This week: the beast we were given, frothed verses of salt‑song, a man in a suit with pink bunny ears, a million mirror neurons, and much more. Enjoy.

Grass: The vitality pushing through us
is stupendous. The green appears
from monochrome, from the shade
into a shadeless shameless glow.
Every blade is singing from the force
of its lit universe. Psychedelic!  
No trade-offs, no slippery motives.   
Today, now, pick herbs from our 
healing garden. Leave the narrow places, 
(suffer the stabs of pain in leaving),
let the grass, even in the cruelest month, heal.

Jill Pearlman, Healing according to our Sages, the Grass

And the message from the universe came when said carrots were getting peeled. And I was rushing because I just wanted it done because then I could…uh oh! I temporarily mistook my left index finger for a carrot and managed to potato peel its tip. The fact it was THAT finger made me feel a bit wobbly so after I had rinsed it and hidden it under some firmly gripped kitchen roll, I chopped the carrots nice and small so they would be done in the same time as the peas, and then got Kath to pop a plaster on it to seal it back down so I wouldn’t see it. (THAT finger being the finger I once had an ‘axecident’ with.)

In the morning it looked a little sad when I removed the plaster, but I showered and nothing much happened except it was a little sore. Magic healing, I thought until I hit it on the basin when cleaning my teeth. And then the world went a little narrower than usual and much blacker.

Thank goodness for a wife who bounces out of bed on her only lie-in day, a local minor injuries unit and the kind and gentle nurse who helped me clean it up, applied steri-strips, popped a bandage over it, and told me I wasn’t making a fuss.

So this week I will be re-establishing the joy of focusing on one thing at a time. I will also be remembering to pause for stillness when I can hear that I am carrying a whole conversation of thoughts around in my head. I will be taking time to think about what needs setting down, and what it is that I need to pay attention to. And for an easy and quick reminder, I will be binning all the shoulds. They are definitely not helpful with their not good enough, critical tone. I will instead be thinking about my coulds and exploring their potential benefits and how they match with my wants rather than giving myself a hard time.

And if you see me peeling carrots in the future you will probably notice that I am intentionally quite mindful about it. Here’s to the art of zen peeling and listening to what we need.

I do of course have times when I truly revel in the way my mind can ask lots of questions and go off at different tangents in response to each one. So for this week’s poem I am choosing to share again a one that I wrote after tidying my desk one evening. During the day I had been coaching and had also reviewed a list of coaching questions. I wanted to organise my workspace and spend some time with my own creative writing to unwind. One of the questions on the papers I was filing away was: ‘What would you like to achieve?’ This question continued to echo in my head after my desk was clear so I used it as the title and set to writing…

Sue Finch, SLOW DOWN

I was asking myself, what have you done of worth yet today, and my answer, well you did dogear two new pages in your Tomas Tranströmer book. (Bright Scythe).

Shawna Lemay, Notes on Photography, Poetry, a Better Good Life, and the Eternity of the Instant

Shajareh Tayyebeh
— Elementary girls’ school in Minab, Iran
bombed during “Operation Epic Fury” February 28, 2026

Panic painted gentian arrows on our feet
between the carpal and the sour toe
a molecular transfer of energy the red
thread pulled us all the lure
and the reel pickled our sorrows
count on happiness as revolutionary
because the beast is at the door
carnivorous two headed
the secrets we were promised as dangerous
girls lying low in the tall grass
imagine the animal’s astonishment
finding us swimming there
arms finally let loose from their silks
it was a measure of time
we were not inevitable
violence or salvation
it’s all the same a constant ache
trade these stories like currency
in the land of indulgence
we were too small for fatigue
we craved the beast we were given
we will not be targets
of this horror 

Rebecca Loudon, April 17, 2026

Sixteen years ago on a day much brighter than it is this morning, my husband picked me up from the hospital where at seven months pregnant I had been admitted, days before, due to my baby’s movement’s lessening. I’d been given steroid shots to prepare for an emergency birth, and then a strange set of events; a domino fall of miscommunication, led to us suddenly not being treated as an emergency. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the story. This is not what I’m here to tell you about today. The story is exhausting. After sixteen years I find myself wanting on this day, the day of her birth and her death, to remember her as the joy that came into my life and changed me. Not the trauma that almost killed me. […]

Her grave in the tree shadowed cemetery, her headstone are the focus of my loss, in many ways, they are unchanging, but not still. It is a slow life, in the cemetery, her grave sees a seasonal life of slow changes and animals and insects, and I like that.This is a kind of life for her too. I find it difficult to explain, this concept that she is a part of the nature and the life in the cemetery, of which there is much and often it is this life that finds its way into the birthday poems.

The birthday poems are a way of immortalising her, and of marking the passage of time, of capturing the moments of loss as we grow around it. Unusually, perhaps because it feels like a significant birthday, I have written several poems for today, but most of them are for me, not for you.

This year, after sixteen years, I need to get her white headstone cleaned. It has become darkened, has absorbed the weather and the lettering is becoming unreadable. Tomorrow the stonemason will come and assess her grave. This is where the poem led me today.

The experience of this loss has changed me as a person, but I have a good life, and much of that goodness came from the experience of her loss and being forced to look at life in a very different way.

For this I am grateful..

The Stonemason’s Visit

The year has rolled over us, again.

Another day of cherry blossom,
of crow-call beneath the beech leaves,
of wind-blown roses; offerings
to the small god of your grave.

The white marble is foxed
with sixteen years of your loss.

I imagine the mason’s thumb
touched to the sharp edge

of your M, of our loved
and missed and wanted,

the way your poem is hushed
to him on the breeze:

you are still the first sigh of spring.

Wendy Pratt, Poem for my daughter on what would have been her sixteenth birthday.

I recently received my contributor copies of On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House Books, 2026), edited by Montreal poet and critic Sina Queyras, an impressive volume of more than one hundred poems by contemporaries, friends, mentors and fresh voices. I have three pieces in the collection—a poem composed in response to Kingston poet Steven Heighton’s death, another composed upon the death of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell’s beloved dog, Niko, and a third, responding to my own Covid-era birthdays, holding off on my fifties (“Forty-twelfth birthday”) until the whole crisis passed. Honestly, this is exactly the kind of anthology I’ve always wanted to be a part of, offering a rich overview of some of the best contemporary writing across Canada and beyond. Queyras has done a remarkable job assembling this work and I thank Queyras, as well as everyone at Coach House, for allowing me space within these pages.

The volume offers itself as “A twenty-first-century reconsideration of the occasional poem by contemporary writers.” Poems for “occasions,” as Queyras offers, whether births or deaths or any other kind of event worth noting. “I start this introduction with bookstores and books because these are essential components in the life of a poem. Poetry happens like this all over the world. Poems are written at café tables and library desks,” they write, early in the introduction, “on buses and subways, in fields and forests. They come out of bodies, comprised of synaptic flares, offering glimpses of the divine, tapping into deep-rooted feelings that are cross-hatched all through the poem, threads of worry and observation. Poems are best shared on paper too, and in person: hand to hand, mouth to ear. I have spent the last fourteen years of my life making such occasions happen at my university in Montreal.” I like this notion of the “occasion,” and was reminded a couple of years back, while judging a poetry contest, how elements of the public view the purposes of poetry: poems elegizing the loss of a spouse, a parent, a pet. A poem for a birthday. Although Queyras also offers the idea of the “occasion” one of the public reading itself.

There is value in witness, the occasion. Value in acknowledging a birthday, an anniversary; or as atrocities occur, armies move and the bombs drop, whether close by or in another country. Ordinary moments are worth noting, as are the extraordinary. There is value as well in acknowledging resistance, survival and trauma, and how portraits remain incomplete if only the positive moments are offered their due. The world is filled with such moments, out of which the stories of our very lives are built. There are moments that require themselves to be seen, otherwise we become lessened through the absence, the dismissal. And thus, the space for writing, whether poems or stories or memoir or essay.

Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, jwcurry prodded at me that not every occasion deserves a poem, and that might be true, I suppose, although I slipped his complaint into a poem as well, noting that particular occasion. Throughout that particular period, I was more consciously following American poet Robert Creeley’s lead, as many of his poems did appear to be prompted by occasions, whatever that might mean. A drive in the car, or the dishes put away. Poems that were set in what also be called the “domestic,” another term used as complaint, usually against writing by women, on those subjects dismissed as merely theirs (children, household, family, etcetera). What, then, the occasion? This particular element of “occasion” is where my three more recent poems, composed across those first few months of 2022, in On Occasion firmly sit, I’d think. All three of these poems are from the as-yet-unpublished manuscript “Autobiography,” a collection that sits as the third in a trilogy begun with the book of smaller (University of Alberta Press, 2022) [see my write-up on such here] and continues with the book of sentences (University of Alberta Press, 2025) [see my write-up on such here]. The current work-in-progress, “Museum of Practical Things” [see my note on such here] emerged a bit later, after a break of a couple of years, during which I purposely worked on other projects, including non-fiction.

The notion of the “occasional poem,” as I have long understood it, is different than poems on the “occasion.” These are poems that don’t fit with anything else a poet might be working on. One might say this is all about approach: those of us working large projects might have poems that sit outside that project, thus are unable to be incorporated. The poems, as Michael Ondaatje once paraphrased Jack Spicer, can live on their own no better than can we. Not everyone writes this way, but for those that do, these outliers, at least for me, are few and far between. My outliers continue, cluster, and eventually form books. 

rob mclennan, Poems, on occasion

If memory serves, I saw the call for submissions right here on Substack, maybe a year ago, and now “Pandora Addresses the Court” appears in the section titled “Occasions of Public, Protest, & Address.” A whole host of personal faves, among them Karen Solie, A.E. Stallings, and Luke Hathaway, also contribute, and I’m grateful to Sina and the whole team at Coach House for giving this poem another home, and for all of their good work on behalf of poetry.

Because I am recalcitrant and weird, I opted not to provide a comment in the contributor notes regarding the occasion for this poem. The actual reason is that I find poetry far more interesting as a reader when it’s just me and the words working it out alone and don’t care to know what the poet thought she was doing. If you feel the same way, stop reading . . . now.

If you are well-adjusted and cooperative: The occasion that prompted this poem was Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, which I found excruciating in every direction, and so it was either launch myself directly into the sun or write a poem. 

Vanessa Stauffer, “Pandora Addresses the Court” (poem)

That Broke Into Shining Crystals (Faber, 2025)
Richard Scott

I am late to the party with this one. I have Richard’s first collection Soho (Faber, 2018) which I really enjoyed, and this one has been on my radar for a while but just haven’t had a chance to buy it.

However, one of our stops in Ireland was Galway, so I took Ally for a rainy walk to Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop. It has the most amazing poetry section, and I picked up this and a book by Richard Siken as well at the same time (more on that later!)

This collection has entered into my top ten contemporary poetry collections (alongside such brilliance as Stags Leap by Sharon Olds). The subject matter is male-on-male sexual assault, rape and the trauma associated with it. Perhaps this explains why it hasn’t been on as many prize lists as it should have – not because of the subject matter, but because of the original and unique approach to language and formal craft that Richard deploys throughout the book.

The book is made up of three sections, and my favourite was probably the first, called “Still Lifes”. Each poem is a Still Life with something i.e Still Life with Rose, Still Life with Lobster, Fruit and Timepiece. In the notes at the back of the book are the painting, or paintings that the poem is in conversation with. It took me a long time to read through these poems because I was reading the poem, then looking up the painting and then going back to re-read the poem again. I’ve never really appreciated the particular genre of 17th and 18th century still life paintings that the poet is engaged with before, but now I’ve read these poems, I feel like I will never look at them in the same way again – which is an amazing thing for a poem to do – to change the way we look at the world, the way we encounter art. Of course I believe the best poetry can do this, but it’s always a shock when it happens.

Kim Moore, March Reading Diary

Readers of the April edition of The Candyman’s Trumpet, edited by the remarkable Sanjeev Sethi, will have been reminded of the rich seam of poetry and abundance of talent to be found on the Indian subcontinent. To that distinguished company can be added Saraswati Nagpal, a Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, whose debut collection, Drench Me in Silver (Black Bough Poetry, 2025), explores cultural heritage and personal identity through vivid imagery and reflective insight. These are uplifting yet economical poems that linger long after the final line. […]

For many readers, the cultural specificity of these poems — infused with references to Hindu deities and traditions — may feel unfamiliar. Yet Nagpal consistently grounds her work in experiences that resonate universally, particularly in poems addressing love and loss. My personal highlight of the collection, Love’s Absurdity, captures the paradoxical nature of love through striking and original imagery: “My heart must tumble like breakers / off a reef, beating their foam‑flecked / braids, moaning frothed verses of / salt‑song loss unforeseen.” The poem conveys both the exhilaration and vulnerability of passion, the uncertainty of a world in flux where “each moment is dusk, light leaving the sky / in purple splendour.” Yet it also offers moments of luminous contentment, when one “wakes wondrous / in warm hands, shadows dispelled / in the balm of his sun‑gaze.” Few poems, Shakespeare’s sonnets included, convey the emotional range of love with such intensity and lyric grace.

Loss, too, is treated with impressive delicacy. A daughter’s grief for her mother permeates the collection, nowhere more movingly than in Libation for Mother. Cooking becomes an everyday ritual that summons the mother’s presence, rekindling memories of being guided through the recipe at the age of eleven. There is solace in the realisation that the mother survives in both the dish and the internalised voice offering instruction, culminating in the image of the daughter “bathed in your sun‑laugh ringing in my kitchen.” Here, loss is tempered by warmth and continuity, affirming that our predecessors endure through the selves they have shaped.

Drench Me in Silver is an engaging and beautifully crafted debut that immersed this reader in an unfamiliar world, rendered vividly through sensory imagery and multilingual textures, while simultaneously exploring universal themes of identity, belonging, love and loss. It marks Saraswati Nagpal as a poet of considerable assurance and emotional intelligence.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Drench Me in Silver’ by Saraswati Nagpal

This is a collection in four parts – Unravelling, I have never met Joseph Gilgun, Breadcrumbs, and Wendy. Each sequence has its own microclimate, but the weathers of each also influence the others. It is darkly funny, smart and knowing in its self-sabotage. Helen Mort calls it “a brilliantly controlled unravelling”.

Unravelling, the first part, is an intriguing mix of a highly innovative choice of format with a condensed, elliptical style of writing. At first, I thought it was a poetic maze, but on a few re-reads I think it’s more like a circle. Whichever direction we follow the logic, we end up passing back through the same spots. This feeling of stuckness fits with what the reader might glean as potentially a difficult subject matter. At the same time, she shows us the nuances of looking back at the before, during and aftermath of situations we may have found ourselves in – how there is no easy closure to be had. There is, nonetheless, a compulsion to pulling at the same threads and hoping for different results;

“You keep trying to edit yourself, like a poem. It won’t work.”

“Your path is littered with half-formed thoughts. You whisper to yourself, That one. No, not that one, maybe that one. You’re searching for something – what, exactly, you’re not sure.”

It’s hard to quote from the individual poems because, more than anything I’ve read recently, the effect of Galia [Admoni]’s work is in the accumulation, the 3am logics that spiral from one piece to the next. Her control stops it from being stream-of-consciousness – this is more like the obsessive cataloguing of the artist or the collector. 

Victoria Spires, Sad boys are not my kink

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Most sentences come to me fully formed while I’m going about my day. The only thing I have to do is make sure I write them down before I forget them. I collect these sentences in my Notes app until I have enough of them to see a narrative or image unfold. I then start shaping the sentences into poems. I trim away as many lines as I can until only the essence of the poem remains. This process can take 10 minutes or 18 months, depending on how capricious the poem’s central sentence is. It usually only takes one sentence for a poem to work as a poem.

4 – Where does a poem or work of prose 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?
Everything I write begins in the Notes app. I usually start getting really passionate about a project once I’ve thought of a title for it. There are titles that have lived with me for many years. But it takes the right amount of experience and thought to write a book that fits the title I’ve envisioned for it. I try to be patient so I don’t ruin my ideas before they’re ripe.

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes! I love performing and reading my poems to people. It gives me a lot of confidence.

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?
The main question that runs through all in my work is: How vulnerable can a person be without getting ostracized? I often wonder what it takes for a person to be rejected by society. So far I’ve learned that people are willing to forgive sentimentality, but not cruelty.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer creates a private space for working people. Most people have to keep their emotions hidden to survive at work, or in daily life in general. These people need stories to decompress. This is why, as a writer, you cannot afford to be vain, insecure, or easily ashamed. You have to put it all out there so that people without the privilege of emotional visibility have a place to go.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nadia de Vries (rob mclennan)

It begins with scratching out
the night sky, thread by thread, one
at a time, layering thin
line over other thin lines,
until only the full moon’s
light slices through. Next, days go
gray, glimpsed through lids or lashes …

PF Anderson, Darkness (#NaPoWriMo 19)

Taken as a whole, my work writing poems for strangers addresses what I call PMM—Pervasive Modern Meaninglessness—a disorder I believe affects all of us in various proportion.

PMM didn’t surface suddenly. The agricultural age became the industrial age, which became the digital age, transforming work from something you did tangibly to something you did intangibly. The information age became the disinformation age, and now, on the precipice of an even more Artificial (AI/AGI) age, authenticity is poised to become something of an anachronism.

“Authenticity” was the topic of my master’s thesis in 1993, so it’s been something of a lifelong obsession for me, as it turns out. Growing up on a Midwestern farm had something to do with this. Child of back-to-the-land hippies, I had a tangible relationship with the food I ate (because I’d gardened it) and the heat our wood furnace produced all winter (because I’d chopped and stacked and hauled it). Even the soap I washed with was handmade. (Did you know lye is made from wood ash? I knew it viscerally, at fifteen.)

My parents made the mistake of buying a farm in winter, only to find that, when the snow melted, they’d purchased an 80-acre junkyard. I was enlisted in the cleanup effort from age seven onwards. It was tough, but we eventually made a heaven of that mess. I didn’t love the farm. I often resented the limitations inherent in a rural lifestyle. But I also had a real connection to that land, the animals on it, and the life we built there. When I talk of “authenticity,” that homestead’s where I’m coming from.

There is no telling what will happen to humanity when the majority can no longer grasp after authenticity with any success. When nothing we encounter over the course of a day is of any substance. Or a week, or a month, or a year. How long is too long for a person to play at being human?

The world is watching an American presidential administration unravel under the pressures created by artifice. There is only so much fakery a democracy can bear. False narratives add up. Misdirection and distraction entangle. Conspiratorial relationships are volatile. Leadership that lacks integrity bloats and sags under its own structural problems.

This administration is a disaster, but I believe the underlying disaster that gave rise to it is PMM. Too many people are too far removed from the things that matter most. FOX News exploits this, big brands use it to sell products, and social media thrives on the dramas that result from it. The world economy is increasingly chugging along on these false fumes. “Data centers”—factories for the data mines that are already carting their loads of information from our bodies, our minds, and our hearts, into the dark machinery of industry, and its banks—are being built on what should be our nurturing farms. These artificiality factories are guzzling our real-life water, overheating our real-life air, sucking our real-life power from us, literally and figuratively. It is not a model of humanity to build a future on.

My prediction is that, as this crisis deepens, poets will have unique leverage on a lot of good rope. Poets are trained to question the language, not repeat it like AI’s “Large Language Models” do. AI is looking for patterns; poets are looking to disrupt pattern in order to mint fresh meanings. There is real currency in this.

Todd Boss, PMM: Pervasive Modern Meaninglessness

And this is the era of dementia, of the post-liberal order,
and all the celebrated maniacs have decided to build for us
a brain big enough to hallucinate the future of all
eight billion people waking and sleeping and driving
and walking through rows of parked cars in an age
of lifestyle-brand packaged-meat influencer-burnout bait.
These are the costs of love among executable files.
And this is my most complete answer, my most sincere
and faithful attempt to keep to the confines of the prompt.
Each world arrives like a glare from the police station.
Each evening is an exit from the pickle ball court. Nowhere
will you find a way to avoid the turn lane, the trash compactor,
the sound of plumbing, the trillion trillions of transistors
that bind our psyche like a musculoskeletal system
or a vast armature of steel and plexiglass and insulated wires.

RM Haines, DAYTON, OHIO / 20 SOMETHING & 6

I am posting these translations—revised versions of those included in my Selections from Saadi’s Bustan—as a way of making Iran’s culture and literary history visible at a time when that visibility seems more important than ever.

[…]

If the king sleeps content upon his throne,
I doubt the poor will sleep undisturbed,
but if he lights the night with watchful eyes,
sleep will bring his subjects a soothing calm.
Thank God the Atabeg, Abu Bakr ibn Saad,
has made the proper way to rule his own!
The only signs of trouble plaguing Pars
are the women whose lunar beauty turns our heads.

A verse from last night’s party caught my ear:
“I held my moon-faced lover while she slept
and wanted nothing more from life than that,
but the sight of her so fully lost in sleep
moved me. ‘Your slender grace shames the cypress.
Wash this sweet slumber from your narcissus-eyes;
smile, show us your lips like rose-petals;
sing for us with your nightingale voice.
Why let sleep hide the mischief your charms can do?
Come! Bring the ruby wine you poured last night.’
She opened one indignant eye, ‘You say
I’m mischievous, but rouse me nonetheless?’”

Under the rule of our enlightened king,
no other mischief dares to stir.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, From Saadi’s Bustan: Umar Ibn Abd al-Aziz Sacrifices A Jewel To Help the Starving

Sitting in the packed playhouse of the Bowery Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side one balmy evening in the summer of 1833 is a teenage boy who can barely afford the theater — he can barely afford his bread — but there he is, rosy-cheeked — an almost baby-like rosiness that would remain with him into old age — exhilarated by the spectacle on the stage, by having made the ferry crossing from Brooklyn in the warm salty breeze, by the triumph of having bought a ticket with his own money. He has just turned fourteen. Three years earlier, he left school to begin earning his living — partly to allay his family’s perpetual financial struggle, partly to allay the numbing of his soul. “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” he will later write. At eleven, he entered the labor force as an office boy for two lawyers, one of whom took the boy’s intellectual development under his wing and introduced him to the splendors of literature with a gift of a circulating library subscription. Within a year, he was apprenticing with the Quaker editor of a Democratic newspaper.

His parents — a twenty-one-year-old woman descended from a lineage of Dutch Quakers and a twenty-seven-year-old man whose ancestors arrived from England in 1640 on a ship named True Love — married the summer of the Year Without a Summer. The rosy-cheeked boy was the second of their eight children. Conceived the year Frankenstein was born, born months after the landmark legislation that proposed the abolition of slavery in Missouri and sparked the tensions that would eventually erupt into the Civil War, this Brooklyn boy would soon be shaking his young country awake from the slumber of complacency — not with preachings, not with politics, but with poems: poems that would effect more spiritual elevation, kindle more moral courage, seed more ideas of the basic humanity we call social justice, and thumb them deeper into the soil of culture than all the preachings and politics of his era combined.

“I would compose a wonderful and ponderous book,” he would resolve, not yet out of adolescence, his gray-blue eyes already drooping with a weary wisdom. “Yes: I would write a book!” And so he would — his life would become this book, then the book would become his life. He would revise it obsessively until his dying hour, expanding and republishing this swelling book, hoping it would beckon to “others who look back on me, because I looked forward to them.” […]

“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” he writes. This overarching belief in the unity of everything, the interconnectedness and interbelonging of everything, colors his entire cosmogony. It would also render him wildly controversial, for he channeled this belief by writing about science and sex and the equality of the sexes and the races and the classes — ideas thoroughly countercultural in his day, in the most literal sense, for they are drawn not from culture but from nature. Verse after verse, detail after detail patiently recorded in his notebook, absorbed and distilled into some essential truth, he writes of the natural way of things, before society and civilization have disfigured them into biases and borders, into the hubrises and hierarchies of which the rickety scaffolding we call society is built.

At the same time, he recognizes that these hubrises and biases spring from the selfsame source as our noblest and most generous impulses, and in this recognition, he gives room for our own multitudes to unfold in his vast heart — the beautiful and the terrible equally welcome as particles of our humanity, for he knows that they are particles of his. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he writes in an era when atoms were still an exotic notion to the common citizen, an incomprehensible abstraction. Only by being porous to the whole of the universe, to every expression of existence, can he harmonize those particles — the cosmic and the earthly, the temporal and the timeless, the scientific and the spiritual, the human and the nonhuman — particles charged, always, by the reality of the present.

Because of his time and place and particular predilections, perhaps more so than any other poet’s in the history of our civilization, Whitman’s poetic development took place in the fragile, fertile ground between the personal and the political. Another titanic poet, Audre Lorde, would capture this fertility a century later: “The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word I.” Walt Whitman was the great absorptive and adhesive I of his era. “The book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853,” he would later recall of Leaves of Grass, “absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”

Maria Popova, Walt Whitman’s Field Guide to Being Yourself: The Trial and Triumph of Leaves of Grass

Will it be saag paneer, warmly
green with spice, or pork belly
glossy under bar lights; that pupu
platter at Alkaline where cocktails
are cute and the sake is tinged
with the smile of tropical fruit?
It’s noon and we’ve changed
our minds at least half a dozen times
but there’s no need to apologize
or forgive the wild swings of desire.
After all, isn’t this our practice?
Tasting, arranging, revising,
paring away then calling out Wait,
bring back the menu? We want it all […]

Luisa A. Igloria, Come as You Are

As I stood in the queue to get into the gallery last night I felt old demons rise. The avant garde doesn’t like waiting in line. And as I looked around at others shuffling up or slouching out for a vape I heard myself say, “Well, at least the art crowd still looks the same.”

There were some familiar faces, people I vaguely recognised from past lives and I made sure my mask was on tight as I moved up the line. And between the elbows and the puffed out chests I began to think about my Sunday walks, my weekly saunter through history where, a mile at a time, I visit old ghosts, make connections with poets across the city. And how glad I am that they’re all dead, how they no longer have to put on show, how I can know them without wearing a mask.

Last week I walked briefly with Marlowe down Hog Lane where he’d gotten into a fight over an unpaid bar tab that ended with an inn keeper’s son being stabbed to death. I was rather glad I didn’t meet Marlowe while he was still alive but I took a vicarious pleasure getting to know him on a brisk Sunday walk. I wondered if I might manifest him here, summon him up, have him rush the gallery doors. Me and Kit, the bad boys of art, back on the PV circuit. I decided against it, politely gave my name to the girl checking the guest list and quietly I made my way inside. Everyone was on show.

A man in a suit with pink bunny ears. Another with eyeliner and heroin skin. A girl in a cape and a Pillbox Hat. They were all here in pleated beards and thigh high boots, with tattoos and tiaras and tantrums and traumas and tears. It was glorious and exhausting, I wanted stay and I couldn’t wait to escape, for what nourishes me destroys me. I needed the silence of my own solitude and this bold brightness to drown my disquiet. I had to go out for a walk in order that I might return. I needed a change in order to find more of the same.

Jan Noble, Nº60 What nourishes me destroys me

The Literary Business, Peter Finch, Parthian Books, 2025, ISBN: 978-1917140522, £20.00

How do you sell books? Get the customer to pick up a copy and then give you the money. Why is this so bloody hard?

This quote from quite early on in Peter Finch’s The Literary Business lays down one of the key themes of the book. Right through his life, from early days as editor and publisher of Second Aeon, through his time running Oriel Books and then the Welsh Academi, and on to the pages of this very book, Finch has sought to get the book into the reader’s hands. However, he’s also fully aware that the one valid counterpoint to his theme is the sad fact that there really is no market for poetry, and no end of poets in search of that non-existent readership.

…pretty much anything in the business of poetry could be made to generate an income, other than the poetry itself. Teach it, discuss it, review it, write about it, edit it, publish it, go on TV and talk about it. These were all activities that resulted in the transfer of money from one hand to another. But be the author of the actual poem in question and money would rarely head in your direction. The best the poet could expect was applause, now and then, if they played their cards right.

As editor of Second Aeon, Finch had first-hand experience of all the wrong ways of going about getting your work into print, among the results being his excellent, and still relevant, How To Publish Your Poetry, a kind of guidebook for the obsessed and his contributions to The Writers Handbook.

Even after Oriel, whose death by a thousand administrative cuts is related in the book, the bookselling impulse continues, so that, for example, in a much later chapter on Chris Torrance, Finch tells the interested reader how to find out about a forthcoming title, Path: the later work of Chris Torrance, that will bring Torrance’s Magic Door sequence to a posthumous close. (As you asked so nicely, the answer is here.)

But there’s a lot more to this book than that. Part memoir, part pen-pictures of other poets and literary figures, part history of Welsh poetry since the 1960s, it’s an invigorating, often humorous read. And there are heroes: Torrance, John Tripp, Bob Cobbing, numerous booksellers and, more than anyone, Meic Stephens, the arts administrator, publisher, singer, Welsh nationalist (to understate his role wildly) whose activities made so much of what Finch charts here possible. As Finch puts it, Stephens didn’t enter the mainstream, his strategy lay in ‘creating that mainstream and wrapping it around himself’. A worthy hero indeed.

Billy Mills, The Literary Business by Peter Finch: A Review

not, in fact, the newest member of our team, but a bobble-headed novelty: a mascot.

not, in fact, a friend to the up-and-coming poet, but a rung on his ladder, a photo-op.

never a contender, the shortlist of two was the other candidate’s name. twice.

not, in fact, valued, or wanted, or loved. but so fucking useful, and so fucking nice.

Fran Lock, REALISATION DITTY

Today, April 17, is Haiku Poetry Day! To celebrate, I’m sharing a piece on a classic haiku theme: cherry blossoms.

Last spring, on a visit to my sister Yoshi’s house, I noticed that her flowering cherry tree was absolutely humming with hundreds of honeybees.

That inspired a haiku:

spring fever
the whole tree
buzzing

At home later, I mixed acrylic paints in the colors I wanted. I then used a gel press to apply the paint to an old typewritten letter, an insurance statement, rice paper embedded with mango leaves, and other specialty papers from Asia.

Using reference photos, I carefully tore the pieces into the desired shapes, then laid them in place on the cradled wood panel.

Next I took a second panel, placed it on top of the first one, and flipped both together. Now the whole collage lay upside down on the spare panel, so that the background pieces—the first ones I needed to glue down—were on top. I then worked my way up to the foreground pieces.

Inspired by the Japanese tradition of haiga (art combined with haiku), I added the haiku to the collage digitally. It is the April art for my 2026 calendar, and I also made a birthday card version, above.

Every spring, I spend some time with a Yoshino cherry tree on our country road, soaking in the delicate beauty of the pale pink blossoms. The experience is joyful with a tinge of heartbreak, knowing how briefly this stage will last.

blossom season
earlier each year
this fleeting world

It’s the impermanence itself that makes these days of peak blossom so precious. The bees certainly seem to know they need to make the most of the moment! Happy spring and happy Haiku Poetry Day.

Annette Makino, Cherry blossoms for Haiku Poetry Day

This newsletter has swung between the two poles of my writing life for the past two years: The leadership writing for tech companies and executives that is the foundation of my leadership communications consultancy, and the creative work that is the heart of my writing practice.

Perhaps this seems a bit mixed-up. But the two are actually deeply connected. Yes, the business writing is more focused, the creative work more expressive. The business writing is more about tech and AI; the creative writing is about presence and not at all AI. 

These two types of writing inform and enhance each other.

If you are writing for business, a creative writing practice can help lift your copy out of the bland, soulless, fake-upbeat style that is increasingly ubiquitous online. 

If you are a creative writer, learning to write more clearly and effectively can help keep your writing from becoming too divorced from its audience. (If that’s what you want!)

For example, when I am stuck in my work writing or looking for inspiration, I turn to poetry. I read poems, and I write drafts of poems, to rejuvenate my sense of the possibilities language contains. 

I read and write poetry to rekindle my sense of myself as a human being, speaking and writing, not a mere creator or consumer of content. Poetry recharges me. 

But, as I admitted in my last newsletter on finding your flow as a writer, it has not always been easy for me to write this way. 

Haiku, as it turned out, were the wedge that reopened my mind’s door to the poetic world. And they also opened the door to a deeper appreciation of the world. They’ve made my life richer. 

Deeply infused in Zen, but with a humble, unassuming form that tends to undercut any pretensions of enlightenment or specialness, haiku cut straight to the chase. They are all about appreciating the mundane world in its ordinary, miraculous, beautiful, ugly, tiny, grand details. Merely noticing and pointing out, like a friend saying: Look, over there. Isn’t that cool?

Over and over, haiku have been the sleeper agents that snuck past my prosaic, practical mental censors, only to activate themselves within my (sub) consciousness as representatives of another world: The one outside my head. The world of stars, autumn leaves, dog fur, green tea, and grasses. The world of rounded rocks and tumbling water, of echoing urban canyons and deserted suburban intersections. 

The best haiku are like that. Like stones, they drop into your consciousness with a little splash, making a few ripples and then leaving nothing behind as the surface returns to glassy calm. (Or whatever your consciousness is doing, which is probably not calm at all, come to think of it.) But meanwhile, the stone sinks to the bottom of the pond, solid as anything, bringing news of the world out there to the submarine life forms that populate the bottom strata of our minds.

Dylan Tweney, How haiku can help you be a better writer

Perhaps
When he leafs through that book

It might feel like skin
As if parting the warmest part of her

He might bring
Forefinger to tongue

Luciana Francis, Interlude

As planned, I am spending my April reading poetry, though some mornings a blogpost feels out of reach. This book, not new, but a fairly recent addition to my book hoard, is one I definitely want to share.

Necessity of Flight is a showcase for its author’s craft. Jane Alynn is also a photographer (see her website for a sampling), and these poems are filled with images and light. To quote the back cover blurb from Lana Hechtman Ayers, at the heart of this book is “a profound reverence for and kinship with the natural world.”

I heard Jane read at Edmonds Bookshop about a year ago, and I can still hear her reading this poem: [click through to read “In Want of Wings”]

Necessity of Flight is alive with wings, “cloudburst / of starlings”; hummingbirds “keen on honeysuckle”; “feathered beggars”; a gull, “dull and brassy and fat / as a wallet on payday, / swelled with longing.” Dreams and memories are longing, too, and almost fly, long-deceased loved ones passing through, and everywhere the rising of the poet’s words from line to line and page to page.

Bethany Reid, Jane Alynn, NECESSITY OF FLIGHT

Honestly, I had not read Etheridge Knight in years until I came across Terrance Hayes’ gorgeous masked memoir, To Float in the Space Between. A masked memoir (or braided memoir) is a term I believe I might have invented. A masked memoir (you heard it here first, dear reader) is when a writer (a poet) begins writing a book about an influential poet (or writer) in their lives, but along the way subconsciously or maybe consciously, begins to focus gently on the poet’s own world. Another masked memoir that begins in biography but then turns to personal history is Mark Doty’s, What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. This is also true of Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall.

To Float in the Spaces Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, (for my first read, I must have skipped the subtitle) begins with a poem of Knight’s, “The Idea of Ancestry,” which functions as a frontpiece and philosophical treatise for the book. “I am all of them, they are all of me; they are farmers, I am a thief…” This satisfying juxtaposition of identities continues throughout the book and float(s) in the spaces between, which is also the last line of Knight’s poem.

More of this masala mix happens again on page 4. Hayes writes, “When I began collecting interviews and stories about Etheridge Knight more than a decade ago, I said mostly to the few people I cornered for interviews, that I’d never write a biography because it would take more than a decade to do it. This is not a biography…Consider this a collection of essays as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself.” There’s so much to love here, isn’t there? First Hayes tells us that he’s been working on this project for more than a decade. He follows that up with how he can’t write a biography because it would take “more than a decade to do so.” And then the definitive, “This is not a biography.”

I have read To Float in the Space Between three times now and I’m getting ready for a fourth visit. Where does the narrative move from Knight’s life to Hayes’? I expect it happens somewhere in Pittsburgh where both poets lived in different times. For me the emotional core of the book is towards the end, it happens between Hayes and his parents at a baseball game…I guess you will need to grab a copy!

Susan Rich, Ethridge Knight on the Outskirts of My Life

Now there’s another word I think and that thought smiles into the light of the next platform. Not my stop. Don’t want to stop this merry go around of abstracted creativity. Even as the cables outside undulate into the next tunnel my smile is personalised to me alone. Not one snake knows me or my thoughts I think, neither I theirs. This black and white journey colours my thinking. We all sway in unison our separation lost in the timelessness of our thoughts. Schuum ~ the doors open ~ I get off on it again. 

Jim Young, A ride on the tube ~ a prose poem

April is National Poetry Month; but this year, I am in hibernation mode.

I’m not going to readings or writing a poem a day for 30 days, not posting much of my or other people’s poems or poetry books on social media, and not doing much poetry writing or any submitting. What’s gotten into me? Some kind of malaise? Or just a sense of being overwhelmed by, you know, life and aging and perhaps too much reflection. Plus there’s garden catch-up to tend to, since I was away for the early part of the season opener. And we’ve had a heat wave with a dry spell and lots of wind, so I’ve had to pace myself with the heavy stuff. Thankfully, Best Beloved can pitch in with much of that. Yet I am reading poetry, and if that ever stops I’ll know I’m in trouble.

So–back from traveling westward-ho. While in Fort Collins, Colorado, some dear friends introduced me to Wolverine Publick House, Cafe, and Bookshop, where there’s a lovely poetry book room in which I found my colleague Ian Haight’s book, Spring Mountain: The Complete Poems of Nansŏrhŏn. Also lots of other fabulous poetry that I had to restrain myself from purchasing, lest I overload my carry-on luggage weight. I read many of the Nansŏrhŏn translations in earlier versions that Ian emailed to me, and it is wonderful to find the book in print (from White Pine).

Ann E. Michael, NoPoMonth, but…

In my first term reading English Literature at university, we studied the Victorians. Busy as I was making friends, falling in love and learning how to do my own laundry, I struggled to keep up with the reading list of weighty novels, but I did manage to write an essay on Robert Browning’s poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ (1852), and it is one of those pieces of writing that – looking back now – I realise has haunted my work ever since. For example, it was through Robert Browning I discovered the power of the dramatic monologue, or persona poem – he is considered an expert at the form (if you haven’t read ‘My Last Duchess’ do yourself a favour and read it now).

I have always been a frustrated actress, and there is something about the intimacy and urgency of the first-person poetry that I’m very attracted to. I love the slipperiness of persona poems, the potential of that ‘I’, and have since translated Ovid’s Heroines, the first book of dramatic monologues.

And then it’s set in a courtly, Arthurian world, and I love myth. And there are faeries and fairytales buried in there somewhere too, and ballads. The poem’s dark depiction of a supernatural waste-land is evident both in my own ballad ‘The Lure’ and in the scenes set in in the kingdom of Carbonek in my novel The Untameables…

Clare Pollard, Reading ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ by Robert Browning (Part 1)

Today’s Poem marks the April 17 anniversary of the death of its subject, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790). The poem’s author, Philip Freneau (1752–1832), is known to us today as the “Poet of the American Revolution,” though it’s hard to say who first settled that mantle upon him, or when. It’s far less difficult, however, to say why Freneau became famous as the poetic voice of the Revolution. Freneau became that voice because there really wasn’t anybody else.

In late-18th-century America, poets were relatively thin on the ground. The Puritan poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor had belonged to the previous century. Although Taylor had died only in 1729, 23 years before Freneau was born, still he had been a Metaphysical poet, a successor to George Herbert and far more of a piece with Herbert’s age than with his own. William Cullen Bryant, meanwhile, would become, in the early years of the 19th century, the new voice of American Romanticism. Bryant’s lifetime and poetic career would overlap with Freneau’s—but in the 1770s, again, for various plausible reasons, relatively few people in America were writing poetry to any appreciable degree.

This is not to say that nobody in Freneau’s day was writing poetry. Any educated person, in America as in England, possessed in his stable of basic competencies the ability to turn a few verses. Thomas Paine, for example, far more famous as a prose polemicist than as a poet, also wrote verse. But it’s worth noting that almost the only person writing poetry seriously, the only person of any real literary fame in the American colonies in the mid-to-late 18th century, was Philip Freneau’s close contemporary in Boston, Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784). Wheatley, however, was writing in enslavement, a circumstance perhaps not quite congruous with the idea of a laureate of freedom, and her subject matter, as her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, demonstrates, was more interior and personal than political. At any rate, it’s Freneau who was recognized, and whom we remember, as that laureate of American independence.

It’s good that we remember him, if for no other reason than because he was an interesting figure: born in New York City, the son of Huguenot French parents; James Madison’s roommate at Princeton; writer of anti-British pamphlets in the early 1770s; business agent on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, where he developed a loathing for the practice of slavery and a consequent commitment to abolitionism, a conviction expressed in his poem “To Sir Toby;” and during the Revolutionary War, crew member on an American privateer. Captured at sea, he spent six weeks on a British prison ship, a traumatic and nearly fatal experience chronicled in his long poem, straightforwardly entitled “The British Prison Ship.”

After the war, he married and began a career in political journalism, positioned by his friends Madison and Thomas Jefferson to be a polemical thorn in the side of the Federalist Party. Jefferson, then Secretary of State, also hired Freneau as a State Department translator, a post that served as more or less a sinecure for Freneau, whose only language besides English was French. Until the end of his life — he froze to death at the age of 80, on his way home in a snowstorm after visiting friends near his estate at Matawan, New Jersey — Freneau continued to write poetry in a vein that anticipated his Fireside successors.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: On the Death of Dr. Benjamin Franklin

Paul Revere’s Ride, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, is the most famous poem about the American Revolution, but it’s mostly myth. Revere did not wait in Charlestown, and watch

with eager search
The belfry-tower of the Old North Church,

to count the lanterns: no, he knew, before he left Boston, that the British were coming by sea. Nor was it

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two by the village clock
When he came to the bridge in Concord town,

for Revere never made it to Concord: he was detained near Lexington by British Regulars. I don’t begrudge Longfellow his myth-making, and maybe there was a special need, as Civil War erupted, to remind America that

In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken…

Still: Longfellow’s Revere is more theme park ride than man. It has thus been left for us, to put the man himself into a poem. And that call should be answered, for he, and the true events of that night, encapsulate the revolution as well as, or better than, Longfellow’s imaginings. It’s all there: the defiance; the assertion of rights; and the bold declaration of British overreach. “I was not afraid.”

Memorandum on Events of April 18

I was sent for by Doctor Joseph Warren,
The night of 18 April. He desired
I go to Lexington, and there inform
Adams and Hancock, that light troops and grenadiers
Were marching to the bottom of the Common,
Where boats were waiting; aiming, it was thought,
For Lexington, to take them prisoner
Or else destroy colonial stores in Concord.
I left at once, and crossed the Charles; in town,
Acquired a horse, and rode. The moon shone bright. […]

Brad Skow, Lexington and Concord

A successful sonnet requires considerable rhetorical control and a kind of density of language: in the earliest examples, we see vernacular poets struggling to pull this off. The style required was new in English in the mid-sixteenth century as it had been in French a little earlier. But it wasn’t new in Latin: in fact, both classical and Renaissance Latin verse offered multiple models for a rhetorically tight, somewhat paradoxical, carefully argued but also passionate short poems, especially in the broadly Catullan tradition, but also in elements of the (overlapping) traditions of epigram and love elegy. […]

Latin poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries never developed a standard way of doing “a sonnet” in Latin because they had no need to: rather, the importation of the sonnet made possible in French and English a kind of closely argued, highly artificial but also passionate poetry that had previously only been doable in Latin. Most of the distinctive features of the sonnet simply weren’t required in Latin because there were multiple existing models that served much the same purpose. A few elements of the sonnet form, however, had no obvious analogue in Latin: namely, the ability to mark a rhetorical ‘turn’ by a shift of form (rhyme scheme) as well as of style and tone, and the particular emotional and rhetorical possibilities offered by a long sequence of poems in an identical form reverting frequently to an established set of images and ideas. Accordingly, if we look carefully, we do find some evidence of poets experimenting with ways to borrow these features in their Latin verse.

Victoria Moul, The Latin sonnet: on a non-existent form

Something a little different this week: I’m delighted to share an interview with Moul. Victoria is a scholar, poet and translator living in Paris. She writes weekly about poetry and translation on her Substack, Horace & friends, which I cannot recommend highly enough. She is also the editor of a new pamphlet, Poems Beautiful & Useful, now available from Headless Poet, a new small press dedicated to the art of the introduction, published by yours truly.

Headless Poet aims to (re)introduce readers to poets of the past, especially work which has been buried by time. There will also be a series of short introductions to (my pick of) the best new poetry. In that spirit, Poems Beautiful & Useful presents twenty ‘popular’ poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which are, in most cases, not well known today. It will, I think, be of interest to curious readers and specialists alike. In this — and in the masterful way in which Victoria has navigated the format’s limits (just thirty-six pages, including the intro) — it really exemplifies what the project is all about. […]

Jeremy: In his (rightly glowing) review, Henry Oliver makes the point that you haven’t included anything by John Donne. I found that interesting, because I don’t think Donne quite fits here. Rightly or wrongly I think of him as a poet who overwhelms the reader, whereas these poems are more companionable, for want of a better word. But of course, presumably in part thanks to T. S. Eliot, we do tend to associate this era with Donne in particular and with the ‘Metaphysical’ poets generally. Some of the poets here would, in other guises, appear in a ‘Metaphysical’ anthology, but not all of them and perhaps not these particular poems. Do these distinctions make any sense to you? Is it fair to describe the selection as a whole as a kind of response to Eliot?

Victoria: Yes, I think Donne and Milton are probably the two most obvious omissions, though we don’t associate Milton so much with shorter verse anyway. Donne is a good example of a poet who was demonstrably popular at the time — there are quite a large number of manuscripts containing copies of his poems — and is central to the “canon” today, though as you imply in your question, he was out of fashion for a long time in between before being revived in the earlier 20th century. I left him out for two reasons. For the pragmatic one, that I wanted to use the pamphlet to introduce readers to less familiar poets, and if I had to guess I’d say that Donne is probably the single best-known poet from the early seventeenth century, at least for British readers. (He was on the A level syllabus for a long time as well.) The other reason is one you also hint at in your question, I think — in this pamphlet I was interested in showcasing verse that, though quite varied, gravitates towards or centres around a kind of practicality or simplicity. That’s not to say that these are all simple poems, but that they have a kind of rootedness to them that I don’t associate so much with Donne — they are tethered a bit more straightforwardly to a message or an occasion. I think that the prominence of the ‘metaphysical’ tag, especially at school level, means that a lot of readers have this idea that early modern English poetry is paradigmatically rather difficult. I wanted to show how poetry of this period can also be rewarding in a rather straightforward sort of way.

Jeremy: I’m thinking about that wonderful line from Geoffrey Hill, which I someone shared on Substack the other day: “We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other… Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be any different than we are?” But, of course, it makes just as much sense to say that, since being human is so difficult, why shouldn’t art offer us a place where we can experience something else? Being simple, beautifully, is terribly hard, in both form and in feeling.

I’m sure this says more about me than anything else, but I’ve always felt that there is a strain within modern poetry that sees difficulty as a virtue in itself and simplicity or clarity as somehow selling out — that there are certain poets who seem to take pride in being obscure. And then, on the other hand, there are clearly popular poets who take pride in being, for want of a better word, bad (see the recent ‘Worst Poets Club’ tour). We are back to the old split, real or imagined, between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ work. That split seems as perncious now as ever, almost intractable. Does it go back to this period?

Victoria: Yes, it’s very hard to write simply isn’t it? This is noticeable in poetry but also everywhere else. One of the hardest things of all, with my scholarly hat on, is to write about very complex and quasi-technical matters in a genuinely straightforward way. To say just what you mean.

I like Hill very much and of course he’s right that everyone is difficult — perhaps complex is a better word. But I’m sure I’m not the only reader to feel, also, that Hill made a bit of a fetish of difficulty, that he used difficulty of various kinds, including setting complex technical challenges for himself, as a kind of strategy of avoidance. There’s something in Hill that seems almost daunted or embarrassed by the magnitude of his own lyric gifts. It’s an interesting phenomenon that I recognise in Cowley as well. I suspect Hill’s poetic “afterlife” might be rather like that of Cowley.

Most people, I think, would acknowledge that people and relationships and the world are indeed very difficult but also that there are moods, or moments, or aspects of life for all of us in which the important things actually seem simple.

I’m not at all against complexity or difficulty in poetry and wouldn’t want to give that impression. If anything I am rather obsessed by it — I come back and back in my own work to Horace, to Pindar, to Sanskrit poetry and grammar — these are all sort of paradigmatic examples of literary difficulty I suppose. I work a lot on very obscure early modern Latin verse and I am fascinated, both as a critic and as a poet myself, by translating poetry, which is immensely difficult — impossible, really. But I suppose like you I don’t see a contradiction. Poetry should be beautiful because that is, as it were, its proper virtue, and it should also have something to say. Pindar is very difficult, yes, because the literary conventions in which he was working were highly complex and they are very distant from ours, but he is also supremely beautiful and there is no doubt that he has something to say. Very “simple” poems can also be very beautiful. And of course many apparently “simple” poems — poems in what we might call the plain style — are in fact underpinned by very subtle and complex effects.

But I think the kinds of difficulty in Pindar, or even Donne, are probably rather different from what you meant when you talked about some kinds of contemporary poetry ‘taking pride in being obscure’. I think I know what you mean there and I don’t really have any patience with it. I’m thinking of something like the poem that just (depressingly) won the UK National Poetry Competition, ‘The Gathering’ by Partridge Boswell. Now that seems to me like an almost comically bad poem and a very good example of this kind of pointless and overwritten obscurity. When ‘meaning’s / odometer is broken’ — indeed!

Jeremy Wikeley, Rewarding in a rather straightforward way

Jane Hirshfield is a master at giving life to unlikely objects. “At Night” is a poem that amazes the reader because of the described living presence found in the world, in terra firma itself. Note the “steadfast gaze” of the earth toward the unknown. The closing lines leave the reader with an image that is precise, easily understood, but almost unapproachable in its vast scope. Hirshfield writes of “the given world” – not the earth but the world the earth experiences from its own point of view: “flaming precisely out its frame”. What remains is the darkness and depth of a space that has no end. An absolutely wonderful possibility.

The poem begins off-center, viewing the horses a bit out of focus. Looking away from the center to the edges makes recognition possible. The black horses become a strong, visual and aural encounter in the poem: “cropping,” “winter grass,” “white jaws that move,” “steady rotation,” and “sweet sound”. After the stanza leap, the horses find shelter among trees, leaving behind the dug-out spots of snow. These circles function as an opening into another world or another sort of existence. Hirshfield writes that you, the reader, will find these circles. The point of view shifts from an observer of the scene to the earth itself – “its single, steadfast gaze” – and the reader identifies with that gaze outward. A powerful transformation. A poem that approaches infinity for me.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Jane Hirshfield, “At Night”

Oak Woman

Dear Lucille, I treasure your poem as a reminder of all
the life that’s left to live in a culture that worships the young.
What is a forest but the strongest of bones, what is
a blossoming but an awakening of self. The sapling
girl is still inside but the Oak woman is stronger & fiercer,
still chasing wildness & wonder. You showed us how.
Respectfully, your ardent admirer

Na/GloPoWriMo day 17 prompt: For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.

I chose this poem [“There is a girl inside”] by Lucille Clifton. I love it & have this screenprint in my photo app.

Charlotte Hamrick, Oak Woman

On a whim, because I found myself in the vicinity, I went for a hike I hadn’t done in a while around a small pond fed by a few trickling streams and dammed at one end for some purpose I do not know. Cedars bent themselves toward the water, and small islands sat covered with the reddish branches of low bushes. A fallen tree’s old root system sat half-skyward and bleached mid-pond. I’m not sure who startled whom the most: me or the frog in leaf-strewn mud. The colors were all the greens and duns and browns and rust and ocher. The sound: low gronks from geese at one end, a jay scree, somewhere far away, always, a motor, even here in this middle of nowhere. Slowly the mind-nattered plaints fell away and I was huff and humidity and the swing of legs and soft stump stump of the perfect walking stick I’d found, and all eyes and notice — lichen like a congregation! trees all knees astride a rocky beast! knobs like balls at the base of that cedar! — all pleasure. Then I slid on a hidden root, twisted my ankle, fell, had to sit and put my head between my knees because I thought I was going to faint, hobbled up and missed the trail’s turn to the parking lot so added fifteen more slow minutes on the sore leg, castigating myself all the while because I KNOW not to hike in low boots with no water and how many times am I going to have to learn this lesson. In other words, my “everyday self,” back again. And in echo, here’s this lovely prose poem by Miriam Drev, translated from the Slovene by Barbara Siegel Carlson. I found it on the recent edition of Ron Slate’s On the Seawall.

Marilyn McCabe, Removed from my usual self, just footsteps

My debut, full-length collection of poems, Night Court, took three years and thirty submissions before it found a home at Glass Lyre Press, winning the 2016 Lyrebird prize, with publication in 2017. Over those years, the book changed considerably, from its title to its content. I even had it professionally edited, a process that helped me understand that a book of poems, just like a novel or a memoir, has a plot, characters, point of view, theme, and structure.

Armed with those lessons, I thought my second collection couldn’t possibly take as long as the first. After all, I was a seasoned writer who’d published a chapbook, Wild Place, and a book of writing exercises, Vibrant Words, as well as Night Court. Surely, I would benefit from the lessons I’d learned sending my first book out.

I was wrong. My second book was just as much work as the first, and followed a similar path: early versions, different titles, multiple rejections, and painstaking reworkings. On the first pass, I chose, carefully I thought, from the poems I’d written after Night Court’s publication, crafting a story about motherhood, mental health, moving from California to Oregon, the environment, and world events.

Looking at early drafts, however, I can see that these versions weren’t focused enough. Still fresh from my move, I tried to force the manuscript into a book about place, but even though many of the poems are place-based, it refused to cohere around that theme.

Gradually, it dawned on me that every poetry collection possesses its own personality, motivations, and twisty logic. To paraphrase Kahlil Gibran’s poem, “On Children:” “Your books are not your books. / They come through you but not from you, / And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” I realized, belatedly, that I was not the boss of this book but its guide; my job was not to order the poems but to allow them to find where they belonged.

Lessons From a Second Poetry Collection – guest post by Erica Goss (Trish Hopkinson)

In my musing over Aprils past and past projects, another year is heavy on my mind recently. Mostly because it occurs to me that there has been a span of 30 years(!) between these two fixed points in time. In 1996, I was still a college student in undergrad. I was all of 22. Youth is all about not realizing how young you really are, but in 1996, I felt like I was as old as I was going to get. I was living with my parents and perhaps enjoying the last year of only minimal obligations as an adult. Within a year, I would be off to the city and my first apartment and grad school. But in 1996, I was finishing up my senior seminar on Milton, which I was ill-equipped for with no/minimal knowledge of Christian mythology and history and only rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Roman myths–also important with that text. I was struggling with the language, much as I did in my teen years with Shakespeare. […]

That spring semester of 1996, I was also  taking my first poetry workshop ever. A couple years before I had enrolled in a fiction writing one. After seeing a few stories, the instructor, one of RC’s alum done good, offhandedly suggested my long and rambling Faulkerian sentences might be suited better for poetry. He was right of course. I already knew that, having been scribbling poems since I was 14 or so. I had already started publishing, first in vanity-esque anthologies you’d find in the back of Writer’s Digest, and in the college lit mag. My poems were pretty bad, but I was writing a lot of them, so was getting better. That spring, I had, up to then, one of my most productive spurts of activity, pounding out poem after poem on the typewriter I’d procured with high school graduation money. […]

Every once in a while, I pull out those undergrad poems on their weirdly-thin typing paper filled with cross-outs and whited out segments. For some, I even have the original messy handwritten drafts. As someone who has hasn’t drafted much in writing, only typing, since the late aughts,  these seem too quaint and anachronistic to throw out even though I should. 

What did I write about that semester?  If I remember correctly, it was probably a lot of the same strange and gothic fuckery I write about now..lol..just much more overwrought and rhymed at the ends.  Poems about artifacts and museums, about the execution of John Wayne Gacy, abandoned houses and formidable forests.

You know, the usual…

Kristy Bowen, another April | 1996

This poem (rooted in this week’s parsha, Tazria-Metzora) emerges from Leviticus 16:29, which reads, in full:

וְהָיְתָה לָכֶם לְחֻקַּת עוֹלָם בַּחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁבִיעִי בֶּעָשׂוֹר לַחֹדֶשׁ תְּעַנּוּ אֶת־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם וְכל־מְלָאכָה לֹא תַעֲשׂוּ הָאֶזְרָח וְהַגֵּר הַגָּר בְּתוֹכְכֶם׃

And this shall be to you a law for all time: In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall practice self-denial; and you shall do no manner of work, neither the citizen nor the alien who resides among you.

My favorite reading of this verse comes from my dear friend and frequent collaborator R. David Markus, who pointed out that while the word תענו is usually pointed and read as t’anu, “afflict,” the same letters could spell תענו ta’anu, “answer.”

I checked several translations (thanks for making that easy, Sefaria) and all were a variation on the theme: afflict your self, afflict your soul, practice self-denial, etc. But the letters are the same as the letters of the word (you, plural) answer: the only change is in the vowels. Which, of course, aren’t actually in Torah, though they are in the Masoretic text.

Reading תענו as answer, as R. David suggests, wholly changes how I experience Yom Kippur. The purpose of the day isn’t “afflicting one’s soul” or “practicing self-denial.” Yom Kippur is not a day for causing oneself to suffer, it’s a day for answering the soul. For me, that interpretation dovetails beautifully with the season’s practices of self-examination, deep inner work, and teshuvah.

And, of course, all of this is a reminder that — as we say at SoulSpa all the time — every translation is a midrash.

Rachel Barenblat, Answer

Ours was the last leg of the ‘French Way’ of the Camino de Santiago, and we left on Easter Sunday. Elsewhere, large groups of pilgrims had timed their walks to reach the cathedral at Santiago to coincide with the Sunday’s celebrations, and so our roads – far from this end-point – were quieter than usual. Our first day’s journey was 23km from the town of Sarria to the little scenic outpost by the water, Portomarín. We left before dawn and walked out of the quiet streets in the dark. Soon we crossed a bridge then a railway line, and then we seemed to quickly hit open fields. That first morning, we walked until it was light, stopping only when we reached the first roadside café, one whose television in the corner played a late-night Honduran music cabaret. The music was bad, the coffee the best of the trip. It was only after lunch, with 15km under our feet, that I took out the first printed poem from my backpack. I opted to begin this with Derek Mahon’s ‘Everything is Going to be All Right’.

Why this poem? I recalled the debate around whether it was a poem of comfort or not – and was drawn to start with something suitably ambivalent. As a poem to memorise, I found it quite absorbing. There is life in it. It jumps around a little, even while repeating images (clouds, light). Where do I fall on its irony or reprieve? In the mouth, it has the taste of the apocalypse. I can see something happening outside the window of the poem’s room. It also reminded me of James Wright’s ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’, but with a significant difference. The end of Wright’s poem seems to come to him like a thunderbolt. It is as unexpected to the poet as it is to the reader; Mahon’s poem feels the opposite. Mahon has been mulling on the phrase long before it is uttered. It feels like a childhood memory of a parent trying to soothe him – or like a friend who had recently tried to console him. Everything is going to be all right. Things will work out. But the world keeps suggesting otherwise. Yes, it feels like a poem of grief for hope. Hope finally lost. But how beautiful in the mouth.

Niall Campbell, So … What Poems Did I Memorise?

I […] received my copy of Prairie Schooner‘s Spring 2026 “The Loneliness Issue,” in which I have a poem, “If I Will Be Queen, Let It Be Queen of the Dead.” Also check out my friend Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poem “The Immigrant’s Very Good Daughter.” (I loved the poem and maybe you will too!) […]

This year we had the chance to see apple trees, cherry trees, daffodils, and tulips all blooming at the same time, though we missed our snow geese and trumpeter swans. It has certainly been a weird month for weather—didn’t it just snow here a month ago? We also visited not just RoozenGaarde but also a new smaller tulip farm called Garden Rosalyn. After a dreary cold beginning to April, it was nice to have some warmer temperatures and sunshine. We didn’t really have enough time to do everything we wanted, but it was a good reminder of how beautiful April can be out here. […]

This week is super crowded, but I am very much looking forward to a poetry break on Thursday, when we’re hosting Kelli Russell Agodon reading from her new collection, Accidental Devotions, at the J. Bookwalter Tasting Room in Woodinville at 6:30 PM (wine and open mic after!)

Kelli’s book is a wonderful combination of thoughtfulness on anxiety, middle age and mortality, and the nature of love and sex, with her usual whimsy and humor. I hope you’ll come out and see her read!

I hope you get a chance to celebrate something poetry-related this month. It’s good to balance the insanity of the world with a little bit of poetry and tulip-gazing.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poem in the New Issue of Prairie Schooner, Welcoming a Nephew to Town and Tulips, and Hosting Kelli Agodon at Bookwalter’s This Thursday!

I’m hoping that you’re all enjoying the arrival of Spring – over the weekend, I saw my first sundew of the year, first damselflies, first lizard, first adder basking on a sun-warmed boardwalk at Cors Fochno.

I will post photos soon. In the meantime, welcome to the blanket bogs and the wind-battered hilltop villages of West Yorkshire.

“My second-oldest sister takes me on the bus to Haworth. It’s her favourite place – which means that it’s also mine. The steam train and sweet shop are fine, but what I love most is the stone, the cottages clustered against the wind, the moor like an ocean. I know nothing about the Brontës, but I stare at the sofa where Emily died, the empty dresses”.

This tiny extract from my essay “A Love Story of Walshaw Moor” (Book of Bogs, 2025) describes my first encounter with the Brontë Parsonage, and with Haworth’s steep, cobbled streets. It was love at first sight – the ghosts held in the thick stone walls, the open moors. In the coming decades, I’ll make a careful point take everyone I love to the ruins at Top Withens – and I’ll always, always wail “It’s MEE! It’s Kath-EE!” at the empty window, because this is the reputed setting of Wuthering Heights, and just like Cathy says, if I died and went to heaven it would break my heart to be taken away from those moors.

So I’m absolutely chuffed – this Thursday 23rd April at 7pm – to read at Haworth Old School Room, hosted by the Brontë Parsonage Museum, to celebrate the launch of Lydia MacPherson’s “The Heights”, (Calder Valley Poetry). Tickets are available here.

Since 2024, I’ve been fighting for the survival of Walshaw Moor in the face of a proposal to build the UK’s biggest onshore energy park on its blanket bogs and peatlands. Campaigning can be an exhausting, dispiriting business – but when you find yourself in the company of kindred spirits, when you are fired by the same passions and furies, it can also be a joy. I was already aware of Lydia Macpherson as a talented West Yorkshire poet, with her first collection published by Salt. Over the last two years, she’s become a comrade-in-arms in every sense of the word – along with her gentle genius of a partner, Nick (himself a wonderful writer and a past winner of the National Poetry Competition). With their warmth and intelligence, and their single-minded commitment to the moors, they are a force not just to be reckoned with, but to be enfolded and fed by.

Clare Shaw, On the Wily, Windy Moors

Buried

under the silent forest
the dead bird sings –
the whole world, motionless,
face black and rotted,
slipping
farther away

Source: Memoirs by Pablo Neruda (Tr. Hardie St. Martin)

Rajani Rashakrishnan, An April full of poems -2

Why am I/are humans in general so moved by birdsong? It’s complex and varied. It reminds us of human song and often, human instruments such as flute or oboe. There’s something existential that we can relate to in how birds call out or call to each other, in a way, for example, we don’t feel comopared to the sounds of cicadas or mosquitos. That feels more environmental. We relate to birds. They fly. A million mirror neurons go off when we experience birds in a way they don’t with flies or lizards. Do we have hollow bones and feathers? Do we wish we had hollow bones and feathers? Birds are in our world and somehow exist in a parallel world. As if they exist in another coincident dimension (I mean other than the more 3-dimensional world they fly in.) They are part of our dream, myths, stories. I imagine the inside of my mouth is the shape of a songbird.

Gary Barwin, STARLING: music with birds

Even without the complications of humans, this world is miraculously complicated with patterns and -ologies. How miraculous it is that while I while my time away at a desk 40+ hours a week staring into a screen and rejecting peoples’ paperwork, little chambered piths sit in the papery darknesses of flower stems. That while I roll my eyes at yet another protocol change or misspelled word at work, Trillium blooms in the woods because an ant dispersed its seed. That while we go on our necessary walks to process the nonsense and wonder of humans and being human, we pass last year’s dilapidation of flowers, native bees nesting in their stems like a secret. Nothing I do in an adjustable rolling chair makes flowers bloom or provides structure to a plant. Nothing I do in Excel Spreadsheets or E-System provides a safe haven for insects.

Sarah Lada, Chambered Pith

This morning, entering Moorlands Woods
the scent of bluebells reached me before 
I really noticed the swathes of blue 
between the trees, my lungs involuntarily
taking a double breath, prompting me to think, 
how could I ever have forgotten this sweetness? 

Last night I dreamt of my parents when
they were young and healthy, my mother’s
red hair, my father’s arms with a summer tan.
Perhaps sometimes it is worth forgetting 
if remembering provides us with such joy.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ From forgetting to remembering

Arlington is full spring. Blossom lines our paths. Redbuds contrast against fresh leaves and white magnolia. Along the path shrubs mound purple, dark pink, light pink, bright pink, mauve, and white. Above the car, a thin-branching tree has bright pink flowers with a white centre that look as sturdy as thick silk. It glows against the redbud and the darkening trees behind. Hostas grow abundantly here, uneaten yet. The birds are always singing the passing time. The cherry has already fallen like old confetti.

I read in the shade, interrupted for coffee and children and to write. Virgil is dying. A passing garbage man talks to Siri. A few leaves fall. Robins run along the grass, territorially alert to each other, sometimes dancing in a spiral fight, and sparrows ruffle solitary in the trees. Early, before the lights are on, or if you catch a quiet moment when no-one is passing through, you can see rabbits occupying the peace. This time I think of Elizabeth Bishop.

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!

Like the raccoon, they keep their own time, moving off as they please, waiting for nobody.

Henry Oliver, Spring-time, night-time, rabbits and raccoons

the sound of the falls
within reach
trout lily

Tom Clausen, trout lily

This week: polar bears in the pews, the pace of chance, bioluminescent joy, the secretary spider, and much more. Enjoy!

Today I am in church again. I have come for silent reflection in one of my favourite seats, but it feels a little closer to the edge than usual. Shuffling footsteps in the aisle have me predicting who might be about to go past. Slowly and steadily polar bears are settling into the pews around me. Their black claws lightly clasp copies of The Book of Common Prayer. One across the aisle is flicking the pages randomly as if speed reading, another puffs out fishy breath in celebration of finding the right page.

Sue Finch, CLAPPING WITH MY HEART

the blue hills open a window.
i greet the poem with calloused hands.
silence ticking in the walls.

Grant Hackett [no title]

I think a lot about how the words author and authority are related. What does it do to the authority of the poet—and the speaker—when errors are allowed to remain and play an important role in a poem? I’d argue that it’s worth the risk, and that there is value in that transparency. I’d argue that it doesn’t undermine the authority of the poet or speaker as much as it prioritizes authenticity.

By allowing imperfection into our poems—by letting some of the breaks and repairs show—we’re allowing for a different kind of intimacy between the reader and writer. I read poems to witness someone else’s mind at work, and these moments of error or brokenness, those switchbacks and wait-on-second-thoughts, help me see that work.

I don’t go to poetry for comfort, as a writer or as a reader. I go to poetry to be changed, to revise my own thinking. I’m much more likely to be changed by the original thinking of another human being, a voice I trust because it’s honest with me, and because I can see myself mirrored in the utterance: the occasional faltering, or disorientation, or struggle to find a new foothold.

We’re imperfect. We slip up. We change our minds. We lose our train of thought. We misspeak or mishear or misunderstand. We do this, all of us, in our lives, but can we also sometimes do that in our work? I want to leave you with a prompt: Let some of the seams show in your next poem or essay. Accept the gifts that arrive packaged as missteps. Try not to buff out every scratch, or sand down every splinter. Give yourself permission to be more human.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

I recorded some el cheapo broken student violin. I played a wonky zither (both plucking and bowing it.) Then I slowed down some of the violin sounds. And finally added alto recorder. Of course, I added some digital processing — some reverb and echo effects to make the audio sound good.

And then I found a text file on my computer which had a bunch of poetry material collaged together. I then further randomized the lines and edited them, moving some around, changing some, removing some others. And so I arrived at the poetic text.

I tried videoing me drawing with a thick pencil around some stones but it didn’t look very interesting, so instead I filmed the rocks in close-up, slowly. I slowed the video down even more and then combined the three elements: the music, the text and the video.

I found it the mix of sound, scrolling text (using a fake old typewriter font) and the visuals to be satisfying. Usually inscrutable and ambiguous.

I did think about what the experience of someone watching the text might be. The slow visuals and the non-developmental music, the ambiguous text. And I thought about what the experience might be if encountered online, which I know is different than say, experiencing the work in a gallery or cinema aka biosphere, as my South African granny would say.)

I think in this work, I’m interested in a slow yet rich experience for the viewer, one that asks questions while keeping the viewer engaged in its play of signs. What is happening? What is being said? How does it feel? What does this say about making art and art itself? How is this like or not like the world or my experience of the world? What do I notice? What thought, feelings, experience, tactility, does this work bring up for me?

Gary Barwin, When I invent rain: how much do you want to know about an artwork?

How might we fashion
the pace of chance?

– Sam Kerbel, “Broken Record”

“Broken Record” is from Sam Kerbel’s chapbook, Can’t Beat the Price, a series of poems that riddle, poems that inhabit the riddling, poems engrossed in the unconscious communication between instances and objects. Words are played into their sonic shadows, or their near-homophones, as with “Romance,” which finishes:

Yes royalty is our golden ample
But we’re never quite finished with things
Are we?

The plural pronoun of the last line asks both if “we” are and what “we” is under conditions too thin and skimpy to imagine the events of tomorrow. The conditions, as they stand, are not enough. And yet there is a confirmation  — “Yes” –  followed by that play on sound and idiom which gives us the “golden ample” rather than the golden apple. The ample is not an apple. 

Alina Stefanescu, “Lyric research and adamant digression.”

Another coolish, sunny afternoon in Northern California. Yesterday biking, today gym, everyday, in the morning, writing, translating. I’ve been slogging away at some prose texts (poems) by a contemporary Italian poet Valerio Magrelli. I discovered Magrelli by reading a selection of his poems by a British poet Jamie McKendrick (Faber), really fine translations that made me want to read more of Magrelli (and McKendrick). I began with a recent collection of poems called Exfanzia, then switched to the prose called In the Flesh Condominium, as backup. I’m gradually getting it, but it’s not easy. I’ve fallen back on Baudelaire as relief, a poem called ‘The Giantess’ (La Géante’) ‘recited’ by Matisse in a book I was reading, a favourite of Matisse, apparently. It’s lovely, I hope I can get it word and tone-perfect.

I’m also trying to do that with a couple of my own poem drafts, over and over, in each case a stanza that won’t come right (of course I come back to them after not having worked on them for a while, and nothing will seem right).

So I’m going to the gym and maybe a yoga class to think of something else.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Palo Alto, Tuesday 12 August 2025

Discouragement, a regular visitor to this writer (and many other writers), has settled into the house with me. Summer is often, for me, a time of writing less and doing outdoor and social things more; this year, though spring was lovely despite torrents of rain, summer commenced with the deaths of two long-time friends, and I haven’t been able to shake my low mood. Now the rejection slips are arriving thick and fast, and I’m questioning the value of my work in particular and of creative writing in general. Like, why bother? What am I doing this for? For whom? What’s my purpose? And under what circumstances? Why? […]

Somewhere on a social media platform, I encountered these words by Virginia Woolf (from “A Room of One’s Own”): “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” Good perspective, that, to stop being concerned for how long your writing matters, or to whom, as long as what you write is what you wish to write. And then if you don’t submit your work for publication? Maybe that is something you can live with. Rather, something I can live with; at this point in my life, I have had hundreds of poems and essays published, six chapbooks, and three poetry collections…maybe from now on, I should write (as I always have) for myself. Even if my work is not in fashion, or considered irrelevant, or judged as potentially lasting, it is still what I wish to write, what I find necessary to express.

Ann E. Michael, As you wish

O, gentle reader. We’ve all been there. And what other medium is open to bottom-feeding poets like myself, but the open mic. And the whole thing is satirised in outstanding fashion here. The persona of the book, Zuleika, wants to be a poet. So she organises an event (hang on… I see where this is going…). The chapter/poem is called ‘Verbosa Orgia’. The first poet to read I has the adopted name of ‘Hrrathaghervood’ and comes on to shout at everyone and receive a ‘standing ovation’ for his ‘Pictish patois’. I won’t spoil all the lines, but everyone in the audience feels as Zuleika does that ‘Mesmerised… by his stage presence, I had hardly/ listened to his utterances’. You’ve met this guy. I have. In the fiction, his name is actually ‘Robbie’ not ‘Hrrathaghervood’. Like I say, you’ll find him familiar. Familiar, too, is the next poet to read at the reading who is called ‘Pomponius Tarquin who has won the “Governor’s Award for poetry”. He says to the audience “This first poem/ is called ‘Matter. Moment.’ This first poem/ is called ‘The Day My Cat Died’./ There are one hundred poems in the collection,/ but I’ll only read seventy-five of them now.” You’ll finish the chapter thinking you were at this reading (but for the ending…). Next up is ‘Calpurnicus Trio who is ‘popular with sheep’. It’s good poetry satire.

Andy Hopkins, ‘The Emperor’s Babe’, by Bernardine Evaristo (Penguin, 2002): Five Reasons to Read.

Last night, I looked at the Saturn through a low-resolution telescope. It took me some time to understand: the large planet of Saturn appeared like a tiny orange dot with rings around it. At first, I felt a bit disappointed but just a few moments later I couldn’t believe that it happened, that I saw the planet of Saturn with my own eyes through an eyepiece lens. After some time, I went to see it the second time. All day today, the orange dot keeps returning to me in flashes and I keep thinking: I saw the planet of Saturn. 

I would not want to live 2000 years later where it might be commonplace to travel to distant planets. I would like to die in a forest somewhere looking through a telescope. And someone, thousands of years later, will find bones of an ancient woman not knowing that she died looking at rings of Saturn. 

Saudamini Deo, The Rings of Saturn

I feel like I’m crawling out of the primordial swamp, I said to my friend Jody yesterday as I crawled out of cave water to where I was eventually able to stand on my feet. At that point, I was the farthest I had ever gone in that cave. My bare knees stung from crawling on my hands and knees over rocks. We started off as a group of six that dwindled down to four due to personal comfort preferences. The four of us, bipedal again, stared up at the cave ceiling as if we were standing inside an expanded, textured lung. What looked like draperies of flesh was limestone and calcification. Some parts of the ceiling had organic debris lodged in the crevices, an indicator of having been flooded to the ceiling. I then had a flashback to the briefest paralysis of panic I felt when army crawling through the earth just minutes ago. I had imagined the small space I occupied filling with an unexpected torrent of water. Being a pro at panic attacks, the paralysis had subsided with my well-practiced mind tricks.

All of us adorning head lamps, we illuminated the limestone cathedral and marveled at its decadence. The ceiling, lung-like and gill-like, had me mindful of my own breathing apparatuses. The expanding and retracting sacks adjacent to my heart. The swell of my diaphragm. The way air catches in the throat. The way I hold balls of air in my mouth and move them around my gums and lips. How those balls of air chortle as they break down into smaller balls of air. And there I was, a little human inside a ball of air within the cave’s body.

Sarah Lada, What in Earth?

In the just-about dark twilight of late summer, the stars coming out after their long Scandinavian rest, we stripped off – no costume or shyness required. L&P insisted I go in first promising me a surprise, and not the jellyfish which L scanned for using a torch. 

I took my silhouette down the ladder into the sea. I swam, and as I stroked the water saw sparks fly from my fingertips. “Oh my god!” I exclaimed. “Oh, oh … wow!” I could think of nothing more poetic. As I moved in the water, it seemed stars were born. 

I looked up at the sky – stars. I looked into the water – stars. Starlight everywhere. Starlight within reach and starlight beyond imagination. 

L&P came in to join the celebration, the firework party, the bioluminescent joy of seawater – plankton when ruffled – in dark-skied warmer waters of this late season.

The current drifted us away from the jetty – we took the light show with us, between our fingers and toes. We laughed, sang, played with the magic of the night – British, Australian, and Belgian, in Swedish waters, nothing between our skins and the heavens’ gift of freedom, of joy. 

Liz Lefroy, I Bathe With / Under / Among Stars

When Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, he joined a tiny but existent coterie of Nobel laureates who were poets: Walcott, Miłosz. Brodsky. Wisława Szymborska joined a year later, the same year both Odysseas Elytis and Joseph Brodsky died. Tomas Tranströmer joined in 2013. You could have intelligent discussion about who else should or could join that list. Les Murray? Adam Zagajewski? Adrienne Rich? Hughes? Darwish? Voznesenski?

Then they were gone. The poets, I mean. I am deliberately excluding Bob Dylan. Louise Glück spent a lonely couple of years as the only Nobel Prize-winning poet on the planet. She died in 2023, leaving none.

To my mind, this feels like an extinction. The removal of a charismatic megafauna. And yes we all know that megafauna need a busy ecology of small and lesser creatures, and unlike extinction, the situation might be temporary; but I feel the lack. Where now that rumpled clique, however few, however male-dominated, of older poets of global stature? You didn’t necessarily have to like them or their work, it was enough that they existed: far from slick, far from performance-y, invested with authority, with shambling gravitas and various accents, persons of conscience whose presence at a festival or a lecture-hall induced a frisson and attracted a crowd.

Why are there none? Why does the very idea of a Great Poet seem almost old-fashioned? Surely it’s not the lack of talent or availability of poets; there have never been so many published poets. It must be to do with the times and our current sense of what poets are for, or can be, in public life.

Kathleen Jamie, Where Have All the Great Poets Gone?

Here’s the first paragraph of a message sent to the Associated Press’s book reviewers a few days ago:

“Dear AP book reviewers,

I am writing to share that the AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1. This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews.”

No one reads book reviews?? Or, to quote the above paragraph, “the audience for book reviews is relatively low”—in comparison with which audience? Or audiences?

This message does not include any substantial data to back it up. A “thorough review” should show statistics like website visitor engagement, how many views a piece of content receives, and how long users stay on a piece of content. The people who’ve been writing book reviews for the AP deserve at least that.

And what about the idea of supporting a literary form that might have a small, but passionate audience (such as poetry)? An organization like the AP helps drive culture forward, but without book reviews, it’s a poorer offering. I was saddened when American Poets, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, ended the “Books Noted” section, which contained micro-reviews of recently published poetry books, in 2021. I did not renew my subscription in 2022.

The letter goes on to thank someone named Mark, no last name, “who has edited the reviews and incorporated best practices for trying to get reviews to appear in search results and get as many readers as possible.” So I guess we can blame this poor guy for not getting more readers for those reviews you worked so hard on.

Erica Goss, Associated Press Ends Weekly Book Reviews

While a couple of weeks too late to celebrate Bloom’s Day (June 16) properly, I made my pilgrimages to the Martello tower and Eccles Street. I bought a bar of lemon soap at Sweny’s pharmacy, and I ate the traditional gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Brynes. I’d been living out these moments in my imagination for more than 25 years, and I savored every minute of making it real—to take something as miraculous as a novel and to let that magic spill over into the lived world.

But what surprised me most, and what I cannot stop considering, is how much of Dublin—and Ireland, more generally—is dedicated to a celebration of its literary tradition. It reminded me of being in Slovenia in the early 2000s, when even the pre-Euro currency had poets on the bills. It’s not Joyce, of course, who gets the attention. In Dublin, there’s even a Samuel Beckett bridge. Living in Clout City, I cannot imagine something like a bridge or a tunnel not being named for a politician. But in Ireland, two of the most challenging and experimental modernist writers and their works are honored—perhaps, even more so, because of their difficulty.

This is the land of Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Oscar Wilde, Iris Murdoch, and Elizabeth Bowen, among so many more. And, it feels like that literary culture is still an incredible point of pride, something you see called out in big or small part wherever you are. And yet, I came back from Ireland to the news that even my home institution—the University of Chicago—was cutting its commitment to the humanities, due to funding pressures caused in great part by our own country’s retreat from supporting higher education and the arts.

I am worried less these days about what my own artistic legacy might be—I know I won’t fill auditoriums like Maya [Angelou] did—and more about what legacy there will be of the literature of today. What happens to a society that gives up on the things that exist outside market value? Who will we be and what will be remembered?

Carrie Olivia Adams, A Country That Celebrates Its Writers?

I became interested in thinking about the poetry of interiors thanks to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. (Originally published in the late 50s, my edition came out in English translation in 1994). All the writers at a certain point had read it. How can any of us think of space the same way after reading it? Mark Z. Danielewski says, “it has everything to do with how our comprehension of space, however confined or expansive, still affords an opportunity to encounter the boundaries of the self just as they are about to give way.”

And John Stilgoe says of the book: “it demonstrates to its readers that space can be poetry” and he notes that the book “opens it readers to the titanic importance of setting.” I can only be jealous of anyone encountering this book for the first time. […]

If you’ve read this far, thanks for coming along with me into this little rabbit hole, thinking about our happiness in spaces. Thinking about how spaces can hold poetry. Thinking about how sight-lines, smells, colours, doors, windows, light, sounds, all operate together on our nervous systems to make us feel certain ways below the surface of our awareness. But how when we become aware of those spatial comprehension we might be able to manipulate where we are to accommodate a poetics.

My morning writing space is a bit of a sacred thing: quiet to begin, then some wordless music. A candle burning, perhaps. Good paper and a fountain pen to think things through. Books and more books. Paintings to look at. (Yes, I’m spoiled in that category). Plants are also nice. Interesting lights when there is darkness, and natural light when possible.

Our spaces don’t have to be perfect, just offer us a place to breathe. Because we can’t be creative when we’re not breathing well. We can’t work well. And who want to squander their gifts?

Shawna Lemay, Neuroaesthetics and Interiors

In the early 2000s, I worked at a tech job on Bainbridge Island, Washington—our office was on the third floor surrounded by trees. One day, I overheard two coworkers having a discussion—one said, “I think a pet store burned down. Or maybe someone’s canaries escaped?” Wait, whaaaat?!

I looked out the window and saw what they were seeing—dozens of yellow birds flickering through the evergreens. I turned back to them and said, “Gentlemen, those are goldfinches.”

Sometimes when beauty shows up, and we panic and think the worst—or we mislabel it. But it’s still there. Beauty just being beauty.

Since the start of 2025, I’ve been trying to write a poem each day (another kind of beauty). There’s something funny that happens when you try this practice—you write a lot of bad poems (okay, that’s not really funny, but it is.) This daily writing practice is kind of like batting practice, except instead of baseballs, you’re swinging at metaphors and images, and occasionally, one cracks the sky open—in a good way.

Daily poems remind me that beauty can still be created, even when it feels absent everywhere else—wordbeauty—when you pair two words together and they surprise you. […]

I turned in the FINAL version of my manuscript, Accidental Devotions, which will be published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2026! I have worked so hard on this collection! And one thing I’ve learned through it all is how revision is its own kind of devotion. My advice when revising a manuscript: 1) Let go of what isn’t strong enough. 2) Bring in a few newer poems to create energy. 3) Continue to allow the manuscript to evolve—even when you’re certain it’s finished.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Beauty Just Being Beauty ~`♡´~

I volunteer at a county food bank, staffed by a handful of paid workers and a stalwart volunteer phalanx of middle-aged (and I use the term loosely) women, and some men. They show up early, stay late, do what needs to be done. They are funny, quirky, busy, kind, crabby, generous. This may be the future, this aged rabble. They may make the way. I don’t know.

I think often of this poem [by] Antonio Machado, perhaps so common as to be a chestnut now, but I find power in it. That first word has been variously translated: traveler, walker, pilgrim, wayfarer; and the second noun as path, road, way. Each has its pleasures and power. I favor “wayfarer” and “way” as a satisfying echo to the original: caminante, camino. I like “pilgrim” too, with its sense of someone going with a purpose and humility, a sense of something larger than themselves at work.

“Proverbios y cantares XXIX” in Campos de Castilla.

Antonio Machado

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

[…]

my translation:

Wayfarer, your steps
are the way and nothing more;
wayfarer, there is no way,
the way is made by walking,
by walking you make the way
and when you look back
you see the way that will never
be walked again.
Wayfarer, there is no way,
only the wakes on the sea.

Marilyn McCabe, and when you look back

Matthew Nienow’s recently released collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m not sure my first book did change my life, though it perhaps coincided with a volatile period in which I did go through some very big changes. I can’t say for sure from this distance, but I likely held some hope that my first book was going to somehow open doors (to where, I don’t really know). All in all, the response was quiet, and this was one of several elements of my life that contributed to a deepening depression and addiction. My drinking, which was already problematic, got worse and worse, and I dove straight to the bottom and stayed there for some time.

When I finally began to get sober eight years ago, it took a great deal of time to get healthy enough to begin writing. Making If Nothing changed me. By going back to the source of pain and betrayal again and again with a hunger for honesty, I had to grow my capacity to be with the parts of myself I couldn’t bear. By doing this, I became more coherent, more resilient, and much more available to my family and friends. Until writing the poems that make up this new collection, there had always been a faint veil between my daily life and my poems. This book erased that separation for me and I haven’t fully metabolized what this means in the larger scope of my life.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Matthew Nienow

On Aug. 1, Megan and I submitted the completed draft of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology to Madville Publishing. We also got some lovely photos of Stevie via photographer Donna Kile, so the cover is in the works, too. Contributors should see a proof this autumn and the book is still on track for a May 2026 release. 

Last month, I received a surprise acceptance letter for the Visiting Joni: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Joni Mitchell, a forthcoming anthology edited by Debra Marquart, Alan Davis, and Thom Tammaro. I submitted my poem “Night Ride Home” to this anthology back in 2022 and, frankly, had forgotten all about it. Glad the anthology is finally seeing the light of day in the near future. 

Collin Kelley, The Sealey Challenge and a Stevie update

My first full collection, Daughter of Fire, reimagines the life and legacy of Queen Margaret of Anjou, the late medieval Queen of England and fierce protagonist in the Wars of the Roses. Margaret is best known today as Shakespeare’s villainous “she-wolf of France” or perhaps as the alleged model for Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones.

Like many women of history who dared to tread their own path, the living, breathing woman behind the reputation has been lost to time. Margaret has not been treated kindly by chroniclers and historians, playwrights and novelists. She’s even been a Manga villainess, which I explore in another poem in the collection.

Daughter of Fire reconsiders this much-maligned warrior queen, seeking out connections with women’s experiences through six centuries, right up to today. My aim was to call out the maligning of women, the gendered insults, name-calling and inuendo that are so often used to control women’s behaviour. That said, this is not a history book or hagiography – this Margaret of Anjou is not a saint or a “girl boss” but a woman with many faces: daughter, wife, consort, mother, political schemer, leader of armies, survivor.

Drop-in by Lucy Heuschen (Nigel Kent)

It’s been a long time — seven years — since I published a poetry collection. I was interrupted by the pandemic, a busy work schedule, and other projects. Receiving a poem is a delicate thing. It requires an intense, Zen-like freedom from thought and for me, quiet mornings. A space opens, a mood descends, and then a thought or image. As it touches the soil, words arrive like wings folding to yield to gravity. A poem is much like a hawk landing, wondering what to devour.

This summer opened a gate to the creative fields, and I found myself circling around a concept that feels like home. It became clear, and I worked myself up to naming a theme: The Artist’s House. I drew into the document poems from my vault and new imaginings. I indulged in paying homage to inspirations and my early immersion in the arts. My parents were dedicated to music and visual art. They enriched my childhood by encouraging me to read and taking me to see painting and sculpture in museums and galleries, as well as to experience live music and dance. They gave me all the lessons I wanted, for which I chose a focus on ballet.

This collection forms a sustained contemplation of what art means in my life, and of the creative process. I tip my hat to favorite artists—Monet, Caravaggio, Andy Goldsworthy, and Oz book illustrator John R. Neill. Favorite poets Emily Dickinson and Rilke get whole sections. Walt Whitman makes an appearance, as does another favorite, Alice Oswald.

Rachel Dacus, New Poetry Book in October

As someone who designs books for other people (or at least designs chapbooks, with occasional commissioned covers for other publishers) and an avid zinester, I have to admit I may approach the task of putting together a book a little differently than a writer who doesn’t have their hands as much in the design. Typically by the time I finish a manuscript, there has already been some thought about potential cover designs, interior layout, materials like video poems and reels, graphics for the book promo stuff. For other writers, the manuscript alone may be the focus, the words on the page, but this will be the second longer project I’ve done with artwork included, so there are already a lot of visuals and design elements at play by default.

Kristy Bowen, self publishing diaries | finishing the book

So far, I can’t recommend Bluesky enough for poetry. Over the past few months, it’s enabled me to connect with a lot of poetry people who were new to me, while also finding a whole host of additional readers from beyond the poetry bubble. One excellent example has been the reception for my poem ‘The Last Carry’, first published in The Spectator and then included in my second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance Press, 2023). As of today, it’s garnered well over 600 likes and more than 100 shares, all along with numerous generous comments from readers. This is the nearest I’ve ever come to going viral! In fact, not a week goes by without a trip or two to the post office for me with books that I’ve sold via Bluesky. From my experience, it’s really worthwhile in terms of finding a new audience for my poems, though perhaps the most significant bit has been the lovely people I’ve encountered on there…!

Matthew Stewart, Poetry on Bluesky

I’ve attended the Glen Workshop many times, so it was a special honor to return as faculty this summer. I was the writing retreat guide, and I spent a few hours each morning working on writing projects in the company of wonderful creative people.

There were too many highlights in the week to name them all, but one that stands out to me is the LOGOS poetry reading on Sunday night. It was co-sponsored by EcoTheo and hosted by Shann Ray, who created such a welcoming space. I loved reading alongside Phil Metres and Gabby Bates, and the audience conversation and Q&A times were more lovely than I can describe; the whole event had a beautiful earnestness about it.

Katie Manning, Glen Workshop Reflection

But of course, what really made me feel better was getting the writing tasks done.  I now have a sermon I like, and I made significant progress on my CPE paper.  Now let me think about the upcoming semester.  I want to establish some habits that can get me back to writing more of what I want to write:

–I want to write my sermon by Thursday, which means that I start thinking and planning by Tuesday.  I had this goal in the spring, but the seminary course work I needed to do often took priority.

–I want to return to my goal that I formulated in the first days of this year, writing one finished draft of a poem a week.

–Actually, that’s not really my goal.  Here is that goal, as I wrote it in my January 1 blog post:  “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.”

–Right now, I have 14 finished poems in the file.  So I am seriously behind.  But I still have 19.5 weeks in the year.  I could get to 52 poems in the file if I focus.

–I have a lot of rough drafts.  Many of them won’t require much revision. So, I’ll take a look through those drafts, as I am also writing new work.  I also want to get back to writing new poems.

–Let me finish with the words of Octavia Butler, from one of her early journals, before she won the MacArthur, which changed her writing life trajectory:  “So be it, See to it.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Goals for the Last Third of the Year

It works I think, a simple straight-forward narrative, something I could have remembered. I don’t, though, think it is true. It is a very vague memory. But then again, things don’t have to be real to be true, or so it seems with all the made up nonsense circulating about the internet.

Paul Tobin, BOUNCING LIGHT

I was recently tagged in a social media post by someone doing the Sealey Challenge – one poetry book a day for the month of August! I do admire people’s stamina. I was tagged because the book of the day for this person – and a mercifully short one at that – turned out to be my own chapbook, published by Hercules Editions back in 2019 under the title Cargo of Limbs. Originating in events almost 10 years ago now, it is utterly depressing that the longish poem that constitutes most of the book remains relevant. Now – as then – the news is full of people in small boats. Then, refugees and migrants were embarking in the Mediterranean. Now, most of the talk here is of people embarking from the coast of France to risk the real dangers of the English Channel. The book remains in print and can be bought from Hercules here or by contacting me directly. […]

It’s early in 2016 and I am on a train crossing southern England. On my headphones, Ian McKellen is reading Seamus Heaney’s just-published translation of Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. This is the book in which Aeneas journeys into the Underworld. As he descends, he encounters terror, war and violence before the house of the dead. He finds a tree filled with “[f]alse dreams”, then grotesque beasts, centaurs, gorgons, harpies. At the river Acheron, he sees crowds of people thronging towards a boat. These people are desperate to cross, yet the ferryman, Charon, only allows some to embark, rejecting others. At this point, in Heaney’s translation, Aeneas cries out to his Sibyl guide: “What does it mean [. . . ] / This push to the riverbank? What do these souls desire? / What decides that one group is held back, another / Rowed across the muddy waters?”

The timing is crucial. I’m listening to these powerful words in March 2016 and, rather than the banks of the Acheron and the spirits of the dead, they conjure up the distant Mediterranean coastline I’m seeing every day on my TV screen: desperate people fleeing their war-torn countries. The timing is crucial. It’s just six months since the terrible images of Alan Kurdi’s body – drowned on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey – had filled the media. In the summer of 2015, this three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish origins and his family had fled the war engulfing Syria. They hoped to join relatives in the safety of Canada and were part of the historic movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe at that time. In the early hours of September 2nd, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on a Turkish beach. After only a few minutes of their planned flight across the Aegean, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rihanna, were all drowned. They joined more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean that year.

Beyond my train window, the fields of England swept past; Virgil’s poem continued to evoke the journeys of refugees such as the Kurdi family. It struck me that some form of versioning of these ancient lines might be a way of addressing – as a poet – such difficult, contemporary events. I hoped they might offer a means of support as Tony Harrison has spoken of using rhyme and metre to negotiate, to pass through the “fire” of painful material. I also saw a further aspect to these dove-tailing elements that interested me: the power of the image. The death of Alan Kurdi made the headlines because photographs of his drowned body, washed up on the beach, had been taken. When Nilüfer Demir, a Turkish photographer for the Dogan News Agency, arrived on the beach that day, she said it was like a “children’s graveyard”. She took pictures of Alan’s lifeless body; a child’s body washed up along the shore, half in the sand and half in the water, his trainers still on his feet. Demir’s photographs, shared by Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch on social media, became world news.

Demir’s images were indeed shocking, breaking established, unspoken conventions about showing the bodies of dead children. I remember passionate online debates about the rights and wrongs of disseminating such images. Yet the power of the images, without doubt, contributed to a shift in opinion, marked to some degree by a shift in language as those people moving towards Europe came to be termed “refugees” more often than the othering word, “migrants”.

Martyn Crucefix, Continuing Relevance of ‘Cargo of Limbs’

I suppose we can blame Trump for the mini-shake-up in the literature world. His selective reduction of NEA grants has helped provoke an anti-woke reaction.

There’s nothing very pure about the Arts. They’re used as a vehicle by dictators and revolutionaries. They’re used as therapy, as vanity showcases. When public funds are used for the Arts, closer scrutiny is attracted. The NEA’s home page currently says that “Approximately 34 Percent … of Arts Endowment-funded activities [are] in high-poverty communities”, which may make US tax payers think that the NEA is left-wing. But stats can be misleading.

Sometimes when I read a magazine I do some stats based on the bios. Some info is easier to collect than others. I like seeing how many of the contributors are Creative Writing lecturers, or have Creative Writing degrees. The old gender ratios have been replaced by more fluid categories. Age and race details are harder to determine. Even if stats can be determined, interpreting them is difficult. Why should the demographics of authors correspond to that of the general UK (or world) population? Isn’t it reasonable to believe that a higher proportion of LGBTQ+ people than the general population will turn to writing?

Tim Love, Reactionary writing?

But the poet can dream. The poet
has the freedom to wish this much
at least will happen: That her
plan works. That the poem can
manifest wings. That the reader
can open a cage. That the thought
can escape, become airborne. 

Rajani Radhakrishnan, It won’t bite

Perhaps we are born with a tendency towards certain landscapes, but I think we learn what to love. As the youngest of six in a single parent family, I had little supervision, and sometimes this came at a price. But in South Cumbria, it felt entirely safe, and I learned to love the tall hedges, the small walled fields and their gates, the copses and crags. I am so grateful to her for this.

I think we were at our closest in nature. As we walk in the heather, I tell Niamh how, long ago, I dreamt Mum told me she wanted to me to be there when she died, and how, against all the odds, it came to pass. I told Niamh how being present when someone enters the world, and when someone leaves it, is the most privileged and holy space, how all ordinary things fall away, how all that it left is the unspeakable magic of it. As Niamh pointed to the peat, I felt something of my mother on the moors.

Peat is unrotted vegetation; that’s why it holds so much carbon, why it’s such a vital defence against climate change. It’s largely formed from sphagnum, which grows from its tips, leaving its death behind it in its roots, which can be millennia deep. Peat, moss, bogs, are death and life all at the same time, deep and dark and soft. My mother is gone, and my mother is in my humour, and love of nature, and I talk about her every day.

When the walk ends, my holiday with Niamh is over, and they will head off with their other mum. The prospect is painful. Remembering what we’ve done these last fourteen days is painful. Even as we live them, every moment is sliding away into memory; there is no way to stop it from moving and leaving. How brave it is to love something, anyone, anything, knowing that it will pass.

Clare Shaw, Coast to Coast: Day 14

At all these fields of flowers, the finches have been twittering around us in the air. The hummingbirds are dwindling in number but still busy at the flowers as well. I’ll miss their bright colors and songs when the winter comes back. Some small parts of late summer are my favorite parts. (Wasps, not so much, but the birds, absolutely, and the blueberries in my garden this year – especially sweet.)

This is a busy month – my older brother is coming out to visit the week after my folks leave – I am trying to look at my schedule for the fall, with readings and classes. After the health and dental dramas of the past weeks, I am ready to relax a bit, hopefully. I’m also hoping my next book gets picked up soon so I can start focusing on my next writing project, which might be quite a different creature than my previous works.

In the meantime, my friends, this seems like a rough and tumble world, but there are tiny moments of joy, beauty, kindness to be found. Sending you all hopes for tiny good August joys.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Parental Visits, End of Summer Flower Farm Visits, August Birds

On the bottom step of the patio,
unmoving: the perfect wire
symmetry of a dragonfly.

In a clump of grass a few
meters away, the armor
shed by a lone cicada.

When the stars emerge
tonight, will they let down
a ladder for them to ascend?

In the shadow of the fig
tree, the secretary spider
keeps writing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Chronicle of Small Moments in Time

This week: reading poetry to pigs, yellow stretchy man, the canon of spiteful literature, and much more. Enjoy.

And so, there I was, sitting in a green chair, reading poetry to our new pigs. (Ten-week-old Middle Whites, an endangered breed).

They wandered about in the morning sun, rooting here and there, coming over for a drink every so often, checking the food trough, which they’d emptied an hour before. […]

I had a poetry book in the car – Broken Land, Poems Of Brooklyn – that I bought years ago in the magnificent Strand bookshop in Manhattan for ten dollars. It’s got lots of really good poems in it, centred on Brooklyn. I settled down to read as they milled about, coming close but not too close, always ready to retreat. I began with a bit of Walt Whitman. Sun-down Poem. It begins ‘Flood-tide of the river, flow on! I watch you, face to face./ Clouds of the west! sun half an hour high! I see you also face to face’…

The pigs retreated. As I read the next verse, they took off to the far corner of the pen and stood, staring, waiting, as suspicious as suspicious animals ever get.

OK, I thought. Not Whitman then.

Frank O’Hara. Yes, well I prefer him to Whitman, I thought, so maybe they will too. And the result was an improvement. They came back out of the far corner to Ave Maria, which begins ‘Mothers of America/ let your kids go to the movies/ get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to…’ The pigs didn’t exactly rush over, but O’Hara didn’t seem to worry them the way Whitman had. They held a kind of middle distance, either watching me, appearing to listen, or nosing up some tempting root.

OK, I thought. An improvement. What now? I let the book fall open.

Ted Berrigan, Personal Poem #9, from 1969, which begins ‘It’s 8.54 a.m. in Brooklyn it’s the 26th of July/ and it’s probably 8.54 in Manhattan but I’m/ in Brooklyn I’m eating English muffins and drinking/ Pepsi…’

Maybe it was the mention of English muffins that did it, or maybe it was something about Berrigan’s laid-back, matter-of-fact tone, translated by me, of course, in my flat Midlands accent. Anyway, first one, then the next, and then the third, came over and stood in front of me, staring. Then – I admit I was a bit unnerved – they settled down in the grass by my feet as I read the whole of Berrigan’s poem. They looked at me, all suspicion gone from their eyes. I’d go so far as to say they were relaxed and at peace.

Bob Mee, READING POETRY TO PIGS

Edward Thomas might be widely known as a war poet, but he is also a wonderfully accomplished writer of nature and place – just think of “Addlestrop”. “The Path” was written in 1915, and in “parapet” you can hear hints of war in the first sentence… Notice how that first sentence winds sinuously before delivering us, like a path, to our destination: “There is a path”. Then we shift into a child’s perspective, looking through the legs of the trees, just like children in a crowd will look through adults’ legs. And it’s as if the woodland itself were alive – magical in its gold, and emerald and silver … but ultimately leading nowhere – except perhaps the end of childhood, or the end of memory, or the beginning of war.

Clare Shaw, Walk with Me.

here, where I must
become common for now, wildflowers
are rampant, heraldic. I slit my eyes
like a sleepy lioness, sprawl out
in the grass. this is a change. sun,
heat, blanketing me with light; eyelids
not curtain enough for any shadow. instead,
thru the tangled lashes everything is hazy
with the red-orange of overripe pumpkins,
the gold of summer squash. heat in me answers
all the altered colours, the dangerous droning
of the pollen-heavy bees, their impossible
flight. there is no courage in me now,
no fear to overcome. around me, the bees
dance until my eyes are dizzy with them.

PF Anderson, Honeybees

I’m reading ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’ by Annie Dillard. She has an extraordinary perspective which includes some direct observations about living, including: “We are here on the planet only once, and we might as well get a feel for the place.” For her, it’s not about the spectacular, but about seeing “what is there” (p.74).

I’ve found I can see what is there in lake Little Norrsjön by swimming. I don’t know about you, but I was taught to swim in straight lines. While I’ve since splashed out into lakes and seas, it’s never struck me before that swimming can be a form of exploration: slow motion, but motion nonetheless. I had this realisation during my second swim, when I went a little further than the first, finding a sandbank and river-mouth. 

Liz Lefroy, I Explore by Swimming

In the 5th arrondissement of Paris, next to the street of the cat that fishes, is an old 16th century building from the depths of which people can sometimes hear music. It seems almost like a surreal tableau or a real manifestation of an underground Biblical hell, with hundreds of people, half drunk, dancing late at night to orchestral jazz in a stone cellar. There is a balding middle-aged bartender, wearing skull rings, serving cocktails and flirting with customers. Back in the 1500s, the building used to be a meeting place for Templars and Freemasons and it is possible to fall asleep, with a grenadine drink in hand, on one of the stairs under the eyes of stone cherubs to the rhythmic silence of the mad rush while dreaming about Dom Perlet, a fishmonger from the 1600s whose black cat could catch fish swiftly from the Seine.

At or after midnight, beyond the smell of old urine and sound of scurrying rats, one can still see something like the shadow of a cat on the ancient green water of the Seine. Time, like water, runs forward and back. I am sometimes in the 21st and sometimes in the 15th century. What does it all mean? Nothing except that we don’t know anything.

Saudamini Deo, Rue du chat qui pêche

Just a river and a lake it feeds into. Neither very spectacular or busy, no cafe nearby for ice cream. Just an outhouse toilet and a changing room at the sauna. We can’t light fires, nothing interesting, but I didn’t even have to fight the kids to get them there. […]

Diving off that board into the lake is a reoccurring image in my poems, like watching the barnacle geese leave in autumn or the first anemones that appear in the forest. I write about them over and over in different variations, trying to capture something that can’t quite be put in words. Moments that mean more than just the passing of the seasons, though they carry that weight as well, the years sliding by much too fast. 

Stepping off that creaking board with no glasses and a fear of heights always feels momentous. I don’t really like swimming. I feel wobbly and uncertain high above the deep, black water, but desperately want to jump in. Water that changes around me, cold to cool to warm, golden to green to clear as I surface. Water that changes me somehow, every summer. So I keep going back, revisiting it in poems and pictures, expecting nothing new, but finding it as I step off that edge and resurface. 

Gerry Stewart, A Summer Ending

It was one of my favourite holidays in a long time. Yes, all inclusive holidays are cheesy, and kind of terrible, but I loved not having to cook or wash up. I loved watching my daughter grow in confidence in the water every day, becoming more and more independent, that pull of love and terror and pride as she moved further away from me. I loved watching her make friends with other children and seeing how she gives her heart so completely, how she falls in love with people. I loved that I did get some time to sit by the pool and read, but that I also found it easy to be present and join in with the water slides. […]

I’ll be hosting David [Morley] as the guest poet for the next “Go to the Poets” online event with Wordsworth Grasmere, so I have read his book partly to prepare for this, but mostly because he is one of the poets whose new work I always look forward to arriving. Passion has just been published by Carcanet and it is a wonderful collection of poems. If you know anything about David’s work, you won’t be surprised to hear that his poems are filled with the natural world – in this collection in particular, birds of every description fly in and out again.

Kim Moore, July Reading

Everyone goes insane the canal swarms over our heads our hair turns to weeds we float swiftly down the sharp V slopes of the Dishman Irrigation Ditch prehensile arms outstretched clothes then shoes then underclothes become loose a strange fear and release in the parking garage early in the morning before work the sodium lights sizzling no guards or cameras. I hit the concrete barrier with my car got out lay on the ground and faced a dead mouse oil stains and a fairy circle of cigarette butts. I lay there for minutes listening then sat up and pried my fender off my tire and drove home. I told no one not even my son.

Rebecca Loudon, Chicago

I carried my tv down the stairs buried it on a hill
with a beautiful view

by spring a small antenna sprouted in that place

somewhere under the earth
wispy clouds and the wingbeats of birds

Gary Barwin, I had a daydream where I gave a tree the Heimlich maneuver: on suicide

The baby goldfinches and other birds have been fluttering about, and so too the Anna’s hummingbirds. My folks are coming into town in a week or so, and we’re cleaning out the spare room in the basement, donating items that have been taking up space (goodbye, old television set!) and I’ll be going to the endocrinologist and the endodontist this week (hooray) to check my thyroid and my back tooth. These crowns are so expensive and not covered by my insurance, so every time it’s like an expensive piece of jewelry or a nice fridge. (Boo…hiss….) I hope a future America with universal health insurance also covers dental health…which might be wishful thinking, as this horrid government continues to tear down everything good (this week, PBS and NPR). In the meantime, I’m still thinking about how to earn an independent living as a disabled writer in this economy where everyone is facing layoffs and inflation. I’m not doing the Sealey Challenge this year because of my family visiting, and I’m also judging the SFPA poetry contest, so I’ll have plenty on my plate. But I do love seeing other people’s reads!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, To August: Broken Molars, Garden Parties, Cats, and Cutting Flowers

I was at a poetry retreat recently, theoretically to write poetry. I did a fair amount of reading of poetry, listening to, chatting about, if very little writing of. I had a couple of conversations about line breaks. My favorite poetry tool. I love the challenge of free verse line breaks — where, why, what’s gained, what’s lost. So many options, so much possibility. But look, just because you write some stuff and stick line breaks in, doesn’t mean you’ve done the art and craft of poetry justice. Sometimes a narrative is a narrative, and should just claim the page. Prose poetry. Short shorts. Flash fiction. Micro-essays. All legit. If what you’re really doing is telling a little story, well, why not embrace the prose form?

I think about these things as creating little rooms inside which an intense experience can be had. Or a loose one. Some rooms are crowded and fascinating or even alarming, some are spare, and the windows are open, and a breeze moves through. Some rooms you walk into and a short play is happening. No matter what, though, there’s an intensity of experience. I mean, it’s a small room! All those walls. The door shut.

Marilyn McCabe, past: spores, gills, fins. No roots or leaves. Then birds cloud the skies, giant animals

I’ve been sending out a few pieces of new work, and some old work that I’ve been revising. I’m also putting the (I hope) finishing touches to a new mini pamphlet, in a similar format to Foot Wear (in other words hand-made and self-published).  Working title is Yo-Yo. I plan to sell it at readings from the autumn.

Usually it’s autumn when I get that feeling of needing change, or a re-boot, but it’s upon me already. Maybe because everything in the garden is ahead of itself so I am too. Peter and I have decided to make some changes to Planet Poetry. It’s now our summer break, and we’re still coming back for a sixth season, but the time, energy and costs involved have taken their toll. We both need space to work on our own projects and even spend more time with loved ones. So it will be a slimmed-down podcast that re-emerges in the autumn.

The quarterly spreadsheet is also crying out to be something different. I’m still working out what that is! Answers on a postcard please.

Anyway, I hope you’re having a good summer. I’m sure we’ll all emerge refreshed in September.

Robin Houghton, Summer, busy, change, decisions…

審判のゐないテニスよ夏の雲　遠藤容代

shinpan no inai tenisu yo natsu no kumo

            tennis match

            without a judge…

            summer clouds        

                                                Hiroyo Endo

from Asu No Kaban (Tomorrow’s Bag), a haiku Collection of Hiroyo Endo, Furansu-dō, Tokyo 2025

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 1, 2025)

[This is where I write then delete the paragraph about how world violence overshadows my small worries. Both the erasure of that perspective and its performance–briefly, apparently virtuously but with no special insight, to an audience with similar politics–feel wrong. No wonder this isn’t my best summer for writing. The world is so much bigger than the page.]

Yet I’ve been reading poetry gratefully, meandering through books I picked up during this injured but wide-traveling spring and summer, remembering the authors I met along the way. I’m giving the small-press books social media shout-outs, although I’ll hit pause on the Sealey Challenge while I’m in Ireland. I’ve never been successful, anyway, at actually reading a poetry collection per day for a month; one or two a week feels better suited to the genre’s intensity. But most people posting under the hashtag aren’t either. It’s still a kindness to other authors to use it, I think, because it slightly amplifies their accomplishments as well as the efforts of poetry publishers.

[While slightly amplifying the person doing the posting, too. Social media highlights the trickiest parts of poetry’s economy, mostly gifts but sometimes barter and, worst of all, in a way that’s monetized by tech bros. I still hope someone posts about Mycocosmic during this month’s Sealey Challenge flurry.]

Lesley Wheeler, Poetic feet [sprained]

The future ticks its out-of-tune
hours. Inside the cool marble vaults of mansions,
a taxidermied history hangs on the walls. Pelts
of animals tuft the floors and couches— bear
and raccoon, gazelle and leopard; the marbled
brilliance of their omniscient eyes.

Luisa A. Igloria, Exhibit

In yesterday’s post on this blog, I wrote:  “In a week of Churchwide Assembly considering the “filioque” and voting for bishop of the ELCA means there’s lots of discussion of the Holy Spirit. I have been thinking of a poem or perhaps a work of theology that talks about the Holy Spirit as the one who wreaks havoc–it might be good havoc, but it’s the kind of thing that can leave ruins in its wake, Holy Spirit as disruptor. We often think we would like that, but we often fail to consider how changed the landscape would be.”

I got to work and spent the day capturing lines that became a poem about the Holy Spirit deciding she has had enough.  It’s not the poem I was thinking I would write in the blog bit above.  In the poem I actually wrote, the Holy Spirit is decidedly female and so very tired of being in relationship (in relationship with the Creator, in relationship with the Son, in relationship with humans, and in relationship with angels and all the hosts of Heaven).

This stanza gives you an idea (and if it sparks an idea for you, feel free to run with it):
The Holy Spirit hides
in an unassuming house,
an old bungalow built
for a previous century,
cramped for a crowd,
comfortable for one.

In terms of title–I like “The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday.”  But in the poem, is she on holiday or permanent vacation?  Perhaps the ambiguity works.  

It’s not a perfect poem, but it’s closer than many I’ve written.  It’s the time of summer when I’d be relieved to produce anything that makes me feel like my poet self–so to have a poem arrive close to fully formed is an unanticipated gift.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Process Notes–“The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday”

Yesterday I shredded a letter from 2012 that told me something about the care we received when my daughter died in 2010, a letter that confirmed that clinical negligence had a part in her death. I still felt like I needed to hold on to it, as if I would need at some point to go back into battle again and fight to have policies changed, to have better checks put in place around maternity care at the hospital. I kept putting it to one side and not shredding it, as if that piece of paper, that proof of what happened might be needed as a shield. How exhausting is this grief – a kind of alertness that you can never quite put down. I dealt with the letter by picking it up and putting it down repeatedly, feeling for a weight in my heart when I did so. What purpose was it serving me? Had I actually escaped from that place, or was I chained to that experience by these physical items, these documents? I decided that that part of my life was past. I shredded it. I let it go. I have released myself from the weight of that single piece of paper. […]

I have a point here, […] and it’s this: rejections don’t happen in an emotional vacuum. They don’t always happen when your life is about surviving and not killing yourself from the sad, but they do usually happen when you are dealing with small and big griefs, work exhaustion, world events exhaustion, secret sads that you don’t tell anyone. All of this adds weight to the rejection.

There’s a real push towards accepting rejection as part of the life of being a writer, and it absolutely is a part of the whole journey, but you have every right to feel bruised about it. It’s another small sad to add to your pile and that stuff is overwhelming.

Delete it, shred it, bag it up until you re strong enough to deal with it, but don’t give up on yourself.

Wendy Pratt, Rejection doesn’t happen in an emotional vacuum.

How many times have I tinkered with a poem before realising that I’ve overcooked it, so then had to undo the change? It’s a good job I’m not a builder. Sure, no one wants to read the obvious word every time, but poets can of course overdo the tweaking by replacing the early-draft choices with alternatives whose other connotations are so far from being synonymous that they blur the original meaning and/or unbalance the syntax to an unbearable degree.

In his Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel, Robert Lowell said this:

You think three times before you put a word down, and ten times about taking it out. And that’s related to boldness; if you put words down, they must do something, you’re not going to put clichés.

And this:

Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of maneuvring.

By that, I infer that he means how the emotional kernel of the poem is conveyed and encased by the rest of it. The best advice I ever received from another poet was to ensure that every poem, like the Tin Man, had a heart.

When Seidel asked him if he revised a great deal, Lowell’s answer was emphatic: ‘Endlessly.’

Matthew Paul, On revising poems

The past couple months I’ve been ferrying back and forth between projects, which is nice since it allows me to work without getting fatigued on one or the other, but also means they may be slower going and likely to be abandoned, at least temporarily, should I get distracted or mired in another bit of shiny. One was the swamp bird women poems, a shorter series, the second THE MIDNIGHT GARDEN, a prose-ish narrative project that will hopefully be more book-length when finished. The third of course, is another delve into mythology subject matter with CLOVEN. I’ve been sharing bits on IG and sending out individual poems this summer, including a couple of video poems (one of which you can catch this coming week as a Patreon subscriber.) These pieces number close to 30, and have some attendant collages I started a couple years back. It’s almost a reverse of GRANATA, its companion book, which was composed poems first, art second.

Kristy Bowen, summering with the greeks

Alt text says this week’s photo shows a yellow plastic toy on a wood surface. I say it is an intact yellow stretchy man who I am not currently stretching. Instead I have placed him on my writing desk for a photo opportunity. I am giving him a nod of thanks, and I won’t be pulling his arms too hard. In fact I am going to put him a jar of his very own to keep him dust free and away from my grip.

Some time ago I bought one of these for each of the people in my supervision group. Delighted to be able to play with mine at the meeting I was a little over zealous in stretching his arms out and perhaps enjoying the elastic stretch and boing of him rather too much because all of a sudden he snapped. I was left holding his arms whilst gazing at his body on the floor. I found myself laughing at the very surprise of how quickly he was altered at the same time as feeling rather disappointed that my toy had broken, and there he was simply smiling back at me.

Choosing to frame the moment in a poem was important to me for a couple of reasons. One, being to capture a moment in time and my observations of his “bitten muffin” shoulders. And the other being to remember the joy of that supervision group and its importance in giving me a safe space to be myself. A space I truly valued. A space where the busy world paused a while for deep reflection and thought. The members of the group brought listening ears, laughter, shoulders to cry on and made a real difference to me. A group that saw you step back out into the day with relaxed shoulders, a clearer mind and a focussed way forward. I think they would like the poem dedicated to the yellow stretchy man and I am glad that it has found its home in Steel Jackdaw Magazine.

Sue Finch, YELLOW STRETCHY MAN

Despite
everything, there is still this life. And in

this life, as you try to dream, a star will
give you a poem. If you just keep doing

the things you cannot but do, completely
unfathomable theories will curl together

in your mind and explain themselves to
you.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Despite

No, not a review. I have no right and no ability to do that. Instead, five reasons to buy it and read it. […]

3: the section ‘Starting Eleven’. Ah, gentle reader. It isn’t about concepts, is it? But… what a concept. One poem each to commemorate the bold sporting stars of a club we have followed. And this one the unglamorous, not-even-nearly-men of an unfancied 80s football team. In this section 12 players come together to be honoured in ‘Starting Eleven’ (I’ll just wait here whilst you catch up on that one). If you have ever mistakenly bought me a drink and listened more than you should have done to me talk about the difficulty of poetry you will have heard me say that the problem with poetry is that often the best poems happen outside of the poem. Outside of the raw words. We are not formalists, m’duck. And here that is the case. This section conjures the rare, pure belonging of following your sporting communitas. Millions of people will disagree, but actual proper football happens in the lower tiers, where intelligent people pay ticket money to see their team never win a league, or a cup, or even a sodding game for three years. And the reasons for that are complex. But, my word, you will find flashes of that complexity illuminated here. Sporting poems are not new, but good ones are rare. I recall SJ Litherland’s book of poems about Nasser Hussain from Iron Press. Like a moth you try to rescue from a high window, I would destroy most of these by quoting them partially – with the possible exception of ‘Ian McDonald’. Customary with these poems, Stewart gives us the flash of genius that maketh the sporting man; here it is the ‘knack for bringing long punts down’. All lower league and non-league fans will know that every player has their moment, their special thing that gets the faithful (ten? hundred? thousand?) faithful on their feet. Here these men are ennobled for that flash; they are not described as nearly man, or also-rans. And that just because you aren’t playing for Real Madrid your life, or your worth, is still fully appreciated. Go on, Basho: have a go at that, then. Stewart also touches on the way that crowds (dare I type ‘of men’ here?) find empathetic understanding and learn about what life is truly about on rainy nights out at Darlington, away. But back to Ian McDonald, who the crowd understands why he ‘lifts his foot out of fifty-fifties/ through the slurry of the centre circle.” Pause to enjoy that gorgeously ugly metaphor, ‘slurry’ and remember those 80s games (go and Google it, if remembering the 80s is not something you can’t do). The crowd, as one, understand the player’s past – the way that includes the horrific injury that ended his time at Shankly’s Liverpool but also brought him to them, at Aldershot. People think they know about football, but what they know is hooliganism mythology of the past and the Coca-Cola-isation of modern times. The human purity of bonding, and empathy is the beautiful thing – the game isn’t the beautiful thing; like certain other human pastimes it is used to divide us. Rather deftly, Stewart shows us how the regard we can have for others, our faith in them as people, and in not glory-seeking or vainglorious pride and affected tribalism. That said, I do totally understand Stewart’s admiration for ‘Ian Phillips’ who can put ‘right-wingers/ straight into the advertising hoardings’.

Andy Hopkins, Matthew Stewart’s ‘Whatever you do just don’t’ (Happenstance Press, 2023): Five Reasons to Read.

A few years back, I reviewed Mave O’Sullivan’s Wasp on a Prayer Mat, a masterful book of haiku and senryu. This new book, Where all Ladders Start, is, in many respects, a different beast. To begin with, while there are some haiku sequences and haibun scattered through the book, O’Sullivan experiments here with a wide range of western forms. These include sonnets, villanelles, a sestina, mirror or palindrome poems in two stanzas and poems in unrhymed stanzas. There’s even a foray into visual poetry, with the title poem being laid out as a stylised heart shape.

And that title is key, a quote from Yeats’ ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’, the lines that contain the phrase acting as epigraph to the book. In Yeats’s oeuvre, the poem marks a final turning point, an acknowledgement that the myth and mysticism that informed his life’s work no longer serves and that he now has to look to his own emotional experiences for poetry. It’s tempting to see O’Sullivan borrowing these words to mark a similar turning away from the relative impersonality of the haiku to a more personal, confessional, mode here.

And the poems tend to bear this out. There are poems on family:

Yourself and Eileen reared a brood so fine:
young men and women, smart and loving all –
oh grandfather, our lives barely entwined.

The Kerry accent was the only sign
of deep roots in that dark, secluded vale.
I pass your workplace on the way to mine.
(from ‘Civil Servant’)

on former partners and failed relationships, and for friends, especially women friends.

Throughout, O’Sullivan handles her formal experiments with assurance, and she has an unexpected facility for well-placed rhymes and a lightness of touch that carries over from her senryu, I suspect, as in ‘As Evening Draws In’, a sonnet in praise of a warm fire on a cold evening:

Oh speckled firelighter, square igniter,
I torch your corners in the cottage grate.
Don’t let me down: make this fireplace brighter.
The air is chilly and it’s getting late.

There are, however, moments when it feels a bit like the content is being squeezed into a predetermined form. On the whole, I feel that the most successful work here is among the haiku sequences and haibun:

hug on the street
the bagpipe’s notes
mellifluous

sponging champagne
from the check picnic basket –
new moon in Leo
(from ‘Situationship’)

A subjective view, I know, but the restraint, the coolness of these poems actually conveys more emotion to me than the more expansive confessional work that surrounds them. O’Sullivan is a fine, accomplished poet, but an exceptionally good writer of haiku.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading July 2025: A Review

My greatest pleasure just now is the long, slow process of unpacking all of my books. We left London four years ago now, but because initially we expected to be in France only for a year or two, we didn’t bring our furniture or most of our possessions with us. Most of our (many hundreds of) books as well as all the lovely — albeit unfashionable — nineteenth-century furniture I have bought at auction over the last twenty years has been languishing in storage somewhere near the M25. A great deal of my books are still in boxes, but a few have begun to emerge and today I thought I’d look at a random selection of poets who have ended up on a shelf together and whom I’ve enjoyed revisiting this week: a funny old mixture of Lawrence Durrell, Richard Murphy and Alex Wylie. […]

My copy of Richard Murphy’s Selected Poems is also a Faber edition, but a much older one, printed in 1979, which I bought at some point second hand (but apparently unread) for £3. (It’s currently available on Amazon UK for £2.79 + delivery, in case anyone would like a copy.) Murphy was an Anglo-Irish poet who died not that long ago, in 2018; he was quite well-known I think in his day and was published by Faber between 1963 and 1989, but I haven’t heard anyone mention him for a long time. Some years ago I was on the interview panel for an academic job and one of the candidates was a specialist in modern Irish poetry: I asked a question about Murphy, out of genuine interest and not at all intending to catch them out, and saw a look of panic flit briefly across their face.

So possibly no-one reads Murphy any longer. I find his poems interesting because they are undeniably good in very many ways but I almost never find them wholly convincing all the way through. Different poems here reminded me of poems by Charles Causley (‘Years Later’), Keith Douglas (‘Coppersmith’) and Seamus Heaney (many of them), without ever quite living up to the parallel.

There’s something particularly self-conscious about Murphy’s diction which tends to break the spell of his verse: over and again I found myself distracted at just the wrong moment by an unusual word or uncommon usage. This is such a delicate thing to get right: of course you want a poet to have a wide vocabulary and know how to use it, and different styles suit quite different dictions. An unusual or unexpected word, perfectly deployed, can be the making of a poem and I often enjoy learning words from poets (Toby Martinez de las Rivas is particularly good at this) — but somehow Murphy’s word-choice too often gets in the way of his poems, making them feel overwritten. This is hard to demonstrate, because it’s a cumulative effect, but here for instance are parts of the poem ‘Care’, about a tame goat, which begins:

Kidded in April above Glencolumbkille
On a treeless hill backing north, she throve
Sucking milk off heath and rock, until

I came with children to buy her. We drove
South, passing Drumcliff. Restless in the car,
Bleating, she gulped at plastic teats we’d shove

Copiously in her mouth.

In these lines I was distracted by kidded — which you’d think would mean ‘having given birth to kids’, i.e., referring to the mother, but here must refer instead to the kid itself; then, though less so, by throve, which is correct but still unusual and perhaps a little ‘loud’; and then finally by copiously, which is I suppose partially transferred from the milk itself, which it would more naturally describe. These are all the sorts of detail and the kinds of poetic technique which could work very well, but somehow here trip me up rather than clarifying. The end of the poem, though is very good. The goat has been so carefully cared for, become so trusting, that it is accidentally poisoned:

So when a child mistook a sprig of yew
And mixed it with her fodder, she descried
No danger: we had tamed her instinct too.

Whiskey, white of egg, linseed oil, we tried
Forcing down antidotes. Nothing would do.
The children came to tell me when she died.

Here I think he gets away with ‘descried’, given the pathos of such a high register word applied to a kid. But too much of the rest of the poem — and of his poems in general — are spoilt by obtrusive words.

Victoria Moul, Three books from a box

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

I first came to poetry as a child. I began dancing when I was 3. I began reading and writing when I was 4. Growing up, my family was very mystical, musical, spiritual, so at home it was easy for me to “be” a poet, meaning I could explore and deepen my neurospicy sensibilities—I was a sleepwalker as a child, I had incredibly vivid dreams that I could recall with great detail, I began astral traveling, I was deeply connected with spirit realms, could commune with spirits, other entities, was incredibly sensitive (secretive), had a lot of imaginary friends, would spend hours preoccupied within the invisible realms in our backyard, on camping trips, or just drifting around aimlessly in my own imagination, I could easily imitate the sounds of other people’s voices, could sing lyrics to songs even if I had never heard the song before and was singing it for the first time, had an episodic memory that felt almost epic, for the most part all of this was fine in the context of my family. I went to a public, creative arts school, I was in a magnet program, so I was involved with various creative practices as a child. In first grade, I guess around age 7, I started reciting poetry by Harlem Renaissance poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, other greats like Emily Dickinson, because my teacher, mom, and assistant teacher—three Black and Brown women who were all about Black history and Black poetry—co-created a daily practice that they collectively reinforced at home, in the classroom, at recess on the playground, and in the world. My mom would have me read poetry aloud to her most nights when I was young, she taught me how to type on her typewriter at the kitchen table, she also taught me how to sew, so poetry became something embedded within my daily practice of reading, studying, playing, moving, making, breathing, speaking, being. Just this very natural thing. I finally began writing poems around age 14, which makes sense to me now because that was around the time when I told my mom I wanted to begin practicing witchcraft and I was no longer interested in going to our Christian Science church. Fortunately for me, she listened and supported my decision.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with fahima ife

In her ‘Notes on Spite’, Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) has suggested a productive new area for enquiry. What are the great works of art and literary criticism about spite? Hollis says “Spite may be the most undertheorized force in creative achievement.” Is that because spite is so hard to define? Even Johnson could only manage a string of epithets: “Malice; rancour; hate; malignity; malevolence.”

Spite is a species of hate, somewhere between revenge and contempt, in which our scorn for an enemy, pest, nemesis, or rival is made into a productive capacity, overwhelming us by becoming the motivating energy of action. Spite ruins mediocrities, but sets genius alight with a brilliant fire that sustains itself by consuming itself, attracting more and more fuel as it becomes notorious to others and preoccupying to the hater.

Spite is the release of unreasonable feeling; it is a partisan, chauvinist, personal expression; spite pretends to principle; alas, it has none. Politics is the great art of spite, followed by poetry, the allocation of capital, and family feuds. None of these is primarily, or purely, an art of spite, but each has the greatest potential to achieve something significant for the sake of malice towards another person. Some spites are general, as in the rage of party politics, the bigotry of policy, but all have some personal correspondence. We never hate entirely in the abstract. Spite is a kind of desire, the lust of despising, the thirst of dismissal.

There is a canon of obviously spiteful literature, such as the Dunciad and The Bickerstaff Papers, but a great deal of the traditional canon is full of spite, too: parts of Dante, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Goethe, Gogol, Hans Christian Andersen, Zola, Hazlitt, Bronte, and Grimm; and so much of Shakespeare: what is Hamlet but a study of spite? (“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”); then there is Iago, Edmund, Romeo killing Tybalt, Beatrice (“kill Claudio!”), Bertram, Portia—, indeed, the great achievement of The Merchant of Venice is to show that the spite which underlies traditional comedy like The Comedy of Errors can be brought to the surface, viciously, unrelenting, and the play can still end with the final act where all are married (Antonio aside). We have a great tolerance of spite, even when it exposes itself and all our hypocrisy. Paradise Lost is the great epic of spite, providing this whole area of study with its epigram: “Done all to spite/The great Creator.” A motto for our envious, entitled, rash, and bloody times! Milton’s poem is often about spite, and provides another good definition: “the hateful siege/Of contraries: all good to me becomes/Bane.”

Henry Oliver, What is spite?

I was astonished to learn recently that Asymptote, “the premier site for world literature in translation,” now charges $10 for general submissions. I consider this fee outrageous. Should this become normalized, writers could spend hundreds of dollars simply trying to place one work. Many will be barred from submitting at all.

Upon investigation, I’ve found high fees at a surprising number of places. Minerva Rising, a press that “prides itself on building a supportive community of women writers,” also charges $10. Red River Review charges $15. 34th Parallel charges $14.50 for general submissions. Limit Experience charges $11.11. Half and One charges $9.

Clover + Bee does not charge a fee to submit. Yet if your work is chosen for publication, you must pay them. […]

This has to stop. The transition to online submissions and the use of submissions software was meant to make processes easier for everyone. If the process is harder, and therefore more costly, something is wrong. At the very least, charging $10 or more per submission is absolutely unsustainable for writers.

Going forward, I will not interview editors of lit mags that charge more than $5 for submissions. I don’t know that I ever did, but now this will be official policy here. I will also aim to focus more on magazines that charge no fee at all.

I’ve spoken to Ben at Chill Subs (who, special thanks, helped me gather some of this data). He told me that they will soon be introducing badges to identify lit mag fees ranging from “free” to “low” to “lol, no.”

Becky Tuch, I Need an Around the Way Lit Mag!

Notebook “tours” have popped up in my email newsletter subscriptions lately, complete with scans of handwritten pages from writers willing to share their doodles, scrawls, sketches, and scribbles. I find these fascinating from two perspectives: in addition to giving us a glimpse into a private space, they reveal something crucial about the creative process. These excerpts show, literally, the bits and pieces of language that might become a poem, essay, or story, or might just stay on that page, complete in themselves.

Handwriting grabs our attention in ways that printed words simply don’t. As I watched the recently released documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, images of Joel’s lyrics, penned on white sheets of paper, spread across the screen: long sentences filled with words and phrases, some crossed out, some traced over and over. Here was evidence of a creative mind at work; Joel’s words were like a sculptor’s fingerprints in clay.

I started keeping a notebook at the age of ten, continued on and off throughout my teens and twenties, and then in earnest in middle age. As I review these pages, what I left out often strikes me more than what I wrote. My earliest notebooks, for example, completely avoid the elephant in the room: my parents’ marriage was falling apart, a fact that haunts those brittle pages like a palimpsest of memory.

Erica Goss, The Notebook Tour – What Shows, What’s Hidden

Folded layers of scent draped in colours of the setting sun, the rose is a symbol of love, romance, sadness and joy. The RHS deemed it the world’s favourite flower, dedicating whole book to some forty varieties, Shakespeare mentions roses seventy times in his writing and a speedy google of “rose poems” delivers dozens of words devoted to this enduring symbol of emotion. There are those who despise the rose – in England it conjures ideas of old lady perfumes and suburban fussiness. I was largely indifferent to them, with a vague sense that they were rather old fashioned, until received one as a birthday gift, and was breathed in fragrance that is both exotic and familiar, watched the way the colours change as the rose ages and fades, the way shell shaped petals circle their central sun – I was in love. […]

Roses represent much more than romantic love. Their role within the socialist party dates back to the 1969, when Marc Bonnet drew the rose and fist logo, with the rose as a symbol of hope, and the fist as a symbol the activist commitment and solidarity necessary to achieve a better life for all. In Italy and Germany, the white rose was the symbol of resistance and pursuit of good. Give us our roses while we’re still here is the rallying cry of trans day of remembrance, held in November each year as powerful and moving reminder of the consequences of bigotry.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Where the wild roses grow

the mountain
is known now for her wound. sometimes i would
call you before the tunnel on purpose.
i wanted to see if the call would get dropped.
only once did the signal carry through.
it is so human to try & test the limits of our voices.
from how far away can you hear me? i wish the tunnel wasn’t
a passing place. i imagine it at night when a car
only slips through every hour or so.
i wanted to walk with you there, the whole mountain
breathing above us.

Robin Gow, tunnel breath

Who we are is what we think about. I recently visited a friend who told me that she hadn’t been living in her body, and I thought, I can relate to that.

My life is being a writer, travel, exercise, family. My life at work is editing and running the press, but we are growing the press, so it’s become all fundraising, swallowing every breath I take so I can’t remember to focus on the other parts of my life, and consequently, I miss them.

Who are we when we lose our essential selves?

We must have realized at some point that our country is becoming a kleptocracy. Our president, a shadowy monarch, taking planes, swords, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from foreign governments, and, since his election, going from a net worth of 2 billion to over 6 billion. We watch friends get abducted by hooded men in broad daylight. Eventually, we won’t be able to remember who we were when we lived in a free country.

I remember.

I remember being a writer, a thinker. A goal maker. I want to be that person again. I want to have time to walk my dogs.

Which brings me to my vision of the future, my Black Swan dream.

The idea of Black Swan events, outlined in the works of statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, comes from the fact that for a long time, there were no black swans that anyone knew of. People thought they didn’t exist. We humans lived in a world of exclusively white swans.

Then, Australia was discovered. Here was a whole continent where there were black swans. This is the basis of a Black Swan event: it must create a shift in what we think, how we live. Unexpected. Unforeseen. The event may initially seem small, but it is followed by a cascade, ripple effect that changes the world.

When people think of Black Swan events, they think of 9/11, the 2008 crash, major events that reshaped society and the world.

But the original discovery of black swans in Western Australia was a good surprise, and Taleb argued that these events can be positive.

I believe in the possibility of a positive Black Swan in this country. America’s demise is not inevitable. We will not return to life as it was. We know that we have to fight for democracy.

I am not the girl walking down the path to feed the chickens, thinking of running away. I have a small garden with herbs and unsuccessful tomatoes and peppers. I think the pumpkins will make it.

I tell myself every day, “Go to work as if you are the beginning of a Black Swan event.”

Kate Gale, I Hear the Black Swan Coming

Everything has been falling apart for so long.

How long must our hearts be cracked open?
Sorrow seems our constant companion.

Help us to believe
that better is possible.

The walls have come down.
Here at the bottom, do we dare to look up?

Rachel Barenblat, Fifteen glimpses of Tisha b’Av

This week: detonation points, Coleridge and nukes, speechlessness, poetry from the edgelands, and much more. Enjoy.

Under this administration, every day, I struggle to stay focused. I have a job. I write. I work in publishing, and publishing is under siege, too, especially diverse publishers. I need to raise funds for Red Hen. I need to edit, to work, to find ways to continue to live and breathe.

In Hungary, in Cuba, in China, in Vietnam, in Russia, in North Korea, there are people taking care of their families, asking the universe for change, living with joy. Our state of mind is our own. I resist. I work for change. I try for joy.

But ICE is in my city, ice melting beneath us. The unsteadiness of the world makes me feel every day like I am on the deck of the Titanic. I try to finish one thing, but mistakes are abundant. When did everything become so dire, so wildly unsteady?

Warm salt water rushes under the Thwaites Ice Shelf. It is becoming unmoored. The current president will be gone when Thwaites finally loosens from the Antarctic shelf for good, but the impacts of his policies will resonate for decades to come.

We live in a country that ignores reality, and will until it’s too late. From the start, we’ve disappeared people, species, histories.

Now, they come for us.

The climate collapses. People go missing, slip under the ice.

As the Titanic sank, the band played “Nearer my God to Thee.”

What will be the sound as our ship goes down?

Kate Gale, What Will Play As Our Ship Goes Down?

Walking on a road called Pas de l’Assassin,
I might think the sea is the victim.

In the brutal emptiness, 
the stubbled fields could be rolled up
and sold to market –
I might be richer, but the land poorer.

The strange crucified lord
of the corn fields might answer someone’s 
need, but not mine.

I settled down by a tank of green waters,
drowned my sorrows by downing
a dozen oysters. 

Jill Pearlman, How to See the Sea

I can see sky through the whale.
Its to-scale belly propped two storeys high,
ideas layered like oil on water,
steel bent into a dream of the thing
in its city sea. […]

Dr Jen Dunn writes about medicine, the inner world, mental health, her Christian faith and psychoanalysis. She has been published in a wide range of Scottish and UK publications, from Poetry Scotland to Surgeon’s News. Jen has won the Perthshire Writers poetry prize and the Society of Medical Writers’ poetry prize, and has been short-listed for the James Muir poetry prize. Jen’s first poetry collection, Tell Me About The Broken Bones, was published in 2025. You can find a copy here at Seahorse Publications.

Karen Macfarlane, Tay Whale

When I was in high school, I wrote nearly two dozen editorials and articles on the ocean and its perilous state (which was, of course, not as perilous as it is today.) At the time, there was a sense of hope that science and environmental activists would turn around the terrible ticking clock. When I am feeling especially helpless given recent (and even not so recent news) I think of those other lives I may have lived. […]

Perhaps that scientist still lives inside me a little, even though her math is bad and she probably has forgotten more than half of what she’s learned in the 30 odd years since high school. She loves research and learning new things about the natural world. The names of birds and plants, varieties or trees and flowers. She doesn’t write about dolphins or whales (not usually) but does write about mermaids more than she should. But perhaps its less like science and more a tiny religion of sorts. That’s what drives the poems sometimes, especially the ones that inhabit the natural world more fully.

Kristy Bowen, the poet and the scientist

Poet and science-writer Sam Illingworth has been noted in earlier posts in this blog — here’s a link — and I enjoy online-searching for his work again and again to find still more.   Illingworth’s blog, The Poetry of Science, is a wonderful site to visit and revisit, to read and explore.  

Recently I discovered the following Illingworth poem  (posted at The Poetry of Science on June 19, 2025) — a poem with a bit of math AND inspired by recent research findings that living near a golf course increases the risk of Parkinson’s disease (possibly due to exposure to pesticides used on the course).

Overspill by Sam Illingworth

They do not play,
but live beside
the tailored grass.

Fairways curve
where warnings should.

The air carries
what water cannot hold.

A hand begins to shake.
A name
slips from the scorecard.

No fence keeps out
what was never invited.

Previous postings in this blog including Illingworth may be found here.

JoAnne Growney, Mathematics and Golf

On this day [16 June] in 1945, the United States exploded the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

Robert Oppenheimer named the site, and when asked if he had named it as a name common to rivers and mountains in the west, he replied, “I did suggest it, but not on that ground… Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: ‘As West and East / In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one, / So death doth touch the Resurrection.’ That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God;—.'”

I love a scientist who loves John Donne. Metaphysical poetry and atomic weapons: they do seem to go together in intriguing ways.I think of Oppenheimer watching that explosion. In one book I read, the author states that these scientists were fairly sure what would happen, but not certain. There was some fear that they might somehow ignite the earth’s atmosphere and destroy the planet. But they proceeded anyway.

Oppenheimer says that he watched the explosion and thought about The Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” Once we had a crew of guys come to cut down a tree. The leader with the shaved head took off his shirt and tattooed across his back was the same line; it was a big tattoo–I could read it from inside the house. On that same day, from the gay guys’ apartment complex on the next street, I could hear disco music, The Village People and Donna Summer, in an endless loop, interrupted by the buzzing chain saws from the tree crew. Some day I’ll use these details in a poem or a short story. Or maybe having recorded them in my blog, I won’t feel the need to use the details elsewhere.

I thought with the film Oppenheimer, more people might know the history, but the significance of this day can get a bit lost.  I hadn’t remembered until doing some digging this morning that the explosion was scheduled for this date because Truman had an important meeting with Allied leaders in Potsdam on July 17. Bomb as savior? Oh, so many poetry possibilities! There’s the desert aspect, the prophets that so often emerge from wilderness areas. There’s the fact that this part of the country has become a detonation point for various immigration fights through the last four (or more) decades.

Those of you who have been reading this blog and/or my poems for awhile now will be saying, “Haven’t you already explored this poetic terrain?”

Indeed, I have. Yet I think there may be more to do.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Trinity Test Site, in History, Film, and Poetry

I live about 20 miles downwind of our local nuclear power station at Hinkley Point on Bridgwater Bay. Hinkley A and Hinkley B have ceased production. In the 1980s I was one of many local people active in opposing a third reactor, Hinkley C. A poster in my front window showed a Roman soldier and the words If the Romans had had nuclear power, we would still be guarding their radioactive waste. Planning consent for Hinkley C was given in 2013 after many years of legal and financial wrangling. Construction began in 2017. It is the biggest construction site in Europe.

My friend and fellow-poet Graeme Ryan has been working on a long poem inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his keen interest in (among many other subjects) electricity. What would Sam have made of Hinkley C, just a few miles from Nether Stowey? Parts of this great work have been discussed in zoom workshops that have helped to keep a group of seven writers connected since 2020. The published work as a whole makes a huge impact; it is far more than the sum of its parts.

Last month a group of us from Wells Fountain Poets went to the delightful Brendon Books in Taunton for the launch of The Dreaming of Hinkley Point. This book, beautifully designed by Terence Sackett, combines Graeme’s poetry with mixed-media images by artist Georgina King. In addition, the artist created a film based on her images, a marvellous backdrop entirely in harmony with Graeme’s reading.

The scope of this sequence is vast, with leaps of creative imagination from Nineveh to Bridgwater Bay via New Mexico, Chernobyl, Fukushima and Zaporizhzhia, and from 1797 to the present day and beyond. Both here and in his previous collection, The Valley of the Kings, the poet shows great skill in overlaying time-frames and identities layer upon layer. There’s nothing sweet and simple about this work. It is as deep and complex as The Waste Land in its network of references, with new revelations on every re-reading. There is the power of rage, but also a strong underlying sense of the holy, the holy-ness of the earth.

Ama Bolton, The time-travelling adventures of Sam Coleridge

After the snake has swallowed its own tail—
what then? Does it tuck itself into a scaly
ball, stitch itself into a leathered sphere
to be kicked around on a green playing field
or struck with a bat as people cheer
in unison from the stands? After the river
has gorged itself on houses and tractors,
gas stations and trucks that slid as if without
protest into its onrushing mouth, did it lie
back down in its bed, its terrible hunger
quiet until the next time?

Luisa A. Igloria, After

A very quick post to draw your attention to the wonderful news that Abeer Ameer, a guest reader for Trowbridge Stanza last year, is shortlisted in this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry in the Best Single Written Poem category for her poem ‘At Least’ published online at Modron Magazine.

Abeer gave a terrific reading in Trowbridge last year. I know that some of you who read this blog will remember her wonderful poems and the time she spent meeting the group, talking about her writing journey and answering questions. It was a really interesting and entertaining afternoon. Abeer has been writing consistently during the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine – you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook where she has been publishing poems responding to the devastating news from Gaza.

Congratulations to Abeer and to all at Modron for championing her work. Good call, Forward Judges!

All the lists for this year’s Forward Prizes are published here.

Josephine Corcoran, Congrats to Abeer Ameer and Modron Magazine!

The Canongate Wall is a feature of the Scottish Parliament building in Holyrood, Edinburgh. Designed by Soraya Smithson and opened with the Parliament in 1999, the wall is in pre-cast concrete; its monumentality and sense of flowing movement has something of the glacier, or a new-built ship easing down the slipway. Set into it are bullish samples of natural rock from across Scotland. Behind the parliament rises the dolorite rampart of Salisbury crags. Stone meets stone.

At the foot of the wall are the grey slabs of the pavement, and then the security bollards that surround the Parliament and keep passers-by safe from the constant traffic.

There are niches in the wall: rhomboids, like skew-whiff windows; they speak to the building as originally designed by Enric Miralles, who died before the project was complete. And maybe also to tenement windows, or eccentric pages of a book. In turn, set in these niches are stone slabs carved with lines from the Psalms, and the occasional proverb, but mostly poetry.

Until a fortnight ago, there were 26 carved stones. On 11 June, however, there was a small unveiling ceremony for three new ones, inserted into vacant niches. The quotations they bore were by the three living former Scottish makars: Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and me. We three were in attendance, as were Smithson, the stone carver Gillian Forbes and her apprentice Cameron Wallace. Although it was a strongly female team (the Parliament’s presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, did the honours), our three quotations brought the number of women’s quotes from one to four (out of 29). The only woman previously represented was the socialist and mill-worker Mary Brooksbank, with a verse from her ‘Jute Mill Song’:

Oh, dear me, the warld’s ill-divided,
Them that work the hardest are aye wi’ least provided,
But I maun bide contented, dark days or fine,
But there’s no much pleasure livin’ affen ten and nine.

After coffee and shortbread in Queensberry House, in a room often used to entertain international delegations, we filed out through the security gates onto the pavement, where one by one we unveiled our stones. (The quotations had been chosen by the public, in a vote organised by the Scottish Parliament. Three options each, approved by us, were suggested and the public were invited to choose between them. Five thousand people voted.)

First Liz Lochhead. She and the presiding officer peeled away a bit of sticky ribbon and a board to reveal a small slab of Ailsa Craig Marble:

this
our one small country …
our one, wondrous, spinning, dear green place.
What shall we build of it, together
in this our one small time and space?

A few words into a microphone, some photos and Jackie Kay was next, a few metres down the street:

Where do you come from?
‘Here,’ I said, ‘Here. These parts.’

Then it was my turn. I sent photos to my children – both abroad – and thought about joking that I wouldn’t need a tombstone now, but I didn’t. It made me think of time passing. I wished my mother could have been there. I felt a rush of affection for those who were there, especially the poets, now we are in our third age. We have been in each other’s orbit for decades. When I began publishing, Liz Lochhead, now 77, was the only properly visible woman poet in Scotland, with her Glasgow glamour. (Very different from me. I took to writing partly because I didn’t have to be visible; the present ‘performance’ culture would have shrivelled me.) As for Jackie Kay, when she read out the lines now carved on the wall, I realised I had known them for ever, and could recite them along with her. The plain assertion of belonging, as a black person in Scotland, is now writ in stone on its parliament building.

Kathleen Jamie, At the Canongate Wall

Last Monday, I was the featured poet at A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends. This weekly Zoom reading and conversation hosted by Jimmy Pappas is so fun! I loved presenting game poems and having the attendees ask questions and make observations back to me. In addition to sharing some poems from my How to Play chapbook, I also shared two game poems I love that were written by other poets: “Do Not Pass Go” by Jennifer H. Dracos-Tice (first published in Whale Road Review!) and “Queen Me” by Kelli Russell Agodon.

Katie Manning, A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends

On Wednesday evening I walked up some very steep hills from Sheffield city centre to Novel bookshop – whose website is here – in Crookes for an evening of readings by seven poets published by Brian Lewis’s Longbarrow Press. The ethos of Longbarrow – whose tagline, ‘poetry from the edgelands’, very much resonates with me and whose website is here – is concerned with making beautiful, mostly hardback books of beautiful poetry.

The readings took the form of half the audience sitting downstairs in the shop’s back room and the other half upstairs, with, in the first half of the evening, three poets reading downstairs and four upstairs; then, after a break, the poets changing over and the audiences staying where they were. The cosiness of the rooms and the excellence of the poetry made for a much more intimate yet paradoxically relaxing set of readings.

Matthew Paul, On Longbarrow Press and James Caruth

I have a new essay out today in the This Be the Place series at Poetry Foundation, edited by Jeremy Lybarger. I wrote about the solace (and abandonment) of the pond I grew up beside on my family’s ten acres in Virginia—along with C.D. Wright, Linda Gregg, a little Agnes Varda, et al—and you can read it here: “A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness.”

The end of the essay references Larks, so for readers of Larks, I hope it deepens the landscape of the poems, and for those who haven’t read Larks, maybe this will encourage you to pick up a copy at your library or bookstore.

Hope you are resting and caring for yourselves and each other as best you can during this long summer,

Han

Han VanderHart, “A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness”–new essay today at Poetry Foundation’s This Be the Place Series

On recent Artist Dates, Jill Crammond and I have been talking about wanting to live creative lives, to buckle down and put in work, to feel like poets, to be part of and contribute to vibrant creative communities.

There’s one problem with the wish: I think we’re already doing it LOL (I took my poetry manuscript into the Adirondacks, for crying out loud!)

As I was putting together my last recap of creative activities, it hit me: I’m doing more than I think I’m doing. So why does it feel like I’m not living a creative life? Is there a disconnect between how I’ve romanticized creative life vs. what creative life actually looks like? What does it really mean to live a creative life? Maybe the only thing I’m missing is the belief — the confidence — that I’m doing the damn thing.

Maybe I need to reconnect with the thrill of it.

Maybe I need to drop all resistance to it.

*

And maybe I’ve been so focused on the single mantra “Don’t Quit!” that I haven’t caught up with the fact that I’m no longer white knuckling the creative life .

There are different varieties of “Don’t Quit.” One is in reaction to rejection. And wow — I’ve had a couple solid years of NO’s. It would only make sense that I’ve been hanging onto “Don’t Quit” as a stubborn response to so many doors closing.

But there is another kind of “Don’t Quit,” and it’s driven not by fear but by love and passion. Maybe that’s the magic of living a creative life.

A recent installment of Erinn Batykefer’s Substack “The Long Pause” has something to contribute here. In Erinn’s interview with Kelley Beeson, author of Undress, a chapbook from Lefty Blondie Press, Kelley recalls a question from Big Magic: “What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?” Reflecting on her prior focus on publishing alone, Kelley reflects, “[Publication] became my main engine in writing. Yuck. There are other, more interesting reasons to write.”

More interesting reasons to write. Yes!

Carolee Bennett, “We’re Traveling Through Space” and Other Reminders of a Creative Life

To think I once was once juggling a dozen blogs. And now? A post every quarter at one or two places… For the curious, or compulsive readers who must finish a paragraph, I once had this poetry blog, a cat-narrated blog, one for flash fiction, a vegan recipe blog, a daily life, and a poem-a-day, a daily selfie blog, a weekly portrait of B blog, one written by a sock monkey, a weekly in Spanish/French, a dream journal, a haiku one, all unhooked from each other because that much hyperglossia would look crazy, no? And I would often binge-write and then let it autopost in an orderly fashion to give the semblance of steadiness while I, behind the screen, crashed.

A difference is keeping things for myself these days. And rather than throw things indiscriminately, I share cautiously with those who have earned trust. Who actually are invested in me. Terribly at odds with being a poet, I know. […]

I previously used all my energy as an introvert on extraversion. People said I had so much energy but I had a boom-crash cycle where after an event I didn’t function or ran the red line of panic attacks and living inside headache constantly. I mean daily headaches from early 80s to 2015 or so.

I laughed more then but chuckled not at all. I was wrapped way tight, keeping myself hopped on excitement, hafta, hafta, gotta, and sugar to extend my comfort zone, keep the walls from crushing me, learning to talk. I was aways stacking triggers to prove myself I could do anything, then wondering why everything was hard.

It’s an interesting fast headspace and I could parse at speed but there’s the sensation of inspiration without..something. The sensation of being productive is not the same thing as useful. Or as being present.

Only by hyperfocus through text I could pull out one thread of purpose from the many tangled threads and find a piece of what felt like order.

Now order is slow and quiet. Of course there are structural changes to make that happen. Ghosting bad dynamics and being less passive, more intentionally choosing instead of drifting. Balking, refusing to play, giving up FOMO, letting go of more, givng myself space to see patterns, to act not only react.

Instead of having my hand in many pies, on committees and publishing, going to many events, trying to keep contact with many people, living in thin-walled places where neighbours scream at each other and traffic noise never stops, I read instead. Probably 3x as much as when I was peak “busy”.

Pearl Pirie, Been a minute

My new mushroom-patterned dress and I will appear at Kramer’s in Washington, D.C., this Tuesday 7/22, where I’m reading at 7 pm with Steven Leyva and Tonee Mae Moll. (The dress is kind of retro and I think I look like a sci-fi 50s nurse in it, or maybe a waitress at a fungus-themed diner.) If you can’t make it but would enjoy a short recorded reading from Mycocosmic in ms form–made in January!–please check out Tina Cane’s Poetry Is Bread series.

In the meantime, a little more on Dickinson’s “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants”: I’m now firmly convinced that “Truffled Hut” should read “Truffled Hat.” As Dickinson’s fans know, she hardly ever saw her poems into print and early editors tended to bowdlerize them; in the1950s, editors started revisiting her manuscripts, some of them sewn into little booklets or “fascicles,” to translate them to print more accurately, although her ambiguous handwriting and inclusion of possible alternate wording makes that tricky. A ms version of “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” DOES survive, contrary to what the internet had me believe (shocking, I know, that a web search led me astray). Reproduced in Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, it reveals how closely her longhand lowercase a’s resemble her u’s: it’s not a matter of whether the top curve touches the upright, as you’d think, but of how close the two strokes come. All respect and gratitude to her valiant editors, who in this case interpret the millimeter’s difference perfectly plausibly. I just think “hat,” with its allusion to a mushroom’s cap, makes more sense. I floated my apostate interpretation at my Phosphorescence reading last week, a totally lovely event that was superbly run, and earned a nod from the moderator plus a comment in the chat: “Team Hat!” I felt quite pleased with myself.

Other than events like these, occasionally typing up a poem draft from a notebook, planning some fall stuff, and dealing with postponed medical appointments, I’m not getting much done in these dog days. Okay, I look at that last sentence and acknowledge I’m ridiculous, but I feel guilty when I’m not teaching yet not writing anything new. Like a mushroom, my confidence tends to evanesce fast. My rational self says, “hey, give yourself a break, your sabbatical is just starting, Mercury’s in retrograde, the world is screwed up, and you’re tired.” Another voice says, “you’ll never write a good book again and nobody sees you fruiting on the forest floor.” I see the same doubts manifesting on a few poet-friends’ social media–and even within some of the recent poetry collections I’ve been reading. Same old poetry life. My friend Emily Dickinson would tease me for getting my feathers truffled about it.

Lesley Wheeler, A D.C. reading, ghost pipes, & more Dickinson

Dear ones, I am so, so thrilled to share that my debut full-length poetry collection Once Is Not Enough is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in Fall 2027!!! When I received the offer to publish from managing editor Gabriel Cleveland, I wept listening to him share notes from three rounds of readers that really understood what I was trying to accomplish in the manuscript, no, the book! It’s going to be a book!

Once Is Not Enough is a collection that is haunted by loss—death, miscarriage, and language most prominently—but also by the tender details of the world, the emergence of peonies in the spring, the taste of salt licked from your own palm. Formally diverse, the work includes brief lyrics and longer sequences, poems in two voices, and poems written in Korean and translated into English. There is a preoccupation with the multiplicity of meaning and voices inherent in language as well as the cyclical nature of grief and life. Music and sound are essential to the shaping of individual poems and the overall structure of the manuscript, which is divided into four numbered sections which I think of as movements.

Hyejung Kook [no title]

I’m very happy to share this new video from my upcoming book, Temporary Shelters. It was produced by Barebones Filmmakers (who happen to be my daughter and her boyfriend–both extremely talented). We did the filming earlier this year in various locations in Pennsylvania’s Poconos.

We’ll have two more videos to release probably in September when the book is officially available.

On that note, I’m also happy to share that Temporary Shelters can now be pre-ordered from Cornerstone Press (at a 20% discount).

Grant Clauser, New Poetry Video and Book Update

horses lie down beside me, one nuzzles my back.

dream life. july.

strawberries feed from my hands.

Grant Hackett [no title]

Life doesn’t have to be a series of grand gestures or great works because most living happens in the quieter moments. The accumulation of those average moments can build to greater achievements but sparks of creativity need introspection and focus. The noise of markets or a gloss of festive lights can be shallow distractions and move people away from themselves. […]

Through “Continuous Present”, D A Prince effectively presses pause, giving readers space to dwell in the moment. To create a period of time to focus on word choice or study the paint strokes, to see how small details accumulate and cohere into a complementary whole.

Emma Lee, “Continuous Present” D A Prince (New Walk Editions) – book review

So, the collection traces – in old-fashioned chronological order – the start, middle, end, and aftermath of a decades old love relationship. It’s a little bit Shirley Valentine, a little bit The End of the Affair, though the role model Farish herself suggests is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Despite the long distance recall, there is a vivid, sensuous immediacy to the writing. In lesser hands, a likely recourse would be to old photograph albums, but Farish is as liable to start a poem from an old map, still in her possession, on which the young lovers scribbled notes for their anticipated, future return (which never happened). And there must have been a lot of maps, as the book unfolds in an almost picaresque fashion with the lovers meeting in Morocco, travelling to Italy, and Sicily, onto Greece, and Crete, before a return to the UK in Oxford. One of the key methods Farish uses to convey the thrill, freedom and passion of early love is through these exotic locations, the colours and customs, the names, the booze, the food. ‘Things We Loved’ – the book’s first poem – does this via Morocco’s markets, rose sellers, taxis, tagines, its acrobats and a dilapidated cinema. In Palermo, we’re along the Via Maqueda, sampling gelato, or polishing off a bottle of Donnafugata in bed (‘Mozart’s 233^rd Birthday’). Later in the book, the woman – now looking back over the decades – finds it’s still a bold Italian red, penne, gorgonzola, and oranges that conjure those long-lost days in true Proustian fashion (‘Pasta alla Gorgonzola’).

Martyn Crucefix, Helen Farish’s new collection, ‘The Penny Dropping’, reviewed

Matthew Paul’s second collection, The Last Corinthians, Crooked Spire Press, 2025 follows on from his first, The Evening Entertainment, Eyewear, 2017.

I enjoyed Matthew’s first collection and it’s clear he’s been honing his craft over the last 8 years. In this time he’s moved from London to a more rural life in south Yorkshire and (as the dedication makes clear) lost both parents. So, a different stage of life. There are still quirky, playful poems, as in the previous collection, but a sense of melancholy is more prevalent. The title poem, The Last Corinthians, is a concept I was unaware of (sport not being high on my agenda!). It refers, to a time before sport became a profession and there were players equally skilled in say football and cricket, as well as having a day job. […]

When I read through the poem titles (eg: The Ballad of Mike Yarwood, Double Chemistry, A Short History of Greenhouses, I was concerned that nostalgia was going to be overwhelming and the poems would be too similar to be interesting. Like those school reunions where you get stuck with that guy who recounts funny incidents from school at great length and with little humour, because for him they were the best days of his life. I can safely say Matthew’s poems are far cleverer, much more entertaining and emotionally sophisticated. At first, I found myself focussing on the pinpoint-accurate historical details and colloquial word choices, but on a second reading, I could appreciate Matthew’s obvious love of language, his skill with rhyme and half rhyme, and his subtle use of form.

Ali Thurm, What I’ve been reading

I will always be in awe of Paul Batchelor’s ability to use speech and voice in his poem ‘A Brace of Snipe’. (click to read)

I can’t express it any better than Andy Hopkins. who writes in his blog piece
‘ The Acts of Oblivion by Paul Batchelor – Five Reasons to Read’ how ‘ the voices of the ‘characters’ are distinct, and are distinct from the persona’s voice.’

Like Andy, I also love the digressions in this poem- the skilful control that enables Batchelor to capture the sense of someone interrupting themselves as they insert detail adjacent to the narrative before returning to ‘the point’ or message of the story, which is, when it finally arrives, in no way obvious or glib. And there is a sense of ‘real people’ in their environs in this poem, affectionately and unsentimentally portrayed, in contrast to the arrogant, cartoonish, rather grotesque and undignified ‘her Ladyship’.

The second poem in the link is the deeply moving Powder Blue. Also concerned with class, and this time about the experience of being ‘Unable to escape’ where you come from and don’t fully belong, while also being unable to escape judgement for being from where you are from- ‘Listen to your accent!’

PaulBatchelor’s latest collection, The Acts of Oblivion, was published by Carcanet in 2021.

Roy Marshall, Two poems by Paul Batchelor

On his website, Hosho McCreesh describes Psalms from the Badlands as “An expansive collection of 150 “psalms” or haiku-like, Japanese-style breath poems about the brutal and beautiful American southwest, with nature as the catalyst for deeper meditations on life, love, grief, loss, and, of course, death.” From poem 1 to 150, you can clearly see his awe of the Southwest, as well as his deep appreciation for haiku and related forms. For example, Poem 21 reads:

The woman’s hands,
watching them peel chile,
the way it still burned days later
in the sunlight—

still burns
years later
in your mind

In my notes, I indicated how close this poem came to a haibun (a prose poem that ends in a haiku). Other poems invoke the long linked form of renku, even in their brevity, such as Poem 80:

Fingers of late spring fog,,
burnt off by morning.

Early July monsoons,
the sunflowers drink deep.

Brittle October stalks,
every drop baked out.

And still it returns
as January snow.

Beyond their connection to the haiku world, this collection does an exceptional job of capturing the landscape and atmosphere of the Southwest in a visceral way. I particularly appreciate that the human element is not removed from these poems, as we are as much a part of the environment as the animals, plants, and weather. Poem 25 is one of my particular favorites in this regard:

Red chile ristra
cleaned of harvestmen
& their cobwebs.

Water boils
red as a
Jemez flood —

Hungry, we wait for
carne adovada.

Ultimately, when reviewing my notes, I don’t find a single disliked poem, or piece that seemed out of step with the broader collection. Psalms from the Badlands is not just an example of exceptional writing, but also a masterful demonstration of how to organize a poetry collection.

Allyson Whipple, Review: Psalms from the Badlands by Honsho McCreesh

At several points throughout the collection, ‘but’ acts as a hinge, starting a last line or a final stanza, just like in the above example, indicating a change in tone as McCaffery homes in on the core of his inspiration. And then in the poem’s concluding clause, ‘as if’, another of McCaffery’s favoured turns of phrase, also kicks in with a leap that lends the poem an extra layer.

When looking at this quatrain in depth, it becomes clear to the reader that those three devices (‘but’, ‘though’ and ‘as if’) all undercut each other in turn. Absolutes no longer exist in vital and linguistic terms. Supposedly modest and clear-cut words suddenly take on unexpected new ramifications.

This additional depth of nuance is to be savoured by any reader, but especially by McCaffery aficionados. Skail evokes the undercutting of everything that came before it, hinting at riches to come in his future writing, a significant landmark on his continuing poetic journey.

Matthew Stewart, The undercutting of everything that came before, Richie McCaffery’s Skail

The full-length debut by Philadelphia poet Mia Kang, following her pamphlet debut, City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020), is the impressive All Empires Must (Portland OR: Airlie Press, 2025), a title I found unexpectedly second-hand at Books Upstairs in Dublin, of all places. “I summon my cruelty / but cannot / name him.” she writes, to open the poem “The Author Calls Him X,” “I am // failed / by my rage, / love // embodied in / an ardent relation / with limits, voice // made by not / doing, not saying.”

All roads lead to, and away from, Rome in these poems, as Kang writes around and through an empire and a series of moments across the stories of ancient history, specifically the founding of Rome. There’s a coyness to her directness and vice versa, writing specific and slant through figures and stories known and less-known, getting to the heart of each character and encounter across a wonderfully delicate lyric. As the poem “In a Roman Story” offers, writing Rhea Silvia: “That wasn’t / what she wanted: she asked // to face the wall / to more fully be // -come the gate he sought. / Oh Mars, you mistook me // for someone / I briefly was.” There is such thoughtful and incredible pacing across these poems, one reminiscent, slightly, of Canadian poets George Bowering or D.G. Jones, the slow hush and halt and play and propulsion of Canadian postmodernism an accidental (I can only presume) patter across her lines. “I have to tell you: I made two. / Didn’t know how else // to make it.” begins the poem “Roman Couplets,” “I put them / a double return a // -part on the page, let them / fall through sky // side by side. I oppose / these maneuvers, but the truth // is there were two— / one left me, one loved me, // they were the same.”

There’s something magnificent in the way Kang articulates elements of Roman history, offering elements on how to hold to a single thought, or reach across decades, attempting to articulate the ways in which one might live, might be; each poem a small moment, each of which together collect and pool into accumulations of large movements. Through Kang, poems and books are composed out of moments, providing a powerful precision of thought, story and word. She writes a book-length narrative, one that provides both an expansiveness and a pointed specificness, held in space, in amber.

rob mclennan, Mia Kang, All Empires Must

One of the things I enjoy about writing these reviews is opening a collection or pamphlet of a poet whose work I don’t know and finding that I’m immediately drawn to it. That was my experience with Pete Strong’s Greenfinch (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, 2024). Even more enjoyable is returning to those poems and each time finding more in them. I have read Strong’s pamphlet several times and that is still my experience, such is the strength of the work.

The poems are concerned with discovery, of achieving a deeper understanding of the self and of the poet’s place in the world which he inhabits. Significantly, the title poem, Greenfinch, is a highly charged expression of discontent with the speaker’s life. He expresses a desire for something entirely different, the life of a greenfinch, which symbolises the happiness, fulfilment and love which has eluded him. He sums up his aspirations in the final line: ‘In my next life I want to be flying.’ He wants to be able to put his current concerns behind him, rise above them, find new perspectives upon life, but perhaps there is also a sense of wanting to escape, to ‘flee’. At the end of the collection, however, we meet an entirely different speaker in the poem, Maps.  He tells us that he carries a map, ‘not to find my way/ nor in case I get lost.’ No, he carries it, because the map ‘reminds me of who I am.’ This is a man who has found himself at last, one who has achieved a new perspective on life, so urgently desired in the former poem. Like the greenfinch in flight, he is able to look down upon the landscape, that is ‘a record of my soul’s use,’ which ‘has soothed like a lullaby/ these last few years. It is/ the portrait I have been painting each day.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Greenfinch’ by Pete Strong

A long time ago, when I first came across Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Sestina,” I didn’t realize that the title referred to the poem’s form. I thought that “Sestina” was, perhaps, the grandmother’s first name—a different form, if you will, of the name “Tina” – “In the failing light, the old grandmother / sits in the kitchen with the child.” 

Once I understood that a sestina is a specific poetic form, however, I decided I would write one. How hard could it be? Well, yeah. I’ve yet to write a sestina I was happy with. It’s a form that’s gotten the best of me every time.

The Handbook of Poetic Forms defines a sestina as having “six unrhymed stanzas of six lines each in which the words at the ends of the first stanza’s lines recur in a rolling pattern at the ends of all the other lines. The sestina then concludes with a tercet (three-line stanza) that also uses all six end-words, two to a line.” Although technically accurate, I think you will agree that this description leaves a lot to be desired, in terms of actually understanding how to write a sestina.

I was intrigued, therefore, by Terrance Hayes’s article, “Your Do-It-Yourself Sestina,” at the Poetry Foundation’s website. The subtitle perfectly reflected my feelings about the sestina: “I almost always anticipate failure or boredom when I attempt the sestina. It’s among my favorite forms.” It’s true, the sestina is one of my favorite forms, but as an admirer of other people’s work, not my own.

I enjoy writing in forms because, as Hayes puts it, “As in almost every excursion into form, I hope simply to be surprised and challenged.” Forms do surprise, and they certainly challenge. I love how the repeating lines of pantoums and villanelles create their own weird logic, and how a formal poem often delivers more poetic satisfaction than free verse. As Hayes writes, “The sestina’s numerological architecture and lexical repetition create a lyrical, potentially alchemical energy.” 

Erica Goss, Sea and Stars: Writing the Sestina

Well, we drove through multiple mountain ranges and wildfire smoke both ways in the five-hour drive to and from La Grande, Oregon. Average temperature? 92°F—with red flag-level winds. I’d never seen how empty most of the states of Oregon and Washington are east of the Cascade mountains. Lots of twisty mountain passes, then miles of semiarid scrub, barely a McDonalds or Starbucks to be found. La Grande, almost at the very Eastern end of Oregon, is a little mountainside oasis—a drive-thru Starbucks, little Eastern Oregon University, where the low-res MFA program held its New Nature Writing Conference. We made it there the first day and we were pretty exhausted, the heat and smoke were hard on my MS symptoms, so I barely had any sleep before I had to get up, dress, teach a class on Solarpunk poetry, and then get ready for a reading and Q&A. Immediately after, we turned around and made the five-hour drive home, barely getting through the mountains before the dark settled in, and once again chased by wildfire smoke. The faculty, staff, and students at EOU were warm and friendly, and I felt very welcomed and thankful to be invited to speak—especially on nature and ecology, which are definitely subjects I’m very interested in, but man, physically this trip was hard. […]

One question I was asked during my class was “how do you keep your optimism with things like these wildfire evacuations?” (One of my friends texted me during the class she was evacuating her nearby small town.) How do I keep optimism? I wish I could remember how exactly I answered. There are always reasons to hope, however slight, and though I consider myself a realistic optimist—or an optimistic pessimist—it is hard, though imperative, to keep a view of the light, however dim. Hayao Miyazaki—along with Octavia Butler—sort of the godfather and godmother of Solarpunk—have visions of the future that, although dark, contain seeds (Parable of the Sower puns here) of how it is possible to have a more equitable, balanced world where technology, humanity, plants and animals co-exist in peace—usually after an apocalypse. So, maybe it’s around the corner any day now?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Nature Writing Conference in La Grande, Oregon, Ecology and Hope, and Grateful for Home

When she ceased whispering, skin thin,
skin frail and still tough, skin holding
almost everything that matters …
when she ceased whispering, I was

wracked with coughs, choking on wildfire
smoke, invisible smoke crossing
invisible boundaries, smoke
I couldn’t smell. The forecast is

for more smoke, and more. The forecast
is for whispers leaving our lips
to take their own sweet time shifting
between states of matter, moving

from gas to water, rock to star.

PF Anderson, Saying Goodbye, Again

We are moving yet again — I can’t believe this is the second move just since I started this substack. (Ah, no, the years, O!) After three moves in the last four years, I sincerely hope this is it for a while. I’m aiming to get a longer post out as usual later this week, but here’s a topical poem as a placeholder just in case.

As is now traditional — very loyal and longstanding readers will remember the first iteration of this post back in September 2023 — this is my favourite “moving house” poem, Hardy’s ‘During Wind and Rain’. As an extra treat, I’ve given you the whole thing this time, even though it’s only really the last stanza that’s relevant today. […]

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

Here in Paris of course it’s not so much furniture on the lawn, as furniture teetering terrifyingly on the monte-charge as they haul it all up. I had to hide in a café for a few minutes while they did the piano, I couldn’t bear to watch.

Victoria Moul, No sudden moves (2)

It’s been raining daily for weeks now. Afternoon and evening thunderstorms crash and bellow and sometimes make me jump like a scalded dog. (Do you know in Britain they say “like a scalded cat.”) Afternoon thunderstorms in summer are common in New Orleans and actually welcomed as they cool things off a bit. But when days and days of rain pass it can get tiresome. I find myself yearning for the sun and, when it peeks out, I feel my mood lift. My tropical plants love all the rain and humidity and are growing like gangbusters but my poor tomatoes look droopy and weary. Too much rain. I’m giving up on tomatoes in the future. The last four summers have been a bust and I know it’s time to accept that I don’t have the tomato touch.

*

I wrote this bit of fluff one day in 2013 when it had been raining for days and the water was over the sidewalk, creeping into the yard, and someone’s dog was barking and barking.

On 13 Days of Rain

Hush now, dog! There’s nuthin’ on the front porch but an empty chair rockin’ in the rain spatter drippin’ off the roof. This ole house is creakin’ and growlin’ but it’s holdin’ tight as a tick. Swoll up clouds are kickin’ great balls of fire and the wind’s battin’ ‘em ‘round our heads. Thunder’s rappin’ an a-rollin’ a stanky leg ‘cross the sky. Yeah, it’s loud enough to wake the dead but they best stay sleepin’ lest they float away too.

Charlotte Hamrick, Women and Nature

I think of thunderstorms on days so hot we could just run around outside in sundresses or bathing suits, getting doused, or sit on a porch and read while the lightning flashed and the rain came down in torrents. And then have garden tomatoes and corn on the cob for dinner, and go outside after dusk arrived and chase fireflies in the wet grass. These are the kinds of things that I feel nostalgic about, though I am not generally a person who gives much energy to nostalgia. It has been awhile since I had enough unoccupied time on my hands that an hour on the back porch observing the rain seemed like a valuable thing to do.

But it is.

Anyway, here’s a prose poem from my book Abundance/Diminishment that I recalled to myself while I was watching the storm.

~~

Competition, Wet Summers

…so here’s this young woman practically in tears—it’s almost one o’clock
and raining harder than ever, thunder so close it’s practically grabbing us by the
shoulders and the lights dim inside each time the sky goes millisecond-bright.
It doesn’t feel like midday. Every stall is full and the horses aren’t happy.
We can hear the skittish ones hollering, pawing, kicking at the doors. It’s a squall,
I tell Sara; but she’s frustrated, fuming, has her tack cleaned and her dress breeches
on for a three o’clock show she’s convinced won’t happen now that all hell’s let
loose in the form of torrents and flash floods, and there’s a stream coursing from
the south door into the first bay of the stable—it looks like the River Jordan.

The roof leaks at a spot directly above her shampooed and just-groomed mare
and I’ve run out of cheery platitudes and patience; I just walk myself to the barn’s
far end, feel the rain splash up my legs from the puddle at the threshold, dripping
on my neck and face through rotten shingles. The wind stops. It’s a straight-
falling deluge and hot, a no-relief rain with big drops that bubble in temporary
pools of runoff by the wash stalls. The afternoon is green and grey, the puddles
a stirred-up brown, and I remember my former boss—thirty years ago—standing
in the type shop doorway on a day like this one. The look on his face was worse
than Sara’s, not frustration or mutiny but numb desolate recall, slack and empty.

“Man,” he said, “It used to rain like this in ’Nam.”

Ann E. Michael, Wet summers

It seems my sister and I have invented another tradition to go alongside our ‘sisters at the snooker’. Our new one is a July concert at Dreamland Margate. Last year we saw Suede and Manic Street Preachers and this year KT Tunstall and Texas. We are already wondering who we will see next year.

And breaking news… I can clap in time in certain circumstances! I have discovered that I can find that rhythm… when I am at an outdoor concert, when I really like the song, and when it’s been in my heart for a long time. Having not really ever been a clapper-alonger before this is worthy of a little celebration. My dancing is still a little on the wrong side of rhythmic, but I can clap along and jump up and down in a relatively beat driven way. There was plenty for me to get my hands in the air for at the concert, and lots of singing along too. […]

It feels apt to share a poem about clapping, but please note it is the kind of clapping at the opposite end of the continuum to the ones described above!

CLAPPING

You can hear your own clapping
louder than anyone else’s.
You are not matching the rhythm
of anyone in this room.
Soon they will be looking at you
willing you to stop.
You try to change the way
your hands hit one another
but you cannot unhollow the sound.

Sue Finch, ENTHUSIASTIC APPLAUSE

Maybe it’s because I’ve finished Novel No.5 and am letting it stew, because I’ve finished compiling the poetry collection and am thinking how best to take the next step to publication, there has been a pause in writing. No poems, no short stories, no stop-gap stream-writing.

We’re working on the smallholding, strimming areas where the flowers have died off, bringing in new hens, testing an old incubator, building a pig ark (arch), planning basic repairs and improvements. And, of course, watching Test cricket on TV and keeping an eye out for what comings-and-goings summer brings at West Bromwich Albion.

The previous life of a sports writer, latterly boxing, but before that cricket, football, swimming too, has long been consigned to history. For years I’ve been selling off, giving away, all the bits and pieces I hoarded over my career. It’s been nine years now and there are still books everywhere that I’ll never need to read or dip into again, reminders of a life that to some extent I don’t want to be reminded of.

I was ok as a writer. I got by. Earned a living. Travelled. Worked at the biggest world championship fights of my generation, worked alongside some fine writers, and felt the privilege of the lifestyle before, eventually, it nearly killed me.

Journalism has changed as technology has changed but I feel fortunate to have worked when I did, among people who wrote sport better than I did, from whom I learned, whose company I (mostly) enjoyed. I suspect press rooms, or media centres as they’re called now, are more anodyne places than they were, full of devices of one kind or another, not so full of raucous laughter and energetic arguments. The insults we traded in fun on a daily basis would give today’s HR people nightmares. Success is measured by the number of hits a story achieves. It’s the way it is. The meaning of expertise has been transformed. […]

Journalism is a different art to poetry, obviously. A proper journalist writes about other people, a subject outside of him or herself. A journalist, as have I told those who have asked to interview me on blogs and podcasts as I’ve become older, is not the story.

I’m fortunate that I have written all my life, have learned a craft, and adapted it as and when needs arose or the inclination took hold.

Now to sorting out the piles of old sports books that can go. A man is coming later this week because he believes some are worth sending to auction. I don’t know what he will choose, if any, but one thing is certain – he won’t be looking at the poetry section.

Bob Mee, AN UNEXPECTED TIME FOR REFLECTION

hair grows on the tops
of my feet. call me whatever comes to you.
i want to be a purple thing. a crepuscular self.
it is summer & i am not barefoot enough.
i use “he” pronouns like the tight shoes.
a gym class kind of word. i imagine
the “h” like a house with a chimney.
a place to go & take everything off.

Robin Gow, he/him

I have been unwell, and craving silence, surrounded by workmen and hubbub, and heat that leans on me like a nightclub beat. I cannot bear talk of politics, can no longer tolerate expressions of righteous indignation. I can’t listen to music I don’t make myself. Am mute in the face of idle chitchat. I am thinking about the impossibilities of communication, of directives, of explanation, excuses, of justifications, logic, of misplaced humor, thought-less jabber. Only this morning, wind on the water, wind among the many leaves, that susurration. The sound of clouds moving across a broad sky. That is all the sound I can stand right now. But maybe the whisper of fabric against fabric as you sit next to me here under this sky.

Marilyn McCabe, in a sudden strangeness

Non-head-injury-related aphasia is new to me. It’s been a strange month. Some parts of speechlessness are familiar, or bound to the age of 15, and some are new. Too new. Wandering through Ingeborg Bachmann’s lectures and nonfiction essays has been a solace, even though reading is strange: I begin a sentence and then lose my grip on it. Not even the most voluptuous syntax holds my attention. It’s as if words have lost their teeth. […]

I’m not sure why this is comforting to me. Perhaps summer, itself, has whisked this gluttony for comfort and silence into my head. But speechlessness gives me time to type old notebooks, which is how I discovered an essay draft from early last year titled “A Eurydice Who Limps: Analogy and Your Orpheus,” a glance at various textual and artistic treatments of the Orphic myth.

After typing up a bit of it today (while groaning over my terribly tiny handwriting), I dug up my copy of Maurice Blanchot’s essay, “The Gaze of Orpheus,” which turns Eurydice into an absence of light waves, rendering her the “profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night seem to lead,” dragging her silence into what Christian theologians would mark as “the fortunate loss,” a peculiar sort of metaphysical baggage that continues to haunt various religions as well as theory […]

Alina Stefanescu, “Language is punishment.”

Pull another chair. Let grief sit with
us like a friend. Let us tell it our
saddest dreams. Let us hold hands,
let us feel fire burn through us not
like flames but like a fever, feel cold
that chills, not like ice but like a tomb.

Just for a moment, destroy euphemisms,
masks, prettiness. Just for a moment, let
it be the beginning. Let it be raw. Let
it hurt. Let despair seep into ears and
eyes and skin. Allow the world its
ugliness. Allow the abyss its hungry
depth. Allow sorrow to hold us close.
Allow it to tell its side of the story.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, In which the terms are non-negotiable

This week: industrious bees, birds made of text, the rhizodont, International Pineapple Day, and much more. Enjoy.

Despite being long removed from my teenage years, I still think of summer as a time of transition or growth. You return to school in the fall to find out who got taller, weirder, or cooler; what new experiences people had, or friends they made or lost. This summer, I’ve decided instead of discovering something new, I would reclaim something lost. And so, after 28 years, since I first left home for college, I have picked up my flute again.

Through high school, despite knowing that I had no long-term musical ambitions, I was quite serious about it and performed with the local college flute choir until I graduated. (I even have a flute performance to thank for connecting me with my now husband.) I am not sure exactly why I stopped playing, other than my singular focus and obsession with becoming a writer. But, as I remember it, I put my flute away after my senior year ended, and it sat in its case, moving with me from city to city and home to home for decades. Ocassionally, my parents or in-laws would ask if I ever planned to play again, and I have always thought that I would, perhaps in some old lady orchestra. Yet still, my flute sat on the bottom shelf in the basement.

And then, earlier this spring, I had the opportunity to see contemporary dance legend Twyla Tharp’s newest work, which is set to music from Philip Glass that features the flute extensively. I left the performance wondering—what did my middle-aged brain remember, and could I be nearing a tipping point where, if I don’t start to reclaim what it remembers, I might lose it completely?

And so, a few weeks later, on a night when I had the house completely to myself and thus could embarrass myself privately, I went down to the basement and dug out my flute and all the sheet music I could find. Nervously, I assembled my flute and brought it to my lips, which to my great surprise instinctively formed an embouchure. I then gathered my yoga breath and put my fingers where I thought they might go to play a D. And what do you know? It made the sound I remembered, vibrato and all.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Who will you be at the end of the summer?

I’m trying out my boundaries and saying yes to more opportunities. Who knows, maybe I’ll even teach again? I don’t want to live my life in fear anymore, especially when the world is so uncertain around us. I can’t wave a magic wand and make everything better, but I can stop letting fear make my decisions.

So, I am starting a new class on essay writing, and I may try to put together a manuscript of essays. I may even try my hand at YA fiction after many years of avoiding it.

It starts inside us. If we are afraid of everything, we will not act in the way that’s probably the best for our lives. And our lives are so short! If you follow this blog, you may have noticed that I’ve been talking about the deaths of two friends in the last year. It made me realize that no matter how safe, how good, how many right things you do, you really can’t protect yourself, and in that case, why not: write the authentic truth about your life? Venture further out into areas that might not be exactly the best for your disability or food allergies but might be an excellent way to connect with a new community of writers? Why not try walking a little further every day in the lavender farm (or your local trail,) because maybe right now is the best my body will ever be? Why not stand up to bullies in politics, or befriend someone who is a little different form you, or read whatever books you like no matter who says they’re okay/appropriate? If I am a poet, why can’t I also write essays or fiction? Lots of my writer friends do this already. This made me think about the cages we put ourselves into, the prisons that are our routines or relationships that hurt us or a country that doesn’t value us, or people that don’t treat us with respect. Why not reach farther, try a little bit harder, face more risk?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New poems in Flare, Upcoming Appearances: Nature Writing Conference, Not Being Fearful, More Lavender and Hummingbirds

i tell my doctor that i don’t want him
recording any more information about me
being trans. i think of a running bible of
my body. what kinds of notes has he taken
over the years? did he note
when i first grew a full beard? did he record
the times i came in a dress & the times
i did not. i look up diy hormones.
one website has a list of rituals.
go out to the forest & perform one & feel
nothing has changed. what level of belief
do you need for a gender ritual to take?

Robin Gow, 6/29

Michigan “writer, editor, educator, dancer, and, more importantly, learner” Leigh Sugar’s full-length poetry debut is Freeland (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), a collection that opens with the information that “Freeland, Michigan is home to the Saginaw Correctional Facility, a Michigan state prison.” Framed as “an impossible love story,” Freeland “examines the unbreakable bond between the author and an incarcerated writer.” As the press release continues: “Drawing critical connections between personal and family history, the Jewish diaspora, and the racial imaginary of whiteness, Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. Expanding out to touch on her own experiences with mental illness and disability, Freeland is a devastating and urgent testimony of love across the physical, political, and social boundaries of the prison industrial complex, interrogating questions of abolition, race, solitude, and memory in poems that simultaneously embody and resist formal structures.”

I’m intrigued by the narrative tensions that Sugar achieves, layering multiple story-elements across carved, crafted lines, allowing the multiple narrative threads an interplay, writing on loss, love, grief and language, wrapping in threads of family story, poetics and how best one might articulate across such potentially vast distances. As she writes as part of the extended sequence “FREELAND: AN ERASURE”: “Not even Eliot or Pound approach the melancholy weapon oof the punitive form. // In profile, I separate from this justice. // Tattoo economy pens my skin into a letter. // Dear anyone.” Freeland exists as an interesting counterpoint to other contemporary literary titles that have explored the prison system, whether Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng writing her father through the poetry collection Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen’s This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications (HarperCollins, 2017), or the collaborative study between photographer Deborah Luster and the late American poet C.D. Wright, One Big Self: an investigation (Lost Roads, 2003; Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007) [see my review of such here]. Sugar centres her specifics around the abstract of human space and interaction, connection and disconnection, composing a lyric of deeply-crafted lines that braid lived experience, whether by the narrator or her “beloved,” across a poetics around human connection, even and especially amid such punitive disruption. “A smile,” she writes, to open the poem “REPRESSION,” “when the officer commands I stop // touching you. The space between shame // and pleasure shorter than the scythe- // shaped stretch of shoulder // revealed when my shirtsleeve slips off // the me whose swift hands leave your neck to right the slip // then return to my own lap. I sag, // guilty, still, still under the camera.”

rob mclennan, Leigh Sugar, Freeland

I can’t think of two busy places that are more different. Even in the crowded, electric areas of Tokyo, even in Shibuya with its famous scramble, there was a sort of order, a vibe that was polite and even hushed in the train stations and on the streets. Nashville, on the other hand, was a cacophony. Neon signs announcing celebrity bars flanked both sides of Broadway. Each one had a band playing and, although I’m sure the bands could be distinctly heard inside the bars, outside on the sidewalk, it was an assault of drums and chords. Every inch of real estate around the Country Hall of Fame and the Ryman was filled with restaurants and retail stores, and there were apartment complexes with more retail spaces under construction everywhere we turned.

It made me consider how some words embody different meanings. Both of these places are tourist destinations and therefore are busy. Synonyms for busy fall into both negative and positive connotations. Negative? Strenuous, hectic, tiring, swarming, teeming. More positive? Energetic, active, lively, bustling, vibrant, buzzy. A few that could be either?Astir, thronging, eventful, crowded. (I just re-read what I wrote up above, and —order, vibe and hushed versus cacophony and assault — it’s pretty clear which experience of busy I preferred.) But even the most accurate words sometimes aren’t enough.

This is part of the difficulty of writing about a place that you do not claim as your own. Your biases come through in language, even when you are trying to simply convey, perhaps, a narrative or a description that struck you in your travels. I have traveled a lot, and well-meaning people always say, “It must give you so much to write about!” Not really. I find that I struggle to write in a meaningful way about travel much of the time. I started three pieces of writing while in Japan and decided to do what I do at home—let something in my surroundings serve as an entry point to a bigger idea or theme rather than to write directly about the experience of traveling. We’ll see how it works.

Donna Vorreyer, travelogue, part 2

A couple of weeks ago I did a reading with Peter Kenny at at Arundel Arts Junction, a lovely eclectic event which also included a comic improv act, jazz for keyboard and sax, a photography presentation and more – it’s all happening in Arundel, people!

Peter and I are doing another joint reading at In-Words this coming Tuesday 24th June from 7.30 at West Greenwich Library, together with fellow Telltale Poet Sarah Barnsley. As well as reading our poems we’ll also be chatting & taking questions about Telltale Press. It’s free, and there are refreshments – come if you can!

Yesterday I was reading in the home of a very good friend. She basically asked me to come and talk about the book, and read a few poems, for a group of her friends. Susan’s enthusiasm and unwavering support for my work are both astonishing. So there I was with a small group of women, telling them a bit about the book, reading some of the poems and answering questions. It was a lovely intimate event. And I sold ten books! Much gratitude to Susan.

Robin Houghton, Book promo: readings, reviews, articles… plus other stuff

Bradford Literature Festival is my favourite festival. It’s immense – massive enough to have its own road signs – but at the same time it makes Bradford into a friendly literature village, where everyone knows everyone, including some of the biggest brightest stars in literature. Plus they have the best Green Room with the best buffet, and a free-to-passholders restaurant with the greatest curry and jugs of lassi.

The first time I worked at the festival, I sat in that restaurant filling my face and chatting to a lovely friendly woman. Eventually, I asked her name, and what she was doing at the festival – to my mortification she turned out to be the festival founder and director, Syima Aslam. Hundreds of events across the city, and an education and outreach programme running throughout the year – but she still has the time and grace to chat.

All of which is to say, that when they invite me to run discussion panels, I always agree.

Clare Shaw, Did The Great Gatsby change your life?

Due in large part to preparing for my book launch events, my reading became much less systematic in the last two months, which is probably no bad thing. […]

On the poetry front, I’ve been reading a couple of books for reviewing, plus others. I bought – again belatedly – a copy of Julia Copus’s most recent (2019) collection, Girlhood, as I always like her poetry. The first poem ‘The Grievers’, available here, is an absolute belter, which beautifully conveys how grief shape-shifts. I love these lines: ‘We steady our own like an egg in the dip of a spoon, / as far as the dark of the hallway, the closing door.’ This and the other 11 poems – including a trademark specular (the form Copus invented) – which constitute the book’s first section are all excellent, showcasing her knack for choosing surprising, just-so words and for making sharp, but not daft, line-breaks. The book’s second and larger section inventively dramatises the interactions between Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst and philosopher, and Marguerite Pantaine, perhaps his most famous case study. It’s a sequence which needs to be read at least twice, I think, to yield its treasures.

Matthew Paul, May and June reading

Sarah Imrisek and I exhibited an interactive video work (BIRD FICTION) at the recent Hamilton Arts Week. I wrote music and poems and Sarah worked her visual and programming wizardry and made a very cool and beautiful projection that responded to the audience’s hand movements.

Our installation also included the video that I’m sharing here. It takes a text about Hamilton, Ontario that I’ve posted below and turns it into the flight of flying birds—the birds are made of text. If you don’t want to watch the entire thing, you can watch a bit and then skip forward to past halfway where the way the birds are made of text changes.

Gary Barwin, THE SKY ABOVE HAMILTON, ONTARIO WAS EMPTY

Yesterday ended with a bike ride to the top of Alpine Road, along a little, but valiantly running creek, a creek whose water supply is replenished, even in summer, by coastal fog. I love the sound of water running over stones, but it isn’t always enough to distract myself when climbing the steepest hills, I recite poems to myself; it’s remarkably effective at taking my mind off how out-of-breath I am, especially on the last three or four really steep, sharp turns.

I was reminded of this again this morning by Victoria Moul, a Paris-based poet, classicist and critic, whose all-things-poetry substack I love reading. And one of the things on my list of things to do this weekend is to read her interview with on another substacker, Henry Oliver whose Common Reader is, thanks to Victoria, a new discovery. In it Victoria recounts reciting poems (to herself?) during dental visits and childbirth. Aha, I thought, so I’m not the only one.

It interests me how I can distract my mind from hills-on-bikes and other things (insomnia) by reciting poems to myself. The oldest poem I remember learning by heart is from a high school assignment to learn and say out loud in front of the class ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ not the most cheerful lines I know. Recently I refreshed my memory of ‘Loveliest of Trees’ (Housman), pairing it with Frost’s ‘Whose woods they are.’ Dental visits don’t bother me, but I wish I’d known this mind-distracting technique when I was bringing children into the world.

Beverley Bie Brahic, California Bay Area, Saturday 28 June, 2025

All lines of the poem arrive, perfect in itself
except that it needs to be written. The gestalt
in a swift and complete vision. Start. Where.
So many words crowd the mouth. Also tongue-tied.

Jill Pearlman, USHA

All poets/writers periodically hit a moment where things stall: you finish something, a poem, a novel, a piece of writing that’s taken as much energy as you can give it, and you sit back and it feels as if there’s no more to be done, nothing else to be dragged out of the mind and body and put into words.

When it happens to me, as it just has, I tend to read, explore the work of others more than usual, or just get on with life – the stuff without which I couldn’t write anything useful anyway. […]

The meadow is full of wild flowers, so I’ve kept the mowing to a minimum, just a strip by the blackberry hedge bordering the woods where the family can put their tents when they want to camp there. We also have a young male deer who has taken to using the cover as a suitable place to rest. Unfortunately, his self-preservation instincts mean if he spots us he jumps up and tears off in, it seems, any old direction, bounding through the pens where the bees and hens live. Still, he’s welcome for as long as he chooses to stay. As usual, there are always a host of jobs to do in the woods now the bluebells and orchids are over. The hide/ tree house needs to be repaired after some stray miscreants had fun trying to wreck it but I need one of my son-in-laws’ help with that. So much to do!

Apart from that, oh yes, poetry. I read a couple of dull books by what the Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski called, in his poem Potato Thief, ‘cardboard cut-out poets’. Saarikoski interests me because he made enough noise to be famous young, was both a radical, political participant and a chameleon-like figure who played both the hero and anti-hero as he drank and partied his way through four marriages, and perhaps inevitably, died young. I suppose I admire poets who are confident enough socially to try to make a difference. I can only attempt to make a small difference, through the writing of poetry, given that I struggle more and more these days to speak when faced by groups of people (football excepted, but the vocal stuff I indulge in then is more often than not confined to howls of blue-and-white-striped dismay at the latest crazy, wrong, anti-Albion decision by an official…)

I also enjoyed a short poem called Temptation by the Romanian poet Nina Cassian in my ‘anthology of the moment’ from 2010, The Ecco Anthology Of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris of Words Without Borders. It’s fulfilling to explore its 500-plus pages and follow up on the poets I like. I have an anthology of Romanian poetry but Cassian isn’t in there, so I shall go off in search of more of her work.

Writing poems will come again, but not yet.

Bob Mee, OK, SO WHAT NOW?

I’ve had a mighty struggle this past few weeks to do even a minimum of writing (determined to catch up this week…we will see, and, after that, to begin blogging again). Reading obsessively about dementia, getting lost in political news…these things do not seem especially helpful to me.

On the other hand, reading poetry, and reading and listening to poets and creatives about their work is one of my go-to solaces. So here are two things. The first was shared by my good friend Francine, and I’m amazed at the prescience of this 2011 interview with Bill Moyers, who died last week at age 91. Though the news is dire, it’s good to know that such people have been walking this trail before us. It gives me hope.

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/27/rip_bill_moyers

I’m also reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön — given to me by my friend Therese — and I highly recommend it.

When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. (p. 7)

By “concretize,” I think the author means, don’t grasp, don’t turn it into thoughts or anything you can hold on to. Let it be as amorphous as it is. Just be with all of it.

The third source is the incomparable PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA from Poetry Unbound. Clicking on his name should take you straight to his most recent substack. Here are a few lines toward the end of Dunya Mikhail’s poem, which Padraig shares in full:

I don’t know why the birds
sing
during their crossings
over our ruins.
Their songs will not save us,
although, in the chilliest times,
they keep us warm…

I don’t know why either, but when I’m outside, walking, at 6 a.m., I listen for them just the same.

Bethany Reid, What I’m Reading

This morning, I was walking and texting a friend who has been mostly homebound recovering from hip replacement surgery.  We talked about 19th century writers who wrote in bed and wondered how they could do that.  We talked about 19th century approaches to dental care.

But most important, we talked about the best ways to remain human in an age of AI and how to create projects for students that keep them embodied–and to create assignments that are more cheating resistant.  I talked about Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and got the idea of having students compare them to Thoreau’s Walden Pond journal.  I want them also to keep a journal to see what it’s like and then write about it all.

It was a good text exchange.  Of course, we’re looking forward to a time when we can meet face to face, but that’s not this summer.  I think it’s funny that we were texting about 19th century writers who kept painstaking journals.  There might be a seed of a poem there.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sunrise Walks and Texts and Teaching Ideas

The ‘rhizodont’ which provides the title for Katrina Porteous’ fourth collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) is not some niche root-canal dental work, but a large predatory species of fish, which became extinct 310 million years ago. It’s thought to be the first creature to transition from water to land and hence the ancestor of all four-limbed vertebrates (including humans). The poems here are divided into two superficially very separate books (titled ‘Carboniferous’ and ‘Invisible Everywhere’) but what Porteous insists holds them together is her exploration of this notion of transition. As ‘#rhizodont’ puts it, ‘We’re all on a journey’, and the ambition of this book touches upon transformations various: geological, natural, industrial, cultural (and linguistic) and technological. There can be no faulting the ambition of this and there are many fine poems, though Porteous insists on Notes explaining a great deal of what she is doing/writing about which gives the whole a rather teacherly quality that will divide her readership. […]

The longer ‘Carboniferous’ section is loosely glued together by a geographical journey from the former coalmining communities of East Durham, moving up the Northumberland coast to Holy Island. This is familiar territory, important to Porteous’ earlier collections, and she again writes well (with great local knowledge) of the geological conditions that have eventually given rise to the important fishing and mining industries (and cultural communities) in the area. Both industries are now in decline and in ‘A Short Walk from the Sea’s Edge’, while the older folk still use ‘old words’ (like stobbie, skyemmie, and gowdspink), the younger generation ‘checks in with Insta before school’. This also illustrates Porteous’ belief that the post-war generations’ transition ‘from analogue to digital technologies’ is a particularly dividing and challenging shift such that ‘the analogue island we lived on’, will seem as incomprehensible as ‘Latin and Greek’ to future generations (‘Hermeneutics’).

Martyn Crucefix, Katrina Porteous’ most recent Bloodaxe collection, ‘Rhizodont’, reviewed.

I think sometimes about how every “period” we perceive in history was a bunch of people’s present. How this period we are in will be parsed by some future historians who will be able to see a larger trajectory of time and circumstance that we cannot see, we here, inside this moving vessel of the present-that-will-be-history. Already people are positing just how we ended up here, in these situations we find ourselves in. But we cannot see what happens next, so can only understand the story up until now. Some of us will die without seeing how the next bit transpires — whenever it is, that next bit. We may not even understand it’s happening until afterward. When we look around and think wow, that was a wild ride. But we’ll, of course, also be caught up in the present of that present, unable to see how that unfolds. Here in this present, it scares me to read about other period in history and how long it takes them to shift to something else. Or I suppose it depends on the nature of the “something else.” Things could get worse. Things could get better. Only that bastard, time, will tell.

The thing is: we’re all in this together, we present-dwellers. I have a photo of my mother in Africa. The tour bus has gotten mired in mud or something, and she and the guides and some of the other old ladies on the trip are all muscling the bus, trying to rock it from its spot. It cracks me up, this photo. But it’s spot on. One minute we’re sitting all faced forward, stewing in our juices, and the next we’ve tumbled out to shove, we strangers and friends and enemies and fellow travelers. I wish we were all shoving in the same direction, though. That’s what I wish.

I found this wonderful poem on the recent issue of 2 Rivers. I love its quirky perspective, how the poem plays with the situation it describes, and enlarges it to encompass the whole world of life.

Marilyn McCabe, into a bottomless future, a cold ocean of absolute unknowing.

The opening anaphora — “Always” — commits the poem to a time beyond time, a claim of futurity. In the second stanza, the “But” seems to undo this commitment by suggesting we can never really speak to anyone except ourselves. Words, as Bachmann sees them, are useless communicative vessels. Or else: they are things which taste doubly, as sound itself does a thing to the mind.

Reading this poem for sound rather than meaning, I thought of the Greek word diaspon, which is short for diapason chordon (“through all the strings”). Diaspon refers to harmony, or a harmonious combination of notes, and it draws meaning from the Pythagorean system, which holds that the world is a piece of harmony in which man is the full chord.

John Dryden used this word in the first stanza of “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687”:

From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.

After providing his song with seven stanzas, Dryden concludes it with a “Grand Chorus” that binds heaven and earth, or the visible and invisible, through chorale. The poem dresses up as religiosity but I think what it does is closer to the spiritual, or that metaphysical plane Dryden occupied. The “Grand Chorus” allows sounds to interpenetrate one another, diluting the sensed distance between one and “an other” in that “last and dreadful hour,” when time itself (that “hour”) “shall devour” “this crumbling pageant”:

The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.

Italic mine. How are we “tuned” towards making music that separates the seen from the felt? How is a poem “tuned”, so to speak, in order to articulate particular images or structure its desires through the deployment of rhetoric?

Alina Stefanescu, “It tastes of both.”

In Odes 4.2, Horace contrasts his small-scale, precise literary style with the grandeur of Pindar — one version of many similar statements in Latin literature of this period (also in Virgil and Propertius, for instance) about the choice between the grand style of epic and panegyric and the smaller or narrower style of elegy, lyric and epigram, associated particularly with Callimachus.

In the middle of Odes 4.2, Horace describes himself as a ‘Matine bee’:

Multa Dircaeum levat aura cycnum,
tendit, Antoni, quotiens in altos
nubium tractus; ego apis Matinae
more modoque

grata carpentis thyma per laborem
plurimum circa nemus uvidique
Tiburis ripas operosa parvus
carmina fingo.
(25-32)

A great gale lifts up the Dircean swan,
O Antonius, whenever he makes for the lofty
tracts of clouds: but I, after the custom and manner
of the Matine bee,

gathering the welcome thyme by constant
labour about the grove and the banks
of the watery Tiber, though small, I craft
highly-wrought songs.

Horace’s meticulous bee is contrasted with the ‘full-flood’ style of Pindar — and of Iulus Antonius, the younger poet he’s addressing. (Although because the poem opens with a famously impressive imitation of the grand Pindaric style, Horace’s supposed disavowal is really an example of having your cake and eating it too: showing that he could do Pindaric style if he wanted to.)

Odes 4.2 was one of the single best-known Horatian odes in the seventeenth century, printed in every edition of Pindar as well as of Horace, and it is cited in pretty much every discussion, no matter how basic, of literary style. Marvell’s Garden and Hortus date probably from the mid-1650s, just exactly the time at which Cowley was writing his Pindariques and Pindaric form in both English and Latin was the height of fashion. Indeed, Cowley’s Pindaric Odes contains a partial translation of Odes 4.2. Here is Cowley’s version of the relevant passage of Odes 4.2, which he — like Marvell — makes the end of his poem (though in Horace it comes in the middle):

How th’obsequious Wind, and swelling Ayr
The Theban Swan [i.e. Pindar] does upwards bear
Into the walks of Clouds, where he does play,
And with extended Wings opens his liquid way.
Whilst, alas, my tim’erous Muse
Unambitious tracts pursues;
Does with weak unballast wings,
About the mossy Brooks and Springs;
About the Trees new-blossom’ed Heads,
About the Gardens painted Beds,
About the Fields and flowery Meads,
And all inferior beauteous theings
Like the laborious Bee,
For little drops of Honey flee,
And there with Humble Sweets contents her Industrie.

This is such a famous passage that any poem ending with the ‘industrious bee’, as Marvell’s does — a phrase in fact very close to Cowley’s ‘laborious’ — immediately recalls Horace’s poem. This matters I think for two reasons that are often underplayed in discussions of Marvell’s poem. First, because the bee stands for the poet, and a poet adopting one particular style over another; and secondly, because Horace’s poem is specifically and explicitly about how to choose a style for political praise.

Victoria Moul, Who planted Marvell’s garden?

Last week I attended a candelight memorial for slain legislative leader, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, at the Minnesota State Capitol, in St. Paul. The next day I started working on an elegy in her honor, and began thinking about the etymologies of her first and last names : “honeybee” and “gardener”. Which reminded me of one of Osip Mandelstam’s most famous poems, written in 1920… and so my elegy grew into a kind of widderruf of Mandelstam echoes.

Henry Gould, Melissa Hortman : in Memoriam

The bee is here. The spider.
The thicket is alive, and crawling.
Green with jewelweed to salve 
rashes from the thicket’s
poison ivy. Green with prickly
horsenettle, coarse pokeberry,
the brilliant, twining nightshade:
        thickets sweat poisons
        as well as fruits.

Ann E. Michael, Blackberries

Sometimes the world seems like a dark circle within a dark circle within a dark circle forever and ever, amen. I think I have a story hunger. Stories that will make sense of the things I know.

Saturday I ran on the beach. Every beach run is a memento mori. I don’t know how to explain why it makes me feel calm. The beating of the waves. The screaming birds. The dead jellyfish, birds, crabs, fish.

And the absurdity! Saturday, a pineapple was left by the tide.

Funny that being that close to all the death, brings me back to life.

Ren Powell, Story Hunger

I had no idea it was International Pineapple Day until Kate mentioned it in her LinkedIn post and I loved the serendipity of the fact there was a poem on my desk with pineapples in it. I took this along to share, and I must say that being described as “The Perfect Guest”, was a wonderful comment to tuck safely in my confidence pocket. If I hadn’t had a poem I would have taken a tin of pineapple from the cupboard and celebrated that, but the poem was just the thing for a poet coach to take along. Kate and I had a wonderful chat about poetry and coaching and it put an extra sparkle into my Friday.

The poem was on my desk because Louise Longson had invited me to be one of her guests for her poetry event ‘Last Saturday’. This invite also widened my knowledge of celebration/commemoration days and I chose to follow up on the following themes that Louise mentioned when writing to me: World Sand Dune Day, Insect Week, Armed Forces Celebration Day and Pride. It felt good to put together poems to match the different themes and try them out together in a zoom room.

Sue Finch, A GREEN CARNATION

The main activity of the day was a game of Musical Inks. We had brought our brushes from last month, various inks and large sheets of paper. We splotched and doodled (and danced) until the music stopped. We passed our sheet to the person on our left, and began again. A wonderful exercise in spontaneity and non-attachment. I love making rhythmical marks to music. When twelve large sheets had been passed around the table we had a break for lunch, which was sumptuous and exotic as usual. […]

Then the inks and brushes were packed away and we went to work with white emulsion, blanking out parts of our own and other people’s sheets. Lastly we added to our own sheets a few more marks made with sticks, grass, feathers and so on. We’ll bring books made from these sheets to our next meeting, on July 19th.

On the way home, Jane and I stopped at the Somerset Rural Life Museum to see the current exhibition, entitled Tractored by Beetles: six artists display works inspired by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Fugitives’ dedicated to the National Landscapes of the UK. It’s on until Sept 14th; do see it if you can. I love Fiona Hingston‘s work Petiole, a response to a particular woodland close to her home. I’d seen this work before, in her studio during Art Weeks. The way it was displayed in the SRLM, the archive boxes covering a table isolated in the middle of the room, gave the work the space it needed.

Ama Bolton, ABCD June 2025

What are we trying to capture in our writing? A snapshot of the moment or something of the feeling connected to an event? I ask because on finishing the piece on peat-gathering I remembered an early comment from the poet Robert Minhinnick. ‘Even in your bad poems, there’s still the grit in the wash.’ It was kind, forgiving criticism to three underwhelming poems that I proffered to him on a writing retreat in the north of Scotland. A poem potentially having grit in the wash seems a lovely idea. The expression comes from the time of handwashing clothes, when you added grit to the water and lather so that its abrasiveness would help the removal of mud or stubborn grime. The phrase taps into something else a poet might capture or preserve: not the snapshot or the view or the observable but, instead, the texture of the moment. Writing, in this gesture, becomes an attempt to make some past world touchable again.

Niall Campbell, On Writing for the Hands

Many journals, even those that charge submission fees, have fee-free (and even deadline-free) options for reviews. Quite a few will send you a selection from their list of books they’d like to have reviewed. Once you’ve proven yourself to a journal, you might become one of their regular review-writers, a position that definitely improves your visibility. In my experience, journals will respond sooner to a review submission, since they want to secure a review of a new book ahead of others. Some journals even pay for reviews.

Believe it or not, writing reviews is – yes – fun. Or, it should be. To keep it fun for me, I choose books that I enjoy. I want my review to convey that enjoyment to the reader, not turn them off from reading the book. I look at reviewing as a way to open the book for people who might enjoy it, not turn them off. I avoid the negative review whenever possible. […]

The type of review I usually write is one I call “the exploratory review.” As I wrote in “Erica Goss’s Guide to Writing Poetry Book Reviews,” this type of review “combines elements of narrative, description, and exposition. In the exploratory review, the book leads the way instead of the reviewer.” (You can get the guide free with a subscription to Sticks & Stones, which is also free.)

As critic David Ulin puts it, “In the best reviews, the book is just a starting point, which is not an argument for self-indulgence but for its opposite: the deep dive, the conversation on which all literature (and yes, book reviews are a form of literature, or should be) depends.” 

For more on these topics, see my blog post, How I Review a Poetry Collection.

I also wrote an article for the 2/3/24 issue of Funds for Writers: Expand Your Writing Practice With Book Reviews.

Happy reviewing!

Erica Goss, How to Become a Poetry Book Reviewer

I come to you on the other side of frantic and chaotic wedding planning. On the other side of a few weeks of daily poem writing feverishly to deal with the stresses of that, on a micro level, and the world around us on a macro level. While both the poems and the wedding celebration worked out well (even despite the extreme heat that forced us, very last minute, inside a bar/banquet hall for our woodland whimsigoth vibe picnic) this week has been about resetting, cleaning a chaotic apartment, and trying to get my ducks forever in a row on projects and layouts, as well as charting a path forward through the rest of the summer in terms of timelines.

And since it’s summer officially now, that only means that spooky season, the high holy months of September-November, are right around the corner. which I have many delights planned in the form of New Orleans vampire brides and dystopian robot women. But there is still some spooky left for summer in the form of cursed coastal towns and sideshow horrors in some upcoming e-zine action, so watch for those…

Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat

I’m hoping to get a load of new drafts out of this break – it does seem to be a time when I get lots done, so fingers-crossed the notes, and scraps turn into something. I’d like 10 -15 new ideas drafted, but let’s see. Writing has to sit alongside just relaxing, reading, consuming Efes, swimming, snoozing, eating, consuming Efes, etc.

I saw Robin Houghton, Sarah Barnsley and Peter Kenny read at West Greenwich Library on Tuesday. All were excellent. it was lovely to see Robin again, and to put bodies to the voices and emails of Peter and Sarah (Thanks again to Sarah for her kind words about CtD in The Frogmore Papers).

I have to say a massive thank you to Kevin Scully and the crowd at Cowden Pound for having me three to read on Thursday just gone. It was a joy to read in such a lovely pub, with such a lovely crowd. The open mic part of the ending was exceptionally strong, and Kevin is a wonderful host. Note to self, if you want to sell books please remember to tell the audience you’ve brought some with you before the end of the reading…**Slaps forehead**

Mat Riches, I could do with an OOO (out of office)

I’m happy to (tentatively) report that my writing mojo has (shakily) returned. Maybe I needed the fallow time during the week I was bed-bound with my back to think, just think, without writing it all down. In the past week I’ve started reading and writing from Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy and started participating in Kathy Fish’s Flash Extravaganza workshop. So far, I’ve done one or the other every day.

June has been a month of changes and challenges for me, not all on the positive side, either. Reading, music, and, yes, TV have pushed me through it.

Charlotte Hamrick, June Listopia 2025

I realise I’ve not been posting many haiku recently, although I’m just about to submit some of mine to the British Haiku Society’s journal, Blithe Spirit. Contributors have also been asked to select a summer poem from the journal’s archive and I’ve chosen this one by by Matthew Paul:

BHS vol 63, Aug 1996

almost anonymous
yellow ladybird
in sun-dried grass

I love the quiet simplicity of this poem, especially the word ‘anonymous’, which seems to suggest, both ‘unnamed’ and ‘overlooked’ – as insects often are, unless we come into direct contact with them.

Around five years ago, reading Matthew Paul’s collection, The Lammas Lands (Snapshot Press, 2015) inspired me to keep having a go at haiku (they were a diversion from writing more mainstream poetry at the time). Then Presence published a haiku of mine and I was bitten by the bug. Haiku took over, or rather my way of living altered slightly, and haiku became a big part of that.

My way of living has recently altered again. After Easter I took what seemed to be the momentous decision to retire. I handed in my notice – one month was the requirement – and suddenly, freedom. More time for dog walks, banjo practice, reading, writing, drawing, gardening, yoga etc. These are all things I was doing while I was working, so really there’s not much change, but I have more time now, and can do stuff in greater depth. That’s what’s been so satisfying, being able to take my time and do things properly. We’ve even fitted a couple of camping weekends in.

Julie Mellor, Summer poems

What does a “metabolically literate” poetics look like in this time of deforestation, of plastic islands, of melting ice caps and wayward storms? How can we, as writers, readers, breathers, enlist the help of the four winds, which seem, at times, to have turned against us with their tornados and hurricanes, raging at our immaturity, our hubris, our willful illiteracy? This is a question I want to conspire around with you, with other poets, with the trees themselves. A question to breathe with rather than to answer. But from my explorations, I suspect this poetry is a poetry tuned into the breath, a poetry that moves like a steady wave, that doesn’t rush to declare itself, but that listens, and speaks, and then listens again. It is a poetry that may happen further from the click of the keyboard and the glow of the screen, and closer to the lungs, the trees, our shared body. A brave and humble poetics that–like the young heroes who find themselves at the house of the North Wind—is willing to offer itself in order to receive.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Tree Conspiracy

i will know it
    outside the dream
when it comes
    behind the calm
because it breathes

Grant Hackett [no title]

When my dad was entering what we now know, but didn’t then, were the last months of his life, we spent much time travelling between Scarborough and Hull for chemo appointments. I’d drive, my dad would talk. The further down the cancer route we got, the more his memories returned to the family farm, the route to the town, stories of what it was to live on the land and off the land and with the land. Stories from his own childhood. He himself, though he had run a small holding of his own, had not farmed since his mid teens when he’d left the family farm to become a Rington’s tea van driver. The narrative was so strong though, the stories like tethers that brought him back; the pull to place like the magnetic forces that bring geese back to their home grounds.

When the operation that he had ran into complications, and he was intubated and unconscious and we talked to him in the hope of calling him back, it was to the land and the work that still needed to be done – the apples ripening, the chicken houses in need of fixing, the sun pooling on the stone bench next to his fish pond awaiting his return there for his morning coffee. But we couldn’t bring him back.

When I wrote about it, later, in my poetry collection, I wrote of him being called back to a childhood in which he had to bring the cows in. I created a version of him that was too busy with farm chores to leave off and return to us. My mum, when she talked of him in the beginning of that most long and dark road through grief, talked of him as the tawny owl in the field that called and called and received no answer.

I wonder if he heard us, through the fog of induced coma, if he knew we were there, holding his hands, when the life support was switched off and he drifted away from us to wherever it was. When I think of those moments now, it is as an observer. As if I was taking notes on my own life experience, ready to create this new narrative, this continuation of a family narrative so attached to place. In fact, here I am, creating the narrative of this time, shaping and re-shaping and feeling the pull of something like home, but a home that has never really been.

When we came back from Thirsk and I dropped my mum off to their small holding and my dad’s grave in the field; the grave that he had specifically asked for, and which had been a nightmare of logistics, the last crazy dad request of his life, the last risk taken, the last fuck you to any sense of normalcy, I returned with a sense of peace and with a sense of gratitude for the stories, the history I get to travel on with.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: My Dad’s Last Days Spent Dreaming of the Family Farm

“The people of Israel, Gaza, and Iran are human beings. No one deserves to live under constant rocket, missile, and drone fire.” These are words from Standing Together / עומדים ביחד / نقف معًا that landed deeply in my heart. “This is not a football game. This is real life, and entire worlds are being shattered day after day.” How much more can our hearts take? And what can we do?

Standing Together is raising funds to bring bomb shelters to underserved Bedouin communities in the south of Israel. NATAL provides trauma support in Israel. The PCRF feeds and supports children in Gaza, and the Sameer Project provides food, shelter, and medical aid. And United4Iran has a fund for survivors of the Iran-Israel war, and their work is well-respected.

Giving tzedakah is meaningful, and in Jewish tradition all are commanded to give tzedakah, even we who receive tzedakah ourselves. But I know what I can afford to donate barely touches the ocean of need. Primarily what I feel able to do is internal. I pray for peace. I extend support to the human beings I know, and I try to extend compassion to the ones I don’t know. […]

I keep coming back to the Amichai poem about turning the swords not only into plowshares but into musical instruments, which I have on a poster on the wall in my office. As difficult as it might be to hammer an instrument of war into an instrument of music, I think it might be more difficult to hammer and reshape the human heart into one that truly beats for justice and for peace. 

Rachel Barenblat, The Best We Can Be: Korah 5785 / 2025

On the eve of his execution in 1896,
he wrote a long poem which his sisters smuggled
out of his cell in a cocinilla: fourteen stanzas,
each with five lines. He called it his last
farewell— Mi último adiós. We had to memorize
at least half of it. It was so hot, and we
were tired of memorizing, so we thought
of going to the corner store to buy more
snacks. With a dramatic flourish, I called out, “Mi
último adiós!”— which made my mother and aunt,
making dinner in the kitchen, drop whatever they
were holding and shriek— Take that back,
take it back, don’t you ever say that again!

Luisa A. Igloria, Very Superstitious

my favourite dream
blossoms falling and falling 
on our riverboat 

Jim Young [no title]

This week: the flower phone, the broken timepiece, World Early Stroll Day, the romantic lives of badgers, and much more. Enjoy,

Tell me of the things you love, I invite. Let’s let rest the things we don’t. And I say this to myself. Again. I offer this blog up week after week as a positive act, and hope you will forgive, and I will forgive myself for, well, all the other stuff.

And I think again, and mention again in this blog, this poem. Its capacity for gazing, unblinking, at guilt, and at the possibility for forgiveness, never fails to leave me gasping. The narrator seeing himself and his father with new eyes, the father’s angers, the son’s resentments, but the poem opens itself up to mercy: the son now sees anew the father, and the act of writing the poem opens the author too to forgiveness of his own callousness in the face of the complicated father’s acts of care.

And this is, again, what poems can do. They can walk beside us to whisper into our ear, through the din, messages we need to hear, always a little bit different every time, as are we each time. As am I. I hope.

Marilyn McCabe, fearing the chronic angers

I’ve done it. I’ve finished writing the book.

I Know What I Saw will be my fifth poetry collection with Bloodaxe, yet bringing this book to completion has been an unfamiliar process. Like never before, I’ve seen how the ordering of collection is its own act of creation – producing new narratives, new poetry even, as poems meet and synthesise. I experienced, to a new depth, how the extended process of drafting and editing – including experimentation with capitalisation, bold, white spaces, punctuation – is not just a matter of presentation. It is transformative, generative: it creates new voices and characters, new stories.

It’s been a time of great learning, and I will certainly write more about it. But for the last few months I’ve felt impatient for this stage of writing to come to an end. My mind was full of the next book, fizzing with green excitement. I’ve had my fill of ghosts – I want to write about moss and shards and trees.

This month, I’ve also been delivering 30 Days Wild Writing every morning with Miriam Darlington. You might think that delivering an hour-long workshop is a fairly undemanding workday – but alongside other tasks like organising the Mass Wuther on the Haworth Moors (more of that in the coming weeks!), I’ve often found myself up past midnight researching – amongst other things – the romantic lives of badgers, the motivations of sledging crows.

It’s a relief then, to come back to land, and specifically to my love of it. My as-yet-unstructured ideas for the next book cluster around my relationship with a small patch of forest in Calderdale – and in a recent Wild Writing session, I was able to express and explore this.

Clare Shaw, My Own Carrigskeewaun

Whilst not expressly writing an overtly ekphrastic poem, I did however want to use the opening few bars – “that watercolour opening” – of Debussy’s Claire de Lune as the main pivot of the poem.

It’s a magical start. That descending arpeggio. Those notes. It has a beautiful, ethereal quality that immediately transports the listener into an almost transcendental state.

I paid close attention to the choice of words ensuring they had comparable harmonic and sonic structures – almost seeing them as complimentary chords. I tried to use words that were phonemically soothing; that were syllabically compatible; and had the capacity to be discrete when internally rhymed.

In terms of the how the poem looked on the page, I used line breaks to enhance its visual appeal. I did not want all the lines to be anchored by the margin as I felt it would detract from the poem’s dreamy aesthetic. In some cases I allowed a line to contain just three to five words so as to re-imagine the soft notes being played from the opening bar.

In all, I wanted the poem to capture its flowing textures, its sensory mood and smooth rhythms. To be written as delicately as possible. To be reflective and respective of Claire de Lune’s Impressionistic roots.

A fleeting moment.

When we simply stop whatever we are doing and float.

Drop-in by Dorian Nightingale (Nigel Kent)

Musical refrains also run through my brain, evoking memories and nostalgia, or just being irritating “earworms.” At any given time such tunes may include Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, strains from a late Haydn quartet, one of many Springsteen songs, Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” or–most confounding of all–the Chock-full-o’Nuts jingle from the 1960s or some similar commercial sloganeering. Why such things wear a familiar groove in the gray matter I don’t know, though Oliver Sacks’ book on music (Musicophilia) and Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music offer some insights, and I’m thinking of reading this one by Samuel Markind when it comes out later this year.

Alas, I’m not gardening because once again the garden is awash in mud, so I entertain myself with endeavoring to discover how/why my brain works (and yours, and anyone else’s), since that’s one of my favorite lines of inquiry when I can’t work outside. I will take a sodden walk later and dwell on possibilities while enjoying the scent of the invasives; I’ll work on some poetry revisions; maybe I’ll listen to music…and freely associate with any and all possibilities.

Ann E. Michael, Perfumes and tunes

As Ted Berrigan lay on his deathbed, Alice Notley said something to the effect of “May the 14 pieces of Osiris be joined.” She describes this in the poem “Point of Fidelity” in her book Mysteries of Small Houses:

when I perform your last rites sprinkling you with drops of gin & tonic and saying, “May the 14 pieces of Osiris be joined together” We laugh though you’ll die the next day Eleven years later I wonder at using such a fiction, a fetish of Egyptian exactly to be there, that moment.

And I’ve been thinking about how we use such fictions, such fetishes “exactly to be there, that moment.” How we use art.

Yesterday, Elee Kraljii Gardiner sent me a link to a recording of a boy from Azerbaijan singing a preternaturally haunting song. I found it very moving and so was inspired to respond to it. “Exactly to be there, that moment.” I downloaded the recording into software and “translated” the digital file into midi and orchestrated it. Then I improvised clarinet over top to make the piece below. It feels of the moment. That moment. Of this moment. One where I feel bewildered—the world seems mad—and could use inhabiting a song, could use being in dialogue with Elee and with Kenan Bayramli and, for that matter, Alice Notley. I could use, though without having to die, the fourteen pieces of my body to be joined, to be merged with the land. I could use the fourteen pieces of this broken world to be joined, healed.

Gary Barwin, “exactly to be there, that moment”

Silence appears in the presence of the divine, as George Steiner noted. But 20th century silence includes the place where “language simply ceases.” It’s not soundless, entirely. The poet sinks into this thing with the abyss at its hem. 

“Silence has invaded everything, and there is still music,” John Cage wrote in For the Birds. 

There are variations within silence and I am obsessed by them, as, for example, when silence differs from itself when by gaining layers, bringing various silences into relation with one another.

Alina Stefanescu, “But it was never enough.”

I got to watch the full Strawberry moon rise and then fifteen minutes later disappear behind clouds, so I was glad I was outside to catch it. I had another crown sans novocaine and this one was pretty painful AND was wrongly fitted so had to be reglued a day later. These dental work things knock me out, and left me unable to even get out of bed—but I still had work to do—a tutorial to be recorded on Zoom, e-mails to respond to, an essay to finish, and submissions to send. So when I was so achey and couldn’t focus, I went out on my back porch. And guess what? I had the happy luck to see our first neighborhood Swallowtail butterfly on a neighbor’s privet, rufous hummingbirds, and even found that the fresh air helped my aches and pains. A reminder that getting outside even when you feel you can’t drag yourself out of bed is usually beneficial. And picking up the camera always brings some joy, especially this time of year—and surprises, like the Swallowtail.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Full Strawberry Moon, First Swallowtail, American Anxiety, and More Goldfinches on the Wing

Alt text suggests this week’s photo could be a purple ball on a gravel surface. I say it is a deflating balloon which I saw at the end of my early morning stroll on Saturday morning. I don’t always go for a stroll on a Saturday morning, but I remembered that it was ‘World Early Stroll Day’ and I was keen to find out what I would see in the new day. There was a thunderstorm as I was waking up, the claps of thunder were loud cracking booms and the rain was heavy, so I waited for all that to end before venturing out. Work in our road is being carried out to replace the gas pipes so the smell of gas infused clay was hanging thick in the humid air and my photo journey captured that work at first. I enjoyed ignoring the red light of the traffic light outside my house and walking on past it. I also found much to interest me in the lines and shadows of the holes that had been dug, but found myself beginning to wish for something different and colourful. Just as I was wondering whether to veer off to see if I could find flowers, I saw the balloon. It looked like it was having a rest after being well loved. There was a gentle poignancy to this thought that made me smile. […]

I enjoyed looking at all the different early morning strolls that were being shared on social media. I love the tingle of the joy of early mornings and the fresh potential of a day. Sometimes when I feel I haven’t seized the opportunity to note it or celebrate it in some way my heart sinks a little. There is an enjoyment to looking back on a day or period in time and reflecting on things that I am grateful for, but the feeling of looking forward is a hopeful kind of joy that shines in a different way.

On Saturday morning as well as my stroll I had treated myself to a ticket for the ‘Badger Saturday’ writing workshop with Clare Shaw and Miriam Darlington. I already had a lovely little kenning dedicated to badgers which I wrote in a workshop with Angela Topping, and I was keen to extend my knowledge and use the time to write what I was calling in my head ‘a full-on, solid badger poem’. That poem is emerging, it is indeed solid, and I look forward to spending time editing it into a finished piece.

Sue Finch, World Early Stroll Day

Across the street from my apartment there is a park, and in the middle of that park there are a number of logs, cluttered amongst the living trees which abut the eastern tip of Burrard Inlet. From time-to-time king tides or teenagers will lift them and deposit them a few feet away. Salt-hardened, they seem ancient. I wrote poems while leaning against the big ones or resting my feet on the smaller ones, over and over until I had a book.

[…]

I remind myself that positioning a certain type of traditional haiku as “faithful” pushes aside all the poets who have experimented with the form in the intervening centuries, be they Masaoka Shiki or Takayanagi Shigenobu or Marlene Mountain or Nick Virgilio. And it also suggests that “traditional” haiku was lowered flawlessly from the heavens, and not itself developed over many years of experimentation. Reviewing the history of haiku—and of poetic form in general—it seems clear to me that to honour a tradition you must be willing to break from it. If not, you are engaging in a practice detached from that of the poets you’re honouring. You become a parody. To honour someone you must be committed to being someone else.

*

Or, as Bashō put it, never “lick the drool of your predecessor.”

Rob Taylor, Some Notes on Writing Haiku

The temple at Sanjūsangen-dō […] features 1000 statues of Kannon, the goddess of mercy. The awe-inspiring gathering of statues dates from the 13th century and was a quiet antidote to the bustle of other temples. To encounter a battalion whose weapons of choice are mercy and compassion was an idea that appealed to me.

Holding a similar mystery were the Torii gates, placed at the entry to each temple. Particularly moving were the Senbon Torii (1000 Torii) Gates outside of Kyoto. Rather than entering with the masses, my husband researched and found a trail to enter through the forest where the gates have remained untouched. Some have fallen, some are rotting, some are being reclaimed by foliage. There were no other people in this section. All we could hear was birdsong. These testaments to a time-worn path to worship, their connections to the natural landscape, made of the forest a sort of cathedral without walls.

And, though one might think that visiting many temples and statues over the course of days would seem monotonous, the intimacy of each setting, the subtle differences in the faces and the materials, and the careful gestures of each Buddha or guardian or goddess made each one a figure worthy of awe. Iconography at its best should make the viewer feel something, even if that iconography is not necessarily connected to one’s own belief system. I can say that these encounters did just that. They gave me a sense of peace, of awe, of history, of joy, of possibility, of admiration.

Donna Vorreyer, travelogue, part one

We did a self-guided walking tour through the Luberon region of Southern France, hiking nine to twelve miles a day through farms, forests and centuries-old hill towns. Instead of having to carry heavy packs and sleep in a tent, our bags were sent ahead to our next inn—a system we loved!

While the wilderness sections were beautiful, some of my favorite stretches of the hikes took us past stone farmhouses, olive and cherry orchards, lavender fields and red poppies.

white hill town
the herder shakes down cherries
for his goats

Annette Makino, Fine art, feasting and footpaths in France

I lie on a narrow twin bed in a Paris hotel. Through the open window, there are indistinct voices, the low rumble of cars, distant sirens. Bjork’s kinetic “Hyperballad” wafts in from another room. It is summer in the 11th arrondissement near Place de la République. Across from me, on his own bed, a beautiful boy reaches out his hand, inviting me to join him. It is 1995, I’m 24 and my life is about to irrevocably change.

Behind me was America and its smothering morality, a string of shitty boyfriends, a file cabinet full of abandoned novels, short stories and poems. There was something about being abroad, out of comfort zones, six hours ahead of what I would soon realize was my “former life,” that liberated my voice and sexuality.

For years, I had read about writers and artists moving to Paris to explore their creativity and find a simpatico community. There was something about the air, light, and energy that seemed to infuse these expatriates with inspiration. 

My first novel began as a poem written in that Paris hotel room, on a tiny side street called Rue Rampon. It would then transform into a screenplay that Jodie Foster’s now defunct production company would call a “beautifully written, but expensive art film.” 

As the 90s ended, my agent suggested transforming the script into a novel. That’s when Conquering Venus was truly fleshed out. I’d spent the previous five years travelling back and forth to London and Paris for “research,” to soak up more of the locales and – frankly – the open-minded, easygoing sex. 

Collin Kelley, 30 years of London, Paris and The Venus Trilogy

But what about the poems themselves? Well, to start with, the first letters of all their lines are capitalised. Apart from providing a harder line ending, this decision is a signal of intent, a pointer that they are not only anchored in the canon, but drinking from a very specific set of its wells.

Throughout the collection, Hinds’ invocation of the power of emblematic words is of special interest. He’s always aware of their allusions, connotations and ramifications, as in the closing couplet to ‘The Fifth Season’…

We will stand in the sand and glass of the broken
Timepiece and ask it to flow.

This poem offers us a terrific example of Hinds’ method at its best, marrying tradition with contemporary concerns (about climate change in this case), taking received notions and renewing them.

By taking a step back from everyday experience and viewing it anew via an esoteric literary filter so as to understand it better, he’s reminding us that other poetries are still possible in the contemporary landscape. As such, New Famous Phrases is a courageous book. It takes real guts for a poet to plough their own furrow in a first full collection, and Daniel Hinds is to be congratulated on his achievement.

Matthew Stewart, Refreshing received notions, Daniel Hinds’ New Famous Phrases

The latest collection by Philadelphia poet, writer and editor Laynie Browne is Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), composed as a “response text” to the work of American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. This collection follows a thread of response texts Browne has been working for a number of years, including: In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press, 2018), composed as a response to Lawn of Excluded Middle by Rosmarie Waldrop; Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], composed as a response to the book The Unfollowing by Lyn Heijinian; and Everyone and Her Resemblances (Pamenar Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], composed as a response to the epic structures and purposes of Alice Notley. It has been interesting to really begin to see the range through which poets have been responding to the work of other writers over the past few years, from the ongoing poem-essays by Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall [see my review of one of his recent titles here; see a more recent interview I did with him here] and Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], to Montreal-based poet, writer and critic Klara du Plessis’ intimately-critical prose through the ten essays collected in her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], a collection of essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’ own words. It is through the how of the response that provides and propels the possibilities of engagement, wending simultaneously through the deeply critical to the intimately personal to elements of the festschrift.

As part of an interview I conduced with Browne last year on this particular and ongoing interest in response texts, posted online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, Browne responded:

I think it began with a tremendous sense of gratitude, to be here in this time, with these particular poets. Unmistakably my life as a poet is possible, in large part, because of these female poets. The first homage text I wrote was for Bernadette Mayer. I was re-reading The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, as a young mother, and I was amazed. Thus began my book The Desires of Letters. […]

What becomes interesting, in part, through this collection is how she doesn’t overtly specify the approach or prompt of these poems, allowing them to speak on and through their own merit, allowing the response itself to be the response, and not her particular framing or starting-point. She offers acrostics, offers poems that begin with borrowed phrases, and other structures to work her way in, around and through her source material. As she writes mid-way through: “I seal my intention to think less poisonous thoughts by following / a path of letters [.]”

rob mclennan, Laynie Browne, Apprentice to a Breathing Hand

Let’s back up a minute, to before
my teachers did what Larkin said parents
do to their kids even if they don’t mean it,
back to pine woods and Zebco rods and reels
and perch ponds we claimed as public land,
possessing what we were still unpossessed by,
lacking even the language of belonging
to something larger than kin, congregation,
each other.

Brian Spears, Reclamation Part 6

This 50^th anniversary edition of the excellent Paideuma takes the form of a symposium on‘Poems We Live With’, with sixty-plus contributors (a smattering of whom I’ve reviewed in the past, as it happens) taking us through their own take on the theme. The contributions are ordered by surname of the author, which leads to some delightfully accidental conjunctions. As might be expected, the contributions range widely in tone, from the deeply personal to the carefully academic (and most of the contributors are academics of one sort or another), but what binds them all is an open commitment to poetry as something of importance, a thing that matters.

In his introduction, Roland Greene talks about two kinds of poems we live with, those which speak for us, expressing things we think or feel but could never express (or not as well as the poem does) and those that are ‘more oblique to our lives’, poems that open up new ways of seeing the world, poems that enlarge us. It’s a useful enough framework, but as I read through the full issue, I realised that it’s really more of a continuum than a binary, and the contributors frequently, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, have other ideas.

Billy Mills, Paideuma Volume 50: A Review

One of the main reasons for reviving this blog was so I could point anyone who might be interested in the direction of my latest discoveries, so here we go. […] First is a long and heavily academic article by James Paz: Storm-thoughts and ice-songs: A creative-critical response to Old English eco-poetry.

This is one for geopoetics people, eco-poets or fans of Old English poetry. It deals with the attitude of early English writers to the natural environment, pointing out that the modern division of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ didn’t really exist, and seeing the human psyche ‘imbricated’ in the natural world, shaped by it and responding to it in a way that is very different from our use of nature as metaphor. It reminds me of Lorca’s understanding of ‘duende’. For a working poet, it disappoints that he doesn’t make much comparison with the practice of contemporary poets, though Alice Oswald gets a mention. Susan Richardson and Jen Hadley have a lot to contribute to this topic – and of course, I’ve written relevant poems and discussed it a little myself! All the same, this article is grounded in a wealth of thinking and writing that I will be following up for a long time.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Some Geekery

Hawks, falcons and eagles have become a bit of a cliché of the contemporary nature poem: I seem to come across them a lot these days, and I wrote about Tyson Hausdoerffer’s poem in Nimrod, quite a good example of the genre, a few weeks ago. Growing up in suburban Essex, I knew my garden birds very well, and I lived in hope of finding an owl pellet to dissect (not as disgusting as it sounds) but other birds of prey were not part of my world. The first hawk I remember encountering was in Skelton’s beautiful and remote lyric, ‘To Mistress Margaret Hussey’, which was the first poem in a nineteenth century anthology of English lyrics given to me by the school librarian whom I wrote about in this post:

Mirry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as faucon
Or hawk of the tower:

(You can read the whole poem here.)

Because she is like a falcon or hawk “of the tower” I understood these birds to be confined. I associated the Margaret of this poem, in her tower, with Tennyson’s Elaine, a poem I learnt because Ursula in The Rainbow recites it passionately to herself in the hayloft, where she has escaped for a chance to read quietly:

Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,
Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat,
High in her chamber in a tower to the east
Guards the sacred shield of Lancelot.

‘Gentle’ in Skelton’s time meant, primarily, ‘noble’ or ‘high-born’, as in ‘gentleman’; but ‘gentle’ can also be what you do in taming a creature born wild, and ‘gentle’ (as a noun) was for some time used for a female falcon, or (later) for any falcon or hawk that’s been tamed for falconry. This second layer of meaning is particularly obvious in Wyatt’s famous lyric, included in fact in Tottel’s miscellany which I wrote about last week. The poem begins:

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

This motif of a creature that is only half-tamed, or which seemed tame but reverts to wildness, is found repeatedly in writing about hawks. Thom Gunn’s extraordinary early poem, ‘Tamer and Hawk’, transforms and expands upon Skelton and Wyatt’s “gentle”.

Victoria Moul, Ware the hawk! (and ban the biography)

My immersion into Paul Celan’s poems hasn’t been depressing; instead I’ve been following, with keen attention over the past weeks, a mind which has been where we are treading.  Celan spoke of poems as being prophetic, that they “cast their shadow ahead of themselves: one must live after them.  Life itself must pass through the poem.”  Yes indeed!  

I follow mindfully through his halting struggle to wrest language out of its abuse and false clarity.  And darkness, I can’t help but feel the power of “living, creative darkness,” a human darkness which also seethes in poems.  I’m thinking of Celan’s “From Darkness to Darkness.” Never would you find a deus ex machina, a miraculous light bursting into a scene in Celan.  Instead a subtle light appears, throws shade ahead of the poet, onto a beloved, onto an empty field.  There is trembling possibility – a breakthrough of recognition, across borders, time and self.  (I’m drawing on a brilliant introduction by Susan Gillespie, who translated Corona, Selected Poems.)  Through the obscurity, the poem carries forward, having been sparked with the light and coursing energy of human exchange.  

I felt it when reading together with a group of smart folks who were listening as if a trumpet was sounding.  And at the protest where a shared consciousness was erupting in the gray rain.  It is a kind of faith, hope against hope in a dim world.  A shared consciousness to observe the present and the unknowingness of the future.  Rock on, Celan.

Jill Pearlman, Celan’s Prophetic Darkness

Given we spent a fortnight in a Scottish lighthouse overlooking the North Sea, I suppose taking Rajani Radhakrishnan’s wonderful Water To Water as first choice reading was appropriate.

Rajani’s 2019 collection of 60 poems is wise, enduring, meticulously crafted – in over-simplified terms, an exploration of how water of one kind or another accompanies us through life and into death. And perhaps beyond. […]

I could quote at too great a length from, or analyse this book from first word to last and, for the time being at least, still not quite do it justice. I’m still exploring its layers – and perhaps because of our contrasting backgrounds it’s as elusive as the water that is the running theme. I know, though, that I am reading the work of a fine writer who has the capacity to move and involve me on a deeper sense than many can. It has a firm sense of place – India, obviously, Rajani Radhakrishnan lives in Bengaluru – and also a reverence for an ancient culture way beyond anything in my restless, pretty much homeless experience.

Rajani’s work is widely available on the internet and there was a second collection, duplicity, published in 2021, centred on life and love in a city during the pandemic. I will buy this one too.

As an aside, Water To Water is also a superb advertisement for self-publishing. It’s a quality production through Notionpress.com that matches that of a major publisher.

Bob Mee, HOLIDAY READING: RAJANI RADHAKRISHNAN, PENGUIN MODERN POETS 19, MATTHEW SWEENEY…OH, AND A NOVEL, AND A CONVERSATION ABOUT SEA BIRDS

At work, I wrote SARAH on a label on my mason jar of coffee creamer. First, I was stunned by the neatness of the letters. Next, I was intrigued by the word on the label. Its phonemes: both exhalations, one a hiss and the other a roar. Yet together, they are a flat field of long meadow grass, blowing in a breeze. I have been to the exact field it conjures. It is a memory that I do not want to fully remember, wanting to keep the mystery. The landscape of Sarah has a dirt road running through it. Some of the dirt is dust suspended in the air as if a pick-up truck recently passed but the truck is nowhere to be seen. A house is in the distance. Hills are in the farther distance. There are chicks roaming around somewhere, but they can’t be seen. The sun is setting and everything is illuminated in an hour of gilded light. Despite the beauty of clouds, the sky is cloudless and beautiful. In this field, I am a child unmonitored and ageless. I am alone. And you, adult reading this, are having a beer with the other adults in that house in the distance, the windows aglow. You’re not worried about me and unapologetically, I don’t care about you. […]

To be named is to be vulnerable. To be named is to be a conjurer of memories and associations. It is not uncommon to meet people and their name just doesn’t sit right. You meet a Heather and they’re not a garden of flowers or an Appalachian plateau. You meet a Kimberly and they are not a crow with something shiny in their beak. You meet a Chad and he’s not an empty parking lot full of puddles that reflect just him. You meet a Brad and he’s not a closet of baseball caps, rarely seeing light. In our age of careful curations of self—be it online or in “real life”—people have “dead names” sometimes carefully or not carefully choosing a new name or identity that reflects their selfscape. And we’re fluid, aren’t we, always changing, always defending and reckoning with selfhood. Always needing to know what we are. Always needing to be perceived how we desire. Protecting our egos. We are but taut strings being plucked into vibration and those vibrations change. And the songs of ourselves are plucked by absolutely everything.

Sarah Lada, I Am a Field

Poetry as proof of life.
In the hostage photo:
today’s paper.
At the bottom of the poem:
today’s date.
Poem as ransom note —
no amount specified.
Pay and pay until God
or fate or blind dumb luck
sets free the captive.
The sweet release of …
death?? life?
Graphite alone can’t say.

Jason Crane, POEM: Field notes

I have hand-me-down facts from the women who came before me. I’m not sure if the sum of the material I’m working with is closer to legend, or to an archeological reconstruction. Like how the sparse dinosaur bones in the museum are scattered in the white plaster. Like all poetry, I hold that what I write is true, if not accurate documentation.

It is a leap of faith to trust that I will step out of the way of my own story, which is a bigger story, which doesn’t have a protagonist.

I’m toying with the idea of structuring the collection by giving each woman her wasp counterpart. One story at a time. Each in her own cell and only occasionally coming out to bash one another in the head with their antennae. I’m not sure that there’s a way to avoid the bashings. It is our nature. […]

I know that an academic approach to creative work feels artificial for many writers. I try to find a way to balance the structure with the free-flowing work. One of the things I like about poetry is the structure. And one of the things I dislike about postmodernism is the idea that the reader or audience can decide for themselves what the work means.

I write with intention. If nothing else, I want to avoid ever wallowing in my own drama again. I don’t want to use my story to appeal to pathos. It’s not something I condemn, but it isn’t what I want to do. I also know that appealing to pathos gets a larger readership that I get. I’m okay with that. But I want to communicate specific ideas. I want to know my whys—all the way down to the truth.

Why?
Because people pretend that they don’t see our true nature.
Why?
Because there is no good and evil. There is nature and we need to love it.
Why?
Because nature sustains us. Every aspect of it.

Ren Powell, Not Playing to the Cheap Seats

As a child, my job was to carry the freshly cut portions to a farther spot where it could dry through the summer. Two or more families worked a bog. The men took turns to handle the spade, the children were harried to work faster since space was always needed for the newest clod. We tripped and stained our knees, we fought off horseflies that longed to bite the softest parts of our skin, behind the legs, or in the crease of the elbow. During a break, a bottle of lemonade would be passed around, its glass gaining the marks of all the muddied, sweating fingers. If it rained on this first day, it did not matter. It did not harm the peat and it kept the flies at bay. Our cotton t-shirts darkened, our wet hair shone, and the rain made buttonholes in the brown water that gathered at the bottom of the bog.

By the end of the day, the cutter’s work seemed almost like the activity of a primitive printing press. Their one black-covered book was repeated and splayed out in a huge perimeter as though we had excavated the island’s library from deep in its earth. […]

Later, leaving the bog and reaching home, we would strip at the door so as not to bring any ticks into the house. But before this, we sat around the bog site. And this is what I’m remembering now: the arms, stained and dirtied. We had time on our hands. Didn’t we just. Peat is moss, grass, flowers, collected and decomposing over thousands of years.

Niall Campbell, Life at a Distance

Time passes differently for children than it does for adults. It’s infinite, elastic, and disquieting. I’m saddened when I hear of kids who already have calendars full of activities; i.e., soccer practice, French lessons, SAT tutoring. To me, this goes against the major gift of childhood: vast stretches of free time. How can a child enjoy those beautiful summer afternoons with a cluttered agenda? Imagine if a school-aged Emily Dickenson, cramming for a chemistry test, had missed the day that brought us this poem:

As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away, —
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.

Boredom is an important part of a child’s free time, especially the peculiar condition of summer boredom. […]

In her essay, “Derichment,” from Synthesizing Gravity, Selected Prose, Kay Ryan denounces our culture’s mad rush to fill every second with “enriching” activities. “Children, it is often maintained, must be enriched; bread must be enriched. Weren’t they rich already?”

Erica Goss, The Two Most Beautiful Words in the English Language

God, please let this baby live.
Let the heart blink back
at me bewildered on the screen
as distant as my own heart.

If not, when
the doors to that small room
open into the future I dread

help me feel the June sun, help me
see the sky above me as infinite
and generous, even there.

—

This week I experienced my third second-trimester loss—our son Hugo Adoniram, at 17 weeks.

We had never planned to have another baby—we’d been through loss enough times—but he was a surprise; and we hoped (cautiously) that this time, and on this protocol, and with this high-risk doctor, things may go differently.

As with all our losses, we prayed night and day. I wrote this poem about a month ago, when everything still looked wonderful, every ultrasound perfect. I was cautious, and I’m not prone to hope.

Renee Emerson, When there is no heartbeat

[T]he big news of the week has been the beginning of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education), the process that trains chaplains to work in a variety of settings. My setting for this summer is the Asheville VA Hospital, and so far, it’s a great place to work. […]

My work this week gave me inspiration for possible poems. Let me record them here so that I remember. The most promising idea is Noah’s Wife working as a chaplain in the VA hospital. Hospital, ark, are they really so different? I also see some potential in putting Cassandra in CPE training–Cassandra who has spent so much of her life with people not listening to her. And now, she is training herself to keep silent, which she discovers is not a gift she has.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Whirlwind Week

She’s in the waiting room, where the large TV
monitor is always tuned to a channel where two men
go into falling-down houses. They rip apart rotting
floorboards and waterstained walls like they
were made of wet cardboard, toss out old bathroom
fixtures and hardware. They stop frequently to banter,
as the closed captions show. Later, a female realtor
will check on their progress; her clients are so
excited for open house. “Before” and “After” time
lapse pictures flash on the screen. When her husband
comes out of his procedure, on the show it’s time for
the big reveal.

Luisa A. Igloria, Outpatient Procedure, with Home Improvement Show

When I was a microbiologist, more than ten years ago now, the lab I worked in was next door to the histology department. I am fascinated by the way biopsies are prepared for microscopic examination. Such precision. The embedding of the sample in wax, the turning of the microtome, the precision blade cutting the sample into a tissue-thin ribbon of slices, so delicate that they can’t be picked up by hand. Instead they are floated on water, fished gently onto a glass slide. I think about this a lot: the art of science, the behind the scenes dexterity of biology, the gentle precision and hands on skill that scientists perform that the public don’t see. Biology always felt more like an art than a science to me.

This is what history can be: a moment, or a series of moments, caught in the paraffin wax block of place, the thin slices peeled away to reveal something mid growth, mid life, mid moment.

Flixton island is a slight rise in the landscape, easily missed. Years ago, at a time in my life when the loss of my daughter had ground the old me out of existence, I decided to do something I’d always wanted to do and volunteered on an archaeology dig.

The place is fixed with many moments. 12,500 years ago, a herd of wild horses moved through a post glacial savannah to the lake here. The horses were small and stout. They were hardy and shaggy. These are the sort of horses that the people of the time painted on cave walls.

There are two stories here, two micro slices of history. One is the horse footprints at the edge of the lake, where the horses came to drink. These are the hoof prints discovered at the site while I was volunteering there. The hoof prints are crescents and scuffs and sunk-in-the-mud hoof prints clustering at a point on the lake edge. 12,500 years ago a moment is caught: it is a moment of fly bites and twitching ears and one or two heads raised, then down. It is a story of water rippling out from the point at which a soft horse lip touches the lake surface. It is a story of a heron moving past on origami legs, and of the sound of geese on the other side of the lake, and a swish of tail and crick- crick-crick of crickets, and the wind blowing through the long grass. The other story is of butchered bones placed in a pile. These too were found at the dig at the time I volunteered. The other story is also a moment fixed in time: it is a moment of wooden spears zipping through the hot air and the whites of a horse’s eyes. It is the story of the violence of horse kicks, thrashing hooves and maybe a bruise or a break of an arm or a head. The ending is of blood in the grass, horse blood, and perhaps of a warm liver being eaten raw, and definitely of meat being carried away. It is a human story. It is a horse story. How long did those moments take? Half an hour, an hour? A morning? The peaceful horses, the horses at the point of death.

Then a great sleep of nothingness; a great embedding of time into wax until we appear, with our tiny trowels and our weather proof macs, and the slicing of the wax begins. So delicate are the slices that we float each on the liquid surface of the human desire to know ourselves, until we can see, wet to the touch, if we would dare to touch, horse hoof prints from horses extinct for thousands of years. And bones rusted to red by the peaty ground, and a horse skull.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Long Ago Horses

Sharing a peek at these new portraits for the Hastings Poet Town project taken by photographer Maxine Silver. We chose the Fire Hills for this shoot. This place is home to me, the smell of blooming yellow gorse, so glorious and coconutty, the greens, blues and turquoise of the sea and the sky, all the salt in the air and all those delicious colours and feelings. I love it up here.

Hastings is a seaside resort with an illustrious poetic history. Once a haven for Pre-Raphaelite poets and Victorian authors, it is still a hub of creativity today. It continues to be home to artists, musicians, and renowned contemporary writers. Edited by Richard Newham-Sullivan and with a foreword by Salena Godden, this new collection ‘Poet Town: Poets & Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts’ is an anthology that brings together the best classic, modern and spoken word poets, linked to this uniquely creative coastal town.

So far Poet Town has received phenomenal quotes and endorsements from the mighty poets, Joelle Taylor and Luke Wright, see below, thank you. The wheels are in motion now, and this fantastic crowd-funded Hastings poetry anthology and photography book, celebrating 200 years of poetry from Hastings and thereabouts will be launched by Moth Light Press on September 1st 2025.

Salena Godden, Poet Town

What little theatres are for actors, little magazines are for writers – you have to start somewhere. UK paper literary magazines have been struggling for a while. The Arts Councils sometimes support them, though the councils’ aims and objectives change over the years. e-publications and web magazines (often short-lived) have made readers reconsider their subscriptions. Rising postal charges, especially when sending abroad, have hit hard. While subscriptions have plummeted, submissions have soared.

In the States, magazines have been struggling too. Unlike here, many of them are based at universities, which protected them to some extent. But now that universities are strapped for cash and Mr Trump has slashed NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funding, even some of the top ten impact publications are on the brink. The Paris Review lost $15,000 in funding. One Story had $20,000 terminated. These may not sound like huge amounts of money but magazines survive on a shoestring.

Tim Love, Magazine survival

Why do so many lit mags omit class as defining point of marginalization and underrepresentation?

Let me be clear: my questions are not an indictment of any lit mag that wishes to actively encourage more racial, gender, and/or bodily diversity among their submissions. As I’ve said many times before, editors have the right to operate their magazines any way they wish. Writers are free to submit to any lit mags whose guidelines appeal to them, and to avoid submitting to those that do not.

I am specifically focusing on what appears to be a curious omission in some journals’ attempts to be more diverse and inclusive. Do editors generally not consider poor people to be underrepresented in literature?

I’ve been reading lit mags steadily, one a month, for the past three years. I’ve read gorgeous poems, thought-provoking essays, entertaining and moving stories. They’ve covered a range of experiences—teaching, dating, travel, divorce, addiction, wanting to have children, taking care of an aging parent, healing from abuse, uncovering family secrets, political strife, communing with nature…

In my experience as a reader, rarely if ever, have I encountered work that highlights the day-to-day struggles of someone without means. These works exist, don’t get me wrong. But they are few and far between among pieces that largely focus on interpersonal dynamics—family and romantic relationships, emotional and psychological struggles.

There is generally one exception to this, and that includes work that has an international component. In the pages of lit mags, it actually is fairly common to encounter writing about a person who has left everything behind to move to another country, or who lives in poverty in a remote village, or whose life has been rent asunder by war, by genocide, by political catastrophe.

These are all critical stories, crucial to our understanding of the world, and often wrenching to read. It is commendable that lit mags seek out such works and make particular efforts toward including translations when necessary.

Yet what I am saying I rarely see in lit mags is the much more banal financial struggle with which millions of people contend every day. Working two jobs. Managing life at $7.25 per hour. Being evicted. Getting the electricity shut off. Living on social security income. Drowning in medical bills. The grinding work of caretaking for a sick relative. Credit card debt… Put another way: Stories of poverty and financial hardship would appear to be underrepresented.

Becky Tuch, Q: Is class a feature of marginalization and underrepresentation in lit mags?

The apple trees and plum are full of fruit. I’ll have to thin out the apples and pray foragers don’t get in again this year. Attempting to think positive seems a flimsy counterpoint to the machismo of world politics, clusters of white men in suits. But retreat to a garden feels like a responsibility in the absence of any other action. The poet Forugh Farrokhzad wrote a poem, I Pity the Garden, which explores the impact of living in a warzone. 

What I do here in Brighton is of little consequence, perhaps, except I do believe the pressure of ordinary people can have an impact on politicians. And I do believe I have a responsibility not to turn away. Last year the Guardian wrote about a family garden in a Gaza refugee camp. 

The Borgen Project has collected a few examples of gardening in warzones. 

Jackie Wills, Gardens, responsibility and conflict

You know how I’ve often wondered what happens when we consider the opposite? It’s a bit of a thought exercise. And while whatever is the opposite to what you normally take for granted in your personal belief system, might not be the answer either, often pondering this might take you down other paths you wouldn’t ordinarily consider.

So this past week I asked myself, what if all of this appreciating beauty, and finding pockets of joy, and having walks where we cultivate awe, and listening to birds, and looking at paintings and sculptures, and touching grass, and looking at the sky, and breathing like a yogi, and counting our blessings, and keeping gratitude journals, and trying to save the environment, and eating our fruits and vegetables, and practicing random acts of kindness, and trying to do good in the world, and actually giving a shit, and feeling empathy, and listening to music, and cultivating compassion, helping others, and sharing your beautiful things, what if, what if, what if, that makes everything worse? What if we could forget about all these activities and ways of being and just get angrier and angrier and protest or disrupt or demand more and better from the powers that be?

So yes, like you, probably right now, I rejected that. (Not the idea of standing up for the rights of all people to live, to thrive, to have their basic human rights respected and needs met). Because we can’t live there, our minds will break down. We need beauty to help us weather out the storm.

It’s hard to think about how we could make a better good life for ourselves and others when we live in the traumosphere.

How do we want to communicate with each other? I was thinking about Jane calling out to Rochester over the moors. Or the flower phone in Frost, or Kerouac’s line, “Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”

Shawna Lemay, Turning My Desk Around Again

just enough darkness to forest the world :: then light dawns in one leaf

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: the grey scale, a rain of earth, a detailed intimacy, a Tennysonian absence, and much more. Enjoy.

A walk in Parc Angrignon yesterday felt like a respite from the extremely difficult time in which we’re living. The world is screaming and yet so many are silenced, afraid of what will happen if they voice the truth or even simply say what they feel, as human beings. It’s a time when truth itself is under attack, as well as the institutions that teach people how to think critically, how to discern the truth for themselves, and express it in a coherent and rational way. A time when we are witnesses every single day to horrific violence perpetrated on the most innocent of victims, when sheer cruelty, corruption, utter disregard for the most vulnerable, and endless lies are becoming normalized. A time when being a journalist, a doctor, an aid worker, or a foreign student has never been more dangerous. A time when our own options for living with integrity seem smaller and smaller, and, as another Substack author writes, one longs for retreat from the madness:

Sometimes I fantasize about disappearing.

Not dying.

Just logging off.

Getting a job no one cares about.

Growing tomatoes.

Writing poems in the margins of a notebook no one reads.

Not as a failure.

But as a kind of freedom.

—Huy Nguyen

For those of us who do write, it becomes harder and harder to know what to say.

Beth Adams, A Letter from Canada, at the end of May

You said if we kept on, worked hard enough,
we’d feel warmth from the centre of the earth,
that we’d know by laying our hands flat
on the bottom of our freshly dug hole.
You told me Australia was right beneath us.
It all seemed so worth digging for.
I pictured us emerging in a different country,
staying there until teatime,
coming back to tell Mum.

Each time you pressed your palm to feel for heat
you looked hopeful
silently inviting me to copy.
But I only ever felt the cold damp
of earthworms.

Sue Finch, Turning the Calendars Over

My daughter asked to read some of my love poems recently. I tried to find some that were understandable and appropriate for an eleven-year-old. Not surprising that this was difficult, but what did surprise me was that they didn’t feel like love poems when I read them, though when I wrote them they felt so overly emotional. 

I struggled to find one that felt a good example of how I write love poems, but I guess they all are. I don’t gush or really even praise the other as there is no particular person in mind. I focus on the moment and the whirlwind of emotions I’m feeling. There is often a sense of sadness on the edges, that the flush will fade, that reality will set in. So they don’t always feel like the giddy heights of love poems, but maybe the more realistic confusion of love. 

I read a few of my poems out to my daughter and while she didn’t get most of them, they’re maybe a bit thick linguistically and not aimed at pre-teens so she was ok with that, but it did open a nice conversation for how love is such a big emotion that it’s confusing and often leaves us feeling very overwhelmed. How it’s important to express how we feel even if it doesn’t always make sense to others. It’s part of understanding how we fit into the world. If she walked away with that sense of it’s ok to express being overwhelmed however and whenever we need to, then I feel pretty good about my poems. 

Gerry Stewart, Expressing Big Emotions

I just found this piece and thought I’d share it today. It is a recording from a live performance at Spoken Beat Night, Bimhuis, Amsterdam, June 2016. The evening was totally improvised and LIVE, a beautiful combination of spoken word and poetry, art and drawings, and jazz performances with the always incredible Shabaka Hutchings and the Spoken Beat band.

This piece feels like a calm voice from another time to me. I love Amsterdam and love to go there, to visit friends and perform. Every time I go I feel rather nostalgic for the summers in 1990s inter-railing around Europe. This poem really captures that moment when you stop and feel it, time shifting, changes occurring, the moment passing and a new moment beginning. I feel it now, the tide turning, I feel a shift, this poem reminds me of that and a young and fearless hope.

This poem was published in my first collection ‘Fishing in The Aftermath’ by Burning Eye Books in 2014. I reckon the poem was written almost 20 years ago and I can picture the bar where I wrote it, it’s a glorious gay bar, overlooking the water, oh you know the one … ah how the years are flying by…

Salena Godden, All We Can Do Is Hope

Another memoir I’ve enjoyed very much recently is Authentic Embellishments, by poet Joshua Davis. Since I work as a book designer, I get the opportunity to read a lot of terribly good small press titles well before the general public, and this one hit my desk at just the right time, I feel, as I struggle with several kinds of interconnected grief—that I may lose my mother sooner rather than later, that our shared genetic condition could mean a similar journey for me or my sisters, and the regret and loss I feel over these pockets of time where I can’t live the way I wish to because I’m needed more urgently elsewhere. Some of this grief is current, and some of it is oddly anticipatory? And yet “grief” does feel like the best word.

I’ve wondered whether my attraction to found materials, both visuals and sound, has to do with these feelings of loss. I can say that collecting the sound effects I used in the collages was directly related to the experience of missing them in the world, so maybe?

Josh beautifully traces the paths of loss, absence, and abandonment in his relationships with his mother, father, stepmother, husband, and child. “A life saved by poetry,” the subtitle promises, and the moments where Lucille Clifton or Ruth Stone appear (or are found? he was definitely seeking!) in his life to guide him emphasize to me, again, how keen a tool art can be for comfort and survival. Yes. 

Shanna Compton, INKY 2: Room Tone in June + On Loss & Found Materials

My mother is disappearing. Diagnosed with dementia six years ago, in recent months her confusion has redoubled, her memories leaving and arriving as unpredictably as fish to the surface of a pond. If she goes out of her house for a walk, she can’t always find her way back. If she wakes up after a nap, she might think a new day has started and begin making breakfast. She knows there’s a number you call in an emergency, but usually can’t recall what that number is. She has forgotten much of our family and most of her friends. She has only once forgotten me, her only child, and then only briefly—but it’s a sign of what’s to come.

I should be precise: my mother’s conscious mind is disappearing, not her body or her unconscious mind—the mind of dreams and reflexes; the mind our conscious mind tries futilely to claim dominion over. For now her body is very much present, and for her age, thriving. When I take walks with her, I hardly have to slow my pace. When she accompanies my two year old daughter to story time at the local library, she sits on the library carpet with the kids and young parents, then pulls herself up to standing at the end, to the amazement of all present. This is not how I have come to understand death’s arrival, especially here in our death-averse society, where we whisk away bodies and scrub rooms clean, buffeting ourselves from the reality of what’s happened with expressions like “passed away” or “gone to a better place.”  My father died of cancer when I was eleven, his mind sharp up until the final weeks. The day he died, surrounded by family in our living room, I stood by his body and held his hand, still not quite cold. Soon after, the paramedics took him away and I never saw my father’s body again. My mother has been dying for years but her body is, for now, undiminished.

And my body, too, persists, though my conscious mind doesn’t understand quite how. While it worries over prescriptions and home healthcare workers and nursing homes, my subconscious is drumming up lines of poems, or the sentences that I’ve cobbled into this essay. I sometimes find myself with a pen in my hand, with no memory of picking it up. And my conscious mind asks the obvious questions: Why? And why now? Why persist with poems and stories and all this fancy language in the face of unavoidable loss? They’re questions I’ve asked myself often over the years, with no final answer arriving beyond the knowledge that not once in my life has my devotion to writing been a conscious choice. All I did was read, innocently at first, oblivious to what I was getting myself into.

Rob Taylor, “Why? And Why Now?”: On Poetry and Companionship

Storyteller Poetry Review has just published 5 of my poems about my wonderful mother-in-law. Some have been published before; some are first-timers. My thanks to editor Sharon Knutson for this opportunity to share an extraordinary life.

Sarah Russell, My Mother-in-Law Boby Clariana

I had been revising som old poems of late, and after some feedback on one it dawned on me that I am pissing about, and that I need to focus on newer stuff. So I am. A new draft emerged this week, and two very recent things are shaping up nicely. I need to go back to the piles of notes I have and perhaps, just perhaps a collection might have started to take shape by the end of the year. A long way to go yet, so no getting ahead of myself, but there feels like light at the end of the torch I intend to take into the tunnel for the first time in a while.

Mat Riches, A jumping off point

How do you build a poetry community? Is it a bit like gardening, in that you have to work at it slowly over time and then all of the sudden, blooms everywhere, and hummingbirds? One thing I want to do is to prioritize time with poets online and in-person, catching up over coffee or the phone, or having people over. Sometimes, it takes a lot of energy, but I think it’s worth it. Even this blog, or social media, can be part of building community. I think we writers work better when we have community. We need to support each other and recognize each other and shout “good job” when someone gets good news and “so sorry” when they get bad news.

Despite setbacks, I did write a poem this week, and I started submitting again. I’m editing my book for sending out again. But there has been a tick-tock in my ear lately (and not just because of the ear infection). It’s how fast time passes these days, and losses that come with getting older, and the feeling that my time is limited.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Ups and Downs, Birds and Blooms, and Building Poetry Community

Now is the time to ask ourselves what we love. I love books. I always have. I love reading them, and holding them, and I love the hope and the dreams and the stories they contain. The facts! The worlds. The perspectives from people that I wouldn’t otherwise meet or places I will never go. Thoughts, philosophies. Lives lived. Lives! Life!

I love holding books. I love re-reading the books I love. I love taking photographs of books! Books, I love you. I love watching a movie based on a book I love and then going back to the book and loving it all over again in new ways. I love talking about a book with someone and they saw something I didn’t. I love taking a single sentence from a book and typing it out and saying it and sharing it. I love being regularly astonished by how words spark one against the other and how sentences somehow contain a style that you have never until then come across. I love how a sentence by one author will resound and then take you to another author and you will learn to hear echoes and rhythms.

I love words. I love sentences.

In an epigraph to a chapter titled “What is a Sentence” in Jan Mieszkowski’s book Crises of the Sentence, John Banville says, “The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization.”

The greatest invention is still the sentence. The book, another great invention. Best technology. Poems, another great invention.

Fernando Pessoa:

“I broke with the sun and stars. I let the world go.
I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know.”

Pessoa, my soul to your soul.

Shawna Lemay, The Greatest Invention

This week, I learned that the estate of Mary Oliver has launched an online shop selling clothing decorated with popular quotations from the late American poet, such as

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves

— and what soft animal wouldn’t love a Suddenly and Unexpectedly sweatshirt topped with a hat that will have strangers asking if your name is Mary Oliver?

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks#32: Try a Poem Staple Gun

As a fairly regular reviewer of collections, I’ve often read books which don’t have an overtly coherent sense of what the poet is trying to say, other than within individual poems. That’s not to say that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, but most poets write poems which speak to, or echo, one another – either directly or indirectly – thus it seems appropriate to make that at least partially explicit through the poems’ ordering. In my case, I gradually took care to carve my manuscript into thematic sections. The drawback with that was that some previously published poems which I think are still not bad didn’t make the cut, because I couldn’t make them fit with the collection’s overall arc.

I was also at pains, as I was with my first collection, to ensure that there were notes at the back. I know that many poets prefer not to do this, in the spirit of ‘never explain’; I, though, don’t see notes as being explanatory but, rather, as helpful to the reader: as a White English, middle-aged male, I can’t expect every reader either to know or understand, at first glance, all of my cultural references; neither do I expect them to look them up online (or even in an encyclopædia!). Assembling notes at the back of the book seems to me to be a sensible thing. There is, of course, a fine balance to be struck between stating who a particular person, painting, TV programme or whatever is, or was, and (in my case) mansplaining in a manner which tells the reader what the poem is about – I like to think that my book, its three sections and the individual poems by and large speak for themselves. I’m not the kind of person who likes to write, or read, cryptic poems. Again, though, I would add the disclaimer that neither would I want to write poems which could be so easily understood at face value that they had no resonance.

As an inveterate tinkerer with poems, some – perhaps as many as half of them – took at least a year, and in some cases more than five years, to be settled. You might therefore not be surprised to hear that the title of the book has also changed lots of times in the last decade. In fact, I only plumped for The Last Corinthians less than two months before the manuscript went to the printer. I should say here that I’m very glad that Crooked Spire Press used a local printer, because supporting the local economy sits squarely with the book’s values. I should also say how grateful I am to work with a publisher who ‘gets’ my poems and what I have tried to achieve with the book.

Matthew Paul, On The Last Corinthians

Thanks to being published by a small press with an open attitude, I persuaded them to use a photo I’d created myself.

I took this photo in my living room (the colour on the wall is French Grey from Farrow and Ball, in case you’re interested!) My idea was to assemble a ‘still life’ in the Dutch tradition of ‘vanitas’ paintings. ‘Vanitas’ being the genre of still life that is supposed to suggest the brevity of one’s time on this planet, and the futility of everything we strive for, since it has to end in death.

This isn’t as gloomy as it sounds, trust me! What I gathered together were pieces of memorabilia, items referenced in the poems, signifiiers… all arranged in such a way that I hope engenders a feeling of a life lived, in all its messiness, chaos, mistakes, serendipity, quirkiness and yes, beauty.

If you look closely you’ll see a Korean Coca-Cola bottle (I used to collect Coca-Cola cans and bottles from all the countries I visited through work!), burnt-out candles and a half-drunk glass of wine (I’ll leave you to decide on the significance of these), rotting fruit (=decay) and a fox’s skull (mostly in pieces). Skulls, and timepieces, are very common ‘vanitas’ tropes. There’s no clock or watch here, but I have included pages from work diaries, a (laminated) production timeline (we had a new product range every quarter), my old Filofax from the 1990s, even some pages from one of my teenage diaries. There are also photos of me as a Brownie and later as a jaded employee posing for yet another visa application. And let’s not gloss over the blister pack of paracetamol. Pills, childhood terrors, stupid work schedules and endless long-haul trips are well represented in the poems. As well as the internet, computers, magnolia flowers (artificial in this case) and ‘burning the candle at both ends’.

Robin Houghton, The Mayday Diaries cover art: what’s it all about?

Many thanks to Arts ATL for selecting Wonder & Wreckage as one of its 13 must-read poetry collections for National Poetry Month. I was in fine company with Beth Gylys, Andred Jurjevic, and Elly Bookman. See the list here.

And also many thanks to friend and fine poet Steven Reigns, who recommended Wonder & Wreckage in his selections for National Poetry Month that appeared on The Poetry Foundation website. See the list here.

Wonder & Wreckage is also a nominee for the annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards, which will be announced in June. I’m among a very crowded field, so not hopeful about my chances, especially since the great Alice Friman is in the running. 

Collin Kelley, Wrapping up May

On the very first day of June five years ago, this little book dropped into the world in the form of a box of copies left downstairs. Chicago was literally on fire from protests (which I still think were outside agitators, rather than the Chicagoans who had been protesting Friday and most of Saturday without incidence.) What would follow was curfews that lasted a couple of weeks and increased policing on Michigan Ave for a couple more years. In the thick of Covid lockdowns, that morning, I sat in a zoom meeting, in which a bunch of librarians fretted over return protocols coming a month later despite not a single one of them actually returning to the office during the remaining year and a half I still worked there after. I wound up texting my boss to say I was taking the day off and depression napping, but later I went to fetch the cat litter downstairs and found my newest book. It was a moment that should have been one of celebration, but I wasn’t feeling it. In the coming months I did my best to market the book, making my first video poems and web content, but it was hard to get traction. In retrospect, it was [the] last traditionally published book I published before moving on to issuing titles myself a year later (after what I like to call now the “Poetry Mid-Life Crises of 2020” ).

This bones of SEX & VIOLENCE started in early 2015 with the blond joke poems, and through 2016 with the Plath centos gleaned from lines in ARIEL. It continued through slasher movie fragments and what was initially J’s Valentine’s love poem series from 2017, but which broadened over the next few months and took on a life of its own. Right after I lost my mom, I sat down to send it in time for the end of the month deadline BLP had for new submissions. When the acceptance came during the early spring, I sat and cried at my desk over not being able to tell her first thing. 

The time since that first spring without her and lockdowns/riots to now, five years later, always feels like it is collapsing in on itself.

Kristy Bowen, book birthday | sex & violence

“Fierce” and “fearsome” offer the perfect segue to the Taylor Swift component of how I’m channeling my rage this spring. Ever since hearing “Look What You Made Me Do” in the opening scene of the penultimate episode of The Handmaid’s Tale series, I’ve had it on repeat. I’ve been loud about it. Very loud. (Sorry not sorry!)

I’ve declared it my twisted summer anthem of 2025. Or my anthem of twisted summer. Or the summer of twisted me. Let it be a season of retribution. A season of reclamation. Let it be a season of taking back our power. A season of kingdoms crumbling and artists rising. […]

I’m happy to say I’ve also reached the defiance stage in what has been a season (or seasons) of rejection for my poetry manuscript. Over the last three years or so, my Gertie manuscript has been rejected dozens of times, while also receiving a handful of finalist nods.

The most recent rejection — which came with a lovely note from the editor about making the final round of consideration — arrived in early May, a couple days after I returned from a writing retreat at Mass MoCA. The press that had it was not only one of my dream presses. It was also the last one to respond from a big submission push I did last spring and summer. And since I had paused submitting and revising after that, it meant that Gertie was no longer a contender for any reading period or contest anywhere.

It also meant that if Gertie was to get published, I’d need to jump back into the whole process, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I spent some time entertaining the fear that the last and latest rejection signaled that book publishing wasn’t ever going to be for me.

I indulged the idea that there simply wasn’t a place in the world for my work, but I took lots of deep breaths, gave myself a good talking to, and consulted my writing community. And … wait for it…

I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time
Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time …

Defiance has always been one of my strengths, and I plan to keep fighting for Gertie. It’s partly because I believe in the book. It’s also because, despite constantly wasting energy entertaining negative self talk, somewhere deep down I believe in myself.

Carolee Bennett, Artmaking as Pleasure: “Uncontainable, Unmanageable”

I had a student who is now a Very
Famous and Important Poet; I don’t
think she remembers me much
anymore, if at all. I had a teacher
who said, It’s really about who you know.
But I still believe in the poems I want
to write, believe in the air I breathe,
the tiny electric pulse which begins
as a prickle somewhere in the brain
or sensorium, informing me I need
to sink into the shag carpet of that
moment and stop asking only the logical
questions; because then a trapdoor
might open and who knows what bright,
surprising universe I might fall into?

Luisa A. Igloria, Partial Self-portrait as Poet, with Novelty Cakes

My husband and I recently visited David Austin Roses in Shropshire. It set me thinking about why I love roses: the scent, the sweet-shop colours and the silkiness of the petals. But they also have thorns and are beloved by insects such as earwigs. This links to my latest poetry collection, Earwig Country (Valley Press 2024), where the main theme is ‘beautiful things have inner horrors’.

We do have a small Tudor style rose garden within our back garden, with box hedges and some David Austen roses, and others that need a little work, pruning etc. We also have a few which were standard roses but have reverted to wild roses, and are far too large for this miniature parterre. So our visit was partly scoping out replacements. I liked the Olivia rose, and hope to order bare rooted in the correct season. I can’t see a rose without sniffing it for its scent, and will only buy scented ones. Everywhere I go I see roses and apply my nose to them, and have done since I was a small child. They are indeed ‘olfactory delights’ (quoting one of my own lines there). […]

Your parents’ tangled minds
are clogged with memories, resurfacing
as they approach their nineties.
We have assumed control.

Safe in their new apartment, they cling
to routine, repeat old stories, laugh,
are mostly thankful for our care: roses
late flowering against the dark of winter.

Angela Topping, David Austin Roses

[E]astern Pennsylvania finally moderated its weather enough that I got the weeds and the seeds and transplants more or less under control this past week–“control” being a general term subject to, well, Nature. The peonies bloomed gorgeously on schedule, as did the nefarious multiflora roses and Russian olives that plague the hedgerow. The catbirds and Eastern kingbirds are back; the robins’ first brood has hatched; the orioles are insistent in the walnut trees and brilliant in the garden, chasing the barn swallows. I’m not doing much writing, though I drafted one or two beginnings of poems. Outdoors takes precedence–not that I can’t write out of doors, I often do so. But poems can wait in a way the garden cannot.

And, speaking of poems (and Pennsylvania), I returned from my trip to find this Keystone Poetry anthology awaiting: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09990-3.html–the followup to 2005’s Common Wealth anthology, also edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple.

The new anthology, 20 years after the initial one, has poems by about 180 poets–yes, I am one of them–covering the corners and the center of the Keystone State. I like it even better than the first collection, and it is clear the editors learned much from the experience of curating poems and creating a cohesive “experience” of the regions. Granted, since I know both of the editors personally and appreciate their poetry and their visions, I may be biased. But that’s okay. Objectively, I truly get how huge an undertaking this was and how well it has turned out. For educators, there is a section at the close of the anthology full of suggestions for reading, writing critically, and writing creatively based on this anthology, and even in comparison with the previous one. As both editors are college professors who teach creative writing and critical writing, these appendices are well-thought out and worthwhile.

I miss the aridity of New Mexico, which seems to benefit my overall health. And I miss my daughter immensely. But springtime in eastern PA has many compensations, not the least of which are blooming even as I write.

Ann E. Michael, Back in PA

I think Palgrave’s decision to exclude contemporary work – he would not ‘anticipate the verdict of the future on our contemporaries’ – was an excellent one. Absolutely no one can ever assess its merit, because it hasn’t had time to accrue any yet. Not that this stops us doing it. Young poets are always certain they live in a golden age; if it were left to them, they would include few poets beyond their brilliantly relevant coevals. But what they imagine the intrinsic value of their poetry is often just its extrinsic attitude, which is half the point of young poets in the first place: to take a stand, and demand a corrective to the inequities and distortions of the establishment. Today, ‘identity’ is still the main game in town, just as ‘class’ and gay visibility were in my day; in my mentors’ day, it was feminist corrective, and in their mentors’, anti-metropolitanism and fighting for the representation of the regions and the Celtic fringe. While one’s day passes quickly enough – the identity-obsession will eventually find its level, like everything before it – it always leaves the year ahead looking different in prospect. In time, I believe things tend to be changed for the better and the fairer.

Old poets, on the other hand, know that poetry has never been in worse shape, and would exclude everybody, bar themselves and their one remaining friend. I’m not even too sure about him, to be honest. But for those reasons, the young and the old can make poor anthologists. The young are too short-sighted and the old too long. Those who enjoy the brief, bifocal wisdom of the mid-river perspective (a mixed metaphor which seems to have conjured a specky fly fisher in waders; my apologies) know that the truth always lies in balance. You want a book which looks both forwards and backwards, because those are the books truest to their own time.

Tennyson, Palgrave’s great friend and advisor, wisely insisted that his own poetry be left out of the Treasury – a stroke of genius, because he knew would put the kibosh on Palgrave using any other contemporary work. Had he done so, it would have done nothing but draw attention to Tennyson’s absence. In vetoing his own inclusion, Tennyson underwrote the Treasury’s own longevity and success. […]

My favourite version of the do-I-put-me-in dilemma is actually a Tennysonian absence: The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry was edited by my favourite living poet, Paul Muldoon, a choice Faber must have instantly regretted. In it, Paul more or less explored the set theory complexities of self-absence. He had already made the most insanely Palgravian choice – a mere ten poets were included in the book; but Muldoon then doubled down on his honourable self-omission by not just leaving himself out, but annihilating his own existence altogether. Instead of an introduction, there was an excerpt from an interview with Louis MacNeice. Given that even back then Muldoon was, by common consent, one of the most important living Irish poets, the book was now rendered self-evidently and gratingly incomplete. The cleverness of this almost situationist piece of publishing is so Muldoonian I could spend an essay unpacking it. But it remains a brilliant anthology, in the true sense, I think – provided you read it with a copy of Muldoon’s Selected in the other hand.

Don Paterson, ‘Here by effacement the poem is restored to unity’: The Genius of Francis Palgrave and the Golden Treasury – Part II

If you enjoy reading poetry and are, at least in principle, interested in reading contemporary poetry and responses to it in “real time” — following poets as they publish new material, getting a sense of new directions and experiments as they evolve — then the obvious thing to do is to subscribe to a handful of poetry magazines. There are several splendid online poetry magazines now, but I still much prefer to read both poetry and criticism in print. This is partly because I just don’t remember poems I read on a screen in the same way. I don’t believe you have really read a poem at all if you’ve only read it once — and certainly, from a poet’s perspective, you haven’t really “succeeded” unless your reader comes back to your poem time and again. Online venues are quick and convenient ways of getting a taste of many writers, but it’s hard to revisit things. You can’t annotate or turn down pages as you can with a physical book or magazine, even saved links often go dead, and the lack of manual interaction I think also impedes memory.

So for me, at least, printed poetry magazines still matter. But if you’re new to reading poetry magazines, or even if you’re quite experienced at it but fancy a change, it can be hard to know where to start. Most print magazines, unsurprisingly, only offer a very small amount of their content for free online, and very few libraries and bookshops now carry them so the opportunities for browsing are limited. (At least in the UK; I see them more often in France.) And it’s hard to find “reviews” of magazines that aren’t aimed primarily at people thinking of submitting, rather than those who are potential readers.

I’ve written reviews of three of the magazines I receive regularly before (Poetry Review, Interpret and the French rbl), and I’ve put the links to those pieces at the end of this post. But today I thought I’d take a look at three very good magazines, all of which I value and read loyally, and all of which print a good deal of prose as well as poetry, with an eye for their differences — what might attract you to one of these over the others if you are a potential new subscriber. These are the spring (i.e. most recent) issues of the long-running PN Review; Poetry London (also well established, but with a recent change of poetry editor); and the quite new, and still evolving, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. All three print poetry, literary essays and reviews (of poetry) in broadly similar proportions.

Victoria Moul, Poetry magazines: three spring issues

I’m always on the look out for books that deepen my understanding of creating poetry and am eternally grateful to writers such as Ted Kooser (The Poetry Repair Manual) and Steve Kowit (In the Palm of Your Hand), who supported my early attempts at writing myself. Last year I was moved to congratulate Isabelle Kenyon of Fly on the Wall Press for the publication of a truly inspirational book (The Process of Poetry) in which British poets of the stature of Don Paterson, Sean O’Brien, Liz Lochhead and Gillian Clarke reflected on the development of one of their poems through discussion with editor Rosanna McGlone. I was, therefore, particularly excited by the news that McGlone was working on a sequel, an Australian version, called The Making of a Poem (5 Islands Press, 2025) and wanted to review it. […]

Whilst there is some commonality in the different poets’ approaches, such as in their shared view of the importance of reading others’ work and in their willingness to experiment, there is diversity  too and, at times, contradictions. John Kinsella, for example, does not believe in giving up on poems, even if they are not working.

‘I’ve never abandoned a poem. If a poem doesn’t work, it gets rewritten and reworked. If I’m doubtful about what I’ve said, the piece then becomes a questioning and an investigation of that doubt.’

Whereas Sarah Holland-Batt, admits to giving up on poems that she feels aren’t progressing

‘All the time I have poems that I feel won’t work and I just let them go.’

Such contradictions are inevitable in a book that seeks to provide insights into the highly individualistic practice of writing poetry. As The Making of a Poem is not a simplistic handbook on the dos and don’ts of poetry writing, the reader must use the poet’s different accounts to reflect critically upon their own practice. Some insights will confirm and some will challenge their approaches and through that challenge produce the potential for its development.

Three of the insights that have led me to reflect on my own practice are: Jaya Savige’s statement that: ‘If I feel I’m getting too confessional, I try to rebalance things by banning myself from the first-person pronoun for the next few poems;’ Mark Tredinnick’s advice  to his students that  ‘ the poem you’re writing isn’t about yourself; it’s about ourselves;’ and Bella Li encouragement to ’trust in your particularity: the subjects you’re interested in, the forms that you want to use…don’t try to change what you’re doing to suit some sense of an audience.’  I have no doubt the lessons other readers will take away  from engaging with such poets will be different. That is the beauty of this book: there will be something for everyone!

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Making of a Poem’ edited by Rosanna McGlone

The latest from Birmingham, Alabama-based poet, fiction writer and editor Alina Stefanescu, and the first collection I’ve properly gone through of hers, is the remarkable My Heresies (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2025), a lyric exploration of being and becoming, of family histories and geographic shifts. “The first word wasn’t love, was it?” she writes, within the first poem of the two-part “Cosmologies,” “It was this once that sat upon a time we can’t locate / in physics. It was the science of bread / being broken and eaten. // I am still terrible at division.” My Heresies is a collection of big, complicated emotions, cultural collision and a fierce intelligence, composed with such a delicate and careful ease of the line. “I, too, would appreciate / being courted at the leveling / of the sacred.” she writes, as part of the short poem “Little Things: A Ring,” “If I can’t partake of the trifecta, / I will settle for that flaming / thing in the angel’s right hand.” The poems are expansive and intimate, containing the whole world and the author’s entire life in the smallest moment, the most contained set of sentences. […]

With opening poem and five carved, numbered sections, there is an element of My Heresies of being constructed as a long sentence, a book-length suite of poems seamlessly stitched into a single, ongoing conversational thread. The poems are propelled by hush and halt, a tempo of thoughtful measure, articulation, excavation and archaeological play, but one that loops and reels and revels in repetition, managing to find new elements across familiar stories, familiar lines and phrases. “Failure to absorb the verb / and modify the actor accordingly.” begins the poem “Indictment for Failure to Conjugate,” “To sit and / play dumb.” There is also an interesting thread contained within this collection of the moments and lyrics of the late German-speaking Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), a poet with whom Stefanescu feels both cultural and poetic affinity. “Paul Celan begins with an act of self-naming.” begins the poem “Sonnet at the Ghost Commune,” “The poem claims the invention of self / on a Bucharest windowsill. Poets put // the moon in its place / at the horn of the table / on the shoe of the satyr folding laundry into bohemian ballet.”

There is such a detailed intimacy to this collection, and a sharp and open intelligence at play, one that invites the reader in as an equal, unafraid of what these lines might reveal.

rob mclennan, Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies

The second section of Thomas Meyer’s Fisher King, ‘Adages Agenda’ begins with these words:

Have I said more than I meant. Or mean to? I mean have I said too much, shy of either revelation or burden. Not so much said as wrote. Letter. Poem.

It’s a significant question for a writer who’s launching into a book a significant part of which consists of the relation of memories of personal relationships from teen romances through his 40-year-long partnership with Jonathan Williams to his current marriage to Michael Watt. It also bears on the idea that people as written have their own reality as compared to their ‘real’ one, as in this poem, poem ‘x’ from the short first section, which shares the book’s title:

I am Merlin.
I only exist in books.

An empty place.

For us, as readers, Meyer’s cast of characters also exist in the empty space of the book but are none the less as real as Merlin; ‘memoirs are inventions, fictions autobiography’. […]

Much earlier in the book, thinking of Bunting and Pound’s ‘Dichten = Condensare’, Meyer writes:

Could it be that an aesthetic invented at the beginning of the twentieth century in reaction to the nineteenth might lack application at the beginning of the twenty-first? We don’t need to compress, we need to expand. Slow poetry? Take time, make time?

It strikes me that in these closing pages, Meyer achieves a kind of slow poetry, a poetry with time and room to think, without succumbing to prolixity:

Something about a peony.
Full blown on the table in a jar.
The whole room filled

with that pink light
coming from

it having us in mind.

Fisher King is a book to inhabit, to move around in, slowly. Inevitably in a review of this nature, I’ve only skated over a few of its surfaces. As a reader, I’ll be back for more.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading May 2025: A Review

There’s no getting around the fact that everyone’s future involves some form of disability. As we age, our bodies show the results of living, i.e., aches, stretch marks, and memory lapses, to name just a few. Poets, it appears, intuit this reality more readily than others, even embrace it. As Loveday puts it, poets, “though not necessarily identifying as disabled themselves, turn to language in order to speak to those instruments of human greed and violence that disable us.” As I read those lines, I thought of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” which includes these familiar lines:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poised between kindness and sorrow, poetry beckons us towards what Loveday calls “connection, mutuality and simultaneous recognition.” How often have you read a poem and felt a deep gratitude, something far beyond the words on the page? This is poetry’s gift. It delves into our shared humanity, reminding us that the world of poems includes all of us. “What poetry embodies, deliberately or inadvertently, fiercely or with great subtlety, is a kind of seismic registry of the zeitgeist, what’s coming and what’s possible.”

The article goes on to connect poetry and disability: “Contemporary poetry, increasingly, registers our proximity to disability…Poetry, like disability, is charged with response in real time.” You could say that poetry takes a stand against ableism, which the American Psychological Association defines as “prejudice and discrimination aimed at disabled people, often with a patronizing desire to ‘cure’ their disability and make them ‘normal.’” 

But is, as the title asserts, poetry disabled? Or is it “differently-abled,” a term sometimes used as a kinder-sounding alternative? I don’t have the answers to those questions. What I do know is that this article made me think hard about my assumptions regarding both poetry and disability.

Eric Goss, “Is poetry disabled?”

“Put it down
on the page” – a writing
teacher says,
“…metaphorically speaking”

Meaning the page pales,
letters on paper have been eaten
and digested (as metaphors do), 
transmuted into light and hovering figures

On a backlit screen, the page
a wink in language, a vestige 
holding its head aloft in a 
restless, churning language. 

Jill Pearlman, The Page, the Page!

Our stories are sighs. They are corporal. Even reading the writing on a page, in a book, we don’t experience the fullness of the words without our lips moving, our tongue only partially restrained, our breath carrying the story into the world with intimate, involuntary utterances.

I once saw the exhibition Body Worlds in New York City. I was fascinated by the plastinate network of blood vessels in the torso. It was as delicate and beautiful as any lace. It made me wonder if the very first artist to make lace knew, subconsciously, of the pattern within us all.

I imagine stories are like this, too. Invisible to us, but like delicate lacework that begins in the brain and traces its way down our spine, into our solar plexus, wrapping our heart. The stories that I’ve heard from the women in my life, the stories that have warped like meaning in a game of whispers, from one mouth, to one ear, to the incidental bumping of other, foreign stories, flattening or rising like a relief in time—these stories are part and parcel of the body with which I move through the world.

Estranged is not the same thing as extricated.

I am a consolidation.
I am a dust devil in the desert,
coming into being
of the dirt
and the spores and the heat

writing a love letter
from and to my mother’s cursive language
from and to her mother, mother’s mother

And in the dark
I will end it all
in a rain of earth
between the yellow lines
of the highway

Ren Powell, A Score of Sorrows

In early spring a book arrived that I had been eagerly anticipating. Atomic Masquerade by Clara Etherin did not disappoint. Witty, exuberant, layered and innovative, this visual poetry collection is full of delights, from brooding palimpsest portrayals of Dracula and Frankenstein to the vivid pair of asemic sonnets “Heaven & Hell” – written in collaboration with AI – with which the book concludes.

Each piece has a distinctive energy, generating an impression of rising out of the page into some intangible third dimension. […]

I have read and reread Atomic Masquerade with great enjoyment; but the enjoyment has been bittersweet, for the book represents the final publication from Penteract Press.

Founded by Anthony Etherin in 2016, Penteract Press has been a leading independent publisher of innovative constrained and visual poetry for almost a decade. The press has given a platform not only to established avant-garde and experimental writers but also to new, previously unknown voices (my own among them). You can read my interview with Anthony about the press, its ethos, and the reasons behind the decision to close here.

Penteract Press books are unique: often sumptuous, always elegant, and characterised by verbal and visual delights and surprises. Moreover, like all good books their intrinsic value to the reader extends beyond the simple pleasure of reading. Diving into a Penteract book is an adventure, an exploration into the art and craft of poetry, an opportunity to investigate the possibilities of language and the space in which letter, word and image coexist.

I have learnt so much from Penteract poets. Luke Bradford’s lyrical Zoolalia, for example, has taught me the beauty of lipograms and how we can tune in to their potential for music and rhythm and energy. The magic of palindromes is revealed through Merlina Acevedo’s Mirrors. Visualising the formal structures in Shakespeare’s sonnets with BardCode by Gregory Betts has suggested new and interesting ways in which I might use rhyme and metrical patterns in my own work.

Marian Christie, A Paean to Penteract Press

I am not a therapist, and the framing of this workshop comes from being a writer and approaching difficult narratives from a writer’s perspective: how do we give shape to trauma narratives, to unwieldy family stories, to personal accounts? How do we deal with memory gaps, empty spaces, lack of documents, family silences, linguistic disruption and failure? Conversely, how do we approach an abundance of material, an overwhelm of information? A box of letters we can barely stand to look at? Confederate roll calls? Court documents? I’ll be walking us through some practical, formal approaches to writing these narratives that have aided me, and also drawing from the community of books I’ve read in my own healing and processing journey (always ongoing), such as What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing by Jen Soriano, but also documentary poetic work such as Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World.

Han VanderHart, Finding Shape in the Dark (on writing difficult narratives) – Two Online, Generative Writing Workshops, July 5 & 19

One of the things I’m looking forward to exploring in my upcoming workshop Rumination as Route is a practice I call ruminative reading: a way of engaging with texts that invites lingering, layering, and the kind of close attention that reveals deeper textures over time.

I’ll be sharing how I approach reading as a writer, and how I tease out unexpected meaning through methods that mirror the digressive and associative structures I write in. This kind of reading isn’t about decoding a text once and for all, it’s about returning to it, turning it over, letting it shift in your hands and your memory.

My ideas around ruminative reading were shaped by my time writing creative reviews for The Bind, a review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors. Though currently on hiatus, The Bind remains a rich and inspiring archive, a space where reviews take many forms: lesson plans, maps, quizzes, writing prompts. It honors writing at important intersections, and I encourage you to spend time on the site if you haven’t already.

José Angel Araguz, on ruminative reading

Daily I am perplexed by, well, the day, what is transpiring, what has happened in the world since I last checked, what the day will bring and how I’m supposed to respond, what I want and what I have and how to reconcile the differences and align the two, who I am, who I was, what I’ll be, how I’ll manage, what it all means, when I know meaning is a made thing. There are other questions. How do birds fly in the rain? Don’t they feel the pelt of drops like bullets on their backs? The rabbits in the backyard are racing around and leaping over each other in play. Does everything play? Are bacteria on my skin doing their own version of Miss Mary Mack with their flagella? There is so much we don’t know.

I used to be a strict believer in the black-and-whiteness of things. With age I’ve settled into a certain comfort with the gray scale. Nevertheless I’m often an impatient reader of poetry that does not show itself to me right away. I won’t name names at the moment. Too much gray and I’m just wandering in the fog, and really, I’d rather not. This little poem, however, has pleased me over some weeks as I’ve turned it over and over in my mind’s hands like a pretty rock.

Marilyn McCabe, a moment

i ask my friends,
“how have you been keeping yourself
together?” i do not actually want
advice but i want to hear if/how
we are surviving. i look up designs
for a plague doctor uniform.
needle in my teeth, i get to work.
sew together old jackets.
i stop sleeping. sleep is for a different time
with less fire & less windows.

Robin Gow, plague doctor

I struggle for language in a murky space. Must I write an ode to this insistent despair? Be thankful for its amorphous presence, its angled ambiguity, its sightless eyes that berate me in silence? The music obfuscates the light. Separates word from meaning. What is the edge of gratitude? What birds listen in the trees beyond it?

talk to me
broken moon:
dark side to dark side

There is the crescendo. Then the quiet. Then the flapping of wings. Then the jacarandas straightening. Then the echo. Then the hum. The tune running in my head.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Purple song

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: plastic dragons, writing for the bees, earwig spiracles, the planet as a prayer wheel, and much more. Enjoy.

I found a forked willow twig whose shape seemed to suggest a sail.
I had a bundle of offcuts of heavyweight handmade paper from making “The Soul as a Bird”.
On waking one morning this week I had an idea for putting them together.
The upper strips were briefly dipped in walnut dye, the lower ones in diluted blue ink. [image]

one step
from shore to ship
and everything
has changed

This is one of the ten-word poems from my little book “Ten Words”. The prompt-word was liminal.
Being a classicist I went with the literal meaning of the Latin word limen, a theshold.
This piece is for our exhibition in Wells Museum next month.

Ama Bolton, A sculptural book

The first panel of Day 3, “Future Forms: Inventing Literary Forms for the Twenty-First Century” (Kai Carlson-Wee, Kate Folk, Alexandria Hall, Keith Wilson, Hua Xi) was a wonderfully creative and eccentric take on poetic forms. In fact, the moderator, Kai Carlson-Wee, termed it “the spirit of the weird,” which I resonated with immediately (I’m always urging my students to get weirder in their poetry). Forms shared included the “palindrome poem” (watch this poetry film based on Carlson-Wee’s poem “Nomad Palindrome”), “Magic Eye” or the stereogram, where if you stared hard enough and in just the right way, a poem would rise from a block of text (like the Magic Eye posters), a poem written completely in symbols which captures what it feels like to have a psychotic break, and some text-based pieces from Kate Folk and Alexandria Hall. 

I gave this panel high marks for its fearless and imaginative transformation of forms, for the energy of the panelists (especially for an early-morning, last-day panel), and for the fun they managed to inject into a category that includes traditional forms such as ballads and sonnets.

Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025, Part 3

I had a hectic week, but this morning—with nowhere to go, no errands, no doctor appointments—I decided to read a book of poems. I cheated, perhaps, by picking up a small book.

But, oh my. Mostly I am here to tell you how exquisite and inspiring I found this “small”—only 30 poems, printed in a 7 X 5 inch format—but powerful book, produced by Empty Bowl Press. The original Chinese of the poems written by Li Qingzhao, a Song dynasty poet (1084-1151) faces the English translation by Sibyl James and Kang Xuepei. I don’t read Chinese, and have, really, not a clue about it, but there’s something about seeing (and almost feeling) the weight of the original characters that deepens the experience.

I remember the January day when I picked this up, from a book display at Book Tree in Kirkland. Despite my resolution to buy fewer books, I couldn’t resist it. (Just look at that cover!)

James and Xuepei explain in the introduction how in their partnership they tried to honor the original spareness and artistry of the poems. They do a brilliant job. They add titles to the poems, but preserve the poet’s habit of naming the song each poem honors. (Alas, the music is lost.)

Their introduction also succeeds in briefly sketching for us the life of Li Qingzhao, a rare woman poet of her time, lucky enough to be educated, and to have married a husband (also a poet) who valued her voice. When exiled during a time of war, she lost almost everything, including her husband. Her poetry persists. Even writing of despair, her lines sing.

Bethany Reid, Plum Blossom Wine

We cannot walk backward. We can only walk forward. Like Wangari Maathai, we can create great visions, work towards a sustainable future. Plant trees. Save animals. Protect our communities. Keep literary culture, art, and the humanities alive.

With billionaires controlling the supply chain, there isn’t room to breathe. But every day, I hope that Red Hen will receive a transformative gift that will allow us to keep publishing books in this inhospitable climate. We ride the train of risk and believe in magic. In the thrum and haul of it, I wake early. Walk to the green, breathe into the sun.

The struggle, glory, and wild of it is every day. Books, literary citizenship, uplifting marginalized voices: our smudge of resistance against erasure.

Kate Gale, The Alert Circle: Who Will Lead America?

As a poet, the modern real-life parable of aquatic Lego lost at sea and still being routinely found on beaches was hard to resist. But I have a lot of ambivalence about this poem. Almost ten years ago, I remember reading the words of Robert Macfarlane on the meaning of a new coinage to describe our era, the Anthropocene:

Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the “Plasticene”. We currently produce around 100m tonnes of plastic globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade, some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record. Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo bottles and deodorant caps – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. “What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic – and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.

Robert Macfarlane, “Generation Anthropocene”, The Guardian, 1 April 2016

Somehow the thought of discarded plastic making its way into the geological layers that will define our era in the future is even more shocking to me than the terrible images of wildlife suffocating in a world of plastic waste. Several years after this article was published, a wave of anti-plastic action swept through the UK, fuelled in part by the 2019 BBC mini-series “War on Plastic”. The programme documented the infiltration of plastic into our homes and everyday lives, followed the trail of recycling to rubbish dumps abroad, and challenged ordinary residents to reduce their plastic waste. There was a sudden and visceral reaction in our local community which led to the formation of a voluntary not-for-profit group advocating for a plastic free community and various efforts by many of us to reduce our single-use plastic waste, including switching to refillable products. Less than a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As we all reached for something, anything to combat the virus, plastic made a comeback, perhaps most painfully represented by the suddenly ubiquitous (and, as it turned out, money-wasting) PPE, but also in household items that went from unnecessary extras to routine items on the shopping list like anti-bacterial wipes. Those of us with young children stuck at home were also buying Duplo, Lego and other plastic toys to keep them amused while we tried to work or manage day-to-day life. The tide of plastic washed back and kept coming.

The last line of my poem riffs on Macfarlane’s powerful rewriting of Larkin. It feels bleak hence, I think, my ambivalence about publishing this piece. I’d like to think that change is possible, that solutions will be found to the overwhelming prospect of an Anthropocene climate changed world but it’s getting harder and harder to hold onto that hope. In the meantime, it must be said, that the dragons are rather beautiful.

Ruth Lexton, Legacy of a Container Loss

Oh, let me out of here now, let me walk in the woods. Thud.
The first bluebells. Primroses in full bloom. Thud.
Celandines. A few violets. A wood anemone. Thud.
Bumble bees in tall grass. Thud.
Let me peer Thud.
into the darkness Thud.
of the pond. Thud.

Bob Mee, TRYING TO READ EXCERPTS FROM RANDOM BOOKS AND THINK WHILE A TALL BUILDING IS BEING DEMOLISHED ACROSS THE ROAD

Harpocrates, it seems, was adopted from the Egyptian pantheon – the God Horus manifested as a child, with a finger to his lips representing the hieroglyph for ‘child’. This was misinterpreted by the Greeks as an injunction to haud yer wheesht. So he became the god of silence and secrets.

In his 1911 painting ‘Silence’ Odilon Redon’s subject is Harpocrates holding two fingers to their lips. The figure is enigmatic, eyes downcast like a Flemish Christ from the Middle Ages as they peer out from wherever into wherever; from darkness into light, from silence into uproar, as if language were a place they dared not enter.

There’s a careful balance in poetry between what we say and what we don’t. Silence is there for at least two reasons – as a means of avoiding saying what needs said, or of saying what needs said. Every word comes bedded in silence – we know that – there’s a tiny silence between words; a wider one between verses; a huge silence surrounds each poem – just look at all that white paper and imagine what I’m not saying. […]

One of the crucial decisions a poet must make is how much to say and how much to leave for the reader to say for themselves. An unemployed reader is a bored reader. My early drafts are usually far too pretentious and blethery – they butt in before the real poem has had a chance to speak – a sort of linguistic warming-up exercise – and then keep on talking long after the poem has run out of things to say. I then spend days, weeks, longer, taking out most of the things I want to say, so the poem ends up as a sort of epitaph to itself, if that makes sense. A gravestone with no grave beneath it.

John Glenday, The Harpocratic Oath

Beautiful youth on red rocks,
rough dimpled, smooth skinned, muscles
curved as old sculptures, hands full
of panpipes. Wrap the sky’s heat
around you, and answer this:
what have we lost by selling
off science, the living seas?

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 300: Not to Sell the Fields #NaPoWriMo

Bee lore escaped me until I entered the world of poetry. “Tell it to the bees” is a tradition that’s both ancient and modern, built from ancient Greece and at home in the most domestic of settings. The tradition rests on the idea bees can slip between the living world and the world of the dead, that they are messengers, predictors and vessels for our secrets. […]

This idea has got me thinking. Over the past few weeks, during those liminal moments between waking and sleeping I’ve been jotting thoughts about what I would write if I had no name, or how I would talk about all the decisions I’ve never made. I have begun to crave anonymity, to see it as freedom and realise the constraints that writing in public brings. I have so many snapshots of poems on my notes app, the things that come in the middle of the night (with various degrees of sense) and so many of these are words that could become something that resonates and that I’m proud of.

Here lies the conundrum. To write to be read means being comfortable with people knowing what’s inside. Being comfortable with people knowing what’s inside means being comfortable with yourself, and with the story that got you to this place of needing to put it down on paper. It also means being comfortable with the fact that people may be angry or upset about what you write.

Or does it? the brilliant thing about being a writer is that it allows us to use metaphor as a means of expression. It allows us to create scenarios that are close enough to the truth to feel like our story, but not so close as to be recognised. 

Kathryn Anna Marshall, How do you go about writing for the bees?

Flowers love this spring, 
but worms sprawl helpless on sidewalks 
and die in the first patch of sun. The dog 
comes home bedraggled from his walks, 
happy and shaking on the stoop. I drape 
my slicker over a chair with a towel beneath 
to catch the drops, brew some tea, open 
my journal.

Sarah Russell, New England Spring

I’ve been working for over a year with Thoreau’s ‘Walden,’ and enjoying it so much. I’ve tried to avoid classic books but somehow I just got into it and couldn’t extract myself. It’s been wonderful reacquainting myself with Thoreau.

Unfortunately I haven’t worked on this project in some time, starting with when my mother fell in early December. Now that I am finishing up with her paperwork I hope this pause will soon end.

In the meantime, I’ve got visual poems from ‘Walden’ in Amsterdam Review, Moist, Sixth Finch and Fugue. Click on the journal names to read the poems. 

Sarah J. Sloat, Bucolics

Three collections I read recently have got me thinking about the grittier sonic elements in poetry; the use of scientific, foreign, antiquated, and invented words; wordplay in general as a poetry component; and how sound can push both experiment and meaning in a poem. I’ve been mulling about the task of writing anything that feels “new,” to me or to my readers, and about the challenges more sonic wordplay would mean for me as a writer. I’m saying here I think it would be difficult to do, because it differs from my long-accustomed voice and style. I’m also saying I like a challenge in creative work, and that my style(s) go though changes always, so why not? In creative art of any kind, the passing of years makes a difference in many things. Content (because: experience). Situation (because: life happens). Methods (because: technology and materials). And influence–what I was reading in high school vs. grad school vs. today–though some favorites will always hold a place in my creative mind.

My poems tend to be plain-spoken, although I’ve never been shy about going beyond the standard vernacular to employ a geological term, a botanical name, or a somewhat archaic noun or adjective when it suits the feel and sound of the poem. Most of my poems don’t fall under the description of experimental or edgy. I’m not making waves with language, but some poets are. And my recent reading has me wanting to experiment more. It will mean failing a lot, because I’m working against my habitual methods of composition. I won’t be as good at it as these poets (below) are. What I’m hoping, though, is that the practice of trying more sonic wordplay in my work implants a tracery of that practice onto my poetic voice.

Ann E. Michael, Reading my contemporaries

One might think that, unlike an actor, the writer’s over-intellectualizing would be an advantage: being able to really dig down into the motivations and cause and effect progression of a narrative. But an intellectual presentation of a scene can be as cold on the paper, as it is on stage.

On the other hand, no one wants to read a text that is flooded with adverbs or takes colorful or obscure verbs to an extreme, tipping into unintentional melodrama, or bathos.

A writer can find the middle ground by utilizing onomatopoeia, which I believe is a form of physical action. Even when we read silently, our body is anticipating performance and has a muscle memory of the spoken word.

We have a hard-wired relationship to our mother-tongue. The plosives (b,p), the fricatives (f,th), the afficates (ch), the nasal stops (m,n), and the glottal stop (in American English it is the silent t in oral contractions like moun’ain), all carry prelinguistic meaning.

Sounds, which I’m asking you to think of as a form of gesture, will always pull up emotional memories. Of course we can override those memories, but as writers, we can also choose to utilize them in our readers.

There’s a difference between the words rip and tear. Don’t think about it. Feel it in your mouth, and listen. Rip starts as a growl and stops with sudden explosion, as though the speaker is spitting. Tear, on the other hand, begins with a plosive effort, slides through a dipthong, and ends with a growl.

Ren Powell, Writing with the Body

The traditional tannery workers in Fès seem to be the ultimate act of immersion: could they be more immersed in color?  Could they put their whole selves into their craft, crawling into vats that fill entire planes with dyes once and often still of turmeric, indigo, pomegranate, mimosa flower, saffron and indigo?  Sinewy limbs stripped to the waist, having cleaned skins with limestone and softened them with pigeon guana droppings.  The radical ‘70s artists who dipped their naked bodies in paint, then rolled on canvases had the same idea. To be one with.  Saturate. With not an ounce of doubt or self or restraint. They are beautiful in a way that horrifies us – how is their health?  Their pay, their hours?  But they uphold long cultural tradition that dovetails with seeking union, here with color.  I’m in. 

Jill Pearlman, To Be Immersed in Color

So if an ode or praise poem can be anything, what’s their magic? “Focusing the poetic lens to dissect, understand, and communicate the beauty and mystery of life.” (That’s Writers.com again.) For me, much of that “beauty and mystery” can be found in odes’ ability to go deep, deep down into the good, bad and ugly while still holding the spirit of appreciation or homage.

Writing for the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Stacey Balkun describes it this way: “I’ve been drawn to the ode because this world needs some celebration in it, and yes, there is much to celebrate. But even more interesting is the intersection between the light and dark, and contemporary poets are using the ode’s form to explore that space.” Balkun crystallizes this even further when she says odes “imbue praise with complexity,” which 100% explains my attraction to them.

That vibration between praise and complexity gives odes and praise poems an abundance of energy and tension and makes the style terrific for poems of witness. In a description for a class on writing the ode, Brooklyn Poets expounds on this communal and political role: “The praise poem, in light of recent global atrocities, is perhaps more necessary than ever before. … The power of praise poems [is how they help us] heal and bear witness in this present moment.”

Carolee Bennett, 40 Odes and Praise Poems

I don’t seem to be able to let this poem be. I’ve had a couple of goes at writing it over the years but a definite version seems to allude me. It is based on the conceit that an avatar of mine is conjured in the head of the man who sold us all down the river with all the horror that comes with the phrase.

INSIDE THE HEAD OF THE MAN WHO SOLD US ALL DOWN THE RIVER

His weasel words of self aggrandisement
once again conjure me into existence
and I am told where to stand and what to say […]

Paul Tobin, WEASEL WORDS

I wanted to let him speak for himself, to express his own anger. To me he is one of the many voiceless dead, resulting from Covid, especially those in care homes (both my parents ended in such a place and died there), those who could not be visited by relatives and friends due to contact restrictions:

and in the quiet I’d hear ashes stir
a murmuring of lips beyond cracked
and inaudible though I know the gist
that I was let down—they’re slow to act

letting people come they let people go
running it’ll be fine! up their fucking flagpole
then backhanding fat cat chums
with a hundred and fifty thousand lives
a fire sale fobbed me off with shit deals

even dangling one last Christmas before me
only to shove it—old ashy whisperer—
folded into yourself a dishcloth
on the drainer—a hiccupping cough
into your pillow—a last companion—

too old to ventilate . . .

We all read the stories of deaths of this sort. None of this is ‘true’ to my own experience (or my parents) but this is where the ‘larger’ truth surfaces, and this was my own way of trying to say something about it. The poem ends very emotionally (for me) because it returns again to autobiographical details. I DO have this picture on my mantlepiece (behind me as I type this out). I’m drawing on my own sense of loss, but I hope the dovetailing with what is fictional (for me) is effective enough. People wrote indicating their compassionating sense that I had indeed lost a parent during Covid and I want to again take this as a compliment to the technical success of the poem in its final state.

Martyn Crucefix, ‘I am not I’: the Slippery First-Person in Poems

It takes tenderness to peel away

what held you so long in the dark.

And so, much as I admire the self-

containment of the daikon, also

I can’t help loving how it’s blushed

with the palest stroke of green.

Luisa A. Igloria, Wearing the Skin

National Poetry Month is wrapping up, and it turned out to be a little more hectic than I expected. Wonder & Wreckage turned one year old, so I celebrated with fellow poet and sister/friend Karen Head with one of our “Call & Response” round-robin-style readings at the Georgia Center for the Book. Thanks to the folks who came out to listen. 

I also had the pleasure of reading at the Cecilia Woloch  & Friends virtual reading today, along with the fabulous Brendan Constantine, Carine Topal, Carol Muske-Dukes, Yona Harvey, Kevin Prufer, Lynne Thompson, Pam Ward and Francisco Letelier. It was wonderful to hear these poets and see that so many people from around the world chose to spend their Sunday afternoon with us.

Megan and I continue to steadily work on the Stevie Nicks anthology. We’ve got a working manuscript together and are polishing off an introduction, so we’re still on track for a Spring 2026 publication. 

Collin Kelley, A National Poetry Month recap

I have not posted anything here for quite some time. As I’ve said before, that is why I will never monetize this space. I’ve been reading a lot of your posts, learning from you, taking notes, finding new things to read, new music to check out. I’ve been working with my editors at Sundress to be sure that my fourth collection Unrivered is ready for layout/cover design. But I haven’t had much of anything to say, so I’ve let this platform be the thing that fell off my plate. So I’ll share today some things that have brought me joy/energized me/kept me writing over the past couple of months.

Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters

It was exciting and exhausting for Rachel Bunting and I to work through our first open submissions cycle as co-editors of our new journal, but the second issue arrived on April 20. We are so proud of the variety of writers and artists that are represented. I invite you to dip in — 5 poems, 2 essays, a very manageable read—and if you like what you see, share it! We are still new and want to grow our audience for our contributors the best we can. (And if you’re a writer or artist, subs for issue three open on May 1!)

Hundred Pitchers of Honey Reading Series

I cut the reading series back to four larger readings this year due to some upcoming travel and commitments to getting Asterales off the ground, but April’s Poetry Month reading was a reminder as to why I love to host this series. You can click on the link to the title above and watch the April reading (as well as all the previous readings) on YouTube anytime you need a little poetry fix. Next year, I hope to return to a more regular format, perhaps six readings a year.

30/30 for April

I haven’t felt very connected to my writing self, so I decided to do a 30/30 this year, loosely using the forms calendar provided by poets Taylor Byas and Seamus Fey. I’ve tried to stay open to whatever comes, to not force any sort of theme or “project”, to just go with whatever comes out. And it’s been working. So far, 22 days in, I have at least 5 pieces that I like, that I think are worth revising. (Yes, I revise. Obsessively. I know some poets who don’t, and that idea gives me the heebie-jeebies.) I won’t share any of the drafts here, as they are all in VERY rough places, but I will share some of the titles, my least favorite part of writing a poem.

• It Doesn’t Have Feathers, Emily
• Self-Portrait as Juliet with Insects
• Self-Portrait as Virginia Woolf Thinking of Frost As She Walked into the Ouse
• Sestina Where I Keep Asking Neil DeGrasse Tyson the Same Questions Over & Over
• When the OED Fails, I Seek Definitions Elsewhere
• Body, Don’t You Owe Me Something Good?

Donna Vorreyer, Back in the Saddle

 I’ve written before that April is the loneliest month. As a poet, you would think it would be a celebration, a month of revelry and readings and reaching new readers. Aprils are always an unusually packed month, not just when I was still working at the library. There I blamed the rise and fall of the semester, which, last couple weeks of April was reaching a head before finals, meant we had a last chance for exhibits and programming that people would actually be likely to attend. Wait too long and everyone was immersed in papers and projects. This was also my experience too as a student, when the deadlines loomed just over the end of the month. This was also typically when I was in rehearsals in collage for the spring show. While May was a bump and then an unraveling to vacation, April was always a little more demanding. 

As a poet from around 2004-2018,  I tried unsuccessfully to do NaPoWriMo, and mostly failed. In 2018, having started a year where I was climbing out from under the grief over losing my mom, I was already writing daily in the months before, so trying it in April seemed a fair bet. That was the first year I ever succeeded, having gotten down a writing routine that worked. Mostly it was just switching trying to write at night to writing first thing over breakfast in the studio. The only thing that changed each April was I included weekends . For a few years, this continued. I had a great slew of projects that had their origins in April’s past (I’ve been sharing peeks of them over at IG this week.) including memoir in bone & ink,  a project about wanting to run away from poetry like a child wants to run away from home. They also include series about The Shining, about Walter Potter dioramas, about Alice in Wonderland.  

While my writing process has a changed a little this past year and I tend to write a few poems a couple times a week instead of one poem daily, my focus is much more narrowed and intentional than it was prior. Nevertheless, I considered mixing things up and doing back to daily writing. Only then I remembered how lonely writing and sharing daily makes me feel during this month of all months. So I decided not to. 

On one hand, this may just be a continuation of years feeling lonely about poetry.  I remember being younger and engaging in the online and in-person communities with relish and enthusiasm. Those communities don’t always exist, or they break apart and form anew.  Every once in a while a poet will ask me where they should send work or where they should do readings when they are in Chicago, and sometimes my answers are incomplete or wholly disappointing. I am not sure I know. Most journals and presses have dissolved over the past two decades, reading series have come and gone, bookstores have risen and fallen.  All that’s left are the poems. 

Kristy Bowen, only the lonely

I always look forward to a new collection from Pascale Petit, and this one [Beast] didn’t disappoint. It also, I realise now in writing this post kind of dovetails nicely with the reading I’ve been doing in Art Monsters – ideas around monstrosity, beastliness, female creativity, excess etc.

Transformation, metamorphosis and the body as a place of unstable ground is always central to Pascale Petit’s work. The speaker of the poems, and family members often shift into the bodies of animals, birds, insects and plants to reveal emotional truths about power and the way we relate to each other, and sometimes fail each other.

Much of Pascale’s poetry is concerned with trauma, abuse and violence […] but she is a poet who writes about multiple places and brings that fascination with transformation into her writing about place. I really enjoyed two of the Odes in Beast: one is called “Ode to a Cornish Hedge” and starts:

Thousand-mile-long rainforest, shaggy remnant, where I slow to hear air pass through earwig spiracles, and bumblebees are thunder-loud in foxgloves

and a little earlier in the collection we have “Ode to the Camargue” which starts:

Your waterlilies are wings of rosy flamingos opening their dawns. You are imparadised with mornings of wild blue iris skies.

Both poems continue with this richness of detail. Writing just those opening couplets out now I can see how ‘“Ode to a Cornish Hedge” is concerned predominantly with sound, whereas “Ode to the Camargue” uses colour to focus on vision. Both then open up to incorporate dazzling writing using all five senses.

Kim Moore, April Reading

It seems the poem’s speaker’s father was simply continuing the abuse he endured on his own children, repeating the cycle. So the speaker is asking if the father’s memoir will be a hagiography or honest. Does saving the family image matter more than speaking the truth. Or is the father just talking about writing a book because he knows his daughter is a writing and she can’t be allowed to celebrate her success. Readers effectively come full circle to the writer’s dilemma about how she can be authentic in her writing.

It doesn’t end on a downbeat though. The final poem “Hope, the Everlasting Sacer” talks of possibility and ends, “The kind people I will meet,/ And the things I will write./ I am set free.”

“I Wish I Could Write” explores intergenerational trauma where abuse repeated instead of the cycle being broken, and the issues that a family member who wishes to write honestly about their life (and abuse) faces. The dilemma is whether to keep up the expected family image or risk being ostrasized for telling the truth. Widner sees this from both the point of view of the adult child facing the dilemma while acknowledging that her parent was damaged. The tone is hopeful, writing the past will free the poems’ speaker to write what really matters to her, overcome that block and fulfill her wish.

Emma Lee, “I Wish I Could Write” Katherine Widner – book review

Rosie Johnston’s previous book, Six-Count Jive was a study in domestic abuse and escape presented in sets of haiku-like poems. Her new publication, Safe Ground sets that experience, ‘a bad case of bad, bad husband’, in a wider context of trauma and recovery that reaches back to a troubled Belfast childhood, with a much-loved womanising, hill-climbing, opera lover father and a mother whose resentments ruined her relationship with her daughter, and forward to a happier present in poems that are baggier, more discursive, than those in the earlier book.

These personal troubles are set in a background of the Troubles, and at moments the public and private seem to overlap, as in this poem on the Abercorn bombing in 1972:

Over his shoulder we’d all seen it: the beast was out of its cage.
Chill control, red-eyed in our homes, ready to clot our lives.
The lowest we can be was loose. Nothing mattered now but blood.

Her escape was, and remains, the sea, right from the very first poem here, ‘Carnlough Bay’:

I breathe. Expand again, at last, to my full size. I’m
tallest in bare feet, on sea-rolled shingle, back
heavy in my heels, cupping the weight of
whelk shells in my pockets.
Constant in it all, so
many years, the
need of
sea.

We see the breakdown of that bad marriage and the speaker’s fraught relationships with her children, but in the end, in the final poem in the book, there is a sense of wholeness, the Waste Land redeemed, its curse lifted by (and by) the sea:

We run, crabs loose from a spilt
green bucket,
back to the best of childhood.

Content with plastic spades,
we burrow
where our simplest selves can find us.

On Margate Sands songs and laughter
ride the winds,
connect us all with all.

That ‘loose’ brings us back to the Abercorn poem, but the worst we can be is transmogrified into the simple best in an echo of marvellous deftness.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading April 2025: A Review

Rebecca Goss is a poet whose work I have hitherto been unfamiliar. Regular readers may recall that I wrote a brief post, here, commending the podcast Goss recorded last year with Heidi Williamson about poetry of place. Like Adrian May, she lives in the middle of East Anglia, in Suffolk. I suggested her most recent (2023) collection, Latch, published by Carcanet and available here, as the book for next month’s poetry book club. It concerns her return, with her husband and young daughter, to the area she was raised in, after living for a long while in Liverpool, and the memories it sparked. At times, it felt like the rural feel had transported me back to the prose of Ronald Blythe in his unclassifiable classic Akenfield. (Though when I think of Suffolk and writers, Roger Deakin, Michael Hamburger and WG Sebald, all of whom I’ve written about on here, also come to mind, as does George Crabbe.) Three poems from Latch were first published in Bad Lilies in 2021, here. As you can see, Goss writes beautifully about a country upbringing. I’ve also now read – in one sitting – her very moving and transfixing second collection Her Birth, about, principally the birth and death of her first daughter Ella. […]

Now I’m working my way deliberately slowly through Jane Hirshfield’s amazing set of essays, Nine Gates, subtitled  ‘Entering the Mind of Poetry’, published by Harper Collins back in 1997. As you’d expect from Hirshfield, it’s immesely thought-provoking; the best book I’ve read about poetry in a long time. It would be very difficult to try and summarise Hirshfield’s ideas. If I were the sort of person who’s deface books by using a highlighter pen to mark the best bits, then my copy of Nine Gates would like an Acid House night had been held within it. This sentence is typical of Hirshfield’s Zen-infused (cliché alert, sorry) insights: ‘Originality lives at the crossroads, at the point where world and self open to each other in transparence in the night rain.’

Matthew Paul, April reading

It’s official news now, but a while back the excellent poet and person that is Matthew Paul told me that his long-awaited second poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, was coming out soon via Crooked Spire Press. I am enormously pleased for him, having loved The Evening Entertainment.

He has also very kindly invited me to read with him at the London launch in June (17th, from 7pm) alongside Vanessa Lampert and Ian Parks. I can’t wait.

Mat Riches, Corinthian Spirit

Denver, Colorado poet and editor Wayne Miller’s sixth full-length poetry collection, most recently following We the Jury (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here] is The End of Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 2025), a collection that continues his lyric explorations at the collision between the dark realities of American military culture and the intimacies of home, family and childhood. “My best friend’s older brother had posters // of nuclear explosions all over his bedroom.” he writes, as part of the poem “THE LATE COLD WAR,” “At night they became the walls of his sleep.” There’s a sharpness to his lyrics, his lyric turns, able to change course mid-thought, allowing the collision of ideas or troubling connections.

The End of Childhood is a title, of course, that provides layers of possibility, from the complicated and naturally-human simplicity of emerging out of childhood thinking, from discovering that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy don’t exist, to the realization of the failings of trusted adults, into further shades of darkness of human possibility. These are poems on multiple levels of realization, and a broadening scope. “Last week, a violent mob / of thousands stormed the Capital. // They wore sweatpants and flags,” begins the second part of his three-part “ON HISTORY,” “puffer coats and tactical gear. // If I ignore the details of their chants / and the silliness of their face paint, // they become a historical form. / That policeman on the television // being crushed in a doorway / over and over is trapped inside // of history. If you feel nothing / for him, then you are inhuman. // Yet all of us were pushing / from one side or another.” His title allows for a further suggestion of innocence, in thinking that such could not happen, could no longer happen; could not happen here. Through his articulations, Miller knows full well that he and all around him live deep within history, from the best moments through to the worst. The storming of the Capital Building, or a teenager felled by a bullet while waiting for the bus. These are poems that meet the present moment, even amid the intimacies of home and memory, children and those recollections of childhood that becoming a parent can so often prompt.

While, for the most part, these troubling elements of “America” sit at the background, almost as a shroud, they are still deeply present, even as the book as a whole writes around childhood, from his to that of his children, offering moments that stitch together that accumulate into narratives with the lightest touch across lines, one phrase carefully set upon another. Whatever the subject matter, there is such a lovely slowness to his lines, a deliberateness, offering hush and a halt amid such careful measure. “My grandfather—just a boy— / discovered his father’s body,” Miller writes, as part of “ON VIOLENCE,” “the trauma of which is why, / my grandmother would say, // he never aspired to more / than basic, menial work. // My grandmother’s father / drowned in Sheepshead Bay // after a night of heavy drinking / with the fishermen // he so admired. Foul play / was suspected, but never proved. // This was in 1920. Back then, / my grandmother told me, // things like that happened / all the time.”

rob mclennan, Wayne Miller, The End of Childhood

While I haven’t properly written poetry for eons, I’ve been reading it all through. Once you start reading poetry you’ll never stop. It gives so much. Life feels weird without reading poems. I’ve been lately reading a couple of books written for poets but I also think that anyone could stand to read them who might like to infuse poetry into their lives and those around them. A book I’ve talked about before here is We Begin in Gladness by Craig Morgan Teicher.

On a chapter on W.S. Merwin, Teicher says:

“Major poets make themselves, with effort; they are not born. I would argue that many major poets begin minor, though the best of them begin with the promise of becoming important voices for their time. They begin weird, out of step in some fundamental way, esoteric, in their own heads. Eventually, their strangeness comes to shape the poetry around them. They give voice to the poetry of their time, and one can no longer understand it without understanding them.”

I like thinking about this even if I’m not sure the world, poetry world, still works that way? Maybe it does. I’m at a distance. Which is to say, can you in this time make an effort, and alter the major / minor situation? Who gets to be the voice of their time? What are the factors, the conditions? What are the obstacles?

The average enjoyer of poems likely just wants to get to the poems. For the average reader, all the poets are minor, perhaps.

Shawna Lemay, Ode to the Minor Poets

Convention has it that Desnos wrote this poem about music-hall singer, Yvonne George, whom he met in 1924. In this story, she haunts his dreams here and returns in the poems of Ténèbres. It was a case of unrequited love, unsuccessful love, or unrealized love, depending on the narrator. By ordinary standards, it was a ‘failed love’— though writers must amongst themselves as to whether the poems realize a love that is perhaps more ‘real’ than a romantic relationship.

Desnos’ poem gives life to the dream, an eternity of life. Yvonne is also said to be the person invoked by Desnos’ haunting final poem (though I’m inclined to suspect Louki deserves consideration).

Born in Brussels in 1896 as Yvonne de Knops, George began her career on stage, where she met Jean Cocteau. In 1922, after being discovered by the influential Paul Franck, Yvonne George moved into a nice apartment in Neuilly that became a hub for meeting artists and writers. Last FM offers a brief history of George’s life, including the following statement: “In 1924, well-known in Parisian intellectual circles as a charming singer, George became the subject of a passionate love affair with the French poet Robert Desnos, who wrote her numerous poems including the famous J’ai tant rêvé de toi (I have dreamed so much about you).”

It is well known that Desnos introduced George to opium, or that opium was in the background of their encounters, as written in Desnos’ novel, La Liberté ou l’Amour (Freedom or Love), a book that received the honor of being condemned for obscenity by the tribunal de la Seine.

Styled as an emancipated woman by her peers, George died of tuberculosis in a hotel room in Genoa on May 16, 1930. Like Jesus of Nazareth, she was 33 years old. “Weakened by her the excesses of her lifestyle, George fell ill with tuberculosis,” says Last FM, leaving us with exemplary palaver of the sort slung at artists and bohemians who died young from tuberculosis or Spanish flu. Ode to the heavy lifting done by “excesses of her lifestyle” here! I say this with sarcasm dripping from my fangs.

Last year, I had the pleasure of being consumed by Desnos’ novella, The Die Is Cast (1943), published by Wakefield Press in Jesse Lee Anderson’s translation, and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who is interested in Desnos’ relationship with Yvonne George and the perfusion of deliriums wrought by opium. Desnos published the book in occupied Paris a year before the Gestapo arrested him for his Resistance activities. The Die marks “a shift from his earlier frenetic surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life experience as from his career as a journalist,” a realism that happens to include his opium experimentation “and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George” in the 1920’s. It may be “junkie literature.” Certainly, Desnos marks an end to utopias “in a distinct break from the ‘artificial paradises’ explored by his predecessors, moving towards “a new era of ‘artificial hells.”

Novella aside, in Desnos’ poetry, the dreaming continues. The poem gives us a world in which the dream, alone, is an honest or decent guide to what could possible. The world is a wreck, a failure; the dream reimagines what it cannot rescue.

Alina Stefanescu, Desnos forever.

But the greatest achievement of The Golden Gate is, I think, its mastery of tone and tonal transitions. [Vikram] Seth himself said that this was what particularly attracted him about Johnston’s (verse) translation of Pushkin which initially gave him the idea for the book, which he wrote while a PhD student in economics at Stanford:

I found in the poetry section [of a bookshop], two translations of Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s great novel in verse. Two translations but each of them maintained the same stanzaic form that Pushkin had used. Not because I was interested in Pushkin or Eugene Onegin, but purely because I thought, this is interesting technically that both of them should have been translated so faithfully, at least as far as the form goes. I began to compare the two translations, to get access to the original stanzas behind them, as I don’t know Russian. After a while, that exercise failed, because I found myself reading one of them for pure pleasure. I must have read it five times that month. It was addictive. And suddenly, I realized that this was the form I was looking for to tell my tales of California. The little short stories I had in my mind subsided and this more organically oriented novel came into being. I loved the form, the ability that Pushkin had to run through a wide range of emotions, from absolute flippancy to real sorrow and passages that would make you think, during and after reading it.

It is the combinations of such transitions — as he says, from ‘absolute flippancy to real sorrow’ — with passages ‘that would make you think’ that really mark out Seth’s own achievement. There are many straightforwardly ravishing passages in The Golden Gate, as well as dozens of genuinely funny ones. Seth isn’t afraid to be serious.

Victoria Moul, He left irregular (moronic) / Sentimentality behind

It’s only been a few days since the Supreme Court Judgement, but it feels like a decade. It’s as if one sunny April day, I stepped through time, back into the atrocious overt everyday homophobia of the eighties, the days of protests and marches. With each headline and every piece of guidance from the EHRC, the world gets darker.

This time, of course, it’s trans people – specifically trans women – at the centre of the storm. But we are a community, and we are in it together. In the 1980’s, as gay men were demonised in newspapers and hospitals even as they died, lesbians and trans people were alongside them. LGBTQ+ people are united by the anger and hatred directed at us through the decades. It echoes around us, it lives within us. I have been spat at, shouted at more times than I can count. I’m scared for myself, but I’m more scared that that we will lose more people, that the damage it does a person to be told that the identity they have painfully built for themselves is over. I’m scared that it will be too much for some people to bear.

And because of that, I want to think of joy. Queer joy, and queer hope. Because by its very nature, being queer – even, or especially, at the darkest times in our shared histories – has joy at its core. After all, our desire for love and freedom is what brings us together. To come out, to transition; to love when you’ve been told you cannot; to be yourself when the cost is horribly high – you have to be hopeful. You have to be deeply committed to joy.

If you want to celebrate queer lives and queer poetry, you could start with 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022). Edited by Andrew Macmillan and Mary Jean Chan, it gathers together queer poems from across the last century, from Charlotte Mew to poetry so fresh it feels like it was published five years in the future. Good poetry is rarely all light or all dark – and this anthology takes in the pain and violence of queer lives – for example, in Jay Hulme’s In the Future:

In the future people like me
will not be able to distinctly describe
the scent of the floor in the men’s toilet
that time they were slammed into it

But at the heart of the anthology is the fact that queer people walk over hot coals just to love, to live honestly, to be happy. We are hopeful.

Clare Shaw, Queer joy, queer hope, and poetry

In the future
insects will sing their vast
chattering wave, and the waves
will crash in rhythm until,
eventually, time dissolves
the poisons. Bright shards
of sea-worn credit cards
mosaic the beach in unintelligible
patterns. The future knows
no center, no margin, no page.
The headless table will seat
no king. Take heart, my love,
for the glaciers grow back also.
Newly ancient and clean.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, bright shards of sea-worn credit cards

In a desert, there is a rain puddle that refuses to die.

In a cemetery, there is honey on the tongue of a tomb that will forever taste sweet.

Winds, waters and ruins press against us, break us to rubble, then build us back up.

A kiss can be a planet, a planet can be a prayer wheel, a prayer wheel can be a shiny coin in a pocket.

When is that moment during the day we live and love our brightest?

Rich Ferguson, The Currency of Certain Occurrences

This year Ali, who I chatted to about poetry last time, was there again and I was delighted when she came over to say hello and let me know that she was still enjoying dipping into my poetry book. Other conversations from new people I met included the joy of dawn chorus, the wonderful Dolly Parton, and finding time to treat yourself as kindly as you do others. I love all these things and it was good to converse with so many like-minded people.

The lodge we stayed in was in a wooded area and I was able to practice using my new head torch (perfect for watching the rabbits in the fields) as well as being immersed in the sound of dawn chorus each morning. I have been thinking about dawn chorus a lot lately. The beauty of this moment in each day, the way it becomes so magnificent at this time of year, how wonderful it feels to stand in the start of a new day or a new venture, and how it feels when darkness breaks. In celebration of all of that I will share ‘It is Not About Dawn’ from my first collection Magnifying Glass.

IT IS NOT ABOUT DAWN

It is about that moment
before the dark time breaks,
being present in the silence,
standing still in an exact moment.

It is all about when that first bird sings,
first light,
the fact that there is an order
that layer upon layer
sculpts the day’s beginning.

It is about discovering how long it takes
before the crow starts to echo back
with his rough
cruck, cruck.

Sue Finch, HAIR BUNS AND PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES

It seems we’ve moved from spring directly into summer, rain evaporating, temperatures rising. The tulip fields have bloomed and ended in what seemed like two weeks—cherry petals litter my lawn as lilacs bloom. It’s a topsy turvy gardener’s problem, because two weeks ago it was too cold to plant seeds and now we have to wear sunscreen when we go out to water.

This last week marked the 30th anniversary of Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore, so we visited, picked up a few books, got to talk to Billie and Gabrielle and John (if you know, you know!) and after they closed, went to Seattle’s Japanese Garden to watch birds sing on top of flowers and observe summer flowers—azaleas, rhodoendrons and wisteria—taking over. […]

You may have noticed, with the return of nice weather, came the return of bird pictures to the blog. And the time has rolled around to my birthday once again. It always makes me introspective, and though I’m happy I’m getting another year on this earth (never guaranteed), the first four months of 2025 have been awfully challening, personally, financially, health-wise, and even poetry-wise. And that’s not mentioning politics or world news. It’s tough to feel like celebrating.

I did sign up for a class on essay writing and got some tickets to see Rebecca Solnit when she comes to Seattle. I’m also starting to meet with other writers again to talk about work. I’m trying to be pro-active, doing positive things with my money—choosing new charities, looking at (gulp) retirement accounts, and trying to bring in more with my writing—and trying to make new friends and build more community around me. I don’t want to ignore that I’m getting older and be too resistant to change to miss the signs that I should be doing something different.

In the meantime, I will try to pay attention to the singing bird next to me, the timing of the stars and flowers, and some of the gifts that aging brings.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Springing into Summer, Open Books, Japanese Garden, Spending $11,000 on Book PR, and Birthdays Coming Up

The poems I’ve been working on lately are about love, but also growing older. Loving the person I’ve become. Aging has never really bothered me, but I can see how the world glances side-eye at me now that I look older, for not dying my graying hair or wearing makeup to hide my wrinkles. I feel as if I’m not allowed to age as I see fit, to be menopausal, hormonal, irrational and maybe in love with all of it. Luckily, I and my poems don’t care how the world sees me and though I may complain about the aching joints, I am celebrating my newly crazy middle age.

These themes have also been popping up in my GloPoWriMo poems, the write a poem a day challenge for April.

Gerry Stewart, Aging and Love are Involuntary

The poem? I opened the trapdoor and let
the birds fly out of the poem. Not one turned
or sang goodbye. Their silence shocked the
poem. The sky shocked the birds.

Then I threw the flowers out. Turned the
poem upside-down, let the water run into
the sink. It smelt of rot, of displacement.

I drew clouds over the moon, unwilling
to wait till morning. Dark, smothering.
Now the poem must, perforce, find a
new source of light. Cast a new shadow.

And I struck out every reference to
food and drink: The poem must starve
till it becomes a tree. It must grow
roots and finds sustenance in the soil
beneath my feet. Or pray for rain.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, It all ends at line fifty

first day of life
the moon counting
its delicate birds

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: sea glass, lilacs, lapwings, catkins, and much more. Enjoy.

The gradual thawing of ice at the lake’s edge. The sudden appearance of snowbells under the protection of the evergreen hedges. The return of the lapwings. I don’t want to miss these things I’ve either not known or have taken for granted. It’s a kind of greed, I suppose. And isn’t all greed tinged with the fear of loss?

In Romania, I was told that the storks had just returned and were building their nests on top of the streetlights. Fruit trees were newly in bloom. But I can’t imagine things any other way because “today” a robin sings in the beech tree outside the hotel window, storks nest on top of street lights, white blossoms open among the white snowflakes, and all the while a bonfire burns in the hotel’s courtyard. It’s a smell that makes me both sleepy and nervous. The wind shifts. Sparks fly. My clothes will smell like comfort and destruction for the remainder of the trip.

Ren Powell, Belonging Away from Home

I attended a reading in Seattle and ran into an old friend, Seattle poet Esther Altshul Helfgott. Among many other accomplishments, Esther founded the “It’s About Time Writer’s Reading Series,” which meets monthly in Ballard and is now in its 35^th year. I’ve known her for decades. As she has two books navigating Alzheimer’s disease with her husband, Abe, I told her what was going on at my house. She reached into her bag and took out a copy of this book. She also told me I needed a therapist and a support group.

Listening to Mozart is, in the words of Michael Dylan Welch, “a bouquet of short poems [that radiate] the sharp and sad fragrance of loss.” They were written after Abe’s death, and reading them helped me imagine moving through the stages of grief I’ve been stuck in—anger and denial—and begin to break through to something else.

I don’t agree
with Bishop in One Art—
that loss
is no disaster
she means the opposite—
loss is all disaster

These tanka-like meditations are as much about acceptance as they are about loss, and they helped me to remember that someday this will be over, and I’ll have three daughters who have lost their father. They reminded me that some day I, too, will have to deal with his loss.

when I
awoke this morning
I thought your
funeral was today—
it was three years ago

The poems are about loss, but they are riddled with hope. As time moves on and the poems continue, Helfgott begins to put her life with Abe, and after Abe, into perspective. Cleaning house, going to the bookstore, walking her dog.

a leaf falls
I watch
you pick it up
you disappear

What I’ve been working through is the realization that the man I married has been gone for a while, for long enough that I’ve found it difficult to remember that guy I held hands with, walked on beaches with, adopted three daughters with, stood on sidelines of countless soccer games with…the man who taught college English for 40 years, the man who retiled our kitchen, built a writing cabin for me in our back yard, built tables and beds…took care of every possible home repair. Up until a day or so ago, it seemed impossible to see that man as also this one. Withdrawn from me, secretive, never finishing a project, forgetting ingredients in favorite recipes, getting into one car accident after another… […]

Esther’s poems helped me begin the journey back to my right mind. These poems and many phone conversations with patient friends, and (finally) a therapist.

Bethany Reid, Esther Altshul Helfgott: Listening to Mozart

Three and a half years ago I moved here from a shady garden, with deep fertile soil, rather damp, rather acid, and I’ve had to adjust to something very different here. It turns out that this garden is, as Culpeper might have put it, ‘under the dominion of Mercury’. Mercury’s plants tend to do well here, for reasons I don’t yet fully understand. The soil is good to heavy, but with a lot of stones in it, not just builders’ rubble and hard core, though there’s plenty of that, but ‘coal measures’ – layers of mudstones and limestone shale above the seams of coal that defined this area until fifty years ago. There is sun, some fertility, but not too much, shelter from the prevailing winds, and enough rain, which they like. As herbs, they tend to be nervines, picking up magnesium from the soil, and therefore good for the nervous system, the brain, memory, coughs and, often, digestion. This garden loves lily of the valley, southernwood, elecampane, lavender, fennel and winter savory, and they thrive here, where many of them struggled in my previous garden.

It is easy to see why they are ascribed to Mercury – the intelligent, volatile, lively and ingenious god of language, communication and creativity – the god of the mind. Mercury has a difficult persona – as a god, he’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, notorious liar, ingenious, dangerously fluent and persuasive, and frankly, about as endearing as Dominic Cummings. And yet. He is the trusted messenger of the gods, the guardian of travellers, protector of herds and herdsmen. His dual personality reflects what was discovered about the planet through history. It is closest to the sun, and the fastest mover – the Assyrians called it ‘the jumping star’ and the Greeks called it ‘Stilbon’ the sparkling star, because of its flashy volatility. It was seen only at evening and morning, which meant that for a long while there was uncertainty about whether it was even one planet or two so Mayans represented it as twin owls one for morning and one for evening. The metal called after him is anomalous, a metal that rolls around on a flat surface like a ball, that divides and rejoins like water, a liquid that isn’t wet. It’s not surprising, then, that when alchemy was extensively studied, Mercury became associated with the process of transition and transformation, forming a triad with the sun and moon. Sun herbs like marigolds and rosemary and moon herbs like mugwort and vervain do well in this garden too. […]

Moving to ‘the dominion of Mercury’ sparked new relationships with the earth, with my neighbours, and with the unfamiliar reaches of myself – and a lot of new poems. Look for bats, ghosts, foxes, druids, rivers, music and herbs. The book is due out in March 2026, and I’m excited about it.

Elizabeth Rimmer, The Dominion of Mercury

Dead flowers mix with the soil and
become other things: fruits, fragrant
flowers, a bird. Ephemeral things.
When love runs out, it becomes a
poem. A forever being. A trellis of
quiet words peering into the water.

Like tree rings, a poem cut open
can tell you its age. Meaning grows
inside it, in concentric circles. Each
measuring the growing distance
between poem and poet. Poet and
love. What if we had another hour?
Another month? Another way?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, What if we had another hour?

Dryden said that Virgil’s Georgics was ‘the best poem, by the best poet’. Although it’s sometimes known just by its most famous and ‘poetic’ passages — the praise of Italy; the story of Orpheus and Eurydice — the Georgics is a wide-ranging didactic poem about the raising of crops and animals (georgica means farming), about the land of Italy and about man’s relationship to labor, toil, that does not romanticise its theme: passages deal with how to test soil for acidity and how deep to plant seedlings, with winter starvation and plague in livestock as well as sex, spring and the beauty and bounty of nature. The tone of its political message is notoriously ambiguous. If you’ve never tried to read it, and you don’t read Latin, Dryden’s own translation is still a pretty good place to start. […]

There are many aspects to Virgil’s remarkable style, but one of them is the way in which he uses mostly ordinary words in a particularly full and precise way. This is what the English literary critic Donald Davie called ‘purity of diction’, and it’s particularly crucial to Virgil’s ability to make the description even of detailed technical material beautiful, moving and memorable. Such precise use of words which are unremarkable in themselves may reanimate expressions or metaphors which have otherwise gone ‘dead’, flat in the language. In this passage, for instance, Virgil begins his catalogue of modes of propagation with a list of plants and trees known for their tendency to proliferate without assistance — whether by self-seeding, by suckers sprung from the tree’s base, or, in these three lines, apparently spontaneously:

Pullulat ab radice aliis densissima silva,
ut cerasis ulmisque; etiam Parnasia laurus
parva sub ingenti matris se subicit umbra.

In other cases, a very dense wood springs up from their roots —
As, for instance, the cherry and the elm; the Parnassian laurel, too,
When it’s small shelters in its mother’s mighty shade.

The detail of densissima sylva at first seems conventional – woodland is often dense, dark, deep or thick in Latin just as in English – but here the obvious phrase gathers specific meaning: woodlands composed of trees which reproduce themselves by suckers from the base are particularly dense because the young trees come up, by definition, very close to their parents. The obvious word seems suddenly meaningful. Robert Frost reanimates the same cliché of ‘deep’ woods, albeit in a very different way, in the well-known poem ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’. His woods are by the end of the poem ‘deep’ with a sense of personal significance: ‘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’ (13-16).

This opening passage of Georgics 2 is also typical of Virgil in the precision of its description. The willow seems to ‘whiten’ (canentia . . . salicta) with a ‘grey-green leaf’ (glauca . . . fronde) because the underside of the leaf is more white or silver in colour, and willow leaves are so long and light that the underside is frequently revealed. (Dryden does not attempt to capture this concise precision: he has simply ‘grey’. Day Lewis has the more accurate, but very wordy, ‘the pale willow that shows a silver-blue leaf’.) We could compare Frost again – one of the strongest English rivals to Virgil as a poet of the trees – with a comparably precise description: ‘When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees’ (Birches, 1-2).

Victoria Moul, Mild brook-willow, and the bending broom

April is April-ing, which means it rushes past and then boom! suddenly it’s spring for real, despite dips and rises in temperature. I open the window in the dining room. I close it. Wear coats when I really need a jacket and jackets when I probably should have worn a coat. Chicago is tricky this time of year, and I could need both in the span of a few hours. 

I’ve been catching up on some new releases for dgp and finishing my decisions on upcoming books for fall. If all goes well, I will have everything in line before we open up for the next reading period in June, which seems impossible that it’s here again. I’ve also started something new writing-wise and finished up the last series, though it still needs a little work. Since the world feels chaotic and precarious I decided to bring WILD(ISH) into the world sooner rather than later (part of it is who knows what will be happening in July and also I fear raised printing prices driving up the cost per copy. This may also affect even the printing I do at home, though so far, ink and paper are still costing me about the same, but only time will tell. I raised prices slightly on chaps and other shop goods last year, but I may have to do it again. Postage is also a bear that may need to be revisited (i still end up eating some of the cost on larger orders and author costs typically.)As everything gets more expensive even the luxuries I allow make me wince…theater tickets, tattoo deposits, occasional dresses and vintage housewares from Ebay. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/19/2025

my hands cry out all night in their sleep
dawn rises
a hole in its palm

Grant Hackett [no title]

Last weekend, LitHub published a piece by novelist Viet Than Nguyen titled “Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire.” The essay is about as good a statement as you’re going to get about literature and politics from a writer of Nguyen’s fame, and it touches precisely on the contradictions that literary people are often at pains to rationalize and ignore. […]

I think the key insight of Nguyen’s essay is that the same contradiction exposed by Palestine is being further exacerbated by the likelihood of Trump’s defunding of soft power institutions. That is, real historical forces are coming to bear on literary culture in ways that insist on waking us up to material, economic factors. And we fail this moment when we allow the focus on Trump, and what may come in the future, to distract from what Palestine has revealed—and to see the common link here. Once the mask has started to come loose, and we see the violence behind it, does an honest person rush to put the mask back in place again? No, surely not. What does it mean, then, when the Trump admin proceeds to fully tear the mask off? We sure as hell don’t salute him, but we’d be fools to imagine we could simply set things back to “normal.” And so, this moment puts an end to world-structuring illusions that have held US society together for decades, and its hegemonic literary culture is no exception.

With things so radically in question, all the lines are being redrawn. And this is why I keep pointing to counterculture—that that is what we should desire for ourselves and our art. Divest from the dying institutional culture, with its imperial ties, and find new psychic energy with which to endure within whatever is coming our way. (Hats off to the many of you who have already done so, or who were never invested in the first place, and to those of you who have educated me along the way.) As I’ve said in this series before, I take it almost as an article of faith that imagination, liberation, and the truth depend on one another. One thing we are denied by institutional, neoliberal poetic culture is a sense of truth: a sense of being informed and autonomous makers of our own culture—we’re always rationalizing shit and shaking hands with the wrong people. And in turn, this makes one less free as an artist, and it makes one less free to speak the truth at a time when the very conditions for truth are being annihilated by fascists.

RM Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 3)

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?

My questions or concerns have emerged really out of my professional/institutional backgrounds, which include the art world and academia. Elizabeth was really concerned with the media-technological intersections between the commercial art world and the USAmerican war machine; drones became a kind of figure for that acute anxiety, but also defanged self-disgust in a sense of complicity. Now, I am thinking more about grief, on an individual level but also on a social level. Covid happened and f*cked us all up in ways that we are still only just beginning to recognize, let alone understand. The ongoing genocide in Palestine has revealed many things about the West and the US, including just how tight the chokehold that the executive branch of government has on the academic and cultural institutions that we, as writers and artists and scholars, have tried very hard to be a part of, actually is. Grief feels really close, and closer still the more it is held at bay. There is so much more to say about this, but I’ll leave it there for now. […]

What are you currently working on?

Right now I am working on a book about grief. It’s also about certainty. It hasn’t really happened on purpose, but whenever I start writing it’s like this kind of elliptical return. It’s also heavily influenced by my very conflicted but somewhat obsessive reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I’m very curious about ways in which philosophers, misguidedly and dogmatically, try to make their readers feel better about how impossible it is to know anything about anything or anyone with any certainty. Philosophy is supposed to be something like therapy, you know? But it fails, and often leads us down worse rabbit holes with more distressing questions, or accusations. I miss my parents and I feel like time stopped when I lost them. But it didn’t for anyone else. I don’t know what to do with that, so I’m writing about it.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Louise Akers

It’s taken me a long time to assemble my second collection of longer-form poems into a coherent state, eight years since my first. I’m delighted to say that it will be published this June, by a new, Derbyshire-based publisher, Crooked Spire Press.

Crooked Spire Press has been founded by Tim Fellows, the editor of the online journal The Fig Tree, here. I am immensely grateful to Tim, not least for his patience. I should mention here that next Saturday will see the in-person launch, in Doncaster, of the first Fig Tree annual anthology (edited by Tim), details of which are on the Fig Tree website, here.

I’m also very grateful to the members of the fortnightly workshop group I’m part of, the Collective, whose comments on drafts of a good number of the poems in the book have been very helpful.

Matthew Paul, The Last Corinthians

My poem “In That Moment of Change,” which I wrote in memory of my friend Ronny, who was murdered by her husband in 2021, was published by the International Human Rights Arts Movement in The Evolving Gaze, an issue of their quarterly publication devoted to questions of manhood and masculinity. They’ve gathered an impressive range of work, in terms of country of origin, age, gender, and more. It’s a publication definitely worth a look on its own merits. My poem is on page 93.

§§§

Back in 2021, I took part in Queensbound, poet KC Trommer’s audio project for bringing poetry into public spaces, both online and in the physical world. The concept is simple. Each poet chose a subway stop in Queens, NY and incorporated it into a poem that they then recorded for inclusion on the site. My stop was Elmhurst Avenue on the R line. If you go to the Queensbound website, you can listen to my poem by clicking on the station, or you can listen on Soundcloud, or—and here is why I am telling you about this now—you can check out the Queensbound podcast, which recently went live. My poem is in the third episode, but I hope you will consider checking out all the episodes.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four By Four #39

Endgame is the play for our time. It is about the end of the world, where one man rules everything, although there is no apparent reason why he is obeyed. It’s a play about the absurdity of life. A play about a world ending in disaster. One man controlling the planet from his chair. […]

Last week, our family went to The Groundlings, a sketch comedy theater in the heart of West Hollywood. We saw the Sunday sketches and went to dinner. It was great being a family going to the theater together again. We haven’t done it for a bit. The pandemic threw us off our game. Some of our best family experiences have been at the theater. It takes a community to make theater. To come to the theater. To make art. To make change.

At the theater, we reflect on our humanity. We question the world we live in—and our own interpretation of the world—in a way that isn’t always asked of you when you go to the movies. Many movies are designed to entertain you, and really thoughtful ones will ask you to question something about the way you live, but a play is like entering another zeitgeist. Through the intimate performances required of plays, we see ourselves walking in the world differently. A play provokes.

[In Endgame,] Beckett explores our need as humans to be in a cycle of dominance. We look to someone to be the boss, someone to fetch and carry. Even when it doesn’t make sense anymore, we continue.

Beckett recognizes how we get caught in absurd cycles that we keep repeating. When we become paralyzed by these cycles, we can’t change the game. On a personal level, a community level, a national level, he’s right.

Kate Gale, Nothing Funnier Than Unhappiness: On Cycles of Absurdity

The scent of burial spices in my nose,
the last of the death wrappings unbound,
I leave this grave.

The weather, with its wintry insistence,
does not deter me, a daffodil
bulb who has known the earth’s protection.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Good Friday Creations

Throughout his portrayal of the seasons there is this indomitable force of life. Consequently, spring is conveyed as an eruption (‘vivid with/ life erupting’) and in summer he describes it as a ‘unifying fire// that drives all that flows/ burns gloriously.’ The use of the image of ‘burning’ is interesting as this fire is not destructive. It reminds me of ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ in Dylan Thomas poem of the same name. However, unlike in Thomas’ poem, the force of creation, that makes things grow, does not also bring about their demise. It is unquenchable. It is the force that generates regular renewal: ‘the earth renews/ from this detritus/ which is a process/ (part of the process). Autumn, therefore, in a later poem is portrayed as a time of ‘abscission’, a time of adaptation to survive. In an era of universal pessimism about the fate of the natural world, this is an interesting and positive rebuttal.

This, however, is not to say that Mills does not criticise humankind for its effect on the environment. In the section entitled Uncertain Songs, he states: ‘the world is broken/ because we broke it/ unthinkingly’ and we ‘cannot adjust/ cannot return’. We may have sealed our fate with our destructive actions, but the earth will survive. His anger at this is palpable in the poem ‘burn it all’ which explores the criminal waste of materialism. This is not the natural fire that drives life that we met in section 1. This is fire in the hands of humankind: it is the fire of materialism that will result in the destruction of human life on earth. Mills is critical of such simplistic approaches to living. As he states in can you see how it is, ‘the world is many & simple/ in its complexity/ & delicate oh so delicate oh so delicate// which is its strength & we/ are not the thing itself/ not what we think ourselves.’ The paradoxes of simple complexity and delicate strength seem to suggest that experience defies understanding and explanation. Uncertainty, therefore, must be a part of the human condition. A factor exacerbated by the limitations of language.  In speaking is difficult Mills describes language as ‘a system of difficulties/ which we live in mostly// & the world indifferent/ & large evades is/ which is at it is/ & all we have is this/ difficult & silent speech.’ Language is all we have and yet it is limited as a tool of understanding: it fails to get beneath the surface of our experience and in those final words there appears to be an acceptance of the fact. As he says in ‘long poem with no name, ‘language gets us nowhere.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘a book of sounds’ by Billy Mills

I’m not much the Easter celebrator, but I do appreciate this day. The sun shines across my desk, starburst daffodils shimmy in the wind out in the garden – I don’t have the heart to cut them to bring indoors – and I’m enjoying the last cup of morning coffee in my bright yellow mug. These things are celebration enough before the start of another wild work week. These things offer me joy.

On the occasion I’ve received a monetary prize in exchange for poetry, I’ve rolled it into fancy kitchenware; Le Creuset in Caribbean Blue, namely. It began with a big, blue sound pot that I named Angus after the wild fiddler of Scottish band, Shooglenifty, with whom Bruce and I kitchen partied at the campground after concert hours for the days of StanFest in Canso, Nova Scotia. Good time, that. Bruce had a few good eye rolls at me, at the pot, and its name before even he gave into calling it Angus.

That said, I’m wildly happy and grateful to learn that not 1, but a batch of 10 poems, has been accepted by Edutainment Night Publishing for publication in the fall. Just enough time to ponder what to add next to the turquoise kitchen.

Kersten Christianson, Easter & the Golden Eggs of Writing

Today, April 17, is International Haiku Poetry Day, which falls in the middle of National Poetry Month. As it happens, I have four upcoming public events focused on poetry and art: a haiku festival, an art opening, a poetry reading and an open studios weekend. […]

The 23rd annual ukiaHaiku Festival takes place on Sunday, April 27, 2-4 p.m. at the Grace Hudson Museum’s Wild Gardens in Ukiah, CA. I’m honored to be the keynote speaker this year, a cool twist for a Ukiah High grad! The organizers write, “Join us to celebrate Ukiah’s palindrome with readings of past haiku contest winners from various local luminaries followed by an all-ages open mic for those who wish to read a haiku of their choosing.” It’s free and open to the public. I’ll have a Makino Studios table with some books, calendars, prints and cards.

Annette Makino, A haikupalooza for Haiku Poetry Day

It seems appropriate, on International Haiku Day, to thank Ian Storr for all his hard work and commitment to the form. Ian has edited Presence for quite some time, around 12 years I believe. I started sending work to him in lockdown and he kindly published my first haiku. It’s fair to say that if Ian hadn’t shown an interest in my work I might not have pursued writing haiku much further than a lockdown diversion. As it is, he’s been a great support, twice forwarding haibun of mine to Red Moon Press in the US, which they have subsequently included in their anthologies. Two and a half years ago, Ian gave me the chance to become reviews’ editor at Presence. What an opportunity that was! I’ve probably read around 90 publications since then, mainly chapbooks, and have been amazed at the inventiveness that’s out there, especially, but not exclusively, from US writers. Ian is now stepping down from his role, and a lovely team from the Edinburgh Haiku Circle are taking over – more good fortune! I’m looking forward to working with the new team, but in the meantime, I want to wish Ian all the very best and thank him for the many hours he has given to the magazine and the writers whose work he has supported.

Julie Mellor, Presence

While Frogpond is keeping me busy, I couldn’t let 2025 go by without a third year of Haiku Girl Summer. I adore running this journal!

As with the past two years, the journal starts on June 1st and ends on September 1st. (I used September 1st as a surprise bonus post for the past two years, but that caused confusion last year, so now I’m just making it an official part of the run.

In order to have poems ready for June 1st, submissions open on May 15th. I can’t wait to see your summer haiku and senryu!

I enjoyed the different perspectives that the guest editors brought to the journal last year. Although I haven’t set up a formal sign-up system yet, I would love to work with guest editors again. If you’re interested in taking part, you can reach me at allyson@allysonwhipple.com.

Please note that I have updated the guidelines for 2025, including a change to the submission period. Please review the updated guidelines here: https://haikugirlsummer.substack.com/p/submission-information

Allyson Whipple, Haiku Girl Summer Returns Soon!

I began Day 2 of the conference with “Eyes Wide: Exploring the Extended Ekphrastic” (Tess Taylor, Victoria Chang, Tyree Daye, Dean Rader, Allison Rollins). This panel was a high point for me, as it featured five excellent poets who also write ekphrastic poetry. Victoria Chang was commissioned by the MOMA to write poetry in response to the art of Agnes Martin. The result, With My Back to the World, is a collection of elliptical, mysterious poems that seem to fit the cool detachment of Martin’s art. As Chang said, “Being looked at is good for a work of art.”

I was most impressed with Dean Rader’s presentation about the creation of his book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly. Twombly was “famously inscrutable,” his art often consisting of scribbles, erasures, graffiti, and collage. Yet from this art, Rader was able to create a series of moving, deeply personal poems. Here are the first lines from “Unfinished Unending Journey:” “In the middle of our life, / we never know it is the middle. // It terrifies my son the sea has no center and no end.”

The second panel of the second day, “From Dusk till Dawn: Exploring Nocturnes & Aubades”(Amy Ash, Amorak Huey, Curtis L. Crisler, Tatiana Johnson-Boria, Kevin McKelvey) was unexpectedly generative for me. I’d been working on a poem that took place on an early winter evening. As I listened to the panelists, I realized that this poem was a nocturne. This nudged me in a new direction, allowing me a fresh perspective. The aubade and nocturne offer opportunities for innovation, drama and possibility; they are emotionally evocative; they can function like Richard Hugo’s triggering town.

Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025, Part 2

Every so often I come across a book that sets itself apart and draws me in. So it is with Robert Seatter’s slim 2021 collection The House Of Everything. I should say what follows is more a personal response than a literary analysis of each of the thirty-odd poems that form the whole. In short, it has absorbed me now for most of the past week, which is good enough evidence that it’s the best poetry book I’ve happened upon this year.

I already had Seatter’s early collections, travelling to the fish orchards (2002) and On the Beach with Chet Baker (2006), both published, as is The House of Everything by the excellent Seren Press, so I thought it would be interesting to see, when I came across it on the publisher’s website, what he was writing now.

The sub-title is Poems inspired by Sir John Soane’s Museum, so it’s right to explain that the work is the result of his stint there as poet-in-residence. Soane’s house, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields near Holborn tube station, should you wish to visit, is preserved as a national treasure, free to enter, where room after room contains a sometimes startling, often bonkers collection of artefacts that the man himself, a wealthy architect, gathered together and lived around up to his death in 1837.

Seatter pays homage to Soane, giving footnotes to poems that work as background explanations. Sometimes this kind of thing clutters or detracts from a poem but in this case the note usually adds to it, as with the tight nine-line poem Sarcophagus. It helped to know that Soane paid £2,000 in 1824 for the ancient Egyptian sarcophagus of Seti I, which had been deemed too expensive for the British Museum. This is now the centre piece of Soane’s ‘sepulchral chamber’. Seatter understands the object is in exile but concentrates on giving it a dreamlike quality that is a subtle alternative to the predictable moral argument – Like a boat left in a room/ waiting for a door to let in a river,/ for a current and for a paddle.

Bob Mee, THE HOUSE OF EVERYTHING, by ROBERT SEATTER

Last August I submitted a manuscript to an open call by the independent press, ELJ Editions. Five micro chapbooks were selected to be included in one volume and mine was one. To say I was happily surprised is an understatement! The entire process with ELJ Editions has been a pleasure. Many thanks to Editor Diane Gottlieb and Founder & Publisher Ariana D. Den Bleyker.

I’m pleased that preorders are now available here. My chapbook, Offset Melodies, is all prose, consisting of micro and flash creative nonfiction and autofiction. I’m excited to be published with four phenomenal women writers: Kim Steutermann Rogers, Ronita Chattopadhyay, Kristina Tabor, and Janet Murie.

This is only the second time I’ve submitted to a chapbook call because, well, if I were ever to have a book, I wanted it to be with a publisher that means something to me. Over the years I’ve had poetry and prose published several times with ELJ Edition journals Emerge Literary Journal and Scissors and Spackle and it was always a positive experience. Also, to be honest, being in a volume with other writers is a bit of a safety net for me. I’m a little nervous.

Charlotte Hamrick, Preorders Open for My 1st Prose Chapbook

This week I was supposed to run a book club for poetry month, record a poetry tutorial for Writer’s Digest, and a bunch of other things, but instead, I was sick in bed with a combination sinus/stomach flu bug, which I strongly do not recommend (if I look like I lost weight in the pic above, I did—from three solid days of being constantly sick and another day of liquid diet. Super fun! Like Ozempic without the cost Lol!) And every day I was in bed, outside the sky was blue, the flowers all jumped into bloom at once (cherry blossoms, apple blossoms, and lilacs generally do NOT bloom at the same time in our area, but the late spring really messed up the bloom cycle). So that was a bummer. It was not covid or the official flu (according to tests) but there are a lot of bugs going around, the doctor said, so just be aware.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy (and Hoppy) Easter, New Poems Up at The Normal School, and a Week of Being Sick (During Beautiful Weather)

I love the presence I have when I’m on vacation. I’m a wandering eye, a drinker of the world, alert, sometimes hyperalert, just on the edge of anxious often, which does serve to sharpen the senses. Waft of subway here and a hint of someone’s cherry vape, and a bit of lilac on the wind; the thrum of human life: engines, mostly, and conversation, its ocean swells when it’s in a language I understand only with focus and concentration. What the wind is doing that very moment: agitating a dry lavender frond hanging from a rooftop garden awaiting the warmth of spring. Nothing is at stake and everything is: the day, what I make of it. Rilke wrote , “Maybe we’re only here to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate….” Immediacy. I love poems that grab me by the immediacy.

It’s what I admired about this poem by Keetje Kuipers. Although here it is about the destruction the narrator wants to undertake, that is, in the immediate future. It’s the details of that destruction and its ostensible reasoning that captured me: “cut down tree after living tree just to get rid of the green,” the narrator snarls, but it is so clearly born of pain, the awful crashing about we want to do out of pain. The poem is so present with it, hyperattentive to it. Burn the whole fucking world down. That’s the only way to avoid pain.

It seems odd to me that this poem appeals to me in the wake of my pleasant vacation. But the world and I are on edge. The green, the green. The sere, the sere. We can hardly bear it.

Marilyn McCabe, let’s turn on every incandescent bulb, each burner

O holidays of promised liberation:
One towards an earthly land,
One to a place promised 
posthumously.
In our hands, 
Questions: 
Which way now, 
How to mind the gap, 
Is home home? Exile exile?  
Do the two meet as two seas that
clash and shamble towards each other?

Jill Pearlman, Festive Earworm

— I’ve been reading The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. Rituals stabilize life, he says, and he quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who says rituals are “temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” He talks about how things can be stabilizing points, a table, a chair. But today, things are consumed, taking away the mode of lingering. He talks about how smartphones are not things because “lingering” is “impossible.” There is a “restlessness inherent in the apparatus [that] makes it a non-thing.” We are compelled compulsively by our phones. “They consume us.”

— “Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things…” (Byung-Chul Han).

— “Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.” (BCH) Digital communication is disembodied, but “rituals are processes of embodiment.”

— Rituals bring about resonances in a community and without them we lose “accord.” “Where resonance disappears completely, depression arises. Today’s crisis of communication is a crisis of resonance.” The digital sphere is an echo chamber where we hear mainly our own bullshit. (My word not his). If you’re interested in reading more about this book, there’s a really good rundown here.

— The digital sphere is horizontal, when what people crave is the vertical or deep engagement. As artists we are all about the vertical. I can’t help but think about how we all keep being fed this stuff we don’t really want. AI, the annoying stuff the algorithm pukes up, the smoothening out of our seeing via AI, the theft of our work and our words.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist: Rituals and Alignment

No ghost deserves to be shaped into a developmental arc that explains why the selves we abandoned led to the self we perform, a construction so fragile that it requires countless defensive structures to sustain, protect, and coddle.

Perhaps the idea of ‘self-esteem’ has always tasted a bit silly to me, an unsustainable Americanism that resembles our lifestyles in order to brush away the thought of what Ingeborg Bachmann and Joyelle McSweeney have poemed as our deathstyles.

Aesthetics of closure aside, a part of us dies but it does not disappear, does not vanish beneath the earth but remains and hovers in this insubstantial form that Jacques Derrida dragged into hauntology, and revisited in his elegies as well as his writings on friendship.

Though
I
sang
in
my
chains
like
the
sea

In a 1923 piece titled “Faites les Jeux” (published in Les feuilles libres, no. 32), Tristan Tzara said that he wrote to destroy the feeling that pushed him to write, a sensation that was too personal, too loud, due relentless at a time when he was actively pursuing his longtime dream of abandoning personality, and not existing as a person. This desire to be “apersonal” (as contrasted with the desire to be “a person”) also appears in the poem “Wire Dance March,” as well as early Dada, which hallows Tzara’s decision (ostensibly made by mother) to ensure that he would never fight in a war. Love sends its sons to Switzerland and then expresses surprise when they wind up in Germany. In early Dada, Tzara’s sense of himself as “a deserter” is never mentioned. Only later would the poet explore this particular shade of his absence.

Alina Stefanescu, Blacktops.

When you come to Amsterdam because of a single sloth graffiti, you almost get the feeling that life is not about what you want, but what you do with what you have.

as if stones
could be
impressed
by us living
things

Kati Mohr, Butterfly House

Last night via Zoom I attended the triple launch of books by Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger. I’ve already read the Sastry and McDermott books. I’ve not read Laurie Bolger’s book yet. Sastry is deadpan/gloomy and Bolger’s anything but. I liked some of hers the most, so I’m looking forward to reading her. McDermott (who writes for Eastenders and the stage!) read mostly about his father’s death during covid.

The readers inserted little extra words here and there, and often didn’t respect the inter-word spaces of the text. Sometimes in a line with spaces they paused where there wasn’t a space. This all makes sense to me – some layout features are for the eye only, and I can understand why there might be “stage” versions of “page” poems.

Tim Love, Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger

It delights me that the American Mathematical society links math and poetry by sponsoring a student poetry contest each year.   AMS recently announced this year’s winners (along with videos of the winning poems) — and I offer samples of the winning poems (from college, high school, and middle school students) below:

     from “Proof”  by Emilynne Newsom, Harvey Mudd College

          There’s a practice you will see in math.
          It is a way of showing what is true.
          In steady step-by-step it lays a path
          from what you know to what you seek to prove.    (Find the rest here.)

     from “Homeric Simile … ”  by Samanyu Ganesh, The Westminster Schools

          Just as the sea otters grasp each others’ paws
          whilst sleeping, latently
          basking in the stillness of their moonlit sanctuary, drifting
          assuredly      . . .       (Find the rest of this poem here.)     

    from “forever”    by Nora McKinstry, Edmond Heights, K-12     

          a mobius strip is a never ending loop a
          forever-going cycle of one small strip
          but still it goes on and on
          impossible to stop but easily created . . .        (Find the rest here.)  

The winners page also lists students who earned “honorable mention” and offers information and poetry from prior contests.

JoAnne Growney, AMS Contest-winning Student Mathy Poems

Andy Fogle interviewed me for Salvation South, and did such an amazing job with this longform interview—we talk Southern denialism, the limit of guilt and shame, the call and response of literature, anger versus the truest emotion, and more.

Salvation South also ran six new poems of mine, including four new Ars Poeticas (yes, I’ve been writing a lot of these for an Ars | Ours project), and two new love poems.

And! There’s a new episode of Painted Bride Quarterly’s podcast Slush Pile, featuring three of my poems, and the editors’ live process of discussing the poems and selecting them for publication. It is a VERY generous discussion, and left me feeling rather abashed and seen and like my cup had been filled all the way up to the very brim, so if you ever receive a request to be featured on the Slush Pile, I hope you say yes without trepidation (and considerably less anxiety than I did, ha). It was really beautiful to hear my poems read by others, and talked through. Such care and generosity, and I learned a lot about my own work in the process. So many thank yous to Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, and Lillie Volpe.

Han VanderHart, Painted Bride Quarterly Podcast, Salvation South Interview+Poems, Of Poetry Podcast, Moist Poetry’s Summer Riot Open Call

“Naming the Trees” demonstrates a sense of compassion and respect for the woods of Ness Owen’s homeland and the craft of the poems inspired by them. That’s not to say they are full of sentiment and awe of natural beauty. They also tackle the frustration and anger at the impact of commercial interests which act against the wishes of locals and without respect for the woods by people who do not have to face the consequences of their destructive plans or live with the ongoing impact. The poems capture that sense of injustice without ranting, but by showing how humans and nature interact, the importance of the connection with the natural world and respect lie at the core of countering the climate emergency. Disconnection is dangerous. “Naming the Trees” shows how to heal that breakage.

Emma Lee, “Naming the Trees” Ness Owen (Arachne Press) – book review

mayflies dead on the streets of Selma
mayflies dead on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
David and I are there to remember
to pay our respects, to see
but everywhere we look
the streets and sidewalks are covered
with drifts of mayfly carcasses
heaps of translucent white wings
uncountable numbers of corpses

Jason Crane, POEM: mayflies

Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.

But despite being so fundamental, or perhaps precisely because of it, loneliness is fractal — the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it branching into myriad lonelinesses, which, like the kinds of sadness, all have different emotional hues.

The loneliness of feeling invisible or misunderstood, bottomless and bone-chilling as the Scottish fog.

The loneliness of seeing what others look away from, remote and shoreless as a lighthouse.

The loneliness of public humiliation, a red-hot iron rod.

The loneliness of your most private failure, inky and arid like the desert at night.

The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.

The loneliness of love, lightless as the inside of a skull.

Maria Popova, 3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever

i want the world to shrink to the size
of a coffee cup. to be able to reach
for every kind of bird i need. i don’t want
to stand at a gas station & fit my prayers
beneath my tongue. i don’t want
to look for gods in neon signs.

Robin Gow, new car

The New Orleans Poetry Festival itself was terrific, rich with different kinds of programming: short “lagniappe” readings, a panel about cool poet laureate projects, performance poetry happenings, a lively little book fair, good food nearby (no L.A. downtown concrete wasteland here!), and much more. I gave a reading with Tupelo poets and spoke on a great panel with the theme “Sacred and Somatic.” I finally met in person several poets whose work I’ve admired from a distance, and glimpsed the amazing Harryette Mullen, although I was too shy to say hello. People said kind things about my book, its snazzy cover, and my new mushroom-print dress. I had dinner with a beloved former student who told me that during a difficult period of his life, I’d made him feel seen, taken seriously as a person and poet. Again: lucky and nourishing convergences.

Yet life has NOT been all shimmer. On the way home, achy and tired, I contemplated the absurdity of flying to New Orleans while coping with the sudden and ferocious bout of sciatica that descended several days before, totally randomly–I was just in the process of sitting down when something twisted. I was nearly immobilized for a few days, then when things loosened up just a little, I got on a plane. I made the right choice, I think, but I was in pain most of the time, and pain makes events and conversations hazy. I liked my unfancy B&B in part because of the fridge and microwave, so after cutting out early from evening readings, I could lie on the floor alternately icing and heating my piriformis. I have been so carefully preventing contagious illness on this book tour through masking plus a swallowing a color-wheel of immune supplements, but I forgot that bodies can give out in a myriad of ways.

Again, I’m glad I went–better to be in pain while pleasantly distracted than in pain bored at home–and very grateful for so many kindnesses from the universe. Yet I’m a little down. Pain taxes a person’s energy all by itself, of course. The Guggenheim rejected me again. I’m behind on everything. I’ve been so looking forward to next week’s Madrid conference, but have had little time to anticipate and prep, and I wonder how much stamina I’ll have for sightseeing. The sciatica IS getting better, by slow degrees, but I’ve mislaid my momentum. Maybe it’s in the side pocket of my dirty suitcase?

Lesley Wheeler, Shimmer, steam, somatic, sciatica

Old magnolia: gaps just the right size
for my dangling legs, a branch to rest a book on.

The seaglass blue of sky over hills
like an embrace from the horizon.

Limestone painted pink at twilight,
rosemary between my fingers.

The light of Shabbat candles
after a brief whiff of struck match.

Singing the alto note in a chord,
holding and held.

*

For my birthday last month one of my nieces gave me a deck of illustrated cards depicting untranslatable words. I drew a card this morning: querencia.

“Describes a place where we feel safe, a ‘home’ (which doesn’t literally have to be where we live) from where we draw our strength and inspiration. In bullfighting, a bull may stake out a querencia in a part of the ring where he will gather his energies before another charge.”

Shabbat. Jerusalem. Harmony. A particular quality of sky. A tree that was chopped down decades ago.

Where are these places for you?

Rachel Barenblat, Querencia

My great aunt Inez never married, and taught American history in a high school in Endicott, New York, all her life. She loved words, music, and art, and could recite many poems and speeches by heart. Whenever she visited, I would sit with her in her favorite chair and she’d read to me, and tell me stories about the poems or prose and their writers. Sometimes we looked at art books, and often she’d set up her easel in her bedroom and work on a painting during an extended holiday stay with my grandparents and us; I was learning to play the piano and she’d often ask me to play for her as she read or painted.

When I was 9, Aunt Inez gave me a book of poems that she had written out, in her firm Palmer Method handwriting, or clipped from magazines. It was perhaps a peculiar gift for a nine-year-old, but she had seen me pretty clearly from the beginning. She’d be pleased to know that I’ve carried that book around with me ever since.

This morning I opened the book to see if Paul Revere’s ride was in it. It wasn’t, but there were others by Longfellow, Tennyson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emily Dickinson. I had followed her instructions and added to them: in the back, written or typed out by me, were adolescent favorites: Frost, Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, e.e. cummings.

Today I stopped on the page where Whitman’s poem, “O Captain, My Captain!” was affixed, with ancient glue stains that looked like blood, and my great-aunt’s note at the bottom: [image]

“The ship is the union, the prize is victory”, she wrote, meaning that the prize was the preservation of the Union, at a very high cost.

Beth Adams, Paul Revere and Me

I’ve been thinking about the word brutal and cruel a lot, reading the news. Brutal has appeared a lot, cruel, I think, has been more rare this past week, though I’ve seen it in other weeks. I’m wondering how I hear each of them, what overtones each has. I looked in the dictionary, and both come from Latin words, the one, says my quick check online dictionary ‘dull, stupid,’ but also ‘characterized by an absence of reasoning or intelligence,’ hence its use for animals or beasts (about, not to be unfair to animals) whose brains we know little, to date). Cruel is from crudus, ‘raw, rough’ (think ‘crudities’). And cruel is defined as ‘willfully causing pain or suffering or (and?) feeling no concern about it.’ So which would one choose to use, if one were a journalist writing about the current political news? Why does ‘brutal’ feel more banal and ‘cruel’ more thought-burdened, to me? How do other people reading the one and the other?

Beverley Bie Brahic, Saturday 19 April 2025, Paris (Easter Weekend)

How many squares does it take
to fill the round mouth, reshape
it into another loud
box? Blocks
stacked
on
blocks,
square teeth
delineate boundaries
of ideas that don’t fit,
grinding them down into grit.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 501: Harm Not With Words #NaPoWriMo

Each year on her birthday, which is also the anniversary of her death, I make sure to remember her in a way that is more than just the daily thoughts about her that I have. Writing her birthday poem, exploring the passage of time, exploring grief as an instinctive reaction to death is one way that I do that.

The experience of this loss has changed me as a person, has gifted me a different way of looking at the world.

Today her birthday has fallen on Easter Sunday. I can hear kids in the village having an eater egg hunt. It is joyful. This is as it should be.

Risen

Today I wish to roll back the stone
and bring out of the tomb a fifteen-year-old version
of the baby I buried.

All will be undone. A miracle.
The rose petals rising like mist from the earth-hole,
her white coffin suddenly empty,
the pine box held up to the crowd for effect.

The grave will no longer feel familiar,
the toys binned, no longer holding
the reverence of votives to the dead.
The plot will be vacated. Someone else
can kneel there now. […]

Wendy Pratt, Poem for my daughter on what would have been her fifteenth birthday

At first, I thought Solmaz’s brilliant poem was, like my little outburst above, a list of responses to illness or distress. Then I realised it’s concerned with something deeper – it’s about the messages we give to ourselves – the ways in which we find ourselves wanting; in which we blame ourselves; in which we seek a perfection which isn’t only impossible, but is also deeply flawed – shaped as it is by the corrupting forces of commodification, profit, reputation, ego.

It’s a hard thing to write a poem consisting totally of questions, and to maintain a momentum. But this poem is actually held together by the questions – they are its form, the scaffold and its engine, the force – even the violence – of the poem. And there’s great variation and contrast within them: some questions are wryly ironic; some wildly and humorously exaggerated; some painful, confronting, disturbing. Some reflect, for example, the huge pressure that the “you” of the poem is under – the reader, the poet, or a universal “you”, trying to hold back the ocean with a glass door. Some reflect intimacy and insight, compassion – “Made peace/ with your mother?” “Have you finally stopped/ shoulding all over yourself?”

Clare Shaw, Reflections on ‘Self-Care” by Solmaz Sharif

I went to the allotment yesterday and began work, but the rain has cancelled my plans to return. I always thank the rain however it comes. Everything has suddenly greened as a result; the lawn, the tiny buds on the trees. Last weekend the Easter witches came, so my daughter was making wands and wreaths out of pussy willow catkins which I used to decorate the door after the kids had gone. Safe to say spring is properly here.

GloPoWriMo three weeks in and I’m still going strong here. I’m not able to write a whole poem every day, but every day I’m turning up at the page and trying to write something. 

Some of the poems I’ve written I really like, but I often feel that about poems early on. They feel so fresh and right, but then I put them aside for a bit and when I go back to them, they feel forced or they’re trying too hard to be clever. So I work on them a bit and put them aside for longer, then work on them a bit more until I feel they’re done. Then I put them aside for even longer and come back to them with a totally different eye. 

It feels strange to go back and read poems I fell in love with years ago. They aren’t the same beasts or maybe I’m not. Sometimes I still love them and they still have a rightness about them. Other times they clash and just don’t work or strut too much with their own poetic-ness. My writing style has changed in many ways over time, but it’s more that I have changed.

Poetry for me is very much what I want to say right now: my emotions, my obsessions, what I’m looking at and thinking about now. Years down the line I may not see things that way anymore, but the poem is a snapshot of that moment, now gone. And like my teenage journals and blurry pre-digital photos I won’t get rid of them just because they’re cringe-worthy or not who I am now. I love how they show my growth and development. But, as Billy Connelly said, pay attention because it’s all going to change tomorrow.

Gerry Stewart, The Poetry of Who I am Now

My region’s been unusually low on rainfall the past 18 months, but this year April showers seem almost to be compensating…my veg patch is mud. Weeding and more sowing will just have to wait. I walk around the neighborhood and my yard and the woods, squelching through muck and stopping now and again to upend a rock or rotten log and see who’s active now. Lots of worms and arthropods, the occasional spider, many ants.

In such moist circumstances, we get fungi; I’ve been enjoying Lesley Wheeler’s new book, Mycocosmic, which I’ve read twice now–once for content and sound, once to learn more from the poems’ craft structures, all the while fascinated by the science of fungus, which she incorporates into many of these poems. It’s a richly rewarding book, sometimes sorrowful, always intelligent, full of insightful poetry. The collection includes some poems that feel like spells, chants, divinations that suggest there are always imaginative methods for coping with anger, unfairness, and loss. Exploring the vein of how interconnected the natural world is, and the human world (with other humans and with the Earth) feels so vital to me, and Wheeler’s book pivots on this vitality. Look at the way Harry Humes threaded through my life, for example, in small but meaningful ways. The same goes for Lesley and for so many other people with whom I’ve shared intersections, interweavings, and connections over the years. That butterfly effect of influence. (Now that I think of it–Harry Humes has a book with that title: The Butterfly Effect). Or are those networks mycelial, as Lesley Wheeler suggests?

Ann E. Michael, Mud & connections

A nurse
attaches a device to the tip of your finger.
Another threads a clear liquid into your
vein. What day is it? You count with her
backward from ten and wind up in some
backforest where you’ll sink without
resistance into the moss. How much
time were you there? You were opened
like a book, cut into a cross-section,
made porous as a sheet of cheese. Now
your hip bone sings like a flute.

Luisa A. Igloria, Machine Shop for Humans