into fig jam on my poetry or marmalade on my novel or honey on either.

Kate Gale, Honey in the Margins: Notes from a Writing Life

I like new beginnings. Every morning. Every step outside. Every “hello”. For the long, linear song of life to be broken up into acts, chapters, narratives, breaks, intermissions, etc., keeps things interesting and novel. Some folks don’t see it that way. “It’s just another day” and its ilk is very well true but also such a yawn. Yesterday, severe winds led to a power outage that rendered everything dark and quiet in my house for several hours. Snow buzzed in the air and the wind droned on through the valley. But eventually the winds will settle. The snow will melt. The song will laze longer and higher in the sky. I like living in seasons. I like the season of beginnings. The season of hunker down. The season of barefoot in the garden. The season of salty skin. The season of the hummingbird. The season of walking in the river. The season of eating straight from the vine. All of those seasons have a beginning, middle, and end.

Happy beginning and ending to you.

Sarah Lada, Annus difficilis

Let time begin again
this one not a river
but a fountain
pouring in every direction
into a pool of itself
at the center
of the sunlit plaza
of the possible

Maria Popova, Cover Song for the Second Law: A Poem for Beginnings

On this New Year’s morning, everything feels metaphorical. The crisp cold air I feel as I stand on the porch waiting for my dog to pee. These sticks. Even this being awake. Awake. In the new year. My wife, asleep. The dog now having assumed my place in the bed. Last night, I figured out if I live to 90, I’ll live into the science fiction time of 2056. It might be science fiction. Hard to tell what it might be like then. And my son (who was with us) would live until the even more science-fictiony date of 2086. Those are “star dates” rather than William Blake dates, or Adrian Rollini dates.

Also, I thought of my daughter, already in the future. She was in Budapest, and entered the new year hours before us. Or Bob and Anne in Cambodia, 12 hour ahead of us. These are new year’s we measure in planetary rotation. Of course, it all is movement. Earth spinning, orbiting. The universe itself making room for itself. Expanding. Time expanding.

The universe writes time as time writes the universe. Or more exactly, the stuff of the universe is both time and space as we know. Hard to conceive of our bodies as both time and matter. A body doesn’t exist except in time. Which means change in some Ship of Thesean way. Is it the same time if each moment is substituted for another? We are make of stardust, but also of the time that stardust exists in, that makes stardust possible. I would say “each shining moment” but that would be eternally cheesy.

Gary Barwin, On the New Year: Four sticks and a band-aid

One thing I ask —
ten minutes to pray
the afternoon prayer
into this poem
while snow falls outside.
Let me look away from the news.
Let this imperfect prayer be.

Rachel Barenblat, A prayer for the first Monday of the secular year

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Moonset and Midwinters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nin Andrews, A Good Year for Son of a Bird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Stars, luck, and revelations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.M. Haines, “The Other Century”

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, How to break through a writing block:

winter wind
the voice of one tree
after another

three of a kind by tom clausen

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, Recent readings and reading

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

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

Tim Love, CB1 – Stav Poleg and Leo Boix

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

Tresha Faye Haefner, Poems and Prompts from Our Community

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

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Poetry Worth Hearing

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

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

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

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

Wendy Pratt, The Fear is on Me

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

PF Anderson, On Resilience

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

Marilyn McCabe, the eloquent purple, those heart shaped leaves

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

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Honeycomb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Artemisa Gold – an Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Boyle, Teeth: On negative reviews

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Mee, ANDY FLETCHER

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

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

How to remember origins,
where we began.

Luisa A. Igloria, Long Night Moon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Still life

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

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

[…]

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Post Amusement Park Visit Syndrome

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Lada, Old Bone

This week: an eye to the telescope, the jeweler’s eye, the eye of a terrible angel, the sunflower’s eye, and much more. Enjoy.

After a good rain, Devil’s Hole is still only 10 feet at its widest. It tumbles over and around boulders of Devonian sandstone left there when the Pocono formation was rearranging itself like a dog getting comfortable on a sofa. The topography creates plunge pools, short shallow runs, cascade falls a few feet high, and cutbanks shadowed by the bent elbows of mountain laurel. It is a remote, mysterious, and beautiful place.

I went there looking for brook trout–small, wild jewels far away from the stocked waters where most anglers go. As a catch-and-release fly fisher who likes to avoid people, this kind of angling is more about the experience than about catching fish. I go to observe the motions –water on stone, current on insect, stillness and rise– form and content defining each other.

Water in motion, like poems, is made of multiple currents, obstacles, fast sections and slower spots. The center channel may be deep or shallow. A gravel bottom holds different insects than a silt bottom. Boulders hide small pockets of stillwater. The steep bank is hard to enter, and then again hard to climb out of. Understanding those variations and learning to use them is what anglers call “reading the water.”

Because I know the region pretty well I already knew what kinds of fish and aquatic insects it would hold for the time of year. That’s the kind of knowledge that comes from having read a library’s worth of rivers.

But, as with a good poem, you can’t know everything ahead of time. At some point you’ve read enough Mary Oliver poems to know what you’re getting into when you enter one, but nothing prepares you for “The face of the moose is as sad / as the face of Jesus.” in her poem Some Questions you Might Ask.

So you read each water anew.

Grant Clauser, Reading The Water: Form and Content in Fishing and Poetry

Autumn happens to be a time of year I like a slow stroll or hike; save the brisk walks for cooler, lousier weather. Now that most of the leaves have fallen, I can spy bird nests and paper-wasp nests (there’s one of those in our tamarack tree; last year, there was one in the Japanese maple). Milkweed puffs are swirling in somewhat chilly air, red berries decorate shrubs and trees. Red-tailed hawks and black buzzards wheel overhead. No reason to churn through the scenery at a rapid pace.

A. R. Ammons wrote an essay titled “A Poem Is a Walk,” in which he describes the physical act of taking a stroll “with” a poem, rhythm, breathing, the stride; he says both a walk and a poem are useless–though you might want to read the essay before agreeing or disagreeing on the uselessness, since his essay is almost a phenomenological argument (and we have to decide what is meant by “useless”). [Note: The essay is paywalled behind University of Arizona’s site, and–oddly–the one legible free version I found is here, from the Università degli Studi di Milano! Well worth reading, though, and in English.]

I think better when I walk slowly and steadily, with pauses to look around. That’s when images come to mind, metaphors, descriptions, sensations, ideas. Sometimes, it is a kind of haiku-walking, generally undirected. I don’t plan to reflect on anything or come up with prompts for poems. And I don’t do it to improve my life expectancy.

I just like to walk. And maybe, a walk is a poem.

Ann E. Michael, Walking

At least two years ago I began a longish poem about a drove road that runs west-east through the Angus glens, and I am having great trouble finishing it. Numerous stanzas have been added, reworked, discarded; there is something I want to say and I know what it is but I struggle to find the words. I have what I think are the bare bones of the thing, and there is a trajectory that feels genuine, natural. The poem is important to me because the place is important to me, and because, having now turned sixty, I have a stronger sense of my own natural extinction, and this poem is the one in which I will show I have made my peace with it. But it is much easier to put words to everything else but this. […]

The drove road of my poem is the route by which cattle and sheep were driven from Braemar in the eastern Cairngorms over the high, subarctic plateau to the market at Cullow Halt at the edge of the broad plain of Strathmore. Because of its extreme exposure, the road was only viable for livestock for a few summer months. At each end a market was held in April and October, with two days between them to allow time to move stock from one to the other. In places the route splays, giving the drovers a choice of grazing or sheltering on drier, snow-free ground. This I know because of the names along the way – Moulzie (frost-shattered), Benty Roads (bents – course, reedy grass), White Haugh (a north-facing river bank, maybe thick with rime). From the east the track rises through the Doll (doll, tol – a narrow valley) up by the Lunkard (a sheiling, a temporary camp) to the Tolmount (the hill at the head of the doll). They might come off the high ground passing below The Scorrie (schor, adj. – steep, abrupt; v., to roar), maybe dropping down again at the Bassies (bassie, a large flat dish, i.e. a slope of hills and flats) and crossing the river at Drums (ridges) or the ford at Crossbog, to arrive at last at Cullow Halt (McCulloch? Or an colbha – bank, border, edge) where the beasts were rested and sorted.

It moves me how these names persist. They have what Zwicky calls a ‘charged density’, similar to what Robert Haas described in Images, his essay on the counterbalancing effect of images in haiku : ‘Often enough, when a thing is seen clearly, there is a sense of absence about it … as if at the point of truest observation the visible and the visible exerted enormous counterpressure’. This is what I sense in these names. They hold a sense of watchfulness, of the real mental labour of moving the animals, constantly heeding the season and the weather and the ground underfoot. Walking uphill from one to the next, the track feels almost warm as if these turns and footholds had just been used, as if you are but a half-day behind them. Their voices are almost audible. ‘Farchal.’ ‘Boustie Ley’ (buist – identification mark; an iron tool for branding sheep; ley – flat ground). The names are a mixture of Gaelic and Angus Scots, and have been used and worn over hundreds of years until they are smooth and turned like the handle of a crook. […]

In Zeta Landscape (2013), Carol Watts opens up the question of poetry whether a poem should only be said to exist when it has a written form; that is, how much of ‘the poem’ is process:

It is sometimes difficult to articulate what the action of the poetry brings about, except a sustained and exploratory mode of attention to. So the “placing” of poetry may come some way down the line, as a reflection or reconceptualization folding back on what has occurred, a form of afterwardsness.

Watts is shifting attention from the written form of the poem – the reproducible, transferable version of it – back to ‘the conditions in which it comes to be thought’. Zeta Landscape was written as part of a poetic exploration of the boundaries of a small sheep farm in Powys. An anthropological understanding of the process of walking in/through a place sees it as analogous to speech. Both are embodied forms of enactment: the pedestrian ‘affirms, tries out, transgresses, respects’, says Michel de Certeau. The names left along the drove road feel rounded down from use, so fit for purpose, like a shepherd’s crook. They are warnings, landmarks, reassurances. They have what Zwicky calls an ‘enactive relationship’: ‘in such seeing lies the experience of meaning’. For me, to write about walking this track is so much a form of afterwardness that it no longer resembles the thing that is, I think, the poem. It already exists in language just and exactly as much as it should. To say these names is to perform a vivid attention to, and the vast, airy, unworded space around them is the most part of it. Zwicky quotes a letter Wittgenstein wrote to a friend to thank him for a poem he’d sent: ‘the poem by Uhland is really magnificent. And this is how it is: only if you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost’.

Lesley Harrison, Everything I have not written

We need unmarked space around us.
Maps that erase everything within a certain radius.
Being lost. Losing ourselves. Finding ourselves.
For it takes many hours of solitude
to answer a single thing with any certainty.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Where am I?

Konnichiwa! I’m back from a wonderful 18 days in Japan with my husband Paul and son Gabriel. On this, my fifth trip there, we toured Tokyo boulevards, mountain trails, rice paddies, rural villages and temples.

sacred shrine
worshippers raise
their selfie sticks

Paul has been studying Japanese intensively and was able to have brief exchanges and read some signs, which was very helpful. The Google Maps and Google Translate apps were also key companions.

We traveled by subway, bus, bullet train, boat and on foot, walking up to ten miles a day even when we weren’t hiking.

rice paddies blurring into the past bullet train

The focus of the trip was a six-day self-guided walking tour in the northern region of Tohoku following the route that haiku poet Matsuo Basho took over five months in 1689. That resulted in his classic haiku-laced travelogue, Oku-no-hosomichi, or Narrow Road to the Deep North. Basho is considered Japan’s greatest poet, and it was moving to visit places that he wrote about almost 350 years ago and to see the many statues and monuments commemorating him.

Annette Makino, Three wayfarers in Japan

Early next month, this impossible project flies into the world — only 18 months after the idea of Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds came to me. What? Why not marry my love of poetry to my newfound love of birds? Why not create a bird guide that might attract new birders? […]

I know of no other bird guide that includes original art work (1001 thanks to Hiroko Seki), humorous bird notes (1001 thanks to Stephanie Delaney), and a 107 pieces of literature by contemporary poets and writers. Included is new work by Linda Bierds, Oliver de la Paz, Kathleen Flenniken, Carolyn Forche, Jane Hirshfield, Naomi Shihab Nye, Major Jackson, Kelli Russell Agodon, Brian Turner, Jane Wong and so many more bird loving writers.

But this is not meant as a sales pitch. (Although holidays are coming!)

What I want to tell you is that this book was born out of a need to change my poetry focus, at least for awhile. After the Blue Atlas book tour came to an end, I craved diving into something entirely new.

I knew that in this historical moment, joy was what I needed most. The joy of discovery; the joy of being in nature; the joy of entering beginner’s mind. Joy!

I still can’t tell you the difference between a golden sparrow and a song sparrow’s song. I mix up the sharp shinned hawk and her other hawk relatives regularly. I doubt I will ever become a master birder. I’m okay with that.

Most of the things I enjoy doing in the world: birding, flower design, gardening, I don’t need to excel at. But when it comes to words, there’s something different going on in my mind. I want to excel. It’s in this interplay of beginner’s mind with the 10,000+ hours I’ve spent with poetry that I am happiest.

Susan Rich, A little story of birds and birdbrains

How is it November 5th already? Because I love Spooky Season (Oct. 1–31), I really tried to slow down October—watching Halloween shows, lighting candles, doing something autumn-festive almost every day—but somehow we’ve still arrived at the darker days of November with the sun setting at 4:46 p.m. tonight in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, night is coming earlier now and it’s pouring outside as I type this, but the good news? This darkness and weather make for perfect writing time.

I had the joy of reading from my next collection, Accidental Devotions, at the gorgeous (slightly haunted) Stimson-Green Mansion hosted by Copper Canyon Press.

After a stretch of gorgeous autumn days, we got a stormy, windy Seattle night—one of those “who’s even leaving their house?” evenings, in fact, I was convinced it would be me in this giant mansion reading to ghosts. But somehow (magic?), it was a full house! I have never been to this mansion before, but it was the perfect historic (read: spooky) place to be a week before Halloween. And I did read a poem about a seance with Rilke’s ghost and well, nothing fell from the walls, so maybe not that haunted.

It also reminded me how good it feels to be around people who genuinely love poetry. Since the pandemic, I’ve found it harder to motivate myself to go out to events in Seattle. I joke with friends, “Remember when we used to do things?” But that night, it felt good to show up, to be part of something meaningful.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Haunted House Reading? Editing Tip? Poetry Prompt? –Yes, Yes, Yes.

I read last night at a fundraiser event with a warm and lovely bunch of American poets; the Bearded Bards of Bluesky. The only Limey in the Zoom room, I was a little trepidatious about the soon-to-be-evident contrast between loosey-goosey American free verse and my faintly antiquated, slightly formal, and often rhyming poetry. Maddeningly, each poem I’d chosen to read had to end on a rhyming couplet for some reason, like a cymbal crash, or as I think Liz Berry put it, tied up with a big bow at the end.

In such company, the jaunty musicality of the bars I was spittin’ seemed like a ‘fol-dee-rol-dee, tra-la-la-la’, not helped by the poems I chose or the fact that I was wearing a djellaba for the cold, which made me look like a pixie. There was a haunted thatched cottage, a trip to look at a Gypsy caravan (where did I find this shit?) and I hope I redeemed my shocking doggerel with a swivel-eyed piece about an omniscient surveillance state, or an exotic drift into revolutionary mysticism.

I remember a discourse on Twitter about, if I’m not wrong, J. Edgar Hoover’s feds somehow promoting free verse at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as representative of corn-fed American libertarianism. I take some refuge in this, as if my taut little formalities are somehow batting for social contracts and European democracy, now all roads lead, it would appear, to the constraints of happy sonneteering. Personally, I think British poets don’t always do free verse so well, though it’s not for want of trying, and try we should. But I’m happy to defend rhyme, be it a coil of mid-line rhyme that holds the poem under a little tension or what corporate food scientists would refer to as ‘mouth-feel’, the pleasure principle of cheap but gratifying tricks such as alliteration, which can be a joy to read aloud, and is possibly easier to remember.

I’m not sure how many lines of free verse I can remember. Sharon Olds’ breath-taking and beautifully tender writing about sex, in ‘True Love’ – ‘I cannot see beyond it’ is more than enough to expunge the memory of the porn awards. Another poem by Kimberley Wolf, which I can’t name for you because I ask her to remind me of it approximately six times a year; ‘When you laugh, a decade of cardinals bursts past the window.’ closes out with a sizzling redemptive and unforgettable flourish. There are probably more, but what I carry with me is mostly rhyming, and thus usually English, poetry. Ireland, both physically and metaphorically, stands somewhere in between, forced to look west away from its bullying neighbour and haunted by the language of the bird-realm; Gaeilge.

james mcconachie, A Vein of Abiding Mineral

Paul Farley read recently at Manchester Poetry Library as part of the ‘Reimagining V’ event. ‘V’ is the iconic poem written by Tony Harrison during the Miner’s strike. I met Paul before the event and we realised to our astonishment we had never met before – which in the tiny poetry world we move in is kind of astonishing. At the bookstall before the event started, I opened Paul’s book to a poem called ‘In One of Your Urgent Poems’ and read the first stanza:

It was like being the I in one of your urgent poems, an I that moved dreamlike with a strange purpose. A drunk I, still stupefied from a club, swaying home on autopilot. A fox I trapped by its instincts in a security light.

And then immediately fell into a particular state which I haven’t felt for a long time, which is a mix of excitement and enthusiasm, like remembering why you loved something that you have only been feeling fond of for a while. So then I bought the book, even though my washing machine had nearly set on fire the night before (another story) forcing me to buy a new one to replace the smoking remains of the old one, sending me down into overdraft hell once again. […]

Anyway, back to When It Rained for a Million Years. It’s currently on the shortlist for the T.S Eliot prize. I’ve only read three of the other books on the list – Sarah Howe’s Foretokens, Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good and Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians. I suppose this book is perhaps the one most rooted in the lyric tradition – but I loved the way Farley writes about masculinity and class and violence and the home in a poem like “The Horse”, which turns an unnamed male figure into a horse in an extended metaphor that runs for the whole poem.

To me it reads like a poem that’s in conversation with other poems about work – it reminded me of Philip Levine’s “What Work Is”. It tracks the dawning of understanding in a child when they realise their parent is not all powerful, but is instead a small part in the great machine of work, of capitalism:

…we thought he was running for guineas, for gold, where we thought he was jumping the fence of the world, not ploughing a scrubby old plot in the cold, or hitched to a cart or being used on the road.

Another of my favourites is “King Carbon”: ‘A King who ordered his palace torched / so he’d feel more at home, / who looks at the overnight reports / on a charred and scaly throne’. I couldn’t help thinking of some of our illustrious politicians when reading this.

I could name many more poems to look out for, but I would really recommend going out and buying it – if you’re interested in how a working-class sensibility can drench your poems without them always being explicitly about class, if you like lyric poems that are aware of the tradition they are writing towards and against, if you like poems that often reflect on the act of writing itself in clever and often funny ways, if you like darkness and tenderness in your poems, then this is the book for you!

Kim Moore, October Reads

It started with a joke in a direct message… 

Why not write a book-length tanka sequence? Why not write a book-length tanka novel? Exactly, why not? There isn’t really any place for truly long sequences in the current journals on the haiku genre, so the answer is to turn it into a book, and that’s exactly what I did.

To be clear: I had no plan. I did what I always do—I wrote when I felt the need to write. Over the course of days, weeks and months, this became a testimony to my life and my feelings, which I found hard to face and hard to bear alone. It was challenging, and at the same time, old acquaintances returned in the form of half-forgotten feelings that made their way into my heart.

Our everyday life is a stream of emotions that float to the surface and sink back down again.

That’s it. Although there is no continuous before and after, no common thread running through it all, it is a story. It is a novel. 

Two motifs appear particularly frequently in Japanese poetry: cherry blossoms and the moon, always a full moon, an autumn moon. One does not decide to write about the moon without being aware that this has perhaps been done too often, that the moon is overused. So one does not write about the moon, right? One does not write about the awakening of buried things in the backyard of one’s life.

Nope. Now more than ever.

That’s how Don’t Write About the Moon was born.

Kati Mohr, Oops. I Did It! A Book-long Tanka Sequence.

I am very pleased to announce the release of my new book Same Old Moon, a collection of haiku (including hokku and hiraku) covering the first ten years of my haikai writing life living in and around Pōneke/Wellington, in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Following last years Before the Earth: Haiku & Haikai—a collaboration with my writing partner Laurence Stacey—this is the first full length solo collection of my work to be published, and I am so excited to be sharing it finally.

Around 17 years in the making, the haiku in this book were culled from a few thousand fragments written between 2008-2019, and edited down to around 1000 ku between 2016-2020. This was further whittled to 200 ku earlier this year—newly edited and sequenced—representing what I consider to be the absolute best of my standalone haikai writing during this time.

Dick Whyte, ‘Same Old Moon’ New Haiku Book Release!!!!

— Let us begin with the comedy of artistic doubt. Granted, I have been trying to return from 8 hours into the future (jet lag), but this past week I have been in a state of artistic doubt. It’s nothing I haven’t had basically my whole entire life to varying degrees, but usually one comes to that place where it feels like: what is the point, or no one wants your art anyway, or I’m making art and sending it into the abyss. And THEN, usually, right after that, comes a feeling of freedom — if no one wants it, you might as well make whatever is in your heart, whatever most obsesses and compels you, entirely for yourself then.

— That state of doubt though, that interval, it can be useful, clarifying, and it can create in you a permission — you allow yourself to be a beginner, to play, to go places you might not have gone otherwise. Nowadays, when I start to doubt, I admit, I have been letting myself get distracted and overindulge in scrolling (the death of art making). And the thing is, is that uncomfortable spot of doubting is rather crucial isn’t it? So here, I pledge to sit with the doubt for longer. Doubt is the friend. I repeat, doubt is the friend.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist: On Making Art Anyway

I know of no greater love letter to language, to its simple pleasures and its infinite complexities, than the one Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) tucks into his posthumously published Memoirs (public library) under the heading “Words” — a stream-of-consciousness prose poem nested between chapters about his changing life in Chile and his eventual choice to leave Santiago, “a captive city between walls of snow,” half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams.” […]

Nested into Neruda’s passionate ode to the brightness of language is also a reminder of the darknesses out of which its light arose:

What a great language I have, it’s a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors … They strode over the giant cordilleras, over the rugged Americas, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with a voracious appetite not found in the world since then … They swallowed up everything, religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries just like the ones they brought along in their huge sacks … Wherever they went, they razed the land … But words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here … our language. We came up losers … We came up winners … They carried off the gold and left us the gold … They carried everything off and left us everything … They left us the words.

We forget this, but it is a truth both uncomfortable and liberating — that there is no wasted experience, that the heartbreaks, the disasters, the plunderings of trust and territory all leave the seeds of something new in their wake. Our very world was born by brutality, forged of the debris that first swarmed the Sun four and a half billion years ago before cohering into rocky bodies that went on to pulverize one another in a gauntlet of violent collisions that sculpted the Earth and the Moon. Words too can do that — universes of perspective colliding in order to shape a habitable truth, to shape the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, the stories we tell each other and call love.

Maria Popova, Words: Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Language

What passes between them
in the heavy afternoon silence?
The moment hovers, endless.
When Sarah blinks, God is gone.
In God’s place, three strangers
bearing even stranger predictions,
shadows preceding them in the late sun.

Rachel Barenblat, Visit

The dark, cold, rain has definitely set in here, as darkness starts about 4:00 PM now. I’ve been working more indoors, reading, and sending work out. But not just sending work out—thinking about the machinations of the publishing world, thinking about PR and what we can expect from our books and our publishers, especially because tomorrow I’m recording a tutorial on PR for Poets for Writer’s Digest and I did a talk last week on the subject.

Book publishing itself has changed so much since I started in publishing, working at Microsoft Press in 2000 as an Acquisitions Editor. Now Microsoft Press no longer exists, and books on technology are considered obsolete. People are reading less, reversing the trend of reading more during the pandemic. Books are selling fewer copies, publishing continues to encounter problems of plagiarism in AI, it’s harder to get the word out about individual books from small presses now than maybe ever in my life, and I don’t want to lie about how challenging it is now to younger writers. I am sending out my own seventh (!) manuscript and the landscape is more expensive (those fees aren’t getting cheaper, and you’re less likely to get a book or subscription than you used to be) and more challenging than it was back in 2003, when I sent out my first poetry book manuscript. Social media doesn’t seem easy to navigate right now, with more and more people totally stopping posting or just getting off of socials altogether (for their mental health, or just because socials have become more annoying). There are still people going on book tours and doing readings online and in person, there are still people buying and reviewing books. there are still people that care. That’s what we have to remember.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, November Chill, Book Publishing and PR Questions, and Trip to the Woodland Park Zoo

I have worried sometimes about my use of “I” in poems. The “I” is certainly not always me; sometimes it is a character or a handy perspective point for the observations around which it is wrapped, a simple first-person eye-to-the-telescope. The tricky thing with the “I” is that often for an effective poem, the “I” can’t be too full of itself. It can stand in the way of the reader.

Sometimes the “I” is useful for starting a poem, but then it might need to be edited out as, in the writing, the poem becomes more about what that “I” saw than the “I” seeing. What is the correct balance for an effective poem between the “I” doing the seeing and the thing seen? If the “I” is needed, there needs to be enough transparency in the “I” that it can easily become you-the-reader.

This makes me think of a larger philosophical question about the self. This is the wonderful writer Olivia Laing from her book To the River: “…is it not necessary to dissolve the self if one hopes to see the world unguarded?” 

It occurs to me that to make good art, there does need to be a dissolution of the “I” but then possibly its re-creation as a vehicle for the art, an eye for the seeing. Which makes me think about a rhetorical question posed in an introduction to a poet at a reading I went to recently, a question I thought was supremely dumb. The introducer asked: “Are all poems self-portraits?” Of course they are/are not and what’s your point? Of course they are a product of wild imagination shaped by the individual experiences of the writer, and a fake wig and glasses, or stripped down to nude and dancing a watusi. I mean, really…

Marilyn McCabe, Excerpt from my new book: Always With the Questions!: One Poet’s Writing Manual

Poets are not mystics, at least not simply by virtue of being poets. Nonetheless, I think there is a kinship between what [historian Marshall G. S.] Hodgson says about the “clarity and sincerity” regarding the self that mystics seek as the prerequisite for achieving oneness with their god and what Sam Hamill says in his essay “The Necessity To Speak” about writing poems in the first person: “The true poet gives up the self. The I of my poem is not me. It is the first person impersonal, it is permission for you to enter the experience which we name Poem.”

Personally, I have no use for the kind of binary set up by the idea of “the true poet”—what, then, is a false poet?—and I would prefer to call “the first person impersonal” an invitation rather than permission, but everything else Hamill says in that quote rings true for me, both as someone who reads poetry for the kind of experience Hamill alludes to and as someone who strives to write poems offering that kind of experience to others. More to my point here, though, when you take Saadi’s Bani Adam lines out of context, despite the beauty and nobility of the sentiment they express, they no longer offer, or at least no longer offer me, such an experience because they have been uprooted from the lived life of the character who speaks them.

Read in context, on the other hand, because I have first been able to feel both the king’s fear and the arrogant self-centeredness in the request he makes of the darvish, I am also able to feel the full force of the courage it took for the darvish to respond the way he did, condemning in absolute terms the king’s inhuman cruelty. It did not take that kind of courage for either the Islamic Republic or Barack Obama to quote Saadi’s lines, but that kind of courage—the kind it took Saadi to write the lines—is precisely the courage we are called to by the very difficult times in which we now live, not poets in particular, but poets no differently than anybody else.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Kind Of Courage These Times Call For

Larkin is asking us, or rather, telling us (there is only one answer) who the child here really is. The poem, in turn, only wants two reactions: either we’re meant to share in Larkin’s disgust, or to be brought up short by the insult as we recognise a version of ourselves in the mirror. In an essay for the Poetry Review, Lara Pawson notes that “it appears to deride someone a bit like me”.

That speaker is, crucially, the product of Larkin’s imagination. As he wrote at the time: “it came from having been to London and having heard that A had gone to India and that B had just got back from India; then when I got back home, happening unexpectedly across the memorial service at the Cenotaph on the wireless… and the two things seemed to get mixed up together.” The way those two things got ‘mixed up’ is more instructive still. Larkin wrote to Monica Jones how the poem came about “when washing up after listening to the Cenotaph service… & thinking how much sooner I’d rather be there than going to India – in fact the two situations presented themselves so strongly in opposition that I was greatly stricken, and dyd Seek to Compose vpon Itt.”

The self-mockery is typical and endearing, but also contains a curious disclosure: it’s as if Larkin can only access his own patriotism—his own pride, perhaps, at a life of unglamorous public service in Hull—by lashing out at an imagined double. Perhaps more to the point, the only person who is caught unaware by the day is Larkin himself, who comes across the service on the radio ‘unexpectedly’.

Larkin’s comments make it clear that he knew all this (he was his own best analyst). The poem is, in this sense, perfectly, and cynically, reactionary: it only exists because Larkin needs an external outlet for his own mixed feelings; he published it anyway. […]

For a poet whose legacy is increasingly and unavoidably political, Larkin published very few explicitly political poems (though various attempts have been made to read ideology into the others), which makes the ones he did publish all the more revealing. British poetry still doesn’t know quite what to do with Larkin and some critics clearly think he’s easily ignored: as far as I can tell, Pawson’s essay in The Poetry Review was the only way in which the Poetry Society (founded to promote “a more general recognition and appreciation of poetry”) deigned to recognise the centenary of one of the public’s favourite poets; one scholar recently dismissed him as a ‘hard right poetaster’ in the footnotes to the Letters of Basil Bunting.

Jeremy Wikeley, Solemn-sinister wreath-rubbish

Around us the monstrosities of race, freestanding 
caricatures of the enslaved with robotic nerves – 
a man strives after a severed limb; a girl whispers to a doll.  

The guard asked if my shoes were Mary Janes. 
They were cute, she said, the shiny black texture, 
the heel thick as a potato.  Retro, updated. 

Jill Pearlman, On Seeing Kara Walker in Mary Janes

As a female writer, talented in a variety of genres, living in a difficult political climate, Hungarian born Krisztina Tóth shares a good deal with Huch (my review of Tim Adès translation of Huch’s final book was posted here). Coming to the fore around the revolutionary year, 1989, Tóth has written poetry, children’s books, fiction, drama and musicals. My Secret Life (Bloodaxe Books, 2025) is her first sole author publication in English, ably translated and introduced by George Szirtes, presenting an overview of her poetry from 2001 to the present. Szirtes tells us that Tóth is no longer living in Hungary because of unbearable frictions with the Orbán regime. Like Huch she is drawn to poetry as personal expression, often to the formal elements of the art, both perhaps offering a redoubt against values she finds unacceptable. If there is little redemption to be found in her poems, there is some consolation to be had through the twin imperatives she expresses, to remain compassionate and to persist in trying to articulate human experience. Neither goal is easy.

Szirtes argues Tóth’s style is conversational, plain, precise, offering ‘a kind of kitchen-sink realism’. The personal also features and in these self-selected poems we get glimpses of a barely affectionate mother, a father who dies young, children, lovers, and a difficult grandmother. It’s not clear if these are genuinely autobiographical portraits and, anyway, they are most often absorbed into Tóth’s emblematic writing. An example would be ‘Barrier’ in which a couple are crossing a bridge, seemingly discussing ending their relationship. With the river below and trams thundering past, ‘the pavement was juddering’ and the poem is really about this instability in relationships as much as the (social/political) world, concluding there were ‘certain matters that couldn’t be finalised’. Such uncertainty drives roots even into the self: ‘I’m somebody else today or simply elsewhere’ (‘Send me a Smile’). Tóth uses the image of the ‘professional tourist’ in one of the major poems included here. With little background given, the narrator visits town after town, apparently hoping to be joined by a ‘you’ who never appears. Obviously a ‘stranger’, she wanders aimlessly, haplessly, buys a few things, the poem inconclusively ending with an image of a used toothbrush, ‘like an angry old punk, / its face turned to the tiles, / its white bristles stiff with paste’ (‘Tourist’).

Alienation, expressed through a profound sense of homelessness, is Tóth’s real subject. With the irony turned up to 11, the poem ‘Homeward’ ends quizzically, ‘But where’s home?’ In such a world view, the ability to remain compassionate is important to the poet, however hard it may be. The painfully brilliant ‘Dog’ presents a couple driving at night, seeing a badly injured dog at the roadside, and the woman wants the man to stop. I think they do, but the poem’s focus is on the powerful impetus to help versus the powerful sense that whatever can be done will prove futile. More weirdly, in ‘Duration’, the narrator finds a Mermaid Barbie doll stuck in the ground outside her flat. The childhood associations, the vulnerability of the frail figure, seem to compel action, but ‘what’?

Martyn Crucefix, Review of ‘My Secret Life’ by Krisztina Tóth, tr. George Szirtes

Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her book of poems, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem, won Wesleyan University Press’s Cardinal Poetry Prize. Her other books include Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination. @rvtrousdale, www.racheltrousdale.com. […]

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?

My critical books have begun as big ambitious questions. But in poetry, it’s so far been short pieces that accumulate into a larger project. Individual poems often suggest themselves around a single sticking point: an opening line; a closing line; a weird image. Can I write a poem in which an octopus climbs a palm tree? Then the challenge is how to find the other pieces that go along with that starting point, because you don’t want the poem to be just one thing—otherwise the octopus gets stuck.

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love readings. Not just of my own work: I started life as a theater kid, and I’m always reciting bits of Shakespeare and Yeats at my children, or reading snippets of science fiction stories out loud to my students. I like to wave my arms around and do the voices, or gallop the meter like Robert Browning in that drunken-sounding wax cylinder recording.

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I want to write things I haven’t seen before. There’s a genre of poetry I think of as “white poet looking out the window,” where a comfortable speaker looks at a nice safe world and thinks about how nature makes them feel. I desperately don’t want to write like that, which can be hard, since I am in fact a comfortable white woman who likes to take walks. I want accuracy and intensity and stakes, and if something’s been said already I don’t see any reason to say it again. That doesn’t mean I always manage originality, just that I wish I could. I’m also very interested in the role of pleasure, humor, and joy in art, especially art that addresses serious or difficult topics.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

On the one hand, I think it’s silly for writers to claim to be special people; I can’t pretend to be a Romantic-style poet-prophet or anything of that sort. On the other hand, I think that artists of any variety have an enormous responsibility to tell the truth in public. This is a political role, because when something is evil, you have to say so. And it’s an aesthetic role, because when something is beautiful, you have to enjoy it. And it’s a social role, because you’re speaking to other people, and inviting them to respond, and trying to create a conversation that goes beyond your own artwork. Writers of poetry, or of fiction or drama, can ask hard questions in very different and sometimes more challenging ways than journalists do. And unlike novelists or actors or even musicians, poets’ work is especially easy to share, and to take with you in your pocket, or keep whole in a corner of your head until you need it—no charger required.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rachel Trousdale

Wolf Eye by Paul Brookes was published as a limited edition of 40 by The Red Ceiling Press in 2023. I was lucky enough to get my hands on #35, having been a fan of Paul’s work since I came across him online and became captivated by his endless, and seemingly effortless, talent for invention. He may well be sold out of it by now, but he has plenty of other books available that are just as good.

One of Paul’s bios describes him as, “a shop asst. Lives in a cat house full of teddy bears”, as well as “a writer, local historian, genealogist, photographer, shop assistant and grandfather.” He has had numerous books published and plays performed, runs creative writing courses and has been featured on BBC R3’s The Verb. He also runs The Wombwell Rainbow and The Starbeck Orion, and rumour has it that he’s starting his own press sometime in the not-too-distant future.

In short, Paul is a poetic polymath, who also extends his considerable creative energy to uplifting the work of other writers and artists.

Back to Wolf Eye. This is a pocket gem of a collection – twenty poems showcasing Paul’s seemingly lifelong preoccupation with different ways of seeing. He has a unique ability to find the other side of something – to come about it from a perspective you hadn’t considered before. This is how the titular poem puts it:

“You never see all of yourself.

Explore the places you’ve never been”

(Wolf Eye)

Many of Paul’s poems use a question as the starting point, or a pivot point, from which the images veer off in unexpected directions.

“Have you

seen the faces of flowers? …

What wallpaper did you choose for your face

before you went out?”

(Have You)

“What is the smell of mirrors?”

(Mirrors)

What I especially love in Paul’s work is how these questions allow for a close listening to the particulars of the things that surround us in our day-to-day world. No detail is too small to be worthy of his poetic eye/ear, and in bringing them to our attention Paul elevates the everyday, illuminating the tenderness, joy and strangeness in them.

Victoria Spires, Alchemising the mundane

You say you want to photograph her,
that you wonder what her eyes are seeing
as she lies unmoving in the water.

I can only think of thick mud
holding on tight to faded crisp packets.

But look, you say, she is smiling.

And she is.

Her long hair floats out
like golden pondweed […]

Sue Finch, No Terrapin Today

[I]n the week that Collecting The Data turned two, there were signs of new life emerging as two new poems made their way into the world. It still feels surreal to have a pamphlet in the world, a publication with my name on it. I have 11 copies of CtD left (message if you want one), or visit the lovely folks at Red Squirrel to get a copy. Should I order more??

If I ever pull my finger out there might even be a full collection. I was saying to someone recently that I don’t think I’ve written much since the launch of CtD, but actually when I look at the box of new poems, there’s probably an average of 2 new poems per month since then, so they are accumulating. If I take a few from CtD, some that didn’t make it in due to space, and what I have now, I reckon there are 60 poems there. I need more because not all will make the cut, but there’s certainly a kernel of a collection there. There are also 6 in some state of getting ready staring at me as I type, and loose notes for about another 25 floating about, but let’s focus on the now rather than the future.

Ink Sweat & Tears published my poem called Beef Rendang. I’m very happy to see that one out in the world, and at a Norwich-based publisher.

My poem Tough Cookies was also published this week in Southword # 49. I was paid for this too. I am lucky enough that I can afford to reinvest, so I’ve ploughed the money from that back into a year’s subscription of Southward.

Mat Riches, Captain Haddock in Monte Carlo

I got a rejection note in my inbox, and it spurred me to look up my submission.  Sure enough, the rejection note referred to two of the poems in a specific way (the full fat cream and the cinnamon rolls):”Thank you very much for entrusting us with your poetry. I’m sorry to say that you’re not a finalist for this year’s ______ Prize, but I’m always glad to read your work! As far as I’m concerned, you deserve all the full fat cream, all the cinnamon rolls.”

I promptly made a few more submissions, with those poems, to other places.  It put me in mind of a time long ago, when I was a much younger poet, taking rejected poems out of the envelope of rejection, giving them a quick check to make sure that they weren’t marked in any way, and putting them directly into a new envelope going to a different literary journal, along with another self-addressed, stamped envelope.

For many years now, I’ve been avoiding any literary journal that charges $3.00 or more for a submission.  I was still back in the paper era, thinking about how little I used to spend when I sent out submissions in envelopes through the U.S. Mail.  But postage has gone up, so now $3.00 seems somewhat reasonable, at least once a year.

I’m still aghast at the odds against my success.  I still want to be a bit wary, and I don’t want to lose track of my expenses, which are no longer tax deductible for me, since it’s been years since I earned any money from writing.

There is part of me that wonders why I bother.  Publications aren’t likely to get me a tenure track job or other opportunities.  My annual review at Spartanburg Methodist College does consider publications, but they are far from the most important part of how I will be evaluated.

I have been dreaming of a book with a spine for so many years and decades now that I still hope it happens.  So part of my submission strategy is force of habit.

I still get a thrill when I have an acceptance.  That alone makes it worth the submitting.  I also know that other work has to take priority, the teaching and the sermon writing, the work that actually pays me money.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rejections to Treasure

When John Martin was closing his independent press, Black Sparrow, he warned us that many of his writers might end up coming to Red Hen. He was right. We published a book by Wanda Coleman, one by Lyn Lifshin. Small presses become a kind of home for the writers they publish, and when a press closes, displaced writers must find their way to other literary circles.

“I’ll miss publishing,” Martin told me. “But I won’t miss all the weird things authors ask for.”

“Like what?” we asked.

“Authors ask for all kinds of things,” he said. “They ask for rent money, they want refrigerators, they want cars.”

As much as these are things we would love to provide, publishing doesn’t have money to spare. Although most of our authors are understanding, we’ve received some unusual requests over time. One of our authors once asked if two of our staff’s salaries could be given to him. He also said that it was unfair that when he flew from New York to Los Angeles that food was not served on the plane. Other authors were stunned to learn that their book deals with Red Hen would not provide a living wage through royalties and movie deals.

Kate Gale, An Author’s Dance: The Importance of Partnership in Publishing

I have always thought of my job as a collector, a curator, more than a gatekeeper or some definitive arbiter of literary taste. Not everything I get excited about excites others. I am often drawn to the strangest projects. The ones that surprise me, perhaps not even with their best technique or form, but more with their audacity and innovation.  The way they show me something I have not seen before. I love darker and more gothic work of course, but also things which play with other texts and forms and hybridity. Projects that might seem to bit off more than they can chew. Voices that are unique or unheard.

I am lucky in that an amazing number of submissions come into my inbox every summer, of which at least half are completely publishable, Of them, depending on the year, I will take somewhere around 10 percent. I also solicit work from past authors on occasion. This seems like a lot when you consider the selectiveness of some chapbook series and lit journals with tiny acceptance rates, but I am usually a bigger boat type thinker. I think back to 2005, the first year I was open to manuscripts and got less than 10.  Two decades later, it is an embarrassment of riches. If this were my full time job or we were operating at a greater profit and could afford help, I would definitely want to publish more. I may still if the economy can hold in all this ridiculousness. 

I’ve often encountered editors online who talk about publishing the best or strongest work. The books that make it all look deceptively easy. Obviously, I am going to like manuscripts that are strong, but I also like books that take risks. That maybe aren’t perfect but are nonetheless interesting and ambitious. That fit with the  styles I tend to want to publish. That said, it really comes down to what I like and what I choose to place my efforts behind. I love that authors will send me a book and say it just seemed right for the press. Those tend to be the books I love most… 

Kristy Bowen, curation vs gatekeeping

About a month ago, Alice Roberts, the famous broadcaster, author and academic, shared my poem, ‘The Last Carry’, on Bluesky. It jumped from 650 to 850 likes in a day. Dozens of people followed me. Was any of this relevant or lasting? Was it just a momentary hit?

Well, I sold several copies of my books on the back of her act, as did HappenStance Press, my publisher. And then those new followers have since struck with me. Moreover, there’s one key thing that they have in common: none of them are so-called poetry people. All of them are from beyond the bubble, and now they’re all reading the other poems that I post on BlueSky, often engaging with them.

In other words, the power of celebrity is huge when it comes to enabling poetry to reach out beyond the bubble. By simply sharing a poem on social media, famous people are breaking down barriers, inviting their followers to read verse in their daily lives. Of course, we’re not proposing pop stars here, but instead cultural figures whose followers might well enjoy written poems if they get over the prejudices that were probably inculcated by Eng Lit GCSE and the dreaded National Curriculum.

Matthew Stewart, The Power of Celebrity

This weekend I’m going to the Poetry in Aldeburgh festival to take part in a panel discussion with Caroline Bergvall and Ian Patterson, titled The Future of the Book. Seems like a good occasion to publish a substantially reworked version of the introductory essay I use on my website. ‘Introductory’ as in ‘Here’s an introduction to me, Jon Stone’.

Why not a simple author bio? I have that too, but since I increasingly view my editing and publishing work as deeply integrated with my own writing, and since I find a need to repeatedly explain to myself what exactly I’m doing and why (the borrowed accounts of others just don’t cut it), a short essay, from the heart, is the way to go. A fair stab at summarising the underlying logic to two decades of feeling alternately hopeful, energised, enthusiastic, furious, anxious, vulnerable, divided, determined and zealous about poetry and its possibilities.

So here it is. You can also read it with hover-over asides and links to existing work here or just continue onward for the plain-text version. [….]

Let’s start with my name. ‘Jon Stone’ sounds, to me, extremely ordinary. It’s got a dull internal echo, like something dropped into a well, and I’m at least the fifth or sixth writer to have it, not counting the volcanologist or the Independent journalist. I should call myself something else, if I want to, as they say, make a name for myself. Yet the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’d prefer not to. Names are useful for identifying who or what you’re talking about, but when it comes to the arts, they already have a tendency to take up too much space. “Who are your influences?” “Who are the best writers?” “Who are you reading at the moment?” “Who will be remembered, a hundred years from now?”

Who cares? What I like best about writing – and reading, for the matter – is being able to lose myself in a text, like a bug burrowing into fruit. When I write, I become self-contradictory, diffuse – not whole. Not amplified. So far, most of the books I’ve written for, or been involved in bringing to publication, have been multi-author anthologies. Sometimes I’m a contributor, sometimes a co-editor. The latest of these don’t even have my name on the front or the spine or in the contents.

In my few solo titles, meanwhile, there’s copious re-use of other writers’ compositions – in collage, mistranslation and so on. In currently-planned future solo titles, there’s even more of this stuff.

I also think readers should see themselves as actively, imaginatively involved in what they read – even partly responsible for what they get out of it. That being the case, some of those aforementioned anthologies include blank pages, with accompanying suggestions as to how they might be filled. Others are put forward as hybrids of poetry and puzzle book, or poetry and game-book. My academic research began with ‘poetry games’ and ‘video game poetry’, and led to my coming up with a fresh term for the kind of poem which incorporates the reader into its circuitry, implicating them in action and outcome.

The corollary of this is that as a writer, it seems I’m avoiding responsibility for the things I make. Unwilling to ‘say’ anything. Reluctant to produce anything nice and straightforward. I try sometimes; I can manage the odd ‘normal’ poem, but the books always ends up as some kind of mutant text. I always have to go a little bit Dr. Moreau.

Jon Stone, ESSAY / The Amalgamist’s Workshop

old encyclopedias:
I buy a complete set
for collaging

Bill Waters, A Collection of Moments: Library Book Sale

Inhabit the Poem, a posthumous collection of the essays Helen Vendler wrote for Liberties, is a beautiful, brief, final statement from a great critic of the old school, which arrives in these days of glib, garish, fluent narcissism—where everyone wants to have a voice—with no greater intent than to make honest readings of great poems. In her scholarly books, Vendler sometimes read more closely than some readers can tolerate. These essays, contrariwise, are perfectly pitched to the common reader. Vendler never shies from quoting and explicating verse, but she also brings in anecdote, biography, history, a little personal comment, illuminating ideas—anything that helps the reader to see the poem for what it is. There is no other agenda.

Vendler has no theory, politics, ideology, or other extra-poetic preoccupation. She does not get caught in the dogma of cliche. She never holds forth about neoliberalism, Freud, modern attitudes, the state of the world, nor does she free associate, nor surmise, nor gesture. Vendler knows the meanings, and histories of meanings, of words; she traces allusions; she shows what context the poet brings in or leaves out; she reads the poet are carefully as she can.

Her tone has something high and formal about it, but she is bracketed and lurking too, sometimes talking as plainly as a cook. She doesn’t proclaim herself, but enters quietly, with the intent of directing us to the words under review. She explains rather than declaims.

Like all good critics, Vendler quotes carefully, vividly, specifically, noticingly. She has the jeweler’s eye for selecting and presenting. She is not resolutely impersonal, but brings herself in as a reader. Rather than using theories of literature (grand, incorporating, totalising) she is a critic of principles (flexible, guiding, open). She knows, as Johnson said, that there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.

Henry Oliver, The poem within the poem

I was honoured last week to be the first interviewee in Greg Allum’s series Bound Voices, part of the launch of his new Ink & Ribbon Press. Greg asked me some particularly thoughtful questions about the links between reading, translation and writing poetry, including my own poetry, which I don’t usually write about here on Horace & friends. Some readers might be interested in my answers so I’ve put a link to the piece below. It includes a tribute to you all for your good-natured patience with my very varied topics!

Bound Voices #001: A Conversation with Victoria Moul

Victoria Moul, Bound Voices: A Conversation with Greg Allum at Ink & Ribbon Press

It’s my pleasure today to share Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real substack. This week’s podcast features a trio of poets, Lillo Way, Lisa Ashley, and me.

https://sheilabender.substack.com

Sheila does a great job introducing us on the podcast, but if you don’t already know all about Sheila Bender, you should. She is the author of numerous books—poetry, nonfiction, and writing instruction that really gets down to the business of being a creator. Her Sorrow’s Words: Writing Exercises to Heal Grief played a crucial role for me in healing my own grief (and I think I need to reread it).. I don’t have a copy of her newest poetry book, Since Then, but am happy to put in a recommendation for her Collected Poems, 1980-2013, Behind Us the Way Grows Wider. She teaches writing, including opportunities for writing abroad in 2026. I encourage you to take a look at her substack, or her Writing It Real archive, at https://writingitreal.com/#

Bethany Reid, Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real

I took part in an editing roundtable last week and one of the questions from the audience of undergrads had to do with pet peeves: what’s something you immediately cut. I thought about it while the other participants answered. I tried to think of something, anything, that grinds my gears such that I am unable to tolerate its presence in a text I am working on and I came up with: nothing. I know it’s a common question and readily answered by plenty of word people, but I find the whole idea baffling. You can do anything, break any rule, you want, I used to tell my students, so long as you have a good reason for it. They were prone to asking the same question, trying to suss out the thing I’d give them hell for, a protective instinct, I am certain, inspired by the experience of some asshole chastising them for one peccadillo or another. Maybe it’s not the pet-peeve part so much as the immediately-cut part that I don’t get. I wouldn’t go around tugging on loose threads on someone else’s sweater, either.

For the sake of appearing principled or intimidating or . . . whatever, I confessed my prejudice against adverbs in poems when it was my turn, but I was at the same time thinking of James Wright doing absolutely everything “wrong” in “A Blessing.” It’s just ridiculous stuff, isn’t it? Twilight bounding “softly,” ponies coming “gladly,” rippling “tensely,” bowing “shyly.” And so much worse: anthropomorphization, that cardinal sin of introduction to creative writing. Two beat lines, six beat lines. A comma splice!! It is, of course, one of the most beautiful poems I know. I realize I keep saying this, but: I doubt you need me to explain why.

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Blessing” by James Wright

I was musing about writers who have day jobs outside of the writing and teaching world. Writers who are medical support workers (like I was), secretaries (like I was), construction workers (nope, didn’t do that), retail workers (like I was). Writers who write on their work breaks, after the kids are in bed, early in the morning before going to work. Writers who don’t have a dedicated writing space but are determined to make room, somewhere, for a few minutes to write.

I want to read those writers.

Bud Smith’s bio states he works in heavy construction. When I first discovered his writing around 2010, his inclusion of that bit of info really impressed me and helped me feel maybe I could do this writing thing even though I had never taken a single writing class or been aware of the literary world at all, outside of reading best sellers. At the time, I was newly retired and finally had the time and desire to pursue writing. It was, and still is, unusual to see a non-writing or non-academic related occupation in a writer bio. Bud’s most recent essay, “My Truck Desk,” is published on his Stack, and in The Paris Review, about writing on breaks at his construction job. Crazy how that worked out for me and my musing mind. (How ‘bout that alliteration.) I recommend reading it – it’s very, very good and very encouraging. Especially if you’re feeling that pesky imposter’s syndrome because you’re a writer whose occupation is/was completely outside the literary scene.

Charlotte Hamrick, Writing Prompts & Working Class Writers

Very prone to getting poison ivy rashes, I had the worst case of it a few years ago. Covering nearly my whole body, including my face, my skin was an exposed nerve. Clothing, couch fabric, everything was uncomfortable. Wearied by it, I decided to change my mind about it. Instead of annoyance and intolerance, I decided to be curious and marvel at it much like how I would marvel at lichen on a tree. I came to terms with my body, realizing that it was a host to fascinating bumps, fields of red skin, a sensitivity like no other. The rash rendered me a cartographer of my own body. Once healed, that awe and wonder continued. Months of steroids led to changes in my body. A swell here, excess there. I marveled at other bodies, too. The daringness of a unibrow. I celebrated the body being an ongoing narrative that even when the life-force is diminished, continues being a storytelling body.

D.H. Lawrence wrote I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself in his poem “Self-Pity”. While there are all kinds of studies and witnesses to animals lamenting and experiencing sadness and pain, I must say that there is a difference between the experience of pain and grief and the experience of resiliency that animals are forced to possess in their mechanism for survival. I’ve seen the lame-legged deer bound over a fence with its three stronger legs. I’ve seen numerous one-footed birds dip and swirl and scavenge for food. Birds without beaks. I’ve seen a few three-legged or partially-crushed turtles mosey along on the forest floors. But how would I know anything about their plight. I don’t. Who knows if this deer carcass or that bird carcass is a memento of simply giving up.

Sarah Lada, We All Become Just Bodies

In the most vulnerable places within your psyche, you will find yourself. Time to come home to yourself. Truly, make a home there. Be ok with where you are, who you are, in this moment. We are constantly evolving. Comfort yourself, feel yourself becoming. You’re all you got. Even with a loved one by your side, even if you’re surrounded by loved ones, we all die, ultimately, alone. You alone come into this world and you leave it this way. The lasso of finality ropes you, drags you across terra firma only to reveal, that, it, too, is an illusion. Ground becomes stardust, minerals, particles: you. […]

Being present can bring you to clarity: there is only this moment and the next. In her talks on impermanence, Pema Chodron mentioned once a bird flying across the sky and how the imprint / image of that second—that moment the bird flew across that one section-part of the sky—in an instant, is gone. You can try train your mind to see the imprint of a bird in the sky which can immediately bring you present.

So there is no “other side” of grief. There is only now. A new trajectory for your existence set up by a series of new moments that arise and fade like the sun or come in and go out like the tide.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Being present in grief.

Bands wider than the breadth of a country, eye
of a terrible angel thrown from heaven.

It wheels with pure intention as a torch
fanned into flame.

Luisa A. Igloria, Landfall

Nina Kossman’s “Gods of Unfinished Business” is subtitled “Poems on History Transformed into Myth”, which feels fitting as it draws on common ground and the continuity between historical myths and tales and contemporary situations. It leans into the idea of people doomed to repeat the same mistakes because they’ve not learnt from the past and also how little humanity’s core values have changed despite technological progress.

In the sequence, “Valley of Closed Eyes”, part 4,

“Salt of the earth in a sunflower seed,
salt on the leaves of the tree of destruction,
salt opening and closing
like a flower,
transparent
labyrinth I must pass
to close my eyelids with your fingers of sleep
to open yours with my fingers of clay and water.”

Emma Lee, “Gods of Unfinished Business” Nina Kossman (Červená Barva Press) – book review

It is said that Francisco de Goya went out at night frequently while Napoleon’s troops ravaged Spain and put flesh on the word, “atrocity.” A gardener named Isidro often accompanied the artist on his nightwalks through Quinta del Sordo. One night, as Goya sketched the stacked corpses along a hillside, Isidro asked why he felt the need to depict such barbarities. Without looking up from the bodies, Goya replied, “In order to acquire the taste for saying for ever and ever to men that they should not be barbarians.”

“If we imagine for a moment that our enemies were to get wind of what we are doing and try to use it as propaganda, it would do them no good at all, for the very good reason that no one would believe them,” wrote the Reichskommissar for the East in a June 1943 letter to his peers in Berlin.

“This transformation of an experience into language, this possibility of a relationship between our sensibility and a world that reduces it to nothing, can today be seen as the most perfect example in French contemporary writing of what literature can be,” Georges Perec wrote in his study of Robert Antelme’s The Human Space, a book which revisited Antelme’s experiences after being deported to Buchenwald, Gandersheim and Dachau.

The commitment to express the inexpressible is central to modern literature.

Alina Stefanescu, “Like images on photosensitive film projected from memory by the eye…”

What does singing about the dark times mean? If we sing a joyful song in a dark time, we know we are singing in the context of that dark time. Maybe it is a defiant, subversive act, a refusal to despair or be cowed by the darkness. If we sing darkly about the dark times, we name what is happening. We name what we are experiencing. We remember our humanity, our shared humanity. Our story may be dark, but we are the ones telling it. To tell the story is to have agency. I think about Jean-Paul Sartre’s line, “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”

Auden famously said, “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen,” But an image or a metaphor can affect the world. It can cause us to see it anew.

Writing is a kind of looking, of noticing. Sometimes looking out at the world, sometimes looking in at the writer or even at the writing. Writing asks what it means to speak, to write. It asks how do words—our own and other’s— influence us? How do they change what we think and see and feel? Canadian writer, Steve McCaffery wrote that, “Capitalism begins when you open the dictionary.” He means that our language shapes how we see society. It has a built-in default world view. But as writers, we can notice such biases. We can work to change language to conform to how we think the world is. To conform to our experience of how things actually are. Of how things might be. […]

Let me tell you one of my favourite jokes. Abe dies and finally meets God and tells him he can’t wait to tell him a great Holocaust joke. And God’s going to like it, because you know, God understands everything.

So Abe tells the joke and God looks confused. I don’t get it, he says. Well, says, Abe, guess you had to be there.

Without parsing the theological implications of that joke, I’d like to think it might be seen to point to the importance and particular role of writers to “be there” – to act as witnesses, as witnesses to the witnesses, and to allow others to “be there,” both now and in the future. And also to be vigilant about that present and that future. So that no one can say they didn’t know, or didn’t notice. About any genocide or persecution. To speak to the belief that it is possible to be complex humans, that we humans, “infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering things” can exist outside of the reductions of ideology and hierarchies, and dehumanizing forces. To speak to the fact that there is an alternative. To keep dehumanization from being normalized.

As Charles Bernstein wrote in a poem addressing 9/11, “the question isn’t /is art up to this/ but what else is art for?”

Gary Barwin, Jewish Heretics and Wild Writers

old skin. thin.

one can see through it to a future.

crows feed on the sunflower’s eye.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: intruding in Eden, remembering how to dream, the angel of history, a museum or diaspora of things, and much more. Enjoy.

The leaves are slowly shifting their colors, including the ones out near the street I catch sight of with a slight startle every once in a while. Last night, storms blew in and left more fall-ish weather in their wake, scattering a lot of the less tenacious leaves. Tonight, J is making beef stew, since it’s officially the season for it.  We are loosely planning a trip north in a couple of weeks to go up to see fall color and maybe stay in a cabin or lodge, so fall is happening, so I am trying to hold on to the good, despite the madness of the headlines and the parade of videos featuring people being snatched off the street.  […]

Work continues of edits for CLOVEN, and I should have a clean version before we hit November, which could mean a release in December if all goes well. Things are also progressing on the new book manuscript,  AMERICAN CYCLORAMA. The one benefit of feeling higher-strung than usual is that it often means my writing comes swifter and more regularly, though it’s not always the best stuff I fear. Still, it’s something to focus on when everything else seems chaos and upheaval.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/7/2025

How Does the World Celebrate an End to Genocide?

Solemnly.
With great caution.
Silently accepting each moment
          that a cease fire holds.
          Holding your jubilation deep inside.
                    Where fear still has a hold of emotions
                    that cannot quite be released to run free.

Michael Allyn Wells, How Does the World Celebrate an End of Genocide

We pray for peace even if we don’t completely trust the people on either side of the negotiating table. Even if we aren’t sure it’s going to work. Even if we’re afraid a strong wind will blow everything sideways. So today I stand in my sideways sukkah with my lulav, and as I beckon blessing from every direction, I’m praying most of all for the blessing of peace.

May the blessing of peace rest on the city of Chicago, where ICE is using military equipment and tactics on civilians. [Source: The Guardian.] May the blessing of peace rest on Portland, which the administration claims is on fire due to “antifa,” but is actually populated with activists who oppose ICE (and fascism) dancing in animal suits. [Source: NYT, gift link.]

And may the blessing of peace rest over Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel.

Rachel Barenblat, And

We are all distracted.

We are told we are distracted.

We loop—inundated with dystopian messages within our chaotic feeds.

The script of the distracted = care about anything trivial in your algorithm (consume) to avoid.

Anyone at this point in the timeline is:

hyperfocused

hypernormalized (evangelizing consumption, practicing avoidance)

actively engaging in cognitive dissonance, apathy, lack of empathy

or has ADHD, PTSD, OCD, CPTSD, or

all of the above.

This is goal of hybrid soft power. War on the imagination, on the collective consciousness.

(And this is not a poem, btw. I’m writing this way because I can’t think anymore in paragraphs).

Propaganda for anti-propaganda works this way.

So along with my attention span being completely shot (thanks grief brain and menopause combined) deliberate action from day-to-day, for me, is useless.

I jump-cut from sobbing on my kitchen floor to hopping on an online work call pretending to be “normal” (whatever the f that means).

The other day, I used the last of our pancake mix (L and I used to make pancakes on Sunday. It’s the middle of the week). I made way too many pancakes, screamed, and threw out the rest of the mix because I can’t share it with him anymore.

I watch movies about the Holodomor and Hannah Arendt while I’m writing social media posts about synchronicities and watch reels of innocent people being disappeared off the streets of my hometown of Chicago.

I watch Adam Curtis videos while organizing Larry’s poems into a new manuscript.

I listen to records at 3 a.m. and try to conjure him like a witch (I am…but still).

I open the curtains every morning at 5:30, 6:00 a.m. so the sunrise can beam across his urn (he loved the sun, a cup of coffee, fresh air).

I wear his clothes to bed. I talk to him every night.

I am feral now. It’s fall. Full moons, eclipses…HEAVY things are happening everywhere.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Attention: there is no attention.

Last night, as the sun was setting, I discovered that I had made my quilt top too wide.  How could this have happened?  Just last week-end, it wasn’t wide enough, and I didn’t think I added that much?  My spouse and I devised a plan, and I set to work ripping out the seam of part of the quilt that was too wide; later I’ll add it to make the length of the quilt fit–it’s far from catastrophic, as discoveries go.

I looked at the sunset colors in the sky and thought about that time when the crew on one of Columbus’ ships saw land from a distance, that liminal time before all the changes got set into motion.  I am now trying to create a poem about ripping out seams on Columbus Day.  So far, it’s not working, but I wrote down some ideas and maybe they’ll come together.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Explorations and the Imagery of Those Interactions

In these two most recent pamphlets, Henry Gould continues his missives from the front line of Trump’s America, 2025 style. Shady Library and The Gate are billed as books 4 and 5 respectively of the ongoing Shield of Mnemosyne project, of which I’ve reviewed previous parts here and here. The poems published in these latest instalments are dated from May 21 to August 3 this year, and deal with both the contemporary and the timeless in Gould’s unique fashion.

Shady Library consists of seventeen individual poems in Gould’s characteristic mix of rhymed stanzas, from quatrains to nine-liners. Figures familiar from his earlier work appear: Parmenides, Roger Williams, the Mandelstams,  Dante, and Columbia.

This last figure takes on a central importance: as Coulombe, dove of peace, as reminder of the explorer who ‘discovered’ America, as the District of Columbia, seat of American political power (and site of much activity by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, another Gouldian figure who resurfaces in The Gate), and, crucially, as the university that the Trump administration targeted over DEI and student support for the Palestinian people.

                                                    What have we done,
America? Columbia is figurehead for us
and pilot too. Buoyancy marks the end of rage.
(from ‘Equilibrium’)

The sentiment in the last line echoing other explicit references elsewhere in the pamphlet:

Brute force can only outrage innocence.
There is no glory in such mega-gloom –
and shame concludes the reign of every tyrant.
(from ‘July’)

and again, earlier in the same poem, this expression of the ideal Anti-MAGA position:

Love does not boast, or brag, or dominate;
love does not boss, or scold – or persecute
the weak, or curse the poor, or scapegoat
strangers, refugees… O Hypocrite.

Those readers who have been following along will recognise love as Gould’s basis for justice and hope. And there is hope aplenty here:

Somewhere, a child is running towards the sun –
laughing with her light, feeling her strength.
Your summer, Psyche-dove, has just begun:
your ship floats in her sea of grass, full-length.
(from ‘Melissa Hortman: In Memoriam’ a poem, ‘after Osip Mandelstam)

The fusion of Love’s bride and Coulombe in a poem dedicated to the assassinated Hortman, a Democrat from Gould’s home city, is a perfect bringing together of key elements in Gould’s belief in America’s ability to rein in its own worst tendencies by returning to its founding vision. You don’t have to share his optimism to admire the writing, or the intent behind it.

Billy Mills, Recent reading October 2025: A Review

I’ve been writing and revising as much as I can in recent weeks (some of it recommendation-writing because ’tis the season). A few nice poetry things have happened. About Place published a new issue containing a couple of my recent poems, “Innocent Murmur” and “At Tables.” Both poems sprang from EMDR insights–that’s the therapy I’ve been doing for almost a year, involving this strange eye-movement strategy to process old hurts that linger somatically, even when you’ve talked and written your way around, into, and through them for decades. (I’m good at the cognitive stuff, I’m just a giant head basically, but it turns out the body stores hurt in ways that reason can’t root out.) “At Tables” comes from a cascade of images that poured out in a poetic, associative way. Some of my father’s most frightening behavior occurred over the cherry dining table of my childhood; my boss frightened me into silence by poking my arm under the rim of a different cherry table; my department now meets at the latter table; I teach seminars around similar tables. No wonder I couldn’t feel safe at work. Therapy and poetry are NOT the same thing, but poetry often emerges from underworlds that rational thinking can’t plumb.

Lesley Wheeler, Washington-bound (the other one)

Since July, I’ve been pushing pretty hard on a new poetry manuscript, attempting to compose and accumulate a handful of lyric sequences into a book-length shape. I like the idea of a full-length poetry collection with only a dozen or so poems within, each poem some six or eight pages in length. It isn’t anything I’d attempted prior, although every poetry title I’ve composed since the late 1990s one could claim an exploration of the long poem, or at least through the book as unit of composition. […]

In July 2025, the Anglican Girls’ Choir of Ottawa’s Christ Church Cathedral toured Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, performing multiple times in Belfast, Galway and Dublin [I’m sure you caught my three travel reports: here, here and here]. As our daughter, Rose, was part of said group, Christine and I, along with our youngest, Aoife, played tag-along for the two week jaunt, accompanying and solo-touristing, and attending performances by the group at the Cathedral Church of St. Anne in Belfast, the ruins of the tenth century monastery Clonmacnoise (Cluain Mhic Nóis), Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Galway, the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, Christ Church Dublin and the National Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St. Patrick, Dublin.

Of course, two weeks away from my desk is no small thing, and it prompted me to work like a maniac for eight weeks prior to leaving home, to clear that thinking space for travel. I wasn’t suspending the blog while we travelled, after all, and I certainly wasn’t going to attempt writing and posting reviews, interviews or anything else on the road. I spent eight weeks pushing reviews, interviews and other posts nearly a month ahead on the blog, beyond our point of departure. I scheduled a half-dozen substack posts, chapbook posts and pushed a whole array of chapbook publication and mailing, so our adventuring in Ireland (plus at least a week or so after we returned) could be entirely free to focus on that particular experience. I wished to remain, even beyond the uncertainties of travel internet access, which was tricky at times, present.

On airplanes and bus rides, I read through longer works of prose, which seems another kind of rarity. With notebook in hand, I scribbled thoughts on what I was reading; scribbled notes on churches and monuments, Rose’s performances, scattered reading, architecture, and moments. I took a few hundred photos, and mailed more than two dozen postcards. I asked questions of tour guides, hostel and museum staff, bartenders, clergy. Why are there flags along the wall, clearly aged and falling to shreds? Why are the stones of that wall different colours? I looked up details and answers to things that prompted my curiosity. I asked questions of locals, and of the classics professor that was one of the tour organizers. How does Brexit affect the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland? Why was Belfast so young a city, and how does that reconcile with a graveyard going back to the 5^th century? If Richard de Clare, 2^nd Earl of Pembroke (c. 1130–1176), otherwise known as Strongbow, is buried in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, where was his wife, Aoife? Why is the Cathedral in Belfast where Rose and her choir sang named for St. Anne, a figure not mentioned in the actual Bible, but only in the apocrypha, as mother of Mary? Through the process of questions (and internet queries), I learned that, unlike her husband, our wee Aoife’s namesake, Aoife MacMurrough of Leinster (c. 1153–c. 1188), is actually buried with her father-in-law at Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, a ruin that sits along the Welsh bank of the River Wye.

Perhaps most minds might not go there, but a reference to Tintern immediately returned me to “Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798” by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). It was this example that prompted my own series of title-attempts: “Lines composed in St. Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast,” “Lines composed a few kilometres past Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, on the banks of the River Shannon,” “Lines composed at Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, Galway,” and “Lines composed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christ Church, Dublin.” For each piece, I held the title as a kind of umbrella, working to compose a sequence of small clusters of lyric underneath the protection and stretch of those titles; pulling apart sentences and fragments to stretch the narrative into a sequence of small cluster-points that constellate the physical space of each page.

I’ve now composed a handful of “Lines composed…” poems, set as foundation for the collection, with further pieces set around this particular core. So far, other poems in the manuscript-in-progress include “Epithalamium , a consortium,” a piece composed after the recent nuptuals of Ottawa poets Jennifer Baker and David Currie, and “Lines composed once landing at Al Purdy’s A-Frame, Ameliasburgh,” after a recent visit we made to Ameliasburg, driving by the late Canadian poet Al Purdy’s infamous house, a site that now hosts a sequence of writing residencies. Ameliasburg, a Loyalist territory, of course, named for Hanover Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of English King George III. These are poems for occasions, it would seem, almost in the Robert Creeley sense, which, arguably, I have always done. Poems to mark or document moments of time, of activity; of thinking, across or within the broader spectrum of daily activity.

rob mclennan, The Museum of Practical Things

I like when something is really sour and nothing except that sourness exists for that instant. I like my crooked teeth even though I try not to smile in photographs. It’s comforting to know that, when I am sleeping, my hair grows like grass. I like that since I am not plastic, I will die someday. In a forest, I am flesh and a tiger can actually eat me. I find it thrilling that there is not much difference between me and a dog or a zebra.

It’s nice that, like an apple, I have skin. 

Saudamini Deo, I like having a body

Last month, I posted an invitation to “Ask Me Anything” over on Instagram. I had so much fun chatting all things creativity, community, books, behind-the-scenes, etc. I want to share some of the questions with you here, too. […]

Q: How do you get over the “ugh, I wish I’d written this!” when you read another poet?

I actually love that feeling. It tells me I’m ready to write. It clues me into craft choices or emotions or maybe new forms that I want to try. Ask yourself what you love about the poem. Why are you so inspired by it?

My friend and I say “I hate you” when the other one writes a poem we wish we’d written. Jillian also says she wants to set those poems on fire. 😂

I’m too scared to set fires, so I just go write poems. […]

Q: Fave communities or resources that have helped you fine tune your poetry?

I’ll start with books: Dear Writer — Maggie Smith, The Poetry Home Repair Manual — Ted Kooser, A Poetry Handbook — Mary Oliver, Poetry Unbound — Pádraig Ó Tuama

I also take workshops whenever I can. Here are some of my favorite workshop leaders: Kelly Grace Thomas, Joy Sullivan, Isabelle Correa, Lexi Pelle, Two Sylvias Press

And community is everything. There are paid communities, of course, that can speed up the process of connecting with other writers. A few favorites are: Gather Poets, Exhale Creativity, and Blue Sky Black Sheep. But I’ve also met and cultivated relationships with other writers simply by connecting on platforms like IG and Substack. I formed a friendship with poet Christen Lee simply by reaching out after reading her poem in Dulcet Lit Mag. Be brave, say hello, and ask to swap work for feedback. It’s so valuable, and much more fun than doing this all on your own!

Allison Mei-Li, You Asked, I Answered

I’ve always been the kind of person who slips easily into dark moods, and the doubt inherent in being a 53-year-old STILL SEEKING her debut poetry collection is a natural portal for that darkness. Instead, however, this revision cycle has made me — and my book — bolder, brighter, and more defiant than ever.

I am incredibly proud of the deep, consistent effort and delighted by the results.

Doubt hasn’t been entirely absent, of course. The ferocity that defined the summer of revision has been book-ended by periods of frustration. In May, on the heels of yet another rejection and just ahead of digging back into the manuscript, I entertained the idea that there just wasn’t a space for me in the poetry publishing universe. And in September, which is the period covered in this blog post, my energy for revision started to flag, and I grew frustrated with a section that just wasn’t coming together as I’d hoped.

I began to wonder if I was failing my vision for the book. Maybe it was time to admit defeat?

Enter the wisdom of writing community… Y’all have been there and done that, and you swooped in to remind me that the process ebbs and flows. Also, so many of you believe in this book in moments when I lose faith. Your guidance and encouragement frequently saves me, including the message I heard loud and clear in September: Girl, it’s OK to take a break.

Best pal Jill Crammond put it in the clearest terms: “I think you should take a nap,” she said. And so that’s how I ended the month. Not stalled out with revisions, but resting. Taking a short pause. Letting some shit go.

We can work so hard we stop seeing straight.

Carolee Bennett, When We Remember How to Dream

Thinking out loud about things that block us in one of Claire Pedrick’s supervision groups this week also had me thinking about focusing and about being temporarily stuck. I have some great strategies for getting unstuck and tackling things that are blocking the way to my next steps or simply getting something done, and I was happy to share these. But I found that I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something particular I needed to find out about being blocked when it comes to editing a set of a poems. How could I have these strategies and still be stuck?

Two kinds of being blocked came to mind – the ‘not wanting to do a thing’ kind and the ‘joy-blocked’ kind. These are the kind of blocks I need to climb over or go round. But here they were showing themselves to both be at play at the same time making the block seem huge.

I didn’t want to edit the poems and I wasn’t finding joy when I did sit down to do it. Thinking out loud with others and then allowing myself time to continue the think enabled me to hear the real stuff going on. Firstly, I had to admit they weren’t all great poems and those that had been sent back instead of being published did need work. I needed to kick into touch the hurry up driver that wanted a set of poems to work on and had pulled them together too quickly. I also had to take on board the feedback I had asked for and respond to it. I also realised that having an overarching theme to the work was hugely important to me, and I had been pushing this aside.

Having leant into all of that I was gifted time to truly focus at a body doubling session. I took along three poems, and during the session I binned one and polished the other two. Without another person sharing time and space it would have taken me much longer to get this sorted. It wasn’t easy, and I felt the twitch of wanting to give in or to check social media to avoid the difficult, but what a wonderful feeling to have cracked the blocks and squeezed through onto the poetry path again.

Here’s to the kind of focus that comes when you stay with something even though it’s hard. And to the joy of being inspired to write fresh poems.

Sue Finch, FOCUSING

Silence is often a cue
that apologies are in order.
Perhaps it is perverse to kneel here
like an intruder in eden
and ask for more.
Nature does this,
weighing down one end of a seesaw
holding me high – precarious, captive, impotent.

I paint a golden eagle in the sky
its six-foot wingspan blocking the sun
the lake turning purple
wind scattering into the branches —
as if imperfection improves the scene
improves me
makes it all bearable
allows me to pray.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Where one road ends

I have never been to the mountains in the fall. Teaching always meant vacations were taken during winter break or during the summer months, but those restrictions no longer apply. Two friends and I took a four day trip to hike and drive Rocky Mountain National Park, and autumn did not disappoint. The number of elk was incredible (the last time my husband and I visited, we did not see even one.) Our hikes led us to spectacular views and everyone we looked, the aspens were jangling their gold. Majesty is a word that is thrown around about mountains, and it is decidedly not hyperbole. Coming from the flat Midwest, there’s something magical about mountains that cannot be beat. […]

Unrivered, my fourth poetry collection with Sundress Publications is now in the world. I’ve been busy promoting it and starting to read from it, so I want to thank and highlight those people who have graciously given me the space to do so over the first couple weeks of the book’s life.

• A Wild and Precious Life Series -I was privileged to read with Taylor Byas and Ashley M. Jones on September 24, and host Dustin Brookshire creates such a welcoming atmosphere. (I think there was a video somewhere on Instagram, but I can’t find it now.)
• Of Poetry Podcast with Han VanderHart – It’s always a pleasure to talk poems with someone as smart as Han, and this was no exception. You can listen at the link
• A Word? with Roi Faineant Press and Kellie Scott Reed. This short video conversation with Kellie was so much fun. We talked about the book, yes, but also about music and memory, everything from Jesus Christ Superstar to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” and its effect on driving speed.
• Verse Virtual – Hosted by Robbi Nester and Jim Lewis, who create a lovely welcoming space. I got to read with Jane Zwart, whose work I adore, and the open mic readers were all talented as well. Video should be up soon.
• My Bad Poetry Podcast – I always enjoy listening to Aaron and Dave and their guests, and I had a blast bringing some of my own bad poems to this conversation. Want to hear a poem about nothing, a really odd metaphor for religion, a low-rent Millay imitation? Episode coming soon, and you’ll be able to find it at the link.

I’m reading online for NAWP this Tuesday evening, and my in-person, in real life book launch will be this upcoming Saturday at Yellow Bird Books in Aurora, IL, where I will read and be in conversation with my good friend and fellow poet Kristin LaTour, who runs the Aurora Writer’s Workshop, a wonderful local conference held in June.

Donna Vorreyer, Three Months Later…

My goal for the last few years has been to review 10% of the titles read. I did it last year, nearly did it the year before.

By now, that would be about 24 reviews for 2025. And I am at 12 reviews.

So can I go for broke and do 12 more in 2 months? (I could add to the count one line raves at AO3. Hardly equivalent.) To keep pacing under my own control, I could do the remainder here, rather than a magazine that may plan 6 months or a year ahead. Am I talking to myself? Very well, I am talking with myself.

The point of reading, writing, reviewing, living is the exploration and engagement, the being present and attentive, not the numbers racked up. (Kind of sounds like a relationship instead of collecting followers online doesn’t it. )

I want to go deeper rather than bigger.

I have been doing my small press since 2007. (That means it’s an adult press as of November.) I have been doing a reader’s log since 2012. Next year will be 14 years.

It’s funny how there are no constants in this chaotic universe. Sure, spiders have 8 legs, except when they’ve lost 3 and continue on. Water freezes at 0 degrees, unless salty. I read Feel Happier in nine seconds: poems by Linda Besner (Coach House, 2017) and I couldn’t enter it. I return the better part of a decade later and it isn’t hard. I has a sort of Eunoia about it. Constraints cinched hard. Still a pointing.

I read To Assemble an Absence by John Levy (above/ground, 2024) and was utterly wowed. How hadn’t read this before? Except I had 18 months before and it was kinda meh then. I wonder if I should reread Guest Book for People in My Dreams by John Levy (Proper Tales Press, 2024) and it too might improve from very good.

Pearl Pirie, Anniversaries

There’s a never too late writing award for the over 60s, an elder fest somewhere and probably enough silver tagged onto old peoples’ events to heat our homes. 

In my city library there’s also a book display for the ‘ageing well’ festival. Mmm…crafting, menopause, gardening, birdwatching. I approach a woman on the desk with purple hair. We’re around the same age. That stand, I say…..it’s so depressing. She keeps quiet. I go on…brilliant women novelists over 60, poets, artists, actors, singers and musicians….composers, inventors and women of history.  We laugh. She promises to tell the person who’s done the display, gently, that it could be more ambitious. That ‘gently’ is telling. It reminds me of words I researched for age in the historical thesaurus (a place to browse on a par with an old-style, ramshackle charity shop). 

Ripe, wintered, strucken, far, oldish, grey, eld, crusted, long in the tooth, over the hill, grandevous, antiquated and my all-time favourite, badgerly. (Someone once shouted ‘badger’ at me when the stripes on the side of my head appeared and much of the rest of my hair was still dark.) It appears in a poem in A Friable Earth. 

Jackie Wills, Pantywaist looking for work

As a midlife, mid-career writer, it seems like a good time to take a moment and think about the habits and goals I’ve become accustomed to since starting to write and submit in my teens. Am I trying to support myself with my writing (and if so, how do I do that better than I’m doing it now?) Am I trying to reach the right audiences? How do I determine whether I say yes or no to an assignment or request? How do I find the right publisher (because it would be nice to find the right publisher that I could stay with the rest of my writing career?) […]

Our J. Bookwalter’s book club is reading a book that just came out in English translation (but the stories were written and published in the seventies and eighties in Japan), Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki. It made me think about Philip K. Dick’s sixties-era Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in that it plumbs strangely prescient subject matter – population collapse vs overpopulation, teens obsessed with screens to the point of violence, and a very 2020’s kind of detachment and way of examining gender and class. It also has things in common with Yoko Ogawa, a Japanese writer I very much admire, and Osamu Dazai’s whose ironic detachment in his many books the 1930s set a standard for Japanese literature. It’s interesting to think what people in the past thought the future would be like – and how much they got right or wrong. I’ve been investigating Solarpunk over the past year, partially because I believe if you can’t imagine a better future, you won’t get one, and the relentless oppressiveness of recent dystopian writings, I’m trying to think of how to write a way to a better future for people and nature. I’m trying to be brave and face some things – like disability and chronic illness – more directly in my writing, and in doing that, to maybe make things better (?)

Jeannine Hall Gailey, October – Trip to Skagit, Application Anxieties and the Mid-Career Writer, Reading Early Cyberpunk

Literature cannot save you, but it can accompany you on the quest for meaning.

Quests send us out into the world, send us through trials, send us into the dark lands of wilderness and despair. Quests teach us that we were really seeking virtue, not gold, true love, not a princess. A quest is a cycle to help us see the world and ourselves afresh. It is a long process of moral reformation. All quest is self-discovery, aspiration, virtue riding in the wilderness.

Shakespeare wrote about the journey of the mind. Elizabeth Bishop wrote of the journey to the interior. Those are the journeys on which great authors are our companions in the struggle. It takes a great deal of reading to go on such a quest of the spirit.

Literature is not trying to save you. It is calling to you. The great works of civilisation are trying to show you your life as a quest for meaning.

A lot of people find themselves midway on the path, wandering the wilderness of the world, and they are now turning to literature.

Good. Welcome. Enchantment is the start of change.

Now the journey begins.

Henry Oliver, Literature can’t save you.

It is night walk season and I don my florescent vest. It is night walk season and for whatever reason, the dried-up river rumbles loud amidst the insect song. Perhaps it is the change in temperature. Perhaps it is the body’s tuning into the dark. With darkness comes more sound. And the pupil—that dark aperture—widens like wells ever-ready to receive a message like a dropped coin. And as my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, rhodopsin is produced in my eyes, promoting night-vision. The racoon or skunk is indeed litter. The intriguing dark hole up ahead on the road that looks like a deep void into the earth—like Wiley Coyote’s convenient trap—is indeed a piece of cardboard. This is the kind of darkness, though, where the coyote trots, head down, between the trees.

Sarah Lada, Make Big Shadows I Can Move In

Tonight I’m trying something new: a fighting game and poetry night for students. They can take turns at 4-player arena battles on Power Stone 2 or team up for 2-player ‘Dramatic Battle’ mode in Street Fighter Alpha 3 (both from the recently released Capcom Fighting Collection 2 ). I’m bringing some thematically linked poems for volunteers to read aloud in between bouts. Here they are:

‘Wrestling’ by Louise S. Bevington
‘Duel’ by Helena Nelson
‘The Boxers’ by Michael Longley
‘Last Round’ by Kim Addonizio
‘Sonnets to Morpheus [“I know kung fu”]’ by John Beer
‘Elegy for Bruce Lee’ by W. Todd Kaneko
‘Fist of the North Star’ by Kayo Chingonyi (available/first published in Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge!)
‘To fight aloud is very brave’ by Emily Dickinson
‘Duellum’ (‘The Duel’) by Baudelaire (I’ve picked the LeClercq translation)
‘Mortal Combat’ by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Jon Stone, VS. Night Mini-Anthology

I’m so jet lagged I should have a lock on my laptop right now. Writing exhausted and with my internal clock set to no discernible time zone at all is probably not advisable. And yet, here we are! Bear with me.

I spent the last week in Greece at Rosemary’s House, mentoring a cohort of writers—poets, memoirists, essayists, and fiction writers—and eating more feta than one human should ingest in an eight-day period. I highly recommend both. Working with writers across genres is a joy and a privilege no matter where I am, but doing that work in such a beautiful place, with such a supportive group? I kept turning to my friend Megan Stielstra and saying, “This is work,” to remind myself.

It was work, and it was pleasure, and I hope to be back.

Maggie Smith, On Growing Up & Leaning In

More often than seems sensible, I dwell on comparisons between building and poetry. That there is poetry in these bricks is undeniable. They might carry a faded provenance of lime-wash, or azulete; the lime tinted with washing blue, said to keep away flies and the evil eye. (There’s a window surround in azulete in the photo of my house above, also flat bricks forming the sill and capping the buttress at the foot of the wall).

Sometimes the brick might be blackened from a fire surround or even a chimney, and cutting them with an angle grinder releases the scent of an ancient fire to rise with the dust. The unmistakeable sweet vanillin smell of oak is pungent and lingering and occasionally, if the sun falls on one of these faintly charred bricks, I might catch the whiff of another home’s hearth. I wonder what was said around it, and in which language, or languages. […]

So many bricks and tiles, so many words and so many people, been and gone. At a zoom poetry event, a poet remarked rather pointedly that she thought using a foreign language in a poem was ‘showing off’ and I was a little taken aback. I did think about this on and off for quite a while, concluding I was and am happy to throw in Spanish, Catalan, Ladino or even Arabic words into poetry. It means I get to do things like rhyme ‘ever’ with ‘cueva’ and because as someone pointed out, these languages are a part of my ‘lived experience’. Just like the bricks and the roof tiles and the honey-coloured stone, they are the linguistic palette of the land and its lingering traces. They are the raw material from which the words arise, passed hand to hand through Roman Hispania, or the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, proudly Mudéjar, a product of Teruel, where I live. I may be English, but here in Spain, when our heads settle into their pillows to rest and dream, they are still cradled through the night by the almohada, from the Hispanic Arabic: al-Muhádda.

james mcconachie, Mudéjar

This week, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis was published by Faber & Faber. It contains uncollected and unpublished poems, and extensive notes on the writing and publication of Heaney’s twelve collections. For anyone who grew up reading Heaney, as I did, it’s an addictive, behind-the-scenes kind of volume. Here are some notes on what I’ve found so far. […]

One of Heaney’s strokes of luck as a poet was to be taught in schools for decades. Next year, however, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of an incident that almost got him cancelled in the right-wing press. In 1976, an “outraged mother” from Suffolk wrote to her local Conservative MP, Eldon Griffiths, to complain that the “The Early Purges” had been set as an “unseen” poem that year. It describes the drowning of unwanted kittens as a coldly practical matter on the family farm:

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, “the scraggy wee shits”,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound

Griffiths contacted the Daily Telegraph, who obligingly ran with the headline “POEM FOR O-LEVEL ‘SICK’”, and — in a different kind of sic — identified the poet responsible as “Sean Heany”.

What I like most about this episode— apart from the fact that a secondary school exam board was willing to set an unseen poem that contained (as the Telegraph put it) “language not encouraged in most homes” — is the calm indifference with which the head of the exam board, Dr. F. Wyld, responded to the trouble-making politician:

Dr. Wyld said: “I replied to Mr. Griffiths pointing out that the function of examination boards is to examine. We try to test candidates fairly, without giving offence, and I am sorry that we seem to have given offence in this case.”

As for Mr. Heany [sic], Dr. Wyld said: “I have to confess that I have never heard of him. I gather that he is one of the modern poets.”

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #37: The Melancholy Spouts of Tractors

Performance of Dirty Old Men 

Highly Commended in Forward Prizes 

Best Single Poem – Performed

Thanks to Bad Betty Press for submitting a video of my performance with the Bad Betty crew in Nottingham. Check out the whole list, my poem is in great company, and I’m sending congratulations and appreciation to all. Thanks especially to the judges for sharing this undiluted fury, it is one of the most fierce protest poems in the With Love, Grief and Fury collection. Huge thanks to Bad Betty, Amy and Jake, for this surprise, for their support and outstanding contribution to poetry as a whole.

On a personal note – I feel heavy-hearted taking any praise and applause for this particular poem. It was written a while back now, however, today we see the dirtiest of Dirty Old Men gaining more power, wealth, votes and momentum, whilst lying to our faces, stripping human rights and profiteering in the deaths of people and planet. 

Salena Godden, With Love, Grief and Fury

In Jonson’s poem, it is not the ‘balanced mind’ of self-knowledge and equanimity that proves reliable, but death itself; the final lines of the English epigram are a moving variation upon the structure of the Latin ending: ‘Which shows, wherever death doth please t’appear, / Seas, serenes, swords, shot, sickness, all are there.’

The emphasis upon the location (wherever . . . there) rather than, as we might rather expect, the unanticipated timing of death connects the end of the epigram with Horace’s point about the unimportance of location for virtue and wisdom. But this insiginificance, which is offered as a source of comfort for Bullatius, is the root of Jonson’s sorrow and loss: when death strikes home, it makes no difference where we are.

Jonson very often used Horace’s epistles as the starting point for poems about friendship, and the epistle to which he returns more often than any other is not in fact the quite brief 1.11 but the much longer Epistles 1.18, addressed to Lollius, which is concerned with how the poet should handle and relate to powerful friends — how to find the delicate mid-point between respect and honesty. […]

It’s been rather a trying week here in Paris. My husband and I are both bogged down in seemingly endless and fruitless domestic admin; two of us (including me) have been unwell on and off all week; and French politics has become completely absurd — comedic, very distracting, and also a bit worrying. But as Jonson, Horace, or Roe would all have said, whatever else is going on, there is always one thing that you can do: my constant mind, I will prepare myself.

Victoria Moul, When I am down at Hackney Brook

You worked as a chemical engineer, a biomedical scientist, and a forensic scientist. I think that’s impressive. Let’s start with chemical engineering.  What kind of chemicals did you work with? What are some key things you’ve learned about this career field? How has your work as a chemical engineer informed your lifestyle, life perspectives, and your poetry?

Instead of listing chemicals, let me offer a metaphor: the haiku mind as a chemical plant. The real estate (including the reaction vessel) is the mind. The reactants are images, memories, kigo, cutting words. The catalyst is a flash of insight or a prompt. The reaction vessel—the brain—responds under pressure (a deadline) and temperature (mood). The distillation column is editing. We purify the product, strip the excess, and maybe collect unused images as reflux for later use. My professors might groan, but haiku really is a high-purity product.

As a biomedical scientist, what were your specialties? What did you enjoy the most about working as a biomedical scientist? What were some of the challenges? How has your work as a biomedical scientist informed your life perspectives and your poetry?

I was often tasked with translating technical ideas into plain language. One job involved a 10-year modernization plan for fifteen hospitals during the early days of digital radiography—when some physicians still thought it was witchcraft. Another project developed a handheld molecular biology tool to identify pathogens in hours, not days—this was before most medical schools even taught the technology.

As an occupational health consultant, I observed hundreds of industrial processes, assessed health risks, and translated findings into terms both workers and managers could understand. It was all about clarity and credibility—skills that carry into poetry.

What inspired you to work as a forensic scientist? What did you enjoy the most about this position? What were some of the challenges? What are the key things you learned? How has your work as a forensic scientist informed your life perspectives and your poetry?

Forensics focuses on trace evidence, attribution, comparison. Did the dyed hair come from a suspect? Is that chemical from the scene or just background contamination?

Locard’s Exchange Principle teaches that when two things meet, something is transferred. That’s haiku. You step into nature, and you carry something away—in memory, in your boots, in your notebook. Hopefully, nature is okay with what we leave behind.

Jacob D. Salzer, Richard L. Matta

They are circling, as they do. Something is dead somewhere in the neighborhood. Or dying. So as much as I like these giant hideous creatures whose very existence thrills me with their alienness, they also seem foreboding. Death is nigh. And, of course, it is. It always is. But with their wingspan and their wattley heads and knobby knees they are so damnably alive, these guys. I thrill to the juxtaposition: life/death, hunger/dying, “civilized” streets/wild life, my earthbound body/their unlikely grace in flight. Turkey vultures jolt me out of my earthbound concerns, sneer at my little anxieties. And in so doing, relieve me, for a moment, of the claustrophobia of my me-centered vision and my you-centered fears, and open for me the sky, where eternity drifts like mares’ tail clouds and peace abides in blue.

Here is a lovely and taut poem by Bertha Rogers, also a vulture appreciator. 

Marilyn McCabe, most exalted fixture, an angel

Some readers of this publication will have been wondering when a Lynda Hull poem would appear, so vast and long has been my adoration of this poet, and since another reader casually asked me today when she’d see the next post, and it happens that I once attempted to order said reader a copy of Hull’s Collected Poems1 as a birthday gift only for it to never materialize, the time, it seems, for Lynda Hull is nigh. I’ve been relearning, these days, to not ignore auspicious signs, even when it means I might embarrass myself by publicly declaiming that in fact I do still adore the work of Lynda Hull, and you may roll your eyes all you want. She is not the reason I started writing poems, but she may well be the reason I never fell out of love with them. What I’m saying is, I’d like to be her when I grow up.

Hull is a poet of furious intensity and lyricism, fiercely engaged with the social world at both the micro- and macrocosmic level. Her work is driven by an intoxicating tangle of sorrow and praise, reverence and despair. She is an ecstatic elegiac, or an elegiac ecstatic, and her too-short life left Planet Earth with just three volumes of poetry, each more restlessly felt and original than the last. “The Window” is the last poem in her final collection, The Only World, which was published after her death in 1994. She was forty years old. I am a little stunned tonight to realize, for the first time, that I have outlived her. I guess I’ll have to be myself when I grow up instead.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Window” by Lynda Hull

This week a friend introduced me to a quote by Walter Benjamin about his idea of the Angel of History, the being who surveys and weighs the actions of the past. It is only a slice of Benjamin’s vignette, but here are the select lines he sent:

‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe…’

The extract almost shivered on the first reading, possessing that little vibration common to all things that are alive. Benjamin was said to have been inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), that odd and not entirely appealing monoprint. Reading the extract, I was reminded how we are always looking for ways to understand the past, and this figure felt instantaneously apt; I imagined it large and looming over all our important incidents.

For me at least, the resonance was only momentary, and I found by the second reading of the lines that my heart disagreed. Would any Angel of History really see overarching catastrophe? I have my doubts. I think it is the human habit, rather than any angel’s, to see catastrophe everywhere.

How would I alter the line? I would risk outlining it as this: ‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of catastrophes, he sees one single act of…’ What? Beauty? Grace? Something like this? I think so.

The terror is that this angel would see a chain-link of sadness after sadness and would perceive not a whole sorrow. How incomprehensible to us. This is the terror, and the hope – that all this suffering is not just suffering. 

Niall Campbell, On What The Angel of History Might See

stars pound on the roof but no one hears.

a lost soul settles to the benthic floor. polished

darkness. weight of silence. have mercy.

Grant Hackett [no title]

Erasing Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s metaphysical classic A Thousand Plateaus page by page, until only tanka and haiku remain. Follow Deleuzian Haiku on BlueSky for regular updates.

“All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities. The plane of consistency is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills, [while] flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency, regardless of their number of dimensions.” (D&G, p9) […]

16

speak:
transformed by a line
of ants

[…]

18

microfascisms
just waiting to crystallize . . .
i become cat

Dick Whyte, Delezuian Erasure Haiku Vol. 2

When I was a teen, I used to sneak out of the house and play music in the woods or, especially, at the loading dock of the local mall because I loved the echoey sound and the sense of being alone, “out there,” playing music as if I were Sonny Rollins on the Brooklyn Bridge or some other improviser reckoning with self and the numinous. Later, I’d play in the outdoor concert hall at my arts high school. In fact, the night before graduation, a friend and I snuck out of our dorms at 3am and I played saxophone and he played the organ which was set up for the ceremony. Badasses, I know. I love playing music at night, and especially outside. I still do this, sometimes playing under the bridge to the 403 Highway near me. I like the susurration of the cars above and the otherwise stillness of the night.

Gary Barwin, Playing Music at Night under the Bridge

Never mind the half moons of cemetery dirt beneath its fingernails. Now, time means you no harm.

Those late-night drives when a familiar voice and a cup of coffee get you so much further down the line.

Up ahead,

a sign reads, You Are Here,

but you know there are still many miles left to go.

Rich Ferguson, Just One of the Many Adventures St. Christopher Remembers

In the distance, lakes black
as tar; the clang of instruments for binding

and shattering. The harp of the world
is strung to the point of breaking.

What hope there might be is a small
bubble, a spacecraft with limited seating.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Last Judgment

I’m becoming a real fan of poetry read aloud.  I love to hear words animated.  Silence falls, and the voice, with its hypnotic or musical or walking tones, steps in. Now that I’ve had the chance to read several times from “Diaspora of Things,” I’m fascinated.  Self-conscious at the start, I was careful to put emphasis here, pause between stanzas where I penciled in “pause.”  Then I slid into a rhythm.  The words took over, released from the page.  I hoped those words, riding on the point of a vibrating arrow, attached to wings, knew how to do what they do.  

Homer called it, “winged words,” how poetry is in flight and comes alive, like airborne birds, like carrier pigeons, conveying meaning and power.  In Hebrew, words and things are conveyed by the same word – devar.  In “Diaspora,” things become released “from the gaze of possession” – so why not words?  If they pierce the reader, go directly from one inner self to another, I ask for nothing more. 

Jill Pearlman, Poetry’s “Winged Words”

the cold finale
of a crime series:
even the softest sofa becomes
uncomfortable, unidentified,
a simple thing

Kati Mohr, Oración de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Diaspora of Things

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

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

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

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

Carolee Bennett, We Don’t Have to Be Quiet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allison Mei-Li, My Slow Art Manifesto

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Illusions, connections

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

Dale Favier, September Comes Anyway

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

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

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

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

We need to have that in mind.

Kati Mohr, Things, Names, Expectations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Awkward in Life

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Birth of a poem

The dream is balance. Balance as we walk forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Boyle, CBe newsletter September 2025: In bad times

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Paint Patch Poetry Process

赤蜻蛉少し飛んでは考える　根岸敏三

akatonbo sukoshi tondewa kangaeru

red dragonfly

            each time it flies a little

            it stops to think

                                                Keizo Negishi

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, magpie brain and the next new shiny

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

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

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

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

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

STOP EATING THE LOVE HEARTS

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

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

Sue Finch, SNOWDON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Love, AI vs AI

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

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

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

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

John Glenday, A Bit of a Performance

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, August Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #46

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

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

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

            My brain dulls a little

            with each lost phrase.

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

The other influences I experienced that helped were:

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Jenny Hamlett (Nigel Kent)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Gillian Allnutt, “lode”

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

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

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

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

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

              —: Fragment :—
                          by Dick Whyte

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

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

       [ . . . ]

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Melanie Dennis Unrau, Goose

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

Marilyn McCabe, shifting uneasily under

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Crane, POEM: the rainbow I want to see

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

Robin Gow, nesting

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for an Uprising

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

word is wind. and sky, windless.

leaves give tongue until their skin burns green.

Grant Hackett [untitled]

This week: the ludokinetic poem, the transparent eyeball, traveling on motherless roads, constructing a witch, and much more. Enjoy.

In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, he notes that there is “a secret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own” because “we have been expected upon this earth.” Our ancestors knew of our coming. As such, just like all previous generations, we possess what Benjamin calls a “weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim.” In other words, although we are not super heroes or gods—not capital m Messiahs with the power to redeem the past, present, or future with grand utopian visions or Paradise on earth—our small, contingent acts can disrupt the version of time that appears linear or inevitable. If we were glitter nail polish, the base color might be our ordinary positionality in the flow of time–our genetics, our culture, our place–and the glitter would be our power to change the course of history. […]

After many months now of watching the genocide of civilians in Gaza, of praying, of gathering money to support the large family of my friend Mahmoud who sends harrowing videos and photos of the devastation and violence there every day, of calling my Senators to demand a ceasefire, peace and justice there have started to feel, for many, like a lost cause. It boggles the mind and confounds my spirit that people can see and know about the thousands of lives lost—many of them children—and not be spurred to outrage. And for me at least, the lost causness doesn’t feel limited to just Gaza, but has leaked a sense of lostness out beyond its edges into everything else. As my friend Cassie […] recently wrote on her fantastic newsletter, “My scientific proposal is that the genocide in Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023 caused the luck to run out in the world.”

As a result of this lost-cause feeling, this luckless feeling, I’m looking for ways to spend more time and energy and heart resisting this particular part of the death machine. A local friend and I are going to be gathering folks who want to organize locally, I’m going to start joining Mothers for Ceasefire at their Wednesday morning demonstrations in downtown Durham, and I’m imagining ways that poetry might be an avenue of resistance here in my own little circle of messianic influence. My idea (still nascent) is that I would print up a series of cards, little broadsides, with poems about Gaza and by Palestinian poets, and the flip side of the card would have links to donate to aid organizations and numbers to call our State Representatives. I would put stacks of these in places around town—coffee shops, vintage stores, yoga studios, maybe therapy offices.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Time

People are starving
and we argue about
who’s more at fault.
Measles is roaring
back to life. Every
day is Tisha b’Av now.
Which means every day
a seed of hope
is planted.
Every day, a runway.
Every day we get up
from the floor,
brush off mourning’s
ashes and begin again
like our ancestors
in the wilderness
who every year
would dig their graves
expecting to die
and wake to discover
another chance.

 A seed of hope / is planted. Tradition holds that moshiach / the messiah will be born on Tisha b’Av — the seeds of redemption growing in the soil of our darkest day.

Every day, a runway. Tisha b’Av begins the seven-week runway toward the Days of Awe and the Jewish new year. 

Like our ancestors.  See Rashi on Taanit 30b:12:1.

This poem was inspired by a conversation after the first session of Seven Habits of Highly Evolved People, the pre-high-holiday class I’m co-teaching with R. David Markus this year.

Rachel Barenblat, Every day

When I think of what helps in these times, I often think of music. My impulse is to go somewhere beautiful—the woods, the water—and play music. One of the things the cantor sang was a Hebrew chant of the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd.”) I’m not a religious person—not believing in lords and such— but these words were powerful in their imagery (“I shall not want,” “lie down in green pastures.” “…leadeth me beside the still waters.”)

When I have a chance in the waiting room, I’ve been making little visual pieces to have the centring effect of making something. Of creating some little beauty. Of making marks to somehow speak to the world. They don’t respond per se to the emotional weight of the moment excepting that making marks, but being “cautiously optimistic” about things is always helpful. At home, I type out some figures on a typewriter and load the scans into the computer which I bring to the hospital. I’ve called them Typewriter Rituals because making them is a small ritual.

Gary Barwin, typewriter rituals in the ICU

When I think about what I am doing here (in this newsletter, that is, I do my best not to think about the other question) I realise that one of my biggest and fondest inspirations is Carol Rumens’s Poem of the Week column [in The Guardian]. Rumens has been writing the column for almost two decades. Each week, she shares a poem, sometimes an old poem, sometimes a new one, then takes us through it, closely and clearly. Anyone will get something out of the discussion, whatever their relationship to poetry, because (because not despite) she always starts with what makes a poem a poem. Its sound and its shape.

Poem of the Week has introduced me to a lot of poems and poets I might never have encountered elsewhere. But Rumens will also change how you think about poems you thought you knew. Put a good poem in front of a good reader and they will always find something surprising, because poetry is the gift that keeps on giving (in this sense, it is very good for the environment). This week’s poem was ‘Sea-Fever’ [by John Masefield]. You can read it here […]

Like Rumens says, I don’t think you can have it too many times. I know this because I’ve been reciting it to our toddler in his cot most evenings for the past month. This is partly because I simply don’t know many poems by heart, partly because once you start doing one thing with a toddler they tend to want you to do it again (he doesn’t have many words yet, but he will ask for the “poom”) and partly because it is such a joy to say.

Jem Wikeley, The Long Trick

A little bit of fun for mid-August — two of the poems that I most enjoying saying to my own children (whether they like it or not). Both of these are very cheering I find at trying moments. The first is by Alfred Noyes, now probably known only for his (fantastic) ‘The Highwayman’, which is still widely available as an illustrated picture book. Years ago, I said ‘The Highwayman’ to both the older boys, then perhaps 7 and 5, while perched on the lower bunk at bed time; I got all the way through to the end, enjoying it greatly myself, and was quite pleased that they were still listening. After I finished, there was a pause, before the younger of them burst out “but it’s sad!” and started to cry, and the elder leaned over the edge of the top bunk to remark censoriously, “I really don’t think that was appropriate for us, Mummy”. (You have been warned.)

I’m not sure ‘The New Duckling’ is entirely appropriate either but it’s very funny […]

My second suggestion, Charles Causley’s ‘Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth Toast’ is a great favourite of the children and I have never got bored of saying it. The final stanza is particularly delicious.

Victoria Moul, Two poems to learn so that you can say them to your children for your own amusement

These hot, humid summer days I’ve been waiting for fall. And then I feel guilty about it, because of that whole be-here-now stuff, that whole life-is-short-enjoy-it-while-you-can stuff. That whole climate-change-this-may-be-the-new-normal stuff… I try to spend some time each day (usually in the cooler hours) in that living-in-the-present stuff. But then it gets hot, and I get whiny. But all those hyphenated points above are so true, dammit. And life is so damn uncertain. So now I’m working on enjoying being a hot thing that lies on the couch feeling hot. If the couch has a breeze, I can almost pull it off, that gratitude business. It’s worth a try, even if I fall back in to whineland. I woke up the other day thinking, dang, I was going to start working on my upper body strength — a little weight lifting every day. I did it for a while, but that was…well…a while ago. That’s okay, I told myself. Today is a new day. You can always start today. I appreciated my generous self for that thought. As Nina Simone sang, “It’s a new life for me, yeah.”

I admire this Stafford poem for its challenge to the new day, the new life, the new yeah. It’s a tape-it-over-the-desk poem. We all need a few of those.

Marilyn McCabe, When you turn around, starting here, lift this

distant thunder
white curtains billow
in the dusk

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’25

A short interactive poem of mine, ‘The Whisky Shop’, is published in the latest issue of Taper, a journal of computational literature (poems and experimental lit crossed with coding, essentially). The constraint for all submissions to the journal is extreme: 2KB file size. A Microsoft Word document of a one-page poem I’m working on at the moment clocks in at 16KB.

To bring ‘The Whisky Shop’ — originally a longer poem with many more options for line swaps — down to 2KB I had to remove all the spacing in the .html file, as well as most of the poetry, and then spend another couple of hours working on efficiencies in the code. For example, all the style selectors are just one character long. Effectively I put the whole thing into a compactor, and I did wonder at one point if it made sense to do so for the sake of a submission to a journal. The end result is a different poem, but interesting in its own way, and I have some ideas of how to yoke the two together in future.

It’s a ludokinetic poem, which means the interactive element is intended to locate the reader inside the poem in some way. In this case, what I envisaged is someone shuffling memories like cards to reconjure a distant experience.

Jon Stone, Taper #14 / The Whisky Shop

Recently, when typing up notes from my journals, I found quotes I captured while watching an Indigo Girls documentary (as one does). It’s full of testimony about how writing and singing allowed them to create — and re-create — themselves.

Emily, one of the Indigo Girls, also talks about the pressures and joys of performing and says this:

I’ve had nights where I was sad, didn’t feel like playing, and by the end of the night I’m just healed, just washed over with that energy of togetherness.

That energy of togetherness. YES.

I’m a loner. Deep, deep, deep in my bones. So the level to which I’ve discovered, nurtured and delighted in writing community has been one of the biggest surprises of my life.

Like… y’all: I’m still writing — inspired! healed! — every damn day because of writing community. Jill Crammond. Sarah Freligh. Woman Words. The Albany open mic scene over the years. The Madwomen in the Attic workshops. Second Best Witches Writing Group. The fairly new but growing Ass in Chair Collective. And others. I’m so grateful.

In art, togetherness really does provide more than camaraderie. It’s energy-giving. It’s momentum-building. It’s cheerleading.

It’s also accountability. For example, after a verrrrrry long break from submitting to journals, I’m back at it. Slowly. Surely. It’s 100% thanks to writing pals who tell me, when I can’t see it myself, that my work is worth making and needs to be out there.

These are the vibes: It’s selfish to hoard your creativity.

Carolee Bennett, Writing Community and the “Energy of Togetherness”

These days, instead of sitting down to write, I go straight to the basement and make art. Today, I completed the third in a series of season-themed encaustics with poems embedded in them. I altered an old poem to fit the photo:

The fabric of spring I wanted to write a sentence with verdant, wanted to use the word lush, wanted it fragrant in word only. wanted it wordy, wanted to roll in the word green, needed the stains of the word grass on the knees of the word jeans, but all day the wind shook the japanese cherries and yesterday’s blossoms have popped like a piñatafull of confetti, blanketing the word lawn with the word pink, a magic shag carpet. I listen for its breath, small jean genie, must of earth behind my ears, rolling,wordless, in the new-woven fabric of spring.

And that brings me to the point of this post. When I lost my job last June, I intended to finish writing a children’s book, work on the rest of a novel, and find a publisher for my full-length poetry manuscript, Words with Friends. I finally accomplished one of those goals.

Today, I’m able to share that my poetry book will be published by Meat for Tea Press! I’m so freakin’ excited!

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Waxing Poetic

I was
        a young mother when someone guided my thumb  
to the hollow atop my newborn’s head, to feel the space 
        between the bones of the skull where they 
had not knit together yet. Even now, I still turn 
        toward the idea of an opening, some keyhole 
through which I can thread my undimmed longing. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Fontanel

Our days are filled like this, with conversations and songs and silence, and with questions like, “If you were a chip, what kind of chip would you be? What kind of chip would you like to be?” Which reminds me of a voice note question my partner asked me – what does your mind do when you’re walking? She knows how the inside of my mind is usually ten cinema screens competing for who can be the loudest or brightest or fastest or most bizarre…I notice that, somewhere in between footsteps and breath and retelling each other The Lord of the Rings, the noise has all but stopped.

And Niamh sings to me again, something they have created from the best lines we’ve spoken, about mountains and not giving up. They apologise that it doesn’t rhyme, and I say that the journey doesn’t rhyme – every day is unknowable. And then I consider that perhaps our footsteps are a sort of rhyme, and that each day, in its different textures and forms, has a series of small repetitions – chance encounters with Flor and Florus, Ken and Ali, the Belgians…how each different day echoes with blackberries and the way everything sparkles in sunlight after rain, and wrens and stonechats, oaks, beech.

Today began in Grasmere, in rain which switched in a moment to sunshine, and strong wind, until I gave up on my coat and let myself be drenched then dried. We walked over Hause Gap, and by Grisedale Tarn, black and grey and slapping at its shores, and down Grisedale Beck into Patterdale. All lividly beautiful, the world startled and bright in its rain and sunlight, but the best part of the day was the extra three miles to Brotherswater Inn via Hartsop, and how the poem of the journey rang loudly with harebells and bracken, hawkbit and tormentil and dandelion, yarrow and dock, thistle and nettle and clover, foxglove and wild thyme, so we were singing and the wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather.

Clare Shaw, Coast-to-Coast: Day 4

sun-striped path
the forest’s outbreath
fills our lungs

[…]

Today is sunny, but through the weekend, the clouds hung on till afternoon, and I was chilly enough to wear a wool sweater. Here on the Northern California coast, we have entered the month of Fogust. In our cool and damp micro-clime, so perfect for redwoods, locals are amazed by the temperature if it reaches 70 degrees.

Annette Makino, Sizzling summer haiku

I have spent a delightful morning pondering Bruce Springsteen–we are almost to the 50th (gasp!) anniversary of the release of the Born to Run album.  Born in the U.S.A. was my Springsteen entry point in the late summer of 1984, and then I got Born to Run later that autumn, in November.  I liked it alright, but I don’t think that any other Springsteen album has captured my heart and imagination like Born in the U.S.A.

On the NPR program Fresh Air, I listened to this interview with Peter Ames Carlin, which explored the making of Born to Run–a fascinating glimpse of the creative process.  Before I listened to that interview, I read Peter McWhorter’s piece in The Washington Post (hopefully a gift essay to read throughout the ages) about the Springsteen playlist that he listened to seven times–that’s all of Born to Run, plus eleven songs:  “Rosalita,” “Prove It All Night,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “The River,” “Spirit in the Night,” “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The Rising,” and “New York City Serenade.”

By listening to the playlist seven times, he gained a new appreciation for Springsteen, particularly the poetry of Springsteen.  He has some interesting insights about poetry and the 21st century person:  “My Bruce immersion teaches me that the reason poetry on the page is such a rarefied taste in America today isn’t that Americans don’t have a taste for verse. It’s because there are pop music artists whose lyrics scratch that itch, just as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Lowell once did. Taylor Swift’s music fits into the same category for me, as well as for many people over 40 I have spoken to about her work. I hear her songs as poetry; the music’s job is just to help get it across. And that’s what I hear when I listen to Springsteen: I hear poetry, and I hear Americans’ love of it.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Poetry of the Playlist, for Reviewers and for Students

I was listening to Mimi Klavarti yesterday. I was cutting my hedge, she was talking on the excellent Poems We Made Along The Way podcast. She was talking about writing constraints, and how they can help to open up creativity rather than constrict it. Have a listen (and to the back catalogue – they’re all great). I’m not sure this is what she had in mind, but I’m going with a self-imposed time constraint. I hope to finish this in the time it takes me to roast a chicken for dinner.

Ok, the chicken is the oven. We have an hour and 20 mins…go.

First, a quick update. Flo and I went to Norfolk for our annual shindig in Worstead. I was asked to read a few poems from CtD one evening round a campfire. It was lovely to be asked. It reiterated how nerve-wracking it is to read to family and friends. Being a bit pissed and it being dark didn’t help. My reading also set three others off reading too, so here’s to next year’s official poetry circle at the Worstead Festival. […]

Earlier in the week I’d been made aware of a series of readings by a new poetry collective called Femina Culpa. The three ladies behind it were reading round London and one such reading included a reading at Bethlem Museum of the Mind which is just down the road from me.   My friend Ellie works at Bethlem, and I can’t not attend a poetry event that is that close to home.

All three readers read amazing tales and stories of women from the past and how they’ve suffered mental illness issues/made to suffer because of this. Check out Emma McKervey, Linda McKenna and Milena Williamson.

Mat Riches, A Chicken in the lighthouse

As artists, how do we want to spend the time and energy we have left? My energy is not what it was, I’ll be honest. And my time on this earth dwindles, as it does for us all. I’m at that surprising “experiencing ageism” time of life. I’m at that “being overlooked for the grants and awards and even minor recognitions” time of my writing life. It was probably going to happen anyway, but the 2020s hasn’t been kind (or generous) to many creatives, has it? I don’t even know what to advise myself these days so I certainly can’t dole out any advice to any of you. Keep trying? Stay weird, seems evergreen. I sort of want to just stop hustling or imagining what I could do as a side gig next. Is my time better spent writing obscure Canadian non-bestsellers and just staying home more? Probably? I feel like if I haven’t started a Substack by now, I missed the boat on that one, plus I don’t think I can write in Substack voice. I’m too small, too unimportant, too insignifcant (don’t worry, these have always been goals of mine) and too tired of that particular kind of hustle to garner any great subscription income.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Visual Literacy

What interested me most about
paintings of Jesus was
the glow around his head
because I saw such auras everywhere
when sun silhouetted our cat
in the dining room window
or lit up dew on tall grasses.

In later years I studied art
and learned the problem of cheating
light from solid pigments
the paradox of density layered
so some artists applied gold dust
to depict the nimbus gleam.

Ann E. Michael, Heaven, hell, & halos

I’ve also been questioning things like—should I even still be writing poetry, or is it time I give up on it and try something else? Should I spend my time doing paying work instead? It feels sort of futile to write poetry in today’s political environment—rampantly anti-academic, anti-art, anti-peace-tolerance-environmental-safety and pro guns, business and everything evil and destructive. It feels like no one is listening, even with much bigger platforms than mine. Maybe, I wonder, I should take up filmmaking. Maybe I should leave America for the adventure of exploring another country, another country, which might be more friendly to the arts (which seems like almost any country at this point). I could take up working at the local pumpkin farm (though heavy lifting would be out). I could sell makeup again. This may be a normal part of getting older. I can’t tell as I’ve never been this old before! Maybe things will make more sense when I can get more than an hour or so of sleep a night. I’ll check in with you next week.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Full Moons, Insomnia, Ends of Summer Gardens in Bloom, and Writing Questions at Midlife

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.

— TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT 2 SCENE 5, LINES 139-41; MALVOLIO

In the month that I begin my Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, it feels right to use a quote from the man himself.

The truth is, I am a chronic self doubter. There is no fixing it. It is part of the strangeness of my brain. The only way of living with it is noticing it, embracing it, and doing the thing anyway.

A few weeks ago I spoke to a mentee about what was blocking their work, why they couldn’t get further on with their writing. They’d had a series of rejections, one after the other, and were doubling the validity of their work. This is something I recognise in myself. I go through periods of feeling like I might have fluked my entire career, that every time someone has validated my work it is because they either felt sorry for me or had made a mistake. Sometimes I imagine that the mistake they made is my fault, because I have given the impression that I am intelligent and competent and talented when I am very clearly not. It is like I have an entire other person inside me that is always telling me how shit I am, and I am never quite sure if they are telling the truth. […]

So far in my Folger Fellowship I have been deep diving the archives and attending seminars and meetings where I inevitably feel like a sore thumb. Most of my colleagues are American, a lot of them are academics. but Oh, the joy of hearing all the projects, the mental stimulation of being around people who are striving to explore so many different perspectives. It is the most creatively nourishing thing I have been involved with. the more I interact, the quieter the self doubt voice is, which tells me that this is a good fit. The confidence in the project is coming not from the validation of the achievement, but from the quality of the work; my work, other fellows work. It’s quite an astounding thing.

And so this is what I am carrying with me into August, and beyond. I will not fear an opportunity that may lead to greatness. I will not let the negative self talk put the fear in me. I will not let the fear [of] not deserving greatness, stop me from reaching for greatness.

Wendy Pratt, August Mantra: Be Not Afraid of Greatness

Hills recline in the distance
smudged by a hand working in pastel,
soft and slow the line where mountains meet violet 

and clouds lay back smoking fiery pipes.
Village, I am wordless.

At a nearby campsite, a grill is about to be lit,
about to blister some sausage.  Blister until
twigs catch, vines chatter in the flames
like gossips with nothing on their minds.

Jill Pearlman, Before the Fire, Dusk

I’m intrigued by this new collection, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), a poetry title that provides a complexity of literary response to “the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health,” and the precarity through which we currently live. “whereupon I join Lear and his Fool / on the blasted heath,” writes London, Ontario-based writer and speaker Jennifer Wenn, in the poem “Fire and Flood,” “and while the erstwhile king howls / at the gale and deluge I cower, / uselessly, / looking for a sign, [.]” There are multiple pieces echoing Wenn’s particular sentiment, seeking a sign or marker of hope through the gloom, with other pieces that rage their appropriate rage through the storm, or even a spiraling into a dark swirl of hopelessness. As Toronto-based poet,editor and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi begins the poem “Movement XVI”: “that dark resignation to loss. how long to run after joy and just / find construction cones scattered. I take out the trash and who / knows maybe I’m resistant to pesticide. some relief comes in / the form of needles. I’m defeated by numbers. It simply won’t / happen.”” Sometimes the only way to respond to a crisis is to write through it, providing a clarity of thought and potential action, and this collection, put together as the result of a public call, provides an assemblage of first-person lyric narratives by some two dozen Canadian poets that shake to the roots of mental health and climate concern, providing both observational comfort and clarity to their sharpness. The collection includes contributions by Brandon Wint, Jennifer Wenn, Conal Smiley, Concetta Principe, Dominik Parisien, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammmadi, Kathryn Mockler, Tara McGowan-Ross, D.A. Lockhart, Grace Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Aaron Kreuter, gregor Y kennedy, Maryam Gowralli, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Sydney Hegele, Karen Houle, Nina Jane Drystek, AJ Dolman, Conyer Clayton and Gary Barwin. There’s a precarity to these lyrics, these lines, one that writes directly into crisis […]

rob mclennan, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, eds. Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland

The Dark, Howie Good, illustrations by Marcel Herms, Sacred Parasite, 2025, ISBN: 978-3-910822-11-5, ISBN: 978-3-910822-13-9, €20.00 […]

I’m a cancer survivor – for now, anyway.
Every three months, I must have blood drawn,
and my chest scanned, to determine if any

cancer cells have migrated, nomads in search
of grass and water.
(from ‘The C Word’)

These lines from somewhere near the middle of Howie Good’s The Dark serve as a keystone to the set of poems in verse and prose that surround them, a deep personal darkness. As the closing lines of the opening poem, ‘Subterranean Cancer Blues’ (with a hat-tip to Bob Dylan) spells out, the cancer patient acquires ‘the kind of knowledge that now/holds my eyes open to the dark.’

But the dark is not simply personal, or tied to present circumstances, as is seen in poems like ‘Elon Musk at Auschwitz’, in which the tech gobshite claims a kind of faux Jewishness, ‘Unholy Land’, whose title speaks for itself, or this:

Night of the Following Day

The person I went to sleep as wasn’t the same person I woke up as, half-drowned in sweat after traveling on motherless roads all night, seeing plants and animals bombed into submission, families forced to dig their own graves at gunpoint, tears evaporate on contact with the air, and only for me to arrive some six hours later back where I started but feeling barely present, like I was still miles and miles away from the redwing blackbird on the black branch.

For a poet living through personal and global extremes, the dark is not a metaphor, it’s a simple fact: ‘You stare into the dark for just so long before the dark begins staring back.’ It’s impossible in a short review  to do justice to how Good receives that stare in these extraordinary short texts. You just have to read them.

Billy Mills, Six for the Pocket: A Small Pamphlets Review

Alice M. Fay (p. 1912-24, etc.), was a poet and illustrator from New York. She published her first book of poetry The Realm of Fancy: Poems & Pictures in 1912, and was featured in numerous ‘little magazines’ of the 1920s, including Rhythmus (edited by Oscar Williams) and Pegasus (edited by W.H. Lench). Other than this, little is known of her life.

into air—
the scent of a violet sings!

Both Fay’s drawings and verse are comprised of accomplished line-work and subtle, suggestive forms, drawn from the ephemerality of the natural world. ‘Where’, for instance, is a delicate micro-treatise on poetics, in which the scent of flowers and vanishing smoke are compared to the songs of the singer: i.e. the poetry of the world is to be found in the invisible and ephemeral, rather than the visible and permanent. Echoing this, in ‘Near Crete’ the sound of the waves become poet: “whispering tales… of ships that come no more.” Again the image arrives and then disappears. Poetry: always vanishing.

serene as the mountains—
thy love

Fay’s work also has feminist and queer undertones. In ‘Beyond’, for instance, Fay seeks a world “untenanted by men,” i.e. beyond patriarchy: “beyond the veil of future’s mystery.” In ‘All This Is Thy Love To Me’ Fay appears to be addressing another woman, and their “love” is described in terms that would have dominantly been read as “feminine” at that time (fair, calm, mysterious, angelic). Furthermore, as neither poet nor lover have textually definite genders, the subject-positions of the poem are left open to suggestion, able to be occupied by readers of any gender and sexuality.

Dick Whyte, Alice M. Fay – 5 Short Poems (1912-24)

I much admired Richard Scott’s second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, Faber, published earlier this year. As in several of Pascale Petit’s collections, this contains work which very skilfully, and with a marvellous ear for musical cadence , transforms the pain of sexual abuse into beautiful poetry. Each of the 21 poems in the first section, Still Lifes, responds to a different still life painting by painters from the 1600s onwards to Bonnard. The second part, a response to Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ felt less successful, as it employs Seventeenth Century language in a manner verging on parody. The third section contains 22 poems after types of crystals and gemstones, as refracted through Rimbaud’s Illuminations as translated by Wyatt Mason, and are, for me, the most successful in the book, because the prose-poem form allows Scott to give fuller vent to his gift for articulating emotion through vivid and sensuous imagery and language, as in this extract from ‘Emerald’:

    The field is a body. Wild grass rippling over breasts and muscles, the jut of a hipbone. Some of the grass is trampled down into mud like a battlefield – screams catch the air. Some of the grass is spread over little hillocks like shallow graves. Some of the grass is cut into a bit, desire lines and goat paths, leading to all the places you ever dreamed of going but didn’t.

As I discovered from listening to his interview with Peter Kenny in Series 5, Episode 10 of the ever-excellent Planet Poetry podcast, here, Scott talks very thoughtfully and eloquently about his craft.

I’ve also been knee-deep in the poems of Wisława Szymborska, as translated by Clare Cavanagh and collected in Map, Houghton Miflin Harcourt, 2015, for the poetry book club I’m part of. My jury is still out thus far, but then it’s a heftily daunting tome.

Matthew Paul, July reading

“Hexentanz” (literally ‘witches’ dance’) has an epigraph from Mary Wigman a dancer in 1926, “But, after all, isn’t a bit of witch hidden in every female?”

“To be inside language – the body as prayer,
as incantation, a strike of lightning.
To be earthed and barefoot
to be creature; muscle and cells.
To fly: to know space beneath you.

And who needs music when you have breath,
when you are the daughter to the Mother of Sighs?”

Dancing has often been linked to sinful behaviour and the devil. Here it’s a prayer to understand the power of a woman’s body, to inhabit it free from society’s rules and regulations. Here, dancing is both a connection to earth and an ability to fly and it doesn’t even require music. Breathing has a rhythm, that’s all that’s needed. […]

Helen Ivory in “Constructing a Witch” explores the witch archetype and how woman, particularly those who don’t conform to society’s expectations, are cast as inferior, and pushed to society’s edges. An exploration that includes how patriarchal structures ignore the needs of women, left in ignorance about their own bodies because menstruation and menopause make them “too difficult” for medicine to study.

Emma Lee, “Constructing a Witch” Helen Ivory (Bloodaxe) – book review

The shortlist for the eco-poetry/nature poetry Laurel Prize 2025 has just been announced. The finalists – judged this year by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and the former leader & co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales Caroline Lucas – are (in alphabetical order):

Judith Beveridge Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)
JR Carpenter Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)Carol Watts
Eliza O’Toole A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books)
Katrina Porteous Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books)
Carol Watts Mimic Pond (Shearsman Books)

[…]

The premise of Eliza O’Toole’s superb debut collection, A Cranic of Ordinaries, is unpromising: a year’s cycle of diaristic pieces in which the poet walks her dog through the Stour valley. But the result is a sublime form of ecopoetry which is visionary, yet creaturely and incarnate, and to achieve this O’Toole channels two great nineteenth century writers. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ joys in the things of Nature which are always ‘here and but the beholder / Wanting’. When self and natural world do communicate, Hopkins named that flash of true relationship ‘instress’.  O’Toole’s ‘Stour Owls’ records just such a moment, listening to the calls of a female tawny owl, the ‘slight pin-thin / hoot’ of the male, followed by a tense silence: ‘then the low slow of the barn owl as the / white slide of her glide brushes the air we / both hold & then breathe’ (12).

O’Toole also adopts Emerson’s idea of the ‘transparent eyeball’, seeing all, yet being itself ‘nothing’. The excision of the self’s perspective is systematically pursued. Seldom is the landscape ‘seen’ but is rather subject to plain statement: ‘It was a machine-gun of a morning’ (11), ‘a vixen-piss of a morning’ (13), ‘a muck spread of a morning’ (34). O’Toole has an extraordinarily observant eye, but this repeated trope counters any taint of the constructed picturesque, the human-centring of vanishing points and perspective. The observer grows ‘part or parcel’ of the world. Such a vision makes demands on language because in truth, ‘It is necessary / to write what cannot be written’ (94), and this yields one of the most exciting aspects of this collection as the poet deploys varieties of plain-speaking, scientific, ancient, and esoteric vocabularies as well as a Hopkinsesque ‘unruly syntax’. She describes ‘young buds. Just starting from / the line of life, phloem sap climbing, / a shoot apical meristem and post / zygotic. It was bud-set’ (26).

Martyn Crucefix, Laurel Prize Shortlist 2025 – My Favourite Is….!

The promise was
graceful, writing a book made up of leaves
(birch, catalpa, magnolia, maple);
made up of leaves and love and hands and words
choked out in last breaths exhaled in dark nights,
made up of whispers woven together
from the humid tenderness of two dear
embodied beings tangling their breath.

PF Anderson, Once upon a time there was a promise

The encouragement to Tell It Slant! has become popular among many CW lecturers and workshop leaders over the last few years, seemingly as a natural extension of the old favourite, Show, Don’t Tell!, but what does it actually mean?

Well, it refers to an approach to writing that veers away from dealing with stuff head-on. Its inherent attraction lies in the opportunity it provides for the poet to explore new perspectives and fresh takes on seemingly tired subjects by coming at them via unusual angles, often omitting bits that would be obvious if treated directly, thus intriguing and challenging the reader. As such, its use is widely seen to be lending the poem extra gravitas and depth.

However, there are also consequent risks in its deployment. One is the accusation that the poet is being wilfully obtuse, frustrating the reader, playing a pointless game by holding back information, the absence of which creates the false impression of extra layers to the poem that actually don’t exist. And another is its tempting propensity for enabling emotional shortcuts that skirt round the potential core of the poem.

From my perspective, Tell It Slant! is useful as a weapon in a creative armoury. However, its overuse in contemporary poetry as an all-encompassing method leads poets down a blind alley, causing many poems to fizzle out before they can take their reader on a journey. And for my money, that journey is where poetic truth is found.

Matthew Stewart, Telling It Slant

I have experienced some great times in the company of poets. Mostly, poets on their own, having a drink or a chat. Obviously, there is joy in experiencing a ‘good’ reading or book launch.

I am glad for anyone who has ‘a community’, whether this consists of one other weirdo who writes poems, or a group who gather regularly to do something communal, or people who move in circles where they feel supported and connected and perhaps mutually celebrated and facilitated.

I don’t feel particularly connected myself, but never set out to be, and am not sure I want or need to be, and it has always been a ‘bonus’ rather than a central aspect of my writing and publishing and (occasional) teaching that their are individuals whom I know and like who do the same thing, and I hope they are well and flourishing ‘out there’ somewhere. […]

Why do people communicate online as if I am privy to backstories and assumptions about themselves and others that I have no knowledge of? I believe issues and people are complex, but encounter anger and simplicity all the time on the internet, and it leaves me none the wiser. Where is the poetry in this? […]

What if, when I check out substack etc, I find there are poets and publishers attacking poets and publishers? What if there are personal battles being conducted online that are disturbing and polarising, and watching them unfold might become as addictive an unproductive as watching car crashes, or as unfulfilling and spiritually nourishing as listening to gossip?

Roy Marshall, ‘Poetry is about community.’

Many magazines these days offer writers a chance to get feedback on their submitted work for an additional cost. The cost typically ranges from $25- $40. When I posted my series about scammy lit mags, almost all of them had one thing in common: They offered feedback to writers who paid for it. However, many reputable magazines offer this option too. So, should you go for it? If so, whom should you trust?

Firstly, I want to talk about why this is happening, a trend that seems to be recent, as I do not recall so many journals offering this option ten or more years ago. Costs of running a lit mag, as we all know, can be high. Many editors seem to be taking on editing/consulting work as a way to offset those rising fees.

It also seems to be a response to a workforce that is ever more precarious. Few and far between are the stable academic jobs for writers. Meanwhile the professional competition is stiffer than ever. Writers don’t just have MFAs; they have PhDs. There are more people seeking careers related to writing, and fewer secure opportunities, than ever before.

So we hustle. Any writer/editor who does not have a full-time job is likely making a living from piecing together a variety of income streams. Teaching. Consulting. Website development. Copywriting. Editing. And so on. Very few lit mag editors are able to make their living solely as magazine editors.

I provide this bit of context because when I first began to consider this trend of editors offering feedback, it got me worried. How can they possibly have time to read submissions, I wondered, if they’re also consulting on particular submissions in great detail? Why would editors think they are the ones who know what’s best for a particular work and a particular writer? Shouldn’t their focus be on their magazines?

Then I took a step back and looked at the larger picture. No, I realized. Sadly, the majority of editors cannot afford to be solely focused on their magazines because that work does not pay. With that in mind, I came around to viewing these additional editorial offerings as a good thing. The workforce for writers is grinding indeed (and most lit mag editors are also writers.) Anything anyone can do to honestly and ethically sustain oneself in this environment is commendable.

Becky Tuch, Q: Should you pay for editorial feedback from lit mag editors?

A lavish and wonderful celebration of connections between mathematics and the arts is the annual international BRIDGES, Mathematics and the Arts Conference.  This year’s conference took place last month (July, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands) and one of its special events was a poetry reading.  

Information about the poets and sample poems are available here at the website of Sarah Glaz (mathematician-poet and coordinator of the BRIDGES readings).  Below I have included one of these very special poems:

View no Fiery Night        by Marian Christie 

No
one
went to   
the tower
to vie with the foe.
Fretting, worn, we rove in night fog ––
the ring, the theft, the vow forgotten. Hovering high
over the town, the frightening wyvern, whirr of her winging interwoven with fire.

First published in Christie’s collection Sky, Earth, Other (Penteract Press, 2024).  Note that this is a Fibonacci poem — with the syllable counts for the lines following the Fibonacci numbers.  ALSO, each line is formed from letters found in the English words for the Fibonacci numbers up to the line count — one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty one; Christie uses the term “sequential lipogram” to describe this pattern.

For lots more wonderful stuff by Marian Christie, you may visit her blog, Poetry and Mathematics. 

JoAnne Growney, Celebrating Poetry at 2025 BRIDGES Conference

Of course, it is still summer. Another month or more of summer. Please, let us make no mistake about that! But why is it that as soon as the calendar turns a page over to August, the sense of new socks and homemade soup come back to the front in my mind.

But I’m not there yet. There are still manuscripts to edit, a garden to care for, and a 15th Anniversary Poets on the Coast to finish planning. And what a POTC it will be!

Kelli Russell Agodon and I began this retreat for women poets because we felt that we could create a poetry community based on generosity and abundance —of writing prompts, of snacks, and poetry gifts. Fifteen years later, it looks like we were right. Women who began committing to their writing, to themselves, have gone on to publish their first books, earn MFA’s, become poet laureates, and even win a National Book Award. Sure, these capable women might not have “needed” Poets on the Coast to begin their journeys, but I like to think we helped at least in small measure.

Susan Rich, What I Did (Am Doing) On My Summer Vacation

I feel like every year at this point in the summer, I start thinking about fall and musing endlessly about how much I am going to get done. It’s harder this year to feel hopeful and productive in a nation under siege by idiots, but I am trying to hang in there, writing silly little poems that feel like they can save my soul a little and grinding at the grind that keeps the gears rolling. 

Mostly, I am pushing through toward a little trip up to Wisconsin end of this week. We’re visiting family for a day up at the campgrond where my grandmother used to keep her RV, the site of most of my childhood summer memories. I have been back occasionally since (my aunt & uncle had their place parked there for decades, and now so do my older cousins on my dad’s side) but haven’t really been in about a decade. The beach nearby we used to go to is gone now and replaced by a boat launch, but the air, last time we were there, was much the same. I could almost smell the Coppertone and the rubber of pink innertubes. 

This week has bought some rejections and at least once acceptance, plus a new poem in Fantastic Other from winged. I am finding, now that I am submitting work more regularly, that my rejection/acceptance rate is still about the same. 4:12, so about 1/3, which isn’t terrible, but has remained pretty consistent from other times when I was submitting a lot of work into the wilds (though it waxes and wanes depending on the competitiveness and/or age of the journal (I do like submitting to brand new publications, or at least new to me, so that rate is sometimes a little higher.) 

Right now, I am sending out a mix of different projects, including the Iphigenia poems as I compile them into the book, winged, another little oceanic series, some early pieces from the midnight garden, plus fragments from the sci-fi-ish series I finished up earlier this year.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/11/2025

I saw her smile.
Sitting alone on a green park bench.

As if she was dreaming a happy poem.
(But what is that?)
Or had found the right words for something
more desperate, more evil, more macabre.
Or had remembered a woolly line from a poem that
was fully formed in the middle of the night
but had vanished with its commas before the sun.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The poem at 16:00 on a random Thursday

A trip to Manchester for Liz Gibson’s book launch resulted in me receiving a new description of my hair. Wait for it… “anti-gravity hair”. A chance encounter whilst queuing for tea and cake meant a man took the opportunity to tell me he liked my anti-gravity hair. I am adding that description to “You always have really surprised hair,” and they both make me chuckle.

The book launch was a delight from start to finish. I have always loved liz’s poetry and to have a whole collection to enjoy is celebratory. It was wonderful to hear them read by the author and I love the additional immersion in words this brings. The evening included guest readers and an interview with the artist who designed the cover for ‘A Love the Weight of An Animal’. A perfect way to launch this well written collection.

I am the ‘Silver Branch’ featured writer this month for Black Bough so I thought I would share a poem from the ones celebrated there…

Sue Finch – August 2025 | Mysite

It’s a prose poem to celebrate the fact I love prose poems and that Kath recently exclaimed, “You mean there are poets who write whole books of prose poems?” 

GOING TO THE CAVES

I am in a long queue for the cave tour. Stalagmites and stalactites are promised. I fear tightness, and more than that, being trapped. The guide tells us that we will see crystals the like of which we’ve never seen before. Then he warns us that there are times when it smells like multi-storey car park stairwells and sometimes all the torches fail. When I look at him, he reaches into his pocket. Here, he says, as if reading my mind, if you can’t get out, take one of these. He offers me a circular, chalky-white tablet which I accept as he nods. It will kill you painlessly, almost instantly. I follow him, wondering if I will swallow the pill.

Sue Finch, EVENING SUN

Why do I keep scrolling when it so often leaves me feeling disheartened or disgusted or in despair?

Because in the scroll I keep discovering new voices saying things I want and need to hear. Because that’s how I often see words from writers who always give me comfort. Because through it I have found kindred spirits in places geographically far from me, and those connections matter and count. (Physical proximity does not guarantee honesty or transparency or an ability to know who someone is. Believe me on that one.) Because it is often in disembodied digital spaces that I find knowledge and understanding I might not acquire through print books or my IRL relationships and activities. Because our online world is its own kind of real. The idea of cutting myself entirely off from it feels like the equivalent of fantasizing about living off-grid in a secluded forest cabin: Sounds kinda dreamy, but I know that I would not last a winter in such a place. Because inside the cacophony of the trivial, the mundane, the hucksterish, the phony, the ridiculous, and the fear-mongering voices, there are others telling truths that build a fire in the cold.

In response to one of my questions, a writer/friend tells me: “Everything feels fluid right now. And a bit unreal. We can just check in on the voices that feel authentic and know that we’re OK.”

Another offers: “I am a big believer in retreat. Sometimes it’s exactly what we need.” She then points me to Andrea Gibson’s “Instead of Depression,” and tears rise at, “Sleep through the alarm/of the world. Name your hopelessness/a quiet hollow, a place you go/to heal…”

Another (or maybe one of these, it is easy to get lost in the bread crumb trails) points me to Elizabeth Kleinfeld, whose recent words in “Grieving My Beautiful Before” knocked the wind out of me:

The grief I felt for my old life hit me. I kind of put off grieving for it by pretending I was going to get back to it, but now that I’m practicing radical acceptance, I realize I can’t get back to it. I can only build a great new life, which leaves me free to grieve that old life. It is knocking the wind out of me.

I trust these voices.

(I still have trust. I refuse to lose trust. That’s a choice I’m making.) […]

Don’t we all, like Whitman, contain multitudes? Aren’t we all sometimes the person running the stop sign and sometimes the person getting hit and sometimes the person recording from the sidewalk and sometimes the person stopping to call 911? Aren’t we all sometimes the tide rushing in and sometimes the waves ebbing in retreat and sometimes the swimmer not waving but drowning and sometimes the person floating on their back, letting the water hold them, because they need a reprieve from kicking?

Rita Ott Ramstad, Letting the salty flood wash over me

seagulls laughing all day long
two smooth stones in my pocket

Kati Mohr, A Touch of Teal, No, Blue

This week: nights without boundaries, fireflies and bats, children in bomb shelters, burying a dictionary, and more. Enjoy.

Last night, I got to participate in a poetry reading and discussion with Thom Eichelberger-Young, as hosted by Rachel Lauren Myers. And my god, I had a fantastic time. Thanks to everyone who came out. […]

In preparing for the talk, I wrote a lot of stuff to clarify my ideas, and I figure some of this might be useful to share here. It’s basically a reflection on the aims and limits of writing about historical nightmare and disaster, the political life of imagination, and the need for an anti-establishment stance as both writer and publisher. […]

[A] form of life upholds the poem as a space of psychic freedom and discovery and truth, and which lives among dreams, among the dead and the immortal, among trees and animals, stars, pasts, futures, all of it. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t also donating to those in need, and educating yourself politically, and involved in protest and other organizing, and whatever beyond that. The poem does not exhaust the political, and in some moments, a poem does not need to actually be “about” political “content.” For me, it’s about psycho-political positioning just as much as anything else: you can have a position on this stuff—as in seeing where your imaginative work is situated, and how it stands up to the nightmare forces and the other lies that would entrap our efforts—and then write about whatever you want. Some may be compelled to do the writing of nightmare and political antagonism, some may find they are called elsewhere, but they do that work with clear awareness of the stakes and where and how the lines are drawn.

R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK: no. 4

Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), poet laureate of the co-creation of time and mind, composed with his wife Una and their twin sons.

A decade before Carl Jung built his famous stone tower in Zurich and conceptualized the realized self as an elemental stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stonemason to build Tor House and Hawk Tower. As this rocky planet was being unworlded by its first world war, he set about making “stone love stone.”

Seeing stonecutters as “foredefeated challengers of oblivion” and poets as stonecutters of the psyche, he went on hauling enormous slabs of granite up from the shore, carrying time itself, cupping its twelve consolations in his mortal hands, writing about what he touched and what touched him.

Maria Popova, How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time

More and more I think that it is important to find roots, to buckle in and brace against the storm that is raging over the world. More and more I find that people want to do that with their landscape, with the places they feel pulled to. They want to honour the nature of the place, they reach for some simpler time that didn’t exist. I am doing it now. I am making elderflower wine from the trees in my own garden, and thinking about the common folk who foraged the hedgerows, the working class people whose voices are lost in the written history of place. I have no idea the religion of these people, or anything about them, only that their hands reached for the white flowers of the elder, as mine do. This is the lineage of place.

Right now, people want to turn away from the men who would bring this world to the edge of annihilation because of a belief that they, and only they, belong to one place. Belonging is not a single moment, it is the knowledge that you are a part of a longer story, and that story is not singular. Time is immense and the history of people in relation to place is one of change, constant, constant change.

Wendy Pratt, Where Time Becomes Thin:

I don’t want to think about poetry
I don’t want to relearn movement
I don’t want to see concrete shredding itself like cardboard
I don’t want to hear another question about another tomorrow —
the big that always hides behind something small.

I must give in and let myself float:
heart and brain and inner ear in a quiet updrift.
I would surrender if I knew to whom.
I would disappear if I knew how to.
I would cry if sadness had remained sadness.
I would tell if you would only ask.

The walls move like kaleidoscope
patterns, changing without colour,
everything, a house of cards,
the king and queen leaning in to
make a small steeple.
The big things have other plans.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Unsettled

At the beginning of spring, I started a practice during some of my leisurely walks. Every ten steps, I stopped and looked deeper at things. This is how I noticed a specific species of flyfishing insect hatching in the wetlands and how these insects preferred to perch on privet. This is how I noticed ways water is held. This is how I noticed the movements of animals that came before me. The small game trails, the broken brush. This is how I noticed signs of movement and desire. This is how I noticed the unnoticeable snails, small as seeds, scattered all over the wet road, being run over by people who do not see them. Small bits of calcium carbonate and tender flesh dotting the road. This is how I noticed death and its spectrum of decay. The beheaded cicada. The quartered doe. The pale, limp crayfish. The small bird, smashed so profoundly like a translucent, pressed flower on the asphalt. Almost invisible, absorbed. Fossil-like. […]

I don’t know anything, really, except that I want to keep doing this. I want to keep discovering the mundane. I want to continue being amazed by what I have always been looking at. So I will. Maybe someday when I bring my finger to the cucamelon’s tendril, it will touch me back.

Sarah Lada, Stopping & Looking

I love poems about flowers and gardens, they remind me of my mum and my nana, and their respective gardens. My nana, who died almost 15 years ago, features fairly frequently in my poetry, including one about her garden—in response to Nina Catherine Howe’s poem ‘Meditation’ (1926)—and another, which I am rather proud of, in response to Hart Crane’s ‘My Grandmother’s Love Letters’ (1920). Finally, here’s a short haikai sequence I wrote in her memory, using both tanka and haiku forms as its base:

under all that sky nana’s grave

*

the same flowers
which adorned
my nana’s
casket:

spring morning

*

the last time
i sat in nana’s garden . . .
the last time

*

ah nana
i remember you
today,
blue-skied
& garden-eyed

Dick Whyte, Amy Thornton-Swartz – 3 Very Short Poems (1926-27)

In August last year I wrote about Tom Paulin’s poem of hurt and slow healing ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. It wasn’t the first time I have talked about it here – but I did think it would be my last. But no. There has been birdsong. And last week, after work, like someone asking us to enact our back-to-normal lives for a scene towards the close of a film, we walked ‘by the river’ and you were, in those lovely four words ‘a step from me’. I had noticed ‘this great kindness everywhere:/ now in the grace of the world and always’ before, but not ‘a step from me’. Four little, simple words, suddenly larger and more vital than the luminosity of those they set up at the poem’s close. A step from me. A miracle. Here you are. Here I am. Our routine was broken by carnage, and now we might be on the way to reclaiming it. A step from me, the evening ‘crepuscular and iambic’, by still waters seeming suddenly depthless though only yards from pebbly rapids splashed in by dogs. A step. The natural and essential gap between any two people at walking pace. You nearly went from me. But you didn’t. And now you are back.

Anthony Wilson, A step from me

–Last night was one of those nights where I couldn’t even focus enough to sew or sketch.  Happily, I was still able to read.  Usually I choose something light, but last night, I turned back to Mark Lynas’ Six Minutes to Winter:  Nuclear War and How to Avoid It.   I bought it a month ago, read the part that I read as the LitHub excerpt, and then put it aside, where it got buried under a stack of papers.   It is one of the grimmest description of nuclear aftermath as I have ever read, even grimmer than the movie Threads.  It was so grim that it was almost not scary.  It’s not exactly new information–after all, we’ve known about the possibility of nuclear winter for decades now.  But the book spells out in detail what that would mean in a way that I haven’t seen before.

–I was happy to turn my attention to Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, nominated for the Booker Prize in the same year as Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song.”  Maybe I’ll spend the summer reading 2023 Booker Prize nominees. […]

–On Wednesday, I wrote most of my Noah’s wife (as in Noah and the Flood in Genesis) as hospital chaplain poem, again by hand during lunch.  I am pleased with the draft, and here, too, I look forward to seeing how it holds together when I type and revise.

–Here’s one stanza of that poem:

She has already witnessed
the end of the world,
the disaster that destroys everything.
She can be a non-anxious 
presence to everyone in the hospital.
She has seen worse.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Saturday Snippets with Apocalyptic Reading

A few weeks ago, I ran a course at Ty Newydd with Roger Robinson called “Building a Sustainable and Authentic Poetry Practice”. Sometimes when I was thinking about and planning for this course, I felt like the worst kind of fraud. How could I talk to other people about building a sustainable practice, when often my life feels anything but sustainable?

I make myself busy all the time, and then feel really down if I’m not busy. I’m not sure that is particularly sustainable! For example, this morning I could feel myself really down and I think it was because I thought I had a quiet week – only to write that list of jobs out and realise I’m actually not quite right if I think this is a quiet week!

I think one of the ways of making any type of writing practice sustainable is getting to know our own writing process – what we think we need, and what we actually need (which might be two different things!). I know that writing all day on a Monday is working really well for me at the moment, that working alongside friends works, that I don’t like to ‘catch’ myself writing or admit that I’m writing, that I often have to pretend I’m doing something else or just messing about. I know that I need feedback from other people to motivate me to keep going, otherwise I get distracted and give up halfway through.

Kim Moore, A Poetry Survival Kit

In the afternoon Nina guided us through the process of making handmade brushes with unconventional materials. It proved to be habit-forming! […]

Since the meeting we have been using our brushes – and looking in a different way at plants, sticks and discarded objects, assessing their potential as ‘mad brushes’. Clare has painted a series of amazing self-portraits, using the thin tip of a pheasant feather for the fine details. […]

As a direct result of our recent exhibition I have been asked to give a presentation on ‘Using materials from the landscape in handmade books’ at the Midsummer Moot, a get-together for local poets at The Avalon Marshes Centre on 24th June, and to teach participants a couple of book structures at two Art & Poetry Days for Bath Writers and Artists, in July and September, at The Hive in Peasedown St John. This community centre has a large art-room which can be hired by the hour – ideal for this sort of activity.

Ama Bolton, ABCD late May

In difficult times people need poetry.

They need places where they can come together, express solidarity, make their voices heard, and feel empowered. One way poets can help build a better world is to offer each other our time, talent, and unity. Another way is to expand opportunities for people to hear each other and feel heard.

To that end, we are launching a new kind of poetry press that will act as a collective, where poets not only share their poetry, but also pool their talent, gaining skills for helping other poets to learn writing techniques, promote their work, inspire new writers, and bring more poetry into their communities. As always, I feel the best way for us to move forward is to collaborate, so as we work on this project, I want to hear from you how you want to be involved and what you most want from this endeavor.

If you are interested in joining us, please take a moment to fill out this survey and let me know what you would most like to learn from/ contribute to this project.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Do You Want to Start a Press with Us?

washing my poetry i sweeten the sea :: until the green of your island is saved

Grant Hackett [no title]

W. H. Auden said that “proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.” Names are the closest thing we have to magic: naming is an act of creation as much as an act of description. Names are also a kind of knowledge. When knowledge dwindles, or is transposed, it becomes obscure. I love ‘Adlestrop’, but the names have always been a problem. I can’t see the flowers. Willows, yes. Grass, yes. But what’s a willow-herb? Meadowsweet? A haycock is a small pile of hay drying in a field. When I first read the poem I thought it was another plant, maybe an early-flowering one that had already dried out. I still read it that way.

I suspect I am not the only one who can’t see what Thomas sees. Does this matter? Yes and no. The poet Dannie Abse, who was born in Cardiff and later lived in London, wrote two poems in reply to Adlestrop, which must have represented a version of poetry he felt alienated by. One of these, ‘Not Adlestrop’, was pretty awful: man stares at ‘very, very pretty girl’ in a train window. The other, ‘As I Was Saying’, is much better, much funnier, a defence of the residents of the ‘ignorant suburb’ against a culture which still expects poets to be in communion with nature. In reply to an imagined critic, Abse reels off a long list of names from a ‘W. H. Smith book’, mocking Thomas’s botanical precision: ‘Butterbur, Ling, and Lady’s Smock, Jack-by-the-Hedge, Cuckoo-Pint, and Feverfew, even the stinking Hellebore…’

Still, Abse is being too defensive. When Thomas launches into his list, he is launching into the names for their own sake. We don’t need to know what they are, because the words are poetry. It is easy to forget, too, that Edward Thomas was born in Balham, in the suburbs (which is near me in south London), and there would have been a time when he didn’t know the names either. Thomas’s names are a kind of invitation, one that feels all the more important now, when both the knowledge and the flowers are fading. Just hearing the word ‘willow-herb’ or ‘stitchwort’ can make you want to find out what it is, and knowing something’s name is the first step towards loving it. [link added]

Jeremy Wikeley, Remembering Adlestrop

As you may know, the word “anthology” comes from the Greek anthos “flower” + -logia “collection”. So it always seems appropriate that one of the reference works I consult most in midsummer — The Reader’s Digest Nature Lover’s Library Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of Great Britain (1983) — should contain a range of allusions to English poetry.

The lore of wildflowers is itself poetry scattered in waste places. Recently, for example, I learned that the yellow-flowered groundsel — a weed that gets everywhere — takes its name from an Old English kenning: groundswyle, “groundswallower”. And then there is the metaphorical vividness of folk names: the toadflax flower, for example, which opens when its sides are squeezed, has been variously called “lion’s mouth”, “devil’s head”, “weasel-snout” and “pig’s chops”.

But for this Pinks I thought I would pick some entries from the Reader’s Digest Field Guide which cite actual poems that, like wildflowers, might otherwise get overlooked. […]

Mugwort / Artemisia vulgaris

This dusty looking plant with its unromantic name seems ordinary enough, but it has often been written about by poets. For instance, Edward Thomas in “The Brook” described how “there was a scent like honeycomb / From mugwort dull”.

[…]

An old couplet tells of the plants medicinal properties:

If they’d drink nettles in March and mugwort in May,
So many fine maidens would not turn to clay.

I’m not entirely convinced by the claim here that mugwort has “often” been written about by poets — a search in the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive, for example, brings up nothing. (I suspect you might be able to find it mentioned somewhere in the prolific recent work of J.H. Prynne, which is absolutely abuzz with wildflower names. But I’m not combing through two dozen pamphlets to confirm this.) The proverbial couplet here, though, has a pleasing touch of Housman to it, and the Thomas poem, as always, is worth reading in full. In it, the “honeycomb” smell of the dull-looking mugwort marks a moment of imaginative transition into a more enchanted world:

There was a scent like honeycomb
From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
A butterfly alighted. From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below.

Read on here for the sound of “waters running frizzled over gravel”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53749/the-brook-56d2335518e67

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #33: The Tangled Vetch

What does it mean to bury a dictionary? That the words are silent, silenced? That they’ve been killed, assassinated, died?

Or is it more akin to planting seeds and, come spring, there’ll be sprouts? Is the language returning to the earth, to where it came from and then, after a length of decay, there is transformation, rebirth. The words becoming part of the larger ecosystem. Are they mulch? Or do they bear the trace of what they have been through, their struggle for air, for legibility, for communication?

It’s an old practice in traditional Jewish culture not to destroy books or papers that are sacred, that have the word for God written on them. Instead, they are stored (see the remarkable Cairo Genizah where a treasure trove of centuries-old books was found, saved from destruction for this reason) and then often buried in a cemetery with ceremony and prayers as if they had been a living thing. A sacred book as a living thing that needs to be treated with respect, dignity, and care.

Once I visited a Sikh temple while holidaying in India. We were shown what looked like a child princess’s bedroom. Beautiful pink bed, sumptuous carpet and tapestries. What was it? It was where they put their sacred book to sleep at night.

For the past several years, I have taken books and left them outside to experience the elements. I’ve hung them from trees. I’ve buried and then exhumed them.

The image above and the video below is of what’s left of a thesaurus that I put outside under leaf mulch and the open sky. It’s been a year or two. The action of burying evokes the slow passage of time, the processes of transformation of organic matter. It’s a very slow poem, a slow music, maybe a deliberate and unfolding parade that even snails would consider stately and sloths, if they knew what glaciers were were, would think to be glacial in its progress. (I do sadly note that glaciers now retreating due to climate change, no longer move “glacially.”)

Gary Barwin, Burying the dictionary

In the background of this poem:
Allegri’s Miserere.
The soft singing of five voices,
turned down too low to hear clearly.

Moments ago in a book
I learned of the existence of this piece,
stolen by Mozart’s brain from the Vatican;
transcribed and given to all of us

in a courageous act of defiance,
or perhaps just a thumbing of the nose
at the cassocked voices of denial.

Now coming through a USB speaker
attached by light waves to a laptop
and, as has been previously stated,
turned down too low to appreciate.

We shrink our miracles
until they no longer scare us.

Jason Crane, POEM: Miserere

Cara-Lyn Morgan is a citizen of the Metis Nation and the descendant of enslaved people in North America.  She was born in Oskana, the area commonly known as Regina, Saskatchewan, and her work explores cultural duality, decolonization, motherhood, and the historical and present-day impacts of colonization.  She currently lives and works in the Greater Toronto Area.  She is a wife, mom, gardener, and neighbour.  Her first collection, What Became My Grieving Ceremony was awarded the Fred Cogswell Award for Poetic Excellence and was followed closely by her second collection, Cartograph.  Her third book, Building A Nest from the Bones of My People, has been warmly received since its release.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When I made my decision to go to art school and to study writing and visual arts, I had a foreboding sense that I had disappointed everyone.  As the child of an immigrant, it can often feel like you are on a set path of success and there’s a great deal of anxiety that surrounds a life choice that threatens “security.” I had a feeling that my parents felt I was indulgent and somewhat petulant in my choice, believing that writing was essentially a “hobby” and that I should explore options that were much more stable, writing in my spare time.  But I believed that I had a story to tell and that I was worthy of the investment to tell it, so when Thistledown accepted my first manuscript and my book was eventually published, I felt very vindicated and validated in my choices to that point.  The physical book felt like proof that I was not just writing as a way to entertain myself.  

My most recent work is a complete departure in style and in content from the previous two works.  This is because I am a completely different person than I was when I started telling stories, specifically ones about my family.  Since I first published, I have become a wife, a mother, someone who understands the mechanics of editing, someone who understands colonization and intergenerational trauma differently—I simply navigate the world from very different eyes.  I’m a matriarch, and I feel a greater responsibility to this current book because it is a new legacy for me.  These family stories are uncomfortable and sad, so I have shifted from writing “love letters to the family” as my previous books have been described.  But no, maybe that’s unfair.  This collection is a love letter to the family as well, because it was written out of a deep love and loyalty.  I wrote this collection because I love my children and I want them to know where they come from.  […]

17 – If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Well, I spent 20 years as a uniformed officer with Canada Border Services Agency, and in fact, I wrote most of my first draft of my first book sitting in one of those booths where you show your passport.  For some reason that is very funny to most people who know me only as a writer.  And the fact that I write poetry is always so mystifying to anyone who knows me only as a law enforcement officer.  These days, I teach police officers Indigenous culture and history and reconciliation.  But I would have liked to have been a baker or a pastry chef.  How different a person I would have been though.

18 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was taught to use writing as an emotional tool early on, to help process the trauma of my parents’ divorce and other adverse events.   I journaled and wrote so that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by things I was experiencing as I grew up, and now I use writing to process intergenerational trauma, and to send stories in to the world so that I do not carry them alone.  I have always written, so I it doesn’t feel like it was ever a choice.  I just did it.  

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Cara-Lyn Morgan

Intelligent, detailed, non-academic discussion of poetry remains a requirement. I’m yet to encounter a convincing argument otherwise– or rather, a convincing argument as to what might replace it. Some have suggested the only criticism poetry requires is poetry itself, but this stance overlooks the ways in which all art (even poetry!) enjoys an uneasy relationship with commerce and market forces and so is always in need of honest redress. Likely now more than ever. “Discrimination is needed,” as Michael Hamburger warned. “Without it, art succumbs to the randomness of commercialism, in which the shoddy product can displace the well-made and durable simply by being more effectively marketed.”

Paul Farley took the pulse at the turn of our millennium, when he half-joked that his ’60s-born generation hadn’t had criticism, they’d had marketing. He was referring to initiatives like the Poetry Society’s New Generation Poets of 1994, a PR attempt to make a newly diverse wave of younger poets seem like the “new rock ‘n’ roll”. What these poets also had in new abundance was literary prizes, and these have only proliferated as the years have rolled on. A decade ago, I published a short piece wondering at the perils of being a poetry reviewer. (Spoiler: there are plenty.) In the end, as I reflected at the time, it isn’t occasionally upsetting folks– that happens to anyone who lives an honest life. Nor is it unwittingly shutting doors on yourself. It isn’t publicly broadcasting your opinions, however scrupulously worded, in ways that might make you wince years down the line. The real peril is more of a threat: that you work to become as astute a critic as possible, and the worst warnings still turn out to be true: the critical culture is forever losing ground to a fast-food one, and cash prizes, administered by a process marred with conflicts of interest, are the endgame of literary reception. So it seems to have proved.

What’s wrong with literary prizes, you ask? Nothing, in and of themselves. How ever misguided you might consider their aims, the Forward Prizes for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize, to name two of the most well-known in these isles, stemmed in the ’90s from a broadly praiseworthy desire to promote excellence in new British poetry to the general literary reader, much in the fashion of the Booker Prize and the contemporary literary novel. A little glam and glitter, with the promotion afforded to shortlisted poets and the eventual winner intended to kick up a media fuss, and bring new readers to contemporary poetry. (No coincidence that the T. S. Eliot Prize was first administered by the Poetry Book Society, an organisation founded by Old Possum himself to build a wider intelligent audience for new verse.) But literary prizes have become a victim of their own success. Not, sadly, in reliably widening the audience for excellent poetry, but in their steady proliferation and growing influence in poetry circles as the main vehicle of literary reception. As Carcanet grandee Michael Schmidt once claimed, if you control the prizes, you control the culture of reception. Meanwhile, as Tim Parks lamented in a recent column for the TLS, reflecting on literary juries with an insider’s eye, “over the years there has been less and less media space for serious reviews. But the prizes multiply, as if the only thing that can fire up enthusiasm for literature is a narrative of winners and losers.”

Ben Wilkinson, Winners and Losers: The Death of the Poetry Critic

“On Textual Violence: Cultural Imperialism and Monolingual ‘Translation,’” a conversation between Mona Kareem and Yasmeen Hanoosh:

I wanted to take the veil of innocence off of literary translation. The colonial nature of translation is widely discussed in translation theory and translation studies, yet it often focuses on colonial archives or dictionaries, to give some examples. Literary translation, however, has been able to maintain its righteousness and innocence, which is really an extension of white innocence. For a working example, I focused on what is referred to as “bridge translation” whereby a white poet and a native speaker co-produce a translation in which the latter is silenced while used as a bridge. The issues with such phenomenon are many: political, ethical, aesthetic. Yet it goes unquestioned, even encouraged.

As someone who was commissioned by a now-defunct Iranian cultural organization to produce more than one of these “bridge translations” from classical Persian literature into English—though my informants were (long-deceased) English-speaking Persian Studies scholars, not native speakers—I take the questions Mona Kareem raises here very seriously. I will tell the story of how I came to make the translations I have published another time. Here I will say only that I took pains to distinguish in a responsible way the work I did from the work of Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinsky, whose versions of Rumi and Hafez respectively are deracinating, appropriating, and, frankly, colonizing in precisely the way Kareem alludes to in her use of the term “white innocence.” (I will leave the degree to which I succeeded and failed—because I am sure it’s both—to readers of these works.) Reading this conversation also brought home to me both my own ignorance of contemporary Arabic poetry and the degree to which all poetic cultures, and all efforts at literary translation, confront more or less the same questions, though they may do so at different historical moments and with different cultural and political histories as context. Those differences, I think, are what make room for learning to take place.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #41

It is not literary citizenship as such that I detest (or detested in 2014, when I wrote this piece). When people refer to “literary citizenship,” what they typically mean is actively participating in the literary community that matters most to them.

For instance, if you are trying to break into literary magazines, being a “good literary citizen” would entail reading lit mags and talking about them, purchasing them, subscribing, promoting their contents, forming connections with contributors, interviewing fellow writers and editors, attending events, participating in readings, blogging for lit mags, learning proper submissions etiquette, helping other writers find appropriate lit mags for themselves, and so on.

Of course I do not detest any of these activities. I do all of these activities, many of them daily. I encourage others to do as much of them as they can.

What I am describing in my article is not so much the acts that constitute “good literary citizenship,” but rather the term itself. What does it mean? How did it originate? How does it undermine writers’ own best interests?

As I say in the article, “to understand the rise of the Literary Citizen, perhaps first we need to look at the meltdown of our economy.” The piece was written over a decade ago, but sadly the economic conditions that I describe still apply today. I discuss the closing of bookstores, newspapers laying off their review staff, and publishing houses gutting their marketing teams.

With the shuttering of all these services and spaces for writers, who then picks up the slack?

Certainly it’s not the owners and CEO’s of publishing companies who lend a hand to writers in times of duress (in spite of the fact that their profits are derived precisely from those writers). No, it’s writers who are expected to look after themselves and one another.

As one particularly blunt marketing executive put it,

“You can train your authors to handle more of the marketing efforts. Writers who become skilled at promoting books can produce thousands of dollars in extra profits for the publisher.”

…“[T]hese authors don’t require expensive salaries, office space, insurance packages, or retirement plans. Instead, the publisher just pays a small author royalty…It’s a win-win, right?”

Marketing, publicity, writing reviews, book promotion, interviewing writers—all these activities previously done by paid staff have increasingly been sloughed off to writers.

Now, though, it comes with a twist. This is not work. It’s literary citizenship!

Becky Tuch, Q: What exactly is “literary citizenship” (and what is wrong with it)?

When I began this blog in August 2020, I wanted to bring attention to debut poets and the sterling work undertaken by small poetry presses in discovering new talent. Today sees both those aims realised. Flight of the Dragonfly Press over the last couple of years has developed a small list of publications by new exciting writers thanks to the hard work of Barbara Mercer  and Darren Beaney. The latest addition to that list is Dorian Nightingale with his debut pamphlet Songs from Last Imaginations, a collection of twenty-three poems interspersed with photographs, some accompanied by quotations. Like those photographs,  the poems are snapshots of moments in time, capturing specific states of being, such as the threshold between life and death, the  fledgling’s first flight, the pursuit of creativity, being speechless , enjoying a concert performance; all told in expertly fashioned verse, far more accomplished than one might expect from a debut publication.

Take for example, one of my favourite poems in the collection, words unspoken. It conveys that moment when one holds one tongue, when one decides to keep one’s thoughts to oneself. The moment is portrayed as a retreat, a ‘snap back/    to the place beyond the perimeter.’ The speaker withdraws from the conversation, but it is not an easy thing to do. This is vividly conveyed through the extended metaphor of words ‘dropping to the ground/       right there in front of me,/ buckling to their knees/  whilst beseeching their worth,/ offering me their terms/   from the wet, sticky earth.’  I loved the originality of this imagery that enables the reader to share the inner conflict of the speaker, his obstinacy (‘tight-lipped’ and ‘unmoved’) versus the desire to say something (‘beseeching’, ‘offering’, ’pleading’). There is something eminently relatable here.

As there will be for many readers, who are poets or involved in the arts,  in the poem, sparks. which captures the essence of creativity, that desire for originality. In the poem Nightingale takes the cliché of the ‘spark’ of creativity and gives it a freshness and dynamism. The speaker symbolises the creative act as a way of lighting a fire. He dismisses the conventional approach, saying ‘i never wanted to light my fire that way./ the friction of sticks within textbooks and booklets, the instructions concurred by many teachers and tutors, conveying the way/ to fashion a flame.’ Note the punctuation, the use of lower case for i and for words following full stops, the speaker is clearly a rule breaker. He wants to find his own method, a unique, personal way: ‘to uncover such things in my own inherent manner.’ Yet as all fellow poets will know this is not easy, and Nightingale explores these difficulties. He talks of ‘the shyness of my instinct’, the search for confidence; of the need ‘to spend time on my insight, to find out if it works,’ the time-consuming labour of creativity;’ of the necessity of failure (‘to know that it hurt when alternatives fail,/ the setbacks of initiative that curtail a better trail’); and of the all-consuming desire to see the creative process through (‘i so yearned to spur a spontaneous nerve./       a lightning bolt moment.’ 

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Songs of Last Imaginations’ by Dorian Nightingale

As those who’ve been reading for a while will know, sometimes I like to think about just a single poem. A couple of days ago I recorded a podcast with Henry Oliver (of The Common Reader) — available to listen to next week, I believe — and one of the things he asked me was whether I was depressed by the state of contemporary poetry, and whether there are good poems being written now. Which of course there are! Then earlier this week a friend who’s also a substacker, Jem, recommended I had a look at a particular poem in the latest issue of bad lilies, a consistently interesting and still fairly new British online poetry journal. It does only poetry, no criticism, and the interface is a bit clunky and annoying, but it’s worth persisting with. […]

Leadbetter’s poem is truly strange as well as moving. I mean that its strangeness is worked out and through in the course of the poem in a coherent way, rather than being an instance of the apparently near-compulsory ‘touch of whimsy’ or ‘hint of the surreal’ that bedevils contemporary Anglophone poetry so tediously. (I wrote about that a bit here.) It’s a proper poem in which all the parts contribute to the whole.

Victoria Moul, A poem by Gregory Leadbetter

I mentioned Erik Satie in a recent post about music to write by. And then I came upon the book Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by the music critic Ian Penman. It’s just the sort of book I love. Written in three parts using three different treatments, the middle being in dictionary or encyclopedia format. It’s fairly well known that Satie was a bit of a weird fellow, what with his umbrella obsession, his proclivity for eating only white food, and his hoarding habit. […]

A while back I wrote about typewriters and pianos and the fact that the first prototype of a typewriter was made using piano keys. So I was delighted to read Penman: “Thinking about visual rhyme between a piano and the keyboard I’m typing this on.” He talks about how he is haunted by an Olivetti he used in his teens, how he prefers his keyboard to be separate from his computer. All of which I completely get.

Penman’s Satie book reminded me somewhat of books like Tim Carpenter’s book on photography, and Moyra Davey’s Index Cards. Writers, thinkers, listeners, see-ers, who insert themselves into the subject at hand. For me that brings an immediacy, an authenticity. Davey says at one point, “I am trying to find a new way to work.” And these books create an avenue for those of us who are wanting to try to write about things without being smoothed out in an ai world. They also quote, refer, acknowledge sources. They connect things that only a weird and engaged human mind will. They’re all a bit weird, I guess, and all I can say is, bring on the weird please, writers, artists.

Shawna Lemay, On Esoterik Satie

While meandering up and down the street with Radu, pausing at his usual pee-mail stops, even venturing to add a new box to the map of his scent-relations, a Carolina wren chirped my name and the world shimmered, froze, melted, became momentarily otherwise.

I thought about a nest I’d come across a few weeks ago, on a similar walk. Had I taken a photo of that fallen nest?

Winding through the image file, I found a photo of the fallen nest, the small blue egg crushed within it. The shell struck me as the broken skin of an origins. It urged me to play with the scraps and remnants, to make an alternate nest from the shadows of things that got cut from my conversation with Gabriela Frank, which will be published in The Rumpus next week. To Gabriela’s question about process, I mentioned fragments and pieces of sound, but there is, perhaps, another way of ‘saying’ the same thing, which is by enacting it.

In my fever for lost and fallen things, I created two structures composed from the cuttings of wood chips at the base of the interview’s final draft. . . Two fallen nests. In the first nest, I decided to frame the speakers by using quotation marks, despite the fact that these words have not or will not be published in an official journal, there is a thrill in according them the status of words that were scored and prepared for performance somehow. The second nest is composed entirely from words of my own, looking up at me from the cutting floor, asking to be placed in a relation that is not quite conversation with one another.

Alina Stefanescu, Playing on the cutting room floor.

The regional drought has officially ended, and the rain continues. Ironic, then, that the online site Feed the Holy just posted a poem I wrote near the close of a droughty August: “Zen Gold.” Fireflies and bats, while not abundant, manage to enjoy the recent dampness. The monarch butterflies have returned to our meadow, though I don’t catch sight of them on rainy days. But the moist conditions didn’t dampen the turnout or enthusiasm of local citizens who came out in droves for peaceful “No Kings” protests here…in a decidedly “purple-red” area of Pennsylvania.

Speaking of regional, this weekend I also attended the debut showing of a documentary film about the performing arts community in Bethlehem, PA, formerly famous for Bethlehem Steel Corporation. The film is titled “Rooted,” and it follows that “roots” idea with the planting of trees at arts sites, the metaphor of the mycorrhizal network (see my references to Lesley Wheeler’s latest book–so much overlap!) and the concept of community development. Especially through works of imagination. In the 1970s, when the steelworks was beginning to slow production and lose employees to retirement and business to competitors, small groups of young, talented artists in theater, dance, music, and puppetry started performing in parks, churches, etc…and gradually found inexpensive space in the city to establish themselves and pursue their dreams. Some of those little startups, such as Touchstone Theatre, have been operating, teaching groups of children, entertaining the community, and advocating for the arts for over 50 years.

Godfrey Daniels coffeehouse/listening room and The Ice House (home of Mock Turtle Productions) have been sites for poetry as well as for music and theater-craft. I have participated in and attended poetry and one-act play readings at both of those venues. I don’t live in Bethlehem, but it isn’t too far away from me–still in the Lehigh Valley region. And I deeply appreciate the work that pioneering arts-folks have done, and that arts advocates and teaching artists continue to do, for our area. The people behind the arts deserve recognition.

Ann E Michael, Behind the arts

I’m still on my go-slow summer, writing in the morning, working on the house or garden or doing something with the kids in the afternoon. Summer is fresh fruit and thunderstorms, always having dirt under my fingernails no matter how hard I scrub and the window open at night. It’s ice cream and sleeping in, museums and cafes, it’s writing when I want. Long days, nights without boundaries. I don’t want it to end, but I have my summer course in Scotland soon which follows midsummer and starts the descent back into the real world. 

Gerry Stewart, Midsummer

Well that’s it, the thing that’s has been a long time coming is done (bar some last knockings). I am overjoyed, and already looking forward to the next one.

I know what you’re thinking…yes, I have finally finished painting our doors. The last gloss work went on yesterday…Only new door handles remain to be fitted —and that’s down to Rach deciding on them. However, no I am not talking about that.

I am talking about Matthew Paul’s second collection. It has been a very long time coming…8 years, in fact…But I would say it has been well worth the wait.

I was invited to read with Matthew at his London launch on Tuesday just gone. There were a lot of launches in London that night, as well as the London Lawyers Charity walk, so London was hot and heaving, but it’s fair to say that Matthew truly set his collection off into the world in style—ably supported by Vanessa Lampert, Ian Parks and myself.

It was wonderful to hear (and those noisy lawyers made it quite hard at some points) from all 3 poets. Everyone had something different about them in terms of style of delivery, poetic style (although everyone loved a detail, I think—I can’t/don’t want to do the analysis on it…I’m not an academic and no one would care anyway), and everyone had different themes and ways of coming at the world…I think this meant that the audience definitely got plenty of bang for their metaphorical buck.

Mat Riches, Punctured by Budleigh Salterton

The Solstice arrived here gloomy and rainy, which seemed appropriate for the day of Martha Silano’s Memorial. It wasn’t formal, but there was music and poetry readings and a tribute from her students. I also saw some old poet friends. I cried in the car on the way there. It’s still hard to believe she’s gone.

Cedar waxwings appeared in my neighborhood that day, which were one of her Martha’s favorite birds, and our friend Kelli has several poems that mentions a connection between grief and waxwings, including “When Women Die, Waxwings Appear” in her first collection, Small Knots. […]

In happier News, I have a poem in the new 75th Anniversary issue of Shenandoah, and our local Woodinville Lavender Farm had its opening weekend. The whole issue of Shenandoah is worth reading, and the lavender farm had good turnouts—it’s just down the street from our house, and we’re so grateful it’s there—a balm and a joy during these difficult times.

And I should say, we’re all in difficult times. I came home from Marty’s memorial to see that Trump has decided to bomb Iran, and that major cities should be on “high alert”—whatever that means, none of it good, I’m afraid. Today I spent the majority of the day dodging AI-generated images of nuclear destruction. Those of us born in the 60s and 70s remember the information we were given about what to do if hit by a nuclear bomb—at school, at home, and a cute (!) video about what we do if we’re in the playground. We need all the days in lavender fields we can get.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Solstices, Poem in Shenandoah, Memorial, Waxwings Appear and Lavender

Years later, I hear a New York poet read a poem about walking through a forest and hearing a sound—either a deer or a bear. There’s a difference, I thought, between prey and predator, and in the woods, you would know it, and that’s how you survive the apocalypse or the end times, but you wouldn’t know that coming from New York.

When I do finally run away from the cult, I walk down the road away from Mr. Whipple’s house with my sleeping bag, harmonica, two dollars, and my dog. I find a library. Someone takes me into her attic and gives me a job taking care of her son. She has a spinning wheel, a houseful of books. I eat honey at her house out of the jar. I’d been waiting for honey all my life.

I walked away with no driver’s license or social security number. I found my way to ASU, then California. Were there more drunken men? Reader, I tell you, they were everywhere. They came for me. What other models did I have? I grew up wanting to save. I had children with them. Raised children with them. Margaritas and champagne wash through all my fairytales.

I thought that anytime now, someone might kill me. But they didn’t. I lived.

Dr. Strangelove dreamed of women, of the bomb, of sheltering from the bomb. George dreamed of running his little world and the women in it. Mr. Whipple dreamed of a young girl’s hands opening the beer, morning after morning, until he died.

I had different dreams: Libraries, streams, books and sunlight between them. I dreamed of sitting in that sunlight. I dreamed of being my own strange love.

Kate Gale, I Dream of My Own Strange Love

I talk to the animals, but they don’t talk back. Research shows humans are terrible at understanding what their beloved dogs or cats are thinking, unable to identify what that body shift means, that shifty eye, the tightening of the nose. Talk to me, we say. There’s a lot of talking going on these days. Not a lot of listening, maybe. Or not a lot of thinking, at any rate.

There is so much I can no longer listen to. So many ways in which I feel unheard. So many things I don’t understand. What if instead of chanting louder as I passed by the guy giving a finger to the marchers, I stepped out of the throng and said, Hey, what’s up with you? Would we have had words? Or shared words? Hard to tell. Impossible to predict. Would we even be speaking the same language? I think of that Tower of Babel, how productive we were, all strategizing in a common language! Now we’re as puzzling to each other as I am to the ant I just bum-rushed off my pant leg. And vice versa. Where did he think he was going?

I like this poem for its plainspoken dealing with god, its plea for understanding, its plea for a common language. Because we humans are animals too. And we’re baying to be heard.

Marilyn McCabe, Fork my tongue, Lord. There is a sorrow in the air

The verse says “Jesus wept,” but
it’s in the wrong tense.
Jesus is still weeping.

He takes turns with Rachel
still lamenting her children
and Shekhinah, perennial exile.

This week they’re crying
for children in bomb shelters
and even more for children outside them.

Rachel Barenblat, Jesus wept

First: the 75th anniversary double issue of Shenandoah launched this week! The website has been professionally redesigned, too (I’m so glad Beth secured funding for that just under the wire–universities are all belt-tightening now). I read and proofread the whole issue so I know for sure it’s terrific. I hope you’ll check it out. If it makes you want to join the party, by the way, the dates for submission windows are here. The number we can handle in any period maxes out fast, by the way, so aim to send early.

Otherwise, my central mission for the last two weeks of spring was to enjoy visits from my adult kids; rest; and read lots. More difficult aims I made some progress on: catching up on chores (the yard was egregious) and taking stock of the poems I’ve been jotting and forgetting so I could get some under submission at magazines. I’ve now read everything in my digital files, revising what seemed most promising and sending out a few (there are other drafts handwritten in notebooks, I suspect). Revision has been slow, partly because I’m legitimately tired, but partly because many of the poems I dug up are emotionally intense as well as wobbly in quality. It was hard to remember some of the occasions and feelings that inspired them.

Revision, for me, is a long process that requires critical distance I can only gain by putting work aside for a weeks or months. Often changes follow that classic formula of cutting the poem’s throat-clearing opener, its overexplained ending, most of the adverbs, and occasional moments of defensiveness or self-pity. Often there’s a governing metaphor with logic that doesn’t quite fly, so I have to re-enter the thinking and parse the poem logically. This sometimes involves expansion, too, especially if I realize I’ve been too oblique or have been dancing around the hard stuff. Those are the architectural moves, but the finishing work of strengthening diction, especially verbs, and trimming unnecessary words (my former colleague Heather Ross Miller called it “thattery and whichery”) also seems endless–I think of some new tweak every time I reread a poem. And some are beyond rescue. I can make them cleaner and craftier, but I’m not capable of rendering them genuinely powerful, the kind of poems a reader might fall hard for–at least, not now. It’s hard to pin down that quality, but often a poem with strong appeal conveys vulnerability or insight, or the language is especially surprising and sparkling.

Lesley Wheeler, Myco-outtakes

I drove my mum along the seafront on our way home from a trip out and found my mind flashing through memories. I revisited the taste of vinegary tomato ketchup on chips, the feel of the seam when wearing my rubber ring to paddle, the sound and excitement of bingo and slot machines. There was also the first time I ever drove my mum in the car and kangarooed it down her road and round the block whilst muttering a number of swear words and thinking she might need lots of persuading if she was ever to go for a drive with me again. And yet there we were decades later enjoying a smooth ride and one another’s company.

The sunny weather brings to mind the joy of simply lying down outside and watching the clouds. Here’s to moments like that and the thoughts that expand within them. This poem was first published by One Hand Clapping.

SKYLARKING

She searches the sky most days.

Never says skies;
to her that one vastness
holds so much.

Sometimes she forgets
she cannot contemplate what exists above.

There are days she wants to pull down the clouds
to build a maze.

Days she wants to swallow the small ones;
their cold candyfloss hydration.

Days she wants to lie down on the side of a hill
with someone she loves
naming every shape.

Days she thinks she would be happy
just watching everything glide by
in the colour of swans.

Sue Finch, Summer Solstice

Crows in the gardenia bush.
Driveways exiting onto asphalt.
One dark speck: a fishing boat;
early morning, the sea
clear as glass.

Luisa A. Igloria, Black and White

This week: grief and blossoms, poems about frogs, purposeful loafing, the crosshairs of the present, and much more. Enjoy.

I’ve been thinking about how this feels like the first book in a while that isn’t, specifically or more generally, about grief, even though it swims around us and within us every time we open a news page or or scroll on our phones. I feel those poems are coming, but I don’t know what they look like yet, but here, in this new book, there is a certain feral energy I am feeling now. The first book that felt leaden with grief was FEED, my first self-publishing adventure in 2021, that contained a lot of poems about mothers in the wake of losing my own.  COLLAPSOLOGIES, which followed in 2023, was more about societal grief, for covid, for our (woefully innacurate) view of humanity and capitalism, for the things and people lost to all of these.  While GRANATA was less so, RUINPORN was about rebuilding and loss in general–for people, for relationships, for homes, and for ways of being and existing in the creative world that had to be shed to move forward.   

Kristy Bowen, notes on wild(ish)

pencil stub
the boat that set out
never returned

for dylan thomas 

Jim Young [no title]

Here are some photos from our recent exhibition celebrating Somerset’s papermaking heritage. [images]

Each of us hand-wrote or hand-printed, instead of an ‘artist’s statement’, ten words and our name on a piece of Wookey Hole Mill handmade paper. These were pegged on a washing line above the display of bookworks made in response to ten other words we had each anonymously contributed: soar, bold, flow, dark, fallen, liminal, patch, divergence, round, and gateway. Judy Warbey’s zigzag book on pale blue Wookey Hole paper, Murmuration, includes all ten words in her description of a flock of starlings. Kari Furre’s book on jute Wookey Hole paper literally performs each word with astonishing virtuosity.

One long wall was dedicated to blue books. […]

My last photo was taken on the last day, when we had 80 visitors and significant sales. Almost without exception our visitors spent a long time engaging with the work and really taking an interest. Though tiring, it was immensely rewarding to be stewarding for five days in a row. Through the big bay window is a view of Wells Cathedral.

I will end with a selection of verses from The Soul as a Bird, my erasure of the Psalms. I have made a PDF of the text and foreword, with notes and some photos. It is available free on request. Email me at barleybooks(at)hotmail(dot)co(dot)uk. […]

CXVIII
princes
like bees
are extinct

CXLVI
praise the child
defend the upside down generation

CXLVII
call them by name
cattle and ravens
make peace

Ama Bolton, On Paper

I have a special fondness for poems about frogs, ever since reading Kobayashi Issa, who wrote hundreds of frog haiku, many of which can be found amongst David Lanoue’s wonderful archive of over 13,000 translations. The opening tercet of [Elizabeth] Jaeger’s ‘Croak’ also has a distinctly haiku feel to it;

When it darkens and rains
I am not anything human:
I am a frog.

I have written a few poems about frogs myself. This is an old haiku from 2012 inspired by the work of Issa and Bonchō;

twilight frog it jumps i jump

And another from 2016;

moon frog moon frog
forever

And something new, written in late-2024, “after” Jaeger;

the frog i try becoming croaks

Dick Whyte, Elizabeth Jaeger – Croak (1918)

It was July of 2020, early in the pandemic, when I made up a form in homage to the classic gardening book, Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. The square-foot poem starts as a wordpool crammed into a small square—a 3 x 3 inch post-it note, for example. “Small, non-scary yellow squares filled with words seem almost playful, and are just as good at turning into sentences, stanzas and paragraphs as fully-filled sheets of paper,” I wrote back in 2020, and I still write square-foot poetry often. Many of my poems started out as little squares filled with words. If you feel like doodling, this is a good way to make poems out of your scribbles.

Erica Goss, Five Poetry Forms You May Not Have Heard About

fog, foge, fouge : (n) Grass or fodder left in the field during winter. SND

(v) Scottish. To pack or cover (a wall, roof, etc.) with moss. OED

Recently I visited a friend up in Aberdeenshire. She is an artist, a craftswoman and a natural gardener; the grounds of her house are full of interesting things. This time she took me off to the far corner where there are very old conifers. A recent storm had brought down one of the oldest; she’d used the timber, and the damp crater the root bowl had created, to build a fog house.

My first thought was that this was some Calvinist version of the summer house – where we sit all afternoon, freezing our brains out, waiting for the haar to lift. But no. The fog house, a popular feature of grand gardens in Scotland in the 19th century, is a round bothy made of any handy wood or stone and thatched and lined with turf and moss – as if it has grown out of the ground. Her husband had sawed part of the trunk into sections and up-ended these to create a row of stools, big and small, along the back wall. We sat and looked out of the door, smelling the new earth, listening to the wind and the birds in the trees while our heads filled with new, silvery air.

In In Praise of Shadows, Junichirō Tanizaki rejoices in the natural darkness of traditional Japanese houses – the unlit picture alcove, the sliding paper screen with its bamboo frame, the toilet at the end of a corridor, open to the trees. Sometimes there are long narrow windows at floor level: “there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth”. I love this idea of a room constructed to hold the sounds of the earth: wind soughts, the stirring and settling of small creatures, the quick whine of an insect ….

Lesley Harrison, THE FOG HOUSE

I have things I want to ask the monsoon
when it hits the west coast in June. It has
a comforting regularity, even in these
times. See, that’s what we do in the
summer, bury questions in the earth so
they will flower after the first rain.

[…]

Somewhere in the jungle, peacocks will
spread their wings to welcome the rain –
nature needs the whole spectrum of
colours to paint hope. What about, and this
I want to talk about face to face, over
many cups of tea, why break ritual over
rhetoric? What about Bulwer-Lytton and
the pen being mightier than the sword?
Now that AI writes and AI fights, who
draws first blood? Who has the last word?
What is the antithesis of yet another poem?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Questions I want to ask the monsoon

Once again, my mathematician-poet-friend Sarah Glaz has carefully organized a math-poetry reading — this one to be held at the upcoming Bridges Math-Arts Conference, July 14-18, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands.  Details concerning the exact time and location for the reading, scheduled for Thursday, July 17, will be announced here at this link.

Below I offer a sampling from the poets who will be reading at Eindhoven — a CENTO that I have built by inclusion of a phrase from a poem by each of the poets registered for participation in Bridges 2025.  (Information about the poets is found here at this website maintained by Sarah Glaz._

WE CELEBRATE MATHEMATICS

The power of a theorem lies 
with a diagram of clockwise arrows 
hovering high over the town,                        
while infinite time is waiting
and triple sixes strive
in-between our beginnings and ends.    

Proof by example is extraordinary.
In the beginning, all is null,
Quaternions trampled on our norms,
spiroplots and tritangentless knots
spiraling toward the undefined.

If my garden of numbers grows
Into systems richer than can be described,
Space cannot reduce the magnitude of errors.
The oldest puzzle ever told
defines the notion of time.

The lines of the poem above have been selected — in order — from poems by these BRIDGES poets:  Sarah Glaz, Madhur Anand, Marian Christie, Carol Dorf, Anthony Etherin, Susan Gerofsky, Lisa Lajeunesse, Dan May, Iggy McGovern, Doug Norton, Pedro Poitevin, Eveline Pye, Stephanie Strickland, Racheli Yovel, Kate Jones, Susana Sulic.

Information about these poets and about poetry at the BRIDGES Conference may be found at this website maintained by Sarah Glaz.

JoAnne Growney, 2025 BRIDGES–mid-July in Eindhoven, Netherlands

The final card in the spread was one I dislike the look of, with its flame-haired angel blowing a trumpet over naked gray people rising from their graves. (If there is a Rapture, I don’t expect to be one of the chosen.) But surrounded by other tarot cards about choices, Judgement suggests I’m on the right path.

It also speaks to an issue I’ve been reflecting on: the relation of my hyper work ethic to a childhood absorbing criticism from my deeply unhappy parents. What a moment for Judgement to come to the emotional fore, in this third month of a book launch, a celebratory time but also a rollercoaster of ups and downs: feeling elated when the room is full and embarrassed when it’s empty; noticing how and where the baby book gets reviewed; spending so much effort in promotion, worried that you’re being tedious and reminding yourself you owe the book this much. The centrality of criticism to my life–I AM a literary critic who spends a lot of time grading, secretly reviewing others’ files and mss, and reading for Shenandoah–means that the judgement reflex is extra hard to let go of. I see it as valuable, sometimes. I know I look “successful,” career-wise, in part because I’ve spent decades self-criticizing to head off criticism from others. It’s especially hard to root out a stubborn lifelong habit when you imagine it has some benefits.

I’m glad I pledged myself full effort in this book launch. No regrets. But I know it would be easier on mind and body if I could manage not to sweat the misfires and slights. Is it possible to deal myself better cards?

Lesley Wheeler, The Judgement Card

[W]hile I am happy to walk around my yard, woods, and neighborhood for 30-40 minutes almost daily, I can’t say I do it at a brisk pace. I get distracted and stop to look at things. Bugs. Worms. Toads. Birds. Flowers. New leaves. Nests. Spiderwebs… I loaf along, as Whitman claimed to do. Some days I start out with good intentions to keep up a lively pace, maybe even to the point where I can feel my heart rate going up. And then–was that a redtail hawk overhead? Did I hear an ovenbird? Oooh, the Solomon’s-seal is in bloom! […]

At my place, it’s feeder creeks I hear and think I may visit, not ponds, but I identify with the mood of this poem [“Walking to Oak-Head Pond and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks” by Mary Oliver]. Walks offer me that joy, that unfurling of leaves, ferns, everything…time to reflect and feel gratitude. If I don’t do quite as well by my heart and muscles as I ought to, maybe my psyche or soul will compensate. If I loaf, it’s a purposeful, sweet loafing, the kind of activity that poets tend to do; it gives me energy of a non-physical sort. (And I think Mr. Whitman would concur.)

Ann E. Michael, Not a brisk pace

My time is being stolen and who knows anymore what is behind the inability of companies, retailers, local authorities, who take my money happily and with so many rules attached to how I must behave, but who have invented mazes, walls, invisible lazers, to keep me on hold, at bay, without speech, without the right to speak, without a person to speak to, without reason, without normal language, normal sentences, without engagement, without empathy. And if it’s not hard enough as a single human being, add to me another human who can’t do it for themselves. And then more than double the time, obviously, because they have even more needs than me and so add in the hospital, doctor, pharmacy time, the shopping, dealing with the council, the managing personal assistants time, the overgrown garden and trees time, the leaking pipe time. And whether it’s the gas company or the GP the language is the same, the hold time is the same, and sometimes I wonder how anyone keeps their cool which is why there are so many notices in windows about kindness and respect and of course everyone should be treated with kindness and respect, but me too, and those of us, all of us, on the other end of the line, email, on hold constantly, on hold, being given endless excuses, or not, on hold for an answer that is not coming but is promised anyway to get me off the line because I no longer have a right to reply, a right to an answer, a right even to ask why is this happening.

Jackie Wills, Time and its manifesto

Andrew Taylor’s There’s Everything to Play For is intended as a companion to the two-volume [Peter] Finch Collected Poems edited by Taylor and reviewed by me at the time. As such, the book is structured chronologically, with Taylor setting the work as it was published in a context of what Finch was doing and reading, who he was talking to and collaborating with, and what was happening in his own life and the wider world of writing at the time. […]

At the heart of all this is the question of Welshness, and of Finch’s place on a kind of margin. ‘A Welsh Wordscape’ articulates part of this by playing on both an English view of Wales and a kind of Anglo-Welsh poetic piety that serves to reinforce the stereotypes. It’s also present in the making of visual texts grounded in the Welsh language as an act of deviance against both Welsh parochialism and English condescension.

There was something of a shift in 1997, when the referendum on Welsh devolution was passed. Taylor quotes an email from Finch where he writes:

the establishment of A Welsh Assembly … marked a sea change in how many of us began to feel about our country…. Being a Welsh writer began to take on a new and considerably less down-trodden meaning.

Some of this shift is reflected in the psychogeographic writing in the Real Cardiff series of books where Finch takes slow looks at the city and its history.

Nevertheless, Taylor notes the paucity of critical work on Finch, which, he says, ‘can, in part, be put down to the outside nature of Finch being from Wales, and partly down to the British underground not knowing where to place him.’ As recently as 2022, Greg Thomas’s excellent study Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland explicitly omits Finch based on that geographical subtitle. The one major exception is Angel Exhaust 21, a special Welsh issue which includes a good deal of material on Finch, including Nerys Williams’ invaluable ‘Peter Finch: Make it New in Wales’. But this is the exception, not the rule.

Billy Mills, There’s Everything to Play For: The Poetry of Peter Finch by Andrew Taylor: A Review

the rust
on my poems
timelines
crack and overflow
with grief and blossoms

*

I combine haiku and tanka with prose without thinking, because I don’t want to change the flow of my writing. Does the water ask where to, and how?

Kati Mohr, Summerheart

In the arts, friendships often develop from sharing a space in a journal, and recognizing a kindred or comrade in their publications or performances. ‘Transavanguardist’ artist Francesco Clemente met composer Morton Feldman through a mutual —Francesco Pellizzi — attached to a journal — Anthropology and Aesthetic.

Feldman dedicated his piano piece, Palais de Mari (1986), to Clemente. Appropriately, the piece made its debut at a intimate concert in Clemente’s studio. […]

An oil-on-linen painting by Clemente, “For Morton Feldman,” crosses paths with the time-signatures that mark duration, unfolding a way to think with the complexity that friendship occupies in the imaginary.

The subjects of Clemente’s image are two compositions: two texts delivered to paper, each leaving their own shadows on the pinkish-white background.

The crumpled music notation sits next to the crumpled star chart (one can discern the edge of Aries in the upper right corner).

Musical staves and constellations: two cosmologies, two ways of thinking and seeing.

Paper and paper: the flesh of two trees rendered as pulp.

Music and stars: paired infinities.

Linear and constellating: the binary that Critical Theory exposed (and why we cannot forget Walter Benjamin).

Aaron Schuster’s fantastic sidereal excavation, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, has been in my mind this week. At one point, Aaron says that “the construction of a work of potential philosophy takes its cue from the skewed way the mind works, how its functioning is undisturbed by a wayward drift.” In this way, the potential (or perhaps even projected) “starts from its own lack, its unsystemacity.”

How long should the resonance last?

I think Feldman presents this question as an opportunity to any pianist who performs his Palais. The rests resist the call of consistency and perfect repetition. Variance emerges within the rests, themselves, creating slight drifts in the duration of each. We are always ‘thinking-through’ the resonances and shadows of others. In a sense, resonances create their own rhythm: the possible may be forsaken for the impossibility that drove that Kafka’s epistemic dread. There is no way out of the present that isn’t a way of playing with the unpredictable and developing in relation to it.

Alina Stefanescu, In the airs.

The truth lies in the cracks of the wall,
the crosshairs of the present; but we are blind
before we’ve even torn out our eyes. Or we push,

with all earnestness, against the idea of
a pre-ordained fate. If fate is real and we
have no choice, we want to feel that we at least

dared raise a voice, shake a fist against time’s
imperium. O, there’s no mistaking its scythe—
Because it sweeps close, we too shall sit

and read to each other, eat and drink
around the table with our friends, until
the heart stops as if of its own accord.

~ In memoriam, Delfin L. Tolentino, Jr. (1950-2025)

Luisa A. Igloria, Close Reading

The figure I thought about most while I was in Istanbul was John Chrysostom. ‘Chrysostom’ means ‘Golden Mouth’ in Greek, and John was a priest in Antioch, his home city, before the fame of his preaching saw him summoned to be archbishop of Constantinople in 397. Before long, he had offended the empress Eudoxia and got himself exiled. He died, while traveling to a still more distant exile, just a few years later in 407. And, as his name suggests, he wrote beautiful Greek. […]

I’d never visited Turkey before and I found it very moving to see Hagia Sophia, where Chrysostom preached, as well as so many other early church figures whose works I have been poring over for this annotation.

Touched by this experience, I have been rereading some Chrysostom to enjoy the lovely clarity of his Greek. But I also wondered whether there were any English poems about him. The only one I’ve been able to find — do write if you can think of others — is this poem by Richard Wilbur, which I found rather striking and provocative. It’s called simply ‘John Chrysostom’, and it’s from his 1956 collection Things of this World:

He who had gone a beast
Down on his knees and hands
Remembering lust and murder
Felt now a gust of grace,
Lifted his burnished face
From the psalter of the sands
And found his thoughts in order
And cleared his throat at last.

What they heard was a voice
That spoke what they could learn
From any gelded priest,
Yet rang like a great choir,
He having taught hell’s fire
A singing way to burn,
And borrowed of some dumb beast
The wildness to rejoice.

I’m a big admirer of Wilbur’s verse translations, which seem to me some of the very best translations of poetry into English of the 20th century. I don’t know his original poetry as well. This, I think it’s fair to say, is quite an arresting poem and it contains one indisputably excellent phrase (“the psalter of the sands”) — though even this very good line struck me as oddly vague. The desert saints and monks were of great importance in the fourth century church, and Chrysostom had himself spent several formative years as a hermit in the mountains near Antioch. (Including, apparently, two full years memorising the Bible without lying down, which unsurprisingly caused permanent damage to his health.) But the mountains around Antioch — now in southern Turkey — are not the desert. So what does it mean to say that Chrysostom lifted his face from the “psalter of the sands”? And why is his face “burnished” (which suggests the sun, but he spent years in a cave). Possibly an allusion to the gilded appearance of Byzantine mosaics?

Victoria Moul, Richard Wilbur’s “John Chrysostom”

Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography by Joseph Luzzi is both scholarly and highly accessible: it offers vivid narrative, clear accounts of changing cultural contexts, clear explanations of complex ideas and a light touch in using textual detail to illuminate broad points. Illustrating the richness of Dante’s work by showing how differently it’s been read in different periods and what diverse inspirations artists have found within it, the author is able to zoom in on particular episodes and passages, giving enough context for them to be understood in themselves without demanding prior knowledge on the reader’s part. Illuminating both the Commedia itself and the writers it has influenced, Luzzi’s ideas will interest both people who already know Dante and lovers of these other writers. Many of the latter, I suspect, will be drawn into reading Dante for themselves.

There’s something of a shifting balance between the two kinds of appeal. In terms of their basic subject matter, chapters 1 – 4 will mean most to people who already have at least some interest in the Commedia, whether from a literary or historical point of view. However, Luzzi’s gift for seeing facts and situations in terms of their concrete meaning for those involved adds a human depth that more narrowly academic studies can miss. So does the agility with which he moves among ideas and makes connections between them. For example, Chapter 1 – ‘Inventing “Italian” Literature’ – revolves round well-established ideas about Dante’s immediate impact and about how the vastness of his achievement influenced the subsequent development of the Italian language. However, I can’t remember an equally vivid presentation of the novelty and scale of ambition involved in his use of the vernacular when ‘Basically, he sought to forge, ex nihilo, a literary tradition [of vernacular love poetry] in an “Italian” tongue that did not yet exist’, and wrote his epic of unprecedentedly universalist scope in the Tuscan dialect rather than the Latin that would have made his work accessible throughout Europe. The decision to do this limited his contemporary readership even within Italy. In a deft application of anecdote, Luzzi tells us that ‘as late as the nineteenth century, Milanese nobles traveling to Sicily were mistaken for Englishmen, so incomprehensible was their dialect to locals’. Against such a cost, though, Luzzi sets the poetic and humane value Dante found in what he called the ‘lingua materna’: ‘In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante developed his views on the necessity of the vernacular by describing how poets preserve what is lasting and lovely in everyday speech …he knew that no mere scholarly or “dead” language could capture the intimate rhythms, cadences and meanings of everyday speech and, by extension, the resonances and experiences of everyday life.’ Reading this, we feel how Dante’s embrace of the vernacular gave his writing its astonishingly concrete, specific power of dramatic evocation. At the same time, I think, we feel how crucial it was to the power and poignancy of his religious vision that it brought together these evocations of concrete, local and ephemeral earthly life and the eternity such life confronts.

Edmund Prestwich, Two books on Dante: Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography by Joseph Luzzi, and The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by Charles S. Singleton, introduced by Simone Marchesi

Amid the silica
sea glass
on its way back
from bottle
to being grains on a beach

Towards the end
of this transformation
I hold it in my hand
and admire the ocean’s lapidary

Paul Tobin, SEA GLASS

When I think about my childhood of the dark spaces and stars I feel sad for those people who have never known that: the absolute dark of a country lane, the freeing feeling of being unobserved, unseen, free to exist in the blackness. I can’t help but feel the eradication of all dark by the power of human light isn’t always a good thing, that there should be places where we can’t quite see, places where we can’t always tell what is real and what is not. This is what to is to be human.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Star Carr at Night

For me, poems are like cats—they appear mysteriously and unannounced. I grew up with cats, and my wife and I are currently on our third and fourth cats, beautiful sisters, and I pay close attention to feline quidditas. Likewise, I pay attention when I feel a poem stirring in me: of course I try to coax it into being, but sometimes I have to let it emerge on its own terms and in its own good time. That being said . . . I’ve written poems in one sitting, and I have poems that have sat silently inside me for years, even decades, before they start to show themselves. […]

Robert Frost purportedly said: “Poetry is about the grief, politics about the grievances.” In our politically, socially, and culturally fraught day and age the boundary line between grief and grievance seems not only blurry but perhaps fluid. But I worry that some writers (and readers) give too much credit to poetry’s capacity to redress the wrongs of the world. Airing grievances under the guise of poetry may get the blood boiling, but I subscribe to Zbigniew Herbert’s position: “It is vanity to think one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.” […]

Perhaps this rationalizes my slow process of writing and my modest output, but I think often of the advice Czesław Miłosz proffers in a poem titled “Ars Poetica?” that dates to 1968: “poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instruments.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Thomas O’Grady [rob mclennan]

on a chair
the cat is curled
like a comma

deep in sleep
he makes a sound

and one foot twitches

Bill Waters, 3 cherita

The contest model has always irked me in general, not least because of a built in bias I started sensing some time ago that was documented by Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young, and Claire Grossman in their article “Literature’s Vexed Democratization,” that awards an overwhelming number of career-making literary prizes to MFA-holders, with fully half of those winners having graduated from one of four schools: Columbia University, New York University, University of California in Irvine, and the University of Iowa. First-book poetry prizes, though, bother me for a different reason as well: the way they fetishize the first book. I read an essay a long time ago in which the writer, I think it was Eavan Boland, talked about what is lost when first books are expected to be perfect enough, whatever that might mean, to win contests or pass muster as MFA theses. She missed, she said, how uneven first books used to be (in whatever time frame she was referencing), the pleasure of watching from poem to poem as the poet tried different things, some of which would pan out and some of which would not. I don’t know if this is what I remember from the essay or if this is my own framing, but it seemed to me that Boland was talking about a level of vulnerable authenticity, or maybe authentic vulnerability, that the polish required to win a contest or pass muster as a thesis tends to smooth over. It’s an interesting point, but I wish I had the essay so I could say more about it. (If anyone reading this knows the essay I’m talking about, please let me know.)

§§§

I’ve never read Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, but, back when I was first learning how to be a poet, it was not uncommon to hear poets talk about poetry as being part of “the gift economy.” A poem, this way of thinking went—if I remember correctly—should be thought of not as a commodity, but as a gift given, freely given, with no strings attached, by the poet to the community. I really liked that way of thinking about the poems I was making, though I also remember wondering how that framework made room for the fact that a book of poetry was a commodity by definition. When I think now about this way of seeing poetry and what it means to be a poet, though, what strikes me is how at odds it is with the professionalization of creative writing that the proliferation of MFA programs has brought about. While I have my own opinion about that, I mean it here as a description, not a criticism. In an interview that I cannot find, Patricia Spears Jones talked about how relatively new it is to hear poets talk about and work at “having a career” as a poet and mean something that is different only in degree, not kind, from what it means, for example, to have a career as a teacher or a lawyer. I wish I could remember exactly what Jones said, because it was far more eloquent than how I am going to paraphrase her here: that she never thought of herself as having a career as a poet, she just made poems. I often wonder—and this has nothing to do with the quality of the poems that get written—what we have lost with the waning of that perspective.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #40

Alt text describes this week’s photo as a person holding books in front of a bush. This makes me laugh because it is exactly what it is, but it is also me with my three books which have been accepted into The Poetry Library at The Southbank Centre in London. I sent the books for consideration before Christmas last year and remember thinking it was good mission to complete before the end of 2024. This week I saw an email in my inbox relating to this and did my ‘I need to read this through half-closed eyes in case it’s not the news I want to see’ trick! Fortunately I could unsquint my eyes to read the words again when I saw that it was an email saying the books would be included in the collection there. I felt proud and marked the moment by heading out into the garden with the books for a photo. It is good to mark moments.

Sue Finch, POET FEELING PROUD

I’ve spent some time with Centaurea Montana this morning, taking photographs, enjoying its geometric shape, the bulbous sack at the base of its style. It feels resilient. The otherworldly petals are flexible and move with ease in the wind. The filament is tough to the touch almost, but not quite, a spike. This is a plant that would cope with a mountainside. Beyond this resilience, this stoicism, is Centaurea Montana’s mesmerising hue. Not quite purple, not quite blue – it hovers in between, changing as light shifts through shadows, peers between buildings and trees. […]

This blue that tolerates
confinement, scant nourishment, drought.
This blue that reminds me
how little I knew you. This blue
that was used to treat battle wounds.
This blue, this mountain lily, that spreads,
flourishes, becomes abundant, if it finds itself free.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, The flower project – Centaurea Montana

Do you listen to music while you write? Or as a prelude? […]

Probably my most listened to writing music in the past is the Anonymous 4 — 11, 0000 Virgins Chants. A bit cliche maybe to listen to chants but this album is embedded in my first few books for sure.

Originally I was going to deep dive into Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt for this post but that’s for another time perhaps. I think a lot of people listen to Erik Satie as well. I often have Stephen Drury’s version of In a Landscape by John Cage in my rotation.

I know as soon as I publish this post I’ll think of 12 other pieces of music I’ve written to / with. But what I know is that if you use the same music for a piece of writing it does something to your brain — fast tracking you to the space of your work.

Shawna Lemay, Writing Music

There are many things to explain why I like this poem…The fact I’m about to go and try a new coffee shop near us (once Flo gets out of bed), the fact that it makes me think of the elaborate doughnuts that the coffee shop Flo works in has on display, it makes me think of the almond croissant I buy on Wednesdays when I’m in the office, and the fact that if I think about the past, I know the sort of coffee mentioned here is not what we had. […]

The poem hinges, for me, in the fifth couplet where it becomes something of an inter-dimensional, omni-directional portal (why yes, we are watching Foundation at present, why do you ask?). Then poem becomes, to me, about the weight of expectation of when you were young and looking forward to an exciting world, a “future full of these cakes and alpine vacations”, a future of love filled with wedding cakes (not all love is about weddings, obvs – Christ, does that need saying? Oh well, I’ve said it), but it also becomes about failed expectation, about the coffee being bad in either timescale, and that the present doesn’t marry up to the past expectations of the future…

Not bad for a poem about coffee and cakes. I wonder if there is something in the bitterness of coffee vs the sweetness of cake, and how the bitter tang of now competes with the sweet expectation of youth.

Mat Riches, Undercoating the doors of perception

I am currently on a writing retreat at Galloway House Estate, thanks to the kindness and generosity of the poet Marjorie Lotfi. I arrived yesterday in glorious sunshine and am staying till Friday. I think the last time I did a solo writing retreat was probably about 15 years ago in Scotland. That week it rained all week, and the wind blew and I hadn’t brought enough books with me, and I sat around feeling miserable and unable to write.

This time I came with a bag full of books so that I didn’t slip into a dark night of the soul, but I have mostly been reading Marjorie’s books that she kindly left for me, and I have been writing this time. Last week, I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to get done this week. I decided what I was most looking forward to was

1) going to the toilet without having to explain I was going to the toilet to my five year old
2) going to the toilet/bath/shower in privacy
3) eating when I wanted

If only the above is achieved I will be happy! But creativity wise, my plan is
1) Finish another draft of my collection
2) Start drafting a short story
3) Read lots of books.

Kim Moore, What happens on a writing retreat?

I have had a heavy heart this week with the loss of my friend Martha Silano (I found another picture of her from 2023, at my reading at Open Books—see how she radiates joy?) It is always hard to lose friends, peers, and members of our local community, but this has hit me harder than I expected. It comes on the heels of losing my college roommate, Tara, who was such an amazing force, scientist, and friend. So senseless.

It occurs to me I don’t really have enough coping mechanisms for grief. I did the things that usually cheer me up—thought the weather has been miserable, cold, and rainy for this time of year, spending time outdoors when I can, going to bookstores, watching lightweight subject matter. One day I spent the entire day in bed with the TV on one station, and again I noticed the repetitiveness and lack of clarity in the local news, and almost all the programming, actually. This is pretty unlike me unless I have the flu or my MS is acting up. I’ve been trying to write about Martha as well as reading through an early version of her last book, Terminal Surreal, due out in September. I was moved by how she wrote about her circumstances with precision and a lack of self-pity and a continued joy in the nature and the outdoors.

As seems appropriate, with its teardrop flowers, the wisteria is in bloom, so we went to the Seattle Japanese Garden (who doesn’t feel at least a little better there?) and smelled the wisteria and observed the koi and water lilies, turtles, and I also got to follow the end of a tea ceremony. The rituals of the season—the rain, the blooms, the ducklings—reminds me that the world continues turning when our loved ones die, and when we die, it will continue then, too. Our small contributions—planting a tree, feeding pollinators, or writing a poem—can seem small indeed, but maybe better than the alternative—causing great destruction, which is far too easy to do.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rebecca Solnit and Journalism, Ducklings, Wisteria, and Struggling with Grief

“Everything happens for a reason“ is no comfort to the federal worker who suddenly lost his cancer research job.

“At least you still have…“: useless news for the woman who lost her home in a wildfire.

Meaning can’t always be stuffed into the shoe of human suffering. Gratitude can’t always snuff out pain.

Some feel their lives speed by so fast, they wonder if childhood magic ever existed.

When I was nine, I trapped fireflies in my heart.

The night flicker I experience from time to time reminds me I was once that young. 

Rich Ferguson, Night Flicker

Since the Global Poetry Writing Month finished I’ve been keeping up my goal of writing every day. I’m trying to put together a small collection and this has been a good way to fill gaps, though I have no idea what I want to say when I sit down everyday or what is missing within the collection. 

This is my current process. I open my journal, write the first word that jumps out at me from whatever I’m reading or looking at. Today the word is pronounced. I don’t know why it caught my eye from the screen, but I just go from there. I may not even use the word as I write, but it feels like an anchor to start with. Then I glance around wherever I am or at what I’m reading, scroll Insta or read a few Substack notes and just scribble down any image, phrase or word that appeals. I have no theme or direction, I am just a collector of scraps and details at this point. 

When I have a page or two of notes, I go back and reread them. Sometimes the juxtaposition of phrases together suggests something or they take me in a particular direction. I rewrite phrases together or if nothing sings I go back and write more notes. Some days I get nothing but notes, other times I’m able to string them together into a rough draft or a few lines that I pull into another poem I’m working on. I’m enjoying the unconscious flow of my writing. I do have themes for my collection, my love and aging poems, but sometimes my brain takes me elsewhere. I’ve circled back for a few poems to my eternal themes of finding home and being lost as a choice, maybe they’ll have a place in the collection too.  

This has been pretty much my process and how I’ve been able to write about 30 poems in 48 days. They may not all be good, but as I mentioned in another post, I’m currently in love with them because they’re fresh and speaking from where I am right now.

Gerry Stewart, A Collector of Scrap and Details

I don’t have many poems by heart, at least not as many as I’d like. I feel that especially keenly now that I’m a parent. But I do know this:

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief.

“The Trees” always arrives in my head this time of year, when London is lit up with gaudy chestnut candles. Partly, it’s that delayed rhyme, which isn’t as simple as it looks: it’s the same scheme as Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Tennyson haunts the whole poem. He’s there in the word “grief”, in the “greeness”, in those long, melancholy vowels.

But it’s the image that’s unforgettable. Like something almost being said is a line which feels like it was always out there, waiting to be found. That’s what buds are like. It is also something only Philip Larkin could’ve written. There is something unnatural about. Buds bloom. Surely, something will be said eventually?

Jeremy Wikeley, Like something almost being said

how strange that nowhere should be nearby :: like the wound in my sip of wine

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: the idea of blackbirds, the bones of a feeling, an assembly of hares, and more. Enjoy.

So hard
when I hear nothing
not to be nothing
falling on the concrete floor.

I’ve noticed that there are no more blackbirds in our neighbourhood. I wonder if they are dying out everywhere now and what will happen to all the poems and songs in their honour? I love the Beatles song. In a few years’ time, perhaps no one will understand that the morning has become emptier and that an idea of blackbirds was important in our lives. Funny. How people cling to themselves and what has been. It’s somehow charming and nonsensical at the same time.

Kati Mohr, Curtains Are Not Necessarily More See-through In Broad Daylight

“Everything is covered in blood related to sound” (Pascal Quignard)

Pascal Quignard organized the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles in the early 1990s. However, in 1994, Quignard suddenly renounced all his musical activities. No more music, he declared. He was finished. What followed was the publication of a book, The Hatred of Music, on the power of music and what history reveals about the dangers it poses. These ten treatises about the danger in listening aim “to convey to what point music can become an object of hatred to someone who once adored it beyond measure.”

Quignard’s beef is actually with the omnipresence of sound, a sonic super-profusion that has metastasized into a force of death more than of life. “Rhythm holds man and attaches him like a skin on a drum,” he wrote. Q mines a pet peeve of Glenn Gould’s when he concludes that “concert halls are inveterate caves whose god is time.” Ultimately, it is an irresistible book about how we hear, and how what we hear can destroy it.

Alina Stefanescu, “The disordered and passionate application” of the non sequitur image.

There is not enough love to smother
every wound. A single day demands
five stages of grief and four stages of
anger. Or all nine parts of disbelief.
The summer sky explodes with
lightning in the late afternoon
as if it too can only take so much.

There is a strangeness in normalcy
like it shouldn’t be and yet it
should. How else will the days
pass if we cannot play hopscotch
when we pass a chalk grid on a
side street, if we do not sing
along with the radio, even if we have
forgotten the lyrics, if we will not slow
down the last forty pages, because
a book must end, but not just yet.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, How much do we need to know?

I don’t want to say a whole lot about the poems, as I often say more than needed. But the description is “studies in an undead mood.” And that’s how I feel about it: the book is guided by mood, ambience and impression, and it wrestles with pervasive dread. Also, uniquely among things I’ve put out, this one has pictures (nothing fancy, mostly internet detritus from my camera roll). See a couple samples below.

Lastly, the print is limited to 35 numbered copies. Don’t sleep! They’ll disappear.

RM Haines, NEW BOOK IS HERE

“Life is long,” a poet friend said to me recently as I was reckoning with a similar rupture. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly in her fifties, not a single grey on her auburn hair in the small white casket cradling her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the swift wing of time. If she had lived longer, perhaps Kate would have returned to spend her remaining days with Emily and not with her English lover, or perhaps they would have met again in perfect disenchantment, in perfect friendship. “If” is the widest word of all, the immense alternate universe in which all of our possible lives live. Hope is what we call the bridge between this universe and that one.

Maria Popova, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem

Dizzying, the tumult of waking. It seems as I watched, the early rhodie opened a bit more a bit more. Daily I stood under the crab apple to breathe in the rising perfume, a bit more a bit more, not wanting to exhale in the still cool morning, the usual human din briefly lulled to the dull roar of a distant dirt mover and plank-on-plank rattle from a neighbor’s construction crew. Buzz of bee moving through the whiteness above me. It was an intimate moment: me, the blossoms, the busy bee. The world was there but not.

Marilyn McCabe, windows. The windows turned to night and night turned into a heavy rain. Then the rain

In our hands we hold the lost,
but our bright eyes stare fiercely
into the heat, harm, hardship
that destroyed them, and thus us
as well, in some other way.
I don’t know if the crowds roar
or blood pounds red in my ears.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 121: Blow the Trumpets Before God In Times of Catastrophe #NaPoWriMo

This is the first new month that has started without my dad being here. I’ve learnt that I want to tell everyone what I learned from him. I’ve learned that one of the best things I can think of to do right now is carry forward the very special parts of him to the best of my ability. I’ve also learned that writing some of this down in a poem felt right, but that reading said poem when we gathered together to say goodbye to him required a large hanky and plenty of time for deep breaths. […]

The way he turned his head to look and smile
never minding being interrupted.
That quiet, gentle, I’m alright, thanks my love.
The time I called him

from somewhere between Crawley and Croydon.
Parked up. Feeling lost.
To hear him tell me exactly where I was
based on the wrong turns I had taken.

Sue Finch, SOMEBODY’S MISSING

My dad passed away this week. I feel shocked by this every time I say it. This post is not about my dad, but it felt wrong not to acknowledge that after the last few hard months, things here continue to be hard and sad.

Somehow, there’s still been joy and fun in the last couple of months too. This extrovert writer is especially happy when I get to throw myself into a sea of writers and spend days totally immersed in the writing world […]

Katie Manning, AWP, PCA, & the San Diego Writers Festival

I never want to forget that we live in a world like this, among creatures that know nothing of our human preoccupations. The paths were muddy and mucky, the sun warm on my face, the smell of wet earth and waking plants strong; nesting blackbirds scolded me from swaying reeds, and song sparrows and white-throated sparrows made music as beautiful as any I can imagine. I will miss going to the lake this year, so it’s important to me to find places and time closer to home where I can leave urban life behind for a while, rest, and recharge my senses and spirit. Meeting that turtle’s beady eye renewed my faith in nature, if not humanity, and that was enough for today!

Beth Adams, A Walk in the Woods on Election Day

I want to thrive. Today. Full stop. In spite of (waves arms wildly) everything. I want to thrive not as an act of resistance, but simply because I am 60 years old, and I don’t want to give away what’s left of my life waiting for some better time that might not come before I go. Since none of us ever know how many years we have left, this stance, I think, is valid for anyone at any age.

Rita Ott Ramstad, No such thing as bad weather?

On April 30 […] I felt like I walked into the light again, as the sciatica calmed and the cold faded out. It reminded me of emerging from serious depression, an experience I’ve had the bad and good fortune to undergo several times. Suddenly you look around and think, oh, I’m better, and only then realize how not-there you were for weeks. […]

It wasn’t the easiest trip, given the sciatica, but in other ways the timing was lucky, as in escaping Spain right before the big blackout. And while I could have used more energy during this first week of spring classes, my verve is perking back up as I need it for more barding around with this new book that is so much about my mother’s death as well as mycelium and other occult life. I just recorded a podcast with The Mushroom Hour; I will read at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville on Sunday 5/4 (live and hybrid, sign up here); I’m joining the always virtual Wild and Precious Life series this Wednesday 5/7; and I’ll be in Baltimore for the Hot L series at Ivy Bookstore on 5/11. That last is Mother’s Day. I wonder if I’ve just delayed the seasonal sadness, or whether I’m genuinely healing from mother-loss, too?

Lesley Wheeler, Dark corridors

What is it knocking on the walls of this little house in the forest? Are we mostly scared of imaginary and unseen and unknown things? Are we afraid of monsters? Wild animals? Maybe zombies, werewolves, devils and demons? Or are we scared of actual threats like axe murderers and serial killers? Or let’s be honest here, are we scared of this alone time with our manuscript and the fact we have no excuses right now but to finish the work and write, write, write and push ourselves from night, towards day, towards the light and the last pages.

It is of course, mostly, the latter, and so instead of working on the book … I think I see a flicker in the night. Then I tell myself a wild horror story and scare myself rigid. I write this Substack post, it is all about fear and how I wish to boil the bones of this feeling down to get to the sticky glue.

Salena Godden, Fear Of The Last Pages

I’m working on an ekphrastic poetry collection titled The Artist’s House, inspired by my llongtime association with visual artists, musicians, dancers, and writers. My poetry and my novels often feature artists or a response to their work. It’s because I grew up with an artist father who painted constantly and invited many artists to our home and shared studios with them. He took us to working studios, local art exhibitions, and art museums in the Los Angeles area. More about my childhood with art and artists here.

The smell of oil paint and turpentine evokes these childhood memories and the wonder of a Saturday morning, watching my father mix oil paints and dash colors and shapes onto a white, gessoed canvas. In the mid-50s he painted these fishing boats at the dock in San Pedro, where we lived. It represented his passion for sport fishing. I loved the flaring spotlights, the night blues, and the way light and midnight blue meet and interpenetrate. My father’s time and focus on his art showed a lifelong devotion. Even as he eased into dementia, a brush was still in his hand. Once, in his basement studio, he confessed, “I don’t know how to mix paints anymore.” But he kept trying.

Rachel Dacus, Art & artists are a theme in my fiction and poetry

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry. It comforts me somehow, even when the poems are sad or angry poems (that seems to reflect the times, which poetry can do). Your own writing, who has it? Does it exist on some hard drive somewhere? You always were excellent at organizing things. A talent I envy and do not possess. […]

When a person we love dies, I guess there’s an impulse–almost an instinct–to memorialize them, at least among those of us in “Western societies.” Or maybe it is a human impulse, I can’t say. I have written too many poems of elegy, and there will be more; but sometimes, it takes awhile before I feel I have the right perspective or frame of mind to write about them, or about my feelings of loss. Today, so much reminded me of you, Beejay, that I had to write something. If not a poem, then an epistle–the way I used to write to you, of ordinary things, the garden, cats, seasons, poetry.

Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Ann E. Michael, Correspondences

It did make me feel somewhat philosophical, turning 52. I’m still around, even after multiple doctors said I wouldn’t be. I’ve lost friends in the last few years, friends who seemed much healthier than I am. So much seems random, out of our control. This leads me to think that maybe we should let go of some of the things that keep us from living a full, joyful life, right now. Don’t put off fun, or things you love. […]

Imagine my surprise when I discovered my poem, “Lessons You Learn from Final Girls,” from Field Guide to the End of the World, was up on the Daily Kos this week (right after Yusef Komunyakaa, whose birthday is apparently a day before mine) as birthday poets. See the link here.  

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Birthday Dinosaurs, Birthday Poems on Daily Kos, Hummingbirds, and More

I woke up thinking about Frankenstein, about ways I might teach my British Lit class even if I’m off campus for some of the teaching days.  I woke up thinking about online discussion posts, but now I’m thinking about a collage/erasure poem.  Now I’m thinking about a wide range of projects that could use erasure and collage.  It’s an interesting way of thinking about assessment:  choose a page, make an erasure poem, add collage elements, and write analysis showing how your creation shows understanding of the work.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Routes to Erasure/Collage Poems

It was the dead time between Christmas and New Year and I couldn’t breathe, so I went outside for some air. My eldest joined me and we traipsed the pavements of our town as dusk fell, before turning onto a footpath to cross a playing field. Here, in the unlikeliest of settings, we encountered the mysterious circular assembly of hares, better known as a ‘parliament’ or ‘council’.

This remarkable sighting in the edgelands of north Bristol became a totem for me through the traumatic years during and after my divorce. A marvel few people have the privilege of witnessing had been revealed to me and one of my children: how, then, could we not get through this ordeal together?

Sadly, despite my magical thinking, our depleted family was further fractured by the inevitable fall-out of that rupture, with my eldest ultimately choosing to go no-contact with their three siblings and me. In an effort to make some sense of the situation, I began to explore this estrangement – carefully – through poetry, turning again to the hares in the hope I’d find some redemption through them.

At first, I expected this poem to be just one of forty or so that might comprise a collection, but during its writing it became more important than I’d anticipated, positioning itself as a potential envoi. At the same time, it increased in complexity, particularly with regard to time. As well as inhabiting what the critic, Jonathan Culler, calls ‘the lyric “now” or moment of utterance’, it looks back to when my eldest and I were apparently in step with each other, and forward to when I’ll be dead and the only reconciliation possible would be for my child to make alone. In this respect, it seems to be in the spirit of poems Thomas Hardy and Ted Hughes wrote for their dead wives, only with the status of narrator and addressee reversed.

Drop-in by Deborah Harvey (Nigel Kent)

I have an odd superstition about getting published.

I believe that the real goal of writing and sharing our work is not just to get fame and fortune, but rather to help us get connected to our authentic “tribe.” I have a belief that whoever gets published alongside me in a journal or anthology is someone I’m supposed to know – or their poem is one I’m supposed to read. […]

I therefore believe that every time I get a piece published, I need to read the full journal I’m published in, and if I don’t I believe the poetry gods punish me by refusing to give me any more acceptances until I do! Therefore, when I get a piece published, I make time to do this specific ritual that helps me not only make new poetry friends, but also find my next submission target.

Tresha Faye Haefner, A Strange Ritual That Helps Me Decide Where to Submit My Work

In preparation for my Creative Retirement Institute course on May Swenson, beginning next Tuesday afternoon, I’ve been reading Swenson’s poetry and a collection of essays, Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Gantt (Utah State Univ. Press, 2006). I also searched for my photographs from my visit to her archives at Washington University, St. Louis, and I found my 2022 blog post about it.

Believe me, I have come very close to contacting CRI and screaming, “I can’t do it!” But, in calmer moments, I think it will be a good distraction from all else that’s going on in my life. Show up, Bethany, it’s only 4 weeks, 8 hours total. Read some poems together, talk about the poems. Talk about Swenson’s creative life and ideas and how far the tendrils of her influence have reached. Easy-peasy.

Of course we will read “Question” and “Centaur,” also “Bleeding” and more of Swenson’s iconographs.

Bethany Reid, Nature: Poems Old and New

[Karen] Solie’s poems offer both deep wisdom and a lightness across the line; a sparkle, if you will, of truth, if that idea might still be one that holds any resonance: the heart of one true thing articulated across an otherwise landscape of dark. Her poems craft deep wells of meditative thinking, lines that turn a leaf over in one’s hand, to study every side.

The landscapes of her poem-scenes are solid, foundational; shifting from poem to poem but always returning, book after book, to the foundation of the people, physical detail, climate and intimacy of rural Saskatchewan, a sense of home and prairie Solie has in common with Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers [see my review of her latest collection here]: the further out either of them might move through the world, the stronger the pull to return back to the landscapes that shaped them. As Solie writes, as part of the extended and descriptive “THE GRASSLANDS”: “And when you do venture in / with your tire tracks and snake gaiters //  the hospitality of grass / is a dry loaf, cracked cup, mattress of prairie wool, / northern bedstraw and great blanket flower, / wild licorice, clover, corn mint, bergamot, // and heat, rippling like curtains / as the grasshoppers saw away – / leave your packed lunch out they will eat it in an hour – [.]”

There is almost a kind of restlessness articulated through these poems, with an inability to remain still even across multiple poems on and around stillness, but rarely in the same geography, the same moment, beyond that aforementioned Saskatchewan (and Toronto, I’ve noticed). The poems, together, cite a restlessness, or perhaps a curiosity, perpetually seeking to reach across another horizon to seek a better understanding of what might be out there, whether through moments across geography, or even across the narrator’s own past. It it the clarity, one suspects, she seeks.

rob mclennan, Karen Solie, Wellwater: poems

Andrew Taylor, who was credited as editor of the vast two volume Collected Poems of Peter Finch in 2022, has now written a companion volume that is part-biography, part-critical analysis.

As I like much of Finch’s work, it was perhaps inevitable that I would appreciate Taylor’s efforts to give it perspective. […]

I’m not so sure about Taylor’s claim that Finch has been overlooked and underrated. You could say that most poets, short of poets laureate of one kind or another, always are. I think Finch has fought for his own space and recognition, partly through performance as well as through his willingness to engage socially or professionally with those who hold literary influence, and, perhaps because he has been so persistent, has become known and respected, I was going to say, within the poetry community, except there is no such thing. It’s just a place where some poets can be bothered to fight for validation and others can’t, so some are visible and others not so, or not at all. Finch has fought, and has done it, it seems to me, ferociously. Unlike those with less stamina, his reputation has increased and established itself over the decades. I admire him for that.

Bob Mee, THERE’S EVERYTHING TO PLAY FOR, THE POETRY OF PETER FINCH by ANDREW TAYLOR

In the British Library there’s a manuscript collection containing many of George Herbert’s Latin poems, including a little occasional epigram which is very probably also by Herbert, but for no obvious reason has been left out of previous editions of his work. The poem is about a gift of gloves.

Here is a transcription of the poem and my own translation:

Wren cum Chirothecis

Candida amicitiæ nascentis pignora, sed quæ
Nescio quo dicam nomine dono tibi
Græca mihi supplet, supplet vernacula nomen
Deficit ad numeros sola latina meos
Et iuste male nempe voco, quod debeo donum
Pollicitum satis est reddere; dono nihil.

Pure tokens of a friendship that’s begun — but which
I cannot name — I give to you.
Both Greek and English offer me a name
It’s only Latin verse cannot contain
My gift. Fair’s fair; it would be wrong to call
What’s owed a gift; if I fulfill
A promise, then that’s not a gift at all.

Occasional verse of this kind — I mean poems written to and for a specific person, to mark a specific event — are often the most difficult to interpret. Frequently we just don’t know enough about the context — their attitudes, relevant recent events, what they agree or disagree on, which of them is the senior or more powerful, what their shared intimacies or injokes might be — to be sure of interpretation, especially when it comes to tone. Imagine for a minute that you dash off a teasing letter to an old friend, or an awkward email to a good friend of your boss, and how hard it would be to reconstruct the tone and context of such exchanges if a historian encountered them without any other information.

These are historian’s problems, of course, but they overlap with questions of literary judgement and interpretation especially because of the particular difficulty of assessing the tone of poems like this. ‘Wren cum chirothecis’ has recently been edited by Robert Whalen and Luke Roman, and I believe they plan to include it in the forthcoming complete edition of Herbert’s work for Oxford University Press. But Whalen and Roman, I think, slightly over-interpret the epigram to Wren. They take the final phrase, dono nihil (literally, ‘I give nothing’) to mean that the poem was not in fact accompanied by a gift after all — that the prospect of a gift (of gloves) is proposed and then withdrawn, making it a kind of mock- or even meta-occasional poem. I think this is almost certainly wrong: there are quite a lot of examples of Latin poems saying, roughly, “thanks for nothing — this gift is so pathetic you might as well not have bothered”, but they are always satiric at best, if not outright invective. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here at all.

Victoria Moul, Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?

You became a doctor and wrote a book titled Bedside Manners. As a medical doctor, what is your specialty? How has your career in medicine informed your poetry in general and your haiku?

Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology are my specialties. My writing and my work inform each other. No doubt, I am a better doctor because of it. The writing, if we do it well—by that I mean, with courage and setting aside the usual protections that keep us from the truth—is a pathway to enlightenment. That kind of understanding brings us to fundamental truths about how the body and the mind work, an area of interest to the healing professions, though we leave much unexplored in our educational processes. It’s all about compassion, empathy, kindness, and making a connection that emboldens trust. How else can we change our lives to accept the often invasive notion of getting better?

You also collected an anthology titled, Poems for the Time Capsule. What was the inspiration behind publishing this book?

I have taught poetry for thirty-five years at a wonderful place called the Fromm Institute. The professors there are allowed to choose their topic. There is no homework, no tests, just explorations of knowledge. The students are all educated and arrive there not to advance their careers but to gain knowledge and understanding. In order to have a text to demonstrate my opinion about the best poems of all time, I created this offering, Poems for the Time Capsule and a second version to use in the classroom. I also have placed it in doctor’s waiting rooms. Reading great poetry builds trust, which is so valuable in the healing professions.

Jacob D. Salzer, David Watts

At this point, a therapist would have me list all my successes: I raised a good-hearted child who’s a hell of a writer and musician; I had a book published by Simon & Schuster; I have two Master’s degrees; I’ve been in a stable and loving relationship for more than 40 years; I make good art.

But for each of those things, I can add the failures: my child is sad, my book was panned, etc.

Sometimes people tell me I’m a badass: tough, confident, impressive. But badasses don’t spend their days inert, playing games on their phones and crying while the TV murmurs in the background. Badasses know their worth and don’t settle for less. Badasses brush themselves off after a swing and a miss and swing again, and they don’t stop swinging. I’m more of a broke-ass bitch.

I don’t say these things because I want sympathy or reminders of my value. And this didn’t come from the suck voice or imposter syndrome. I’m not an imposter. I have a strong mind and I make some good stuff and I still like to squeeze all the juice I can from this life. I’m just being honest about the demoralization of a job search—at any age. And I’m showing you the ways I cope—or don’t—with my failures.

A lot of us feel this way at times, and it can impede action. However, even as I stew over my lack of worth to the business community and my brokeassery, I do what I can. I went to three May Day marches, in DC and Maryland, on Thursday. I went to the Flower Mart (first time ever for this forever city resident) yesterday. I’m heading to an in-person Indivisible meeting today. I’m planning a doll-head and thrifted ceramics indoor/outdoor fountain. And I’m trying to figure out how to turn myself into Blossom, one of the PowerPuff girls, even though I’m more of a Buttercup. (Buttercup won’t go over well on LinkedIn.)

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, No Crying in Baseball

sometimes i wish i would
have left that interview halfway through.
i would have said, “there is a hole
in the sky that is calling me more than this.”
i wish we could get real with each other.
i want people to tell me i didn’t get the job
to my face. i want them to say,
“you looked too crazy for our
pretty white building.” then i can laugh.
i’m convinced i can hear it between
the form rejection’s lines. i don’t apply
to jobs anymore. i plant garlic. i leave offerings
for fairies on the windowsill. i check my bank account
like a morning mass. no eucharist
just the stingy taste of spruce tips
from the cutting board. sometimes feed my fingers
into parking meters to buy myself
just a little more time.

Robin Gow, form rejection

a softening of the heart
a lowering of walls
advice over the phone:
avoid the area

later we learn
someone shot himself
in the dark on the campus lawn
avoid the area

sell yourself short
sell yourself cheap
just sell yourself
avoid the area

Jason Crane, POEM: Avoid The Area

In “The Rabbi,” Marc Chagall placed a sassy rabbi in a vivid yellow and green space as he takes a pinch of snuff. His dark gaze challenges, engaged in a metaphoric parable. It is self-critique, myth, provoking. “Degenerate Art,” an exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris, tells how the Nazis dragged this luminously yellow canvas through the streets of Mannheim, with the tag, “Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.” It is chilling, the philistine, ideological and disgust all wrapped up in a familiar package.

Jill Pearlman, The Now-Parable of Degenerate Art

We witness the world coming at us—

profits and poverty, despots and detainees.

Galaxies of goodwill and a moon refusing to turn maniac.

Wars coming at us. The bullet that killed Lorca coming at us. 

Fury, forgiveness, and imprisoned humanity.

Our weary world is spinning faster. Behind us is history, and even that is changing.

Suddenly, we’re different but still living in our skin.

Rust, reprisal, and death-pallor promises coming at us. Ma Rainey blues and the incendiary jazz of revolution.

We move through smoke and dust, search for stable stars in the night sky.

Across our knuckles, a tattooed map to find our way home.

We allow no one to alter the image to lead us astray. 

Rich Ferguson, We of the World

The trees are leafing out again at last.
Flying little chartreuse flags, crumpled
like wet laundry before they spread
and take up space.

If this were a love poem
I would say, I want you to take up space
and stretch toward the sun, exuberant
as the birds who can’t stop singing.

If this were a love poem
I could say anything at all
and you would know I really mean
all I want is for you to bloom.

Rachel Barenblat, Spring

Play heart-rendingly 
                     on your instrument so as to move
the coldest juror and melt the prison bars—  Blindness
         and the long road back—   A shorn head, loosened
                     cuffs; chains snapped for a body restored—

Luisa A. Igloria, The Underworld

And here’s a bonus poem, not really written “after” [Gale] Wilhelm, but still somewhat inspired by her work […]

spit on the spirit
till it’s holy
& filled with holes

like rain articulating
the surface of a lake

we kiss

Dick Whyte, Gale Wilhelm – 4 Short Poems (1929-1930)