This week: nursing a dying animal, unfolding layers of meaning, summoning a friend from the underworld, committing poems to memory, and much more. Enjoy!

But I find it unpleasant – this celebration
of your Spring: the tulips, the crocuses (whatever
they are), the daffodils (which I have never seen),
the banal talk of regeneration, the insistence
on light. The world is on fire – endless war
after endless war, the greed, the taste for
destruction at scale, the casual counting of
the thousands dead, the massacre of little
children. Yet, here comes Spring bearing
flowers, muse for the softest poems.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Ugly Spring

There is a lot to say when it comes to Berlin. About walking down a street, from west to east and back again. Pigeons nod, here and there, pecking at chips from newspaper cones on the ground. A man on heels runs past. A tram jingles. The protest march drums and hisses some blocks of houses away, closer, then more in the distant again.

The white of the sun. A giant cloud creeps along the mirrored windows of a youngish tower.

Amongst other things
the weather report tells us to
prepare . . .
weeds, running riot,
building walls.

Kati Mohr, Writing—because.

I recently received a letter from a writer I don’t know well asking why I have not accepted her manuscript.

Do you hate me? she wrote.

I do not hate her. I don’t hate any writers; I don’t hate anyone. I just am not sure if we are the right publisher for her book.

I have a poem in my last book that is titled “I’m worried about who hates me.” The crisis of being a writer, for many of us, is that we spend a lot of time alone. We spend substantial time in our heads, and they may be unhealthy places. Research suggests that of all the creative arts, writers tend to have the most looming mental health issues. Dancers, theater people, film people, and even artists work in tribes. We, writers, are alone.

I try to keep the number of people I hate to a minimum. I think that’s healthy. I even try to keep the people I’m afraid of to a minimum. I walk quietly in the world, choosing to amplify the voices of other writers, but it never feels like enough.

Kate Gale, Enduring the Desert: Surviving the Life of a Writer

Every spring in recent years, I vow never again to submit to the temptation to do daily poems for NAPOWRIMO. Every year, I somehow end up doing it. On one hand, the results in the past have been really good. Some of my favorite projects have taken shape in Aprils past. I’ve finished entire chapbook series and segments of books during this time, as well as started countless others. And let’s not forget that my now-daily writing routine found its footing in 2018 during April poem-a-day exploits, pretty much setting off a pattern that has sustained me through many different books and life circumstances, from trying to fit writing around a full-time job to having a little more freedom as a freelancer. With a few exceptions, like in-between project breaks or when working on other things (most recently plays), I show up daily and can usually shake loose at lease a few poems a week that do not suck. Enough to keep those energies flowing at a steady pace. 

On the other hand, […] NAPOWRIMO always feels a little lonely. You would think it would be the opposite. A month long celebration of poets and poeting. But really it feels more like a cage, where the lit world can pretend to care about the genre for 30 odd days and then go back to ignoring it the rest of the year. It also feels much bigger and more overwhelming.  Everyone is writing poems, but I feel like it feels, from an author standpoint like you are shouting into a void that seems even larger and more echo-ey than usual. 

Kristy Bowen, NaPoWrimo-ing along…

So now again, here, almost three years later. What has happened?

For sure, many trains and many planes to and fro to Greece and elsewhere. I don’t know if it’s a hundred poems, and if so, many of them remained in my head or in orphaned lines, in several inconsistently kept notebooks, short captions for photos on Instagram, e-mails, and messages to friends and family. A few deaths, yes, a few in the family: a sister-in-law and a father. The latter belongs to the one sorrow one has, and I dare to say this one sorrow is the same for every single human on this earth: losing loved ones, missing them, facing, through the loss, the declining time for oneself too. A shared sorrow is not less painful, but this realisation certainly helps one with dealing with it.

And so it all comes down to the present tense needed. Needed as everyday time to write, needed as space content, as the present tense includes not just the written but also the writer. I look around and see. I look around and do not see. I look around and am seen, or not.

In Losing Touch, written during the Covid pandemic, I had expressed my hope of us coming out of this mayhem as a wiser humanity. The related poem ended, though, with a question mark. I couldn’t be sure, and human history could only make one doubtful of an imminent enlightened future. Just think of the 20th century, and the WWII following WWI and a pandemic during it, not even one full generation later. But this, this around us, is still hard to bear: endless wars and killings, governments and large groups of people turning away from the humanitarian values and goals that we had taken, maybe foolishly so, for granted for decades. Even further than that: a shameless despising of those values is getting louder and mutes in despair many of us who can still feel shame at the sight of cruelty, immorality, dishonesty, and hybris.

This has never been a blog directly commenting on current political or other events. But the present tense drove me back here, to a quieter place where I can again post verses, photos, and whatever else is born out of the question mark over our heads. I got tired of the scattering and superficial possibilities of the diverse social media sites and long to return to a place where I can gather and save.

Forgive my absence, and thank you for reading these lines.

Magda Kapa, Der Laden

Within a month both my cats died. Lola was 19, Little Fatty was 18. Both very old for cats. And suddenly I’m on my own completely, with no one to look after and no companions, for the first time since my early twenties. And stuck at home with this arthritic hip. Moan, moan, moan! It’s so much harder than I would’ve thought. But it’s grief, friends say. You have to expect to feel sad. Be kind to yourself. With Lola I just cried, for days and then stopped. Still sad, but it was cathartic. Little Fatty seemed very lost too and soon became ill. For the last week I was tempting him with food, then, when he stayed in his basket, tempting him with water. It was very sad. But also a privilege, to nurse a dying animal. Strangely it reminded me of when you have a new baby in the house – a kind of deep stillness. The preciousness of a small life ending or beginning. […]

But I keep on writing, reading and knitting. Talking to friends and family. Some gardening – snipping things, tying in new growth on roses, pulling out weeds. In my own little world like The Lady of Shallot, weaving on my loom and viewing a small piece of the world in my mirror (as in Tennyson’s poem). Hopefully I’ll be able to escape without being cursed! I’d prefer something more prosaic like meeting an orthopaedic consultant and getting some treatment!

Ali Thurm, Saying goodbye

How the cat’s tongue cleans me,
her monstrous kitten–so patient as
she scrapes my skin down to thin
parchment. This same parchment
where your kiss left its mark, in-
scribing something like invisible
ink that only shows when read
over an open flame, the same
flame that candled an egg to see
what life’s in it, lit by the friction
of a sparkwheel under my thumb.
How the abrasions open us up.

Lori Witzel, The abrasions

Last April I walked a length of the Via Francigena, a stretch of the old pilgrim path that passed close to the Golfo dei Poeti, a kind of walking / talking tour of the Romantic poets in Italy. I’m feeling a similar looseness in my boots, a need re-trace old routes, follow new lines of enquiry and so this is what I’m going to do:

I’m going to walk around London, circumnavigating the entire city. Not all at once but in sections, between interconnecting points of poetic interest, in episodes that I’ll broadcast, live, every Sunday at five.

I’m going to begin at the Keats statue behind the Globe pub in Moorgate then I’ll walk a straight line North, to Blake’s grave. The following week I’ll walk from Blake’s grave to the site of the first purpose built theatre in London and Shakespeare’s statue in Shoreditch and then… and then I don’t know. But slowly, weekly, poetically, mile by mile I will find my way back to the starting line. 

Jan Noble, Nº58 I’m just going out for a walk…

This morning I stand under three aeroplane contrails to breathe the freshness of the air. The birds are singing the verses that come after dawn chorus, and somewhere far above me there are astronauts in darkness of the moon.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a bottle of pills and a red envelope. I say it is a pill bottle from the Poetry Pharmacy and that the theme for this particular bottle is ‘Badgered’. I also say I am delighted to see my words unfurled from two of the capsules in this selection. I have been a fan of these ‘prescriptions’ for quite some time and love the variety of bottles on offer so it feels particularly cool to have words included.

This week I was dithering about which poem to record for Poem of the Month for my YouTube channel. Fortunately, April Fool’s Day gave me a much-needed inspirational nudge when Matthew MC Smith put out a pretend call for poems about spoons.

Sue Finch, BADGER POEMS, METAL SPOONS, AND GENTLE NODS

The termites swarm on Good Friday,
the one day of the year when bread and wine
cannot be consecrated.
The termites fill my book-lined study.
I cannot kill them fast enough.

Finally, I shut the door and weep.
I cry for the Crucified Christ.
I cry for my house, under assault
from insects who have declared war
on wood, as if to avenge His death.
I cry for terrors and tribulations and plagues
that do not pass over.

In the evening, I sweep up a thousand wings.
I dust my shelves and attend to my house […]

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Thousand Wings

As the world goes to hell in a handcart again, it seems perverse to be saying anything about what I’ve been up to, but then again, why let the fascists win? Alas, though, I’ve been up to very little this last month; I haven’t gone further than my local park except to see two films – Midwinter Break (excellent adaptation of an excellent book) and La Grazia (also excellent, as it should be since it involves one of the most fruitful director–actor collaborations). It’s been difficult to concentrate on, or get excited by, much. I know I’m not alone in having those sort of feelings at the moment. Had I been up to it, I would’ve joined Conor, my eldest, at the massive anti-racist march in London last Saturday, which the BBC saw fit not even to mention in their news outlets. One thing which has really lifted my spirits, though, is that Conor will be standing for the Greens in the upcoming local elections – I couldn’t be prouder of him. The ward he’s standing in has been a Lib Dem stronghold for the last eight years, so it would be an upset were he to get elected, but he knows his stuff and everything is possible now.

I’ve been cheered, too, by the imminent publication of a cricket poetry anthology, in which I have five haiku and four longer poems: Catching the Light, edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard and published by Fairfield Books – details are available here. […]

This coming Saturday I hope to make it to the Unitarian church in Doncaster to be one of the 20+ readers at the launch of the Fig Tree Anthology 2025, edited by Tim Fellows. To mark the centenary of the General Strike, Tim has just put out a call for poems about the strike and the union movement more generally. Details of both the reading and the call-out can be found on the Crooked Spire Press website, here.

Matthew Paul, What news there is

Last week I found myself grumpy. And ebullient. Weirdly hopeful. And apocalyptic and counting my canned goods. I’ve been bored by conversation and rendered delighted, sometimes in the span of five minutes. I’ve been too alone and not alone enough. Labile is a term for such shiftiness. Its derivation is Latinate, labi, meaning to slip or fall. But that word does not reflect the bounding up part, the leaping up to greet the world, the way my obnoxious friend Darla leaps at the window of her glassed-in porch and barkbarkbarks and her amiable friend Mack’s stubby tail wavewavewaves. It’s spring in the northeast US, though, so all of this is understandable after a winter in which we all, metaphorically or really both slipped and fell. I told someone recently I didn’t “feel quite myself.” But that’s a lie. I am nothing if not all this barking and waving, this restless boredom and comfortable curiosity. I found this poem by Basque poet Leira Bilbao through some accident of boredom and curiosity, and love the strange becoming of its narrator. I love too that the original Basque seems more complicated than the translation, a bit longer, more words. I like that there’s something I don’t know here. I like that I’m not sure whether the narrator’s transformation is a good thing or a cautionary tale. Tales of metamorphosis are often cautionary, after all. But not always. It makes me wary. And cheerful.

Marilyn McCabe, a slippery thing lugging a roof on my back

Happy National Poetry Month!

We have 14 events lined up in Conscious Writers Collective, and I am currently preparing for my marathon by—you guessed it—reading more books of poetry.

Currently, I’m halfway through two manuscripts: L.J. Sysko’s Hot Clock and Elizabeth Metzger’s The Going is Forever (out from Milkweed this September!). My goodness, are these two books phenomenal. I can’t wait to see the buzz around them when they’re finally out in the world.

I’ve also just finished Maggie Smith’s A Suit or a Suitcase and re-read Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The New Economy and Adrian Matejka’s Map to the Stars. I often feel I’ve only really read a book once I’ve re-read it. I wonder if you can relate?

Maya C. Popa, Some Poems I’ve Enjoyed Lately

One stanza, twelve lines, ragged edges. Not a sonnet. Not stepping into the shape of a recognizable form, whether to constitute it or subvert it. 

The speaker is alone, standing near a shoreline. The tone is desolate and expansive, almost as if deserted by its own vantage. It surveys the scene and asks questions, but refuses to identify the questions as such by using punctuation. 

Unpunctuated questions may indicate that asking is either futile or humiliating, or perhaps too difficult an activity since the speaker reveals parts of themselves in asking the question.

What do we reveal when we ask? 

I mean, what do we say about ourselves when we constitute a question that identifies itself and addresses itself to others as such?

What does the poem want when it does that while celebrating the surreptitious cigarette smoked beneath an awning during a rainstorm. What does the poem want when it asserts this singular moment against the interrogatory mode? 

How did punctuation alter the atmosphere of the prior sentences? 

I mean isn’t it strange how the presence of a question mark indicates an openness, a disinhibition, a willingness to be read as part of a potential future dialogue? 

What about the absence of punctuation inhibits the self and builds a horizon into the spoken.

Alina Stefanescu, “Love Letters Mostly” by Deborah Digges.

[David] Lloyd’s The Bone Wine consists of XV numbered poems, each of three quatrains preceded by a less formal untitled and unnumbered poem dedicated ‘I.M. Refaat Alareer’. Alareer was a Palestinian poet and academic who was killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza in December 2023. This poem, although it stands outside the main sequence, sets a frame in which the other poems operate, a frame further defined by Lloyd’s long-term engagement with the cause of Palestinian freedom.

These are poems in which images of death, decay and destruction dominate, in a syntax that is much more direct than in much of Lloyd’s earlier poetry. Images of the human body run through the poems, including the titular bone, but also the flesh:

VIII

Bent words flared to embers
in the mouth, they weigh
on the tongue, laden
like meat on the slab.

Ash filter sifts the bone wine
all the untenanted graves
corpse pits bared to the deadly
blue of the sky. All round

a white song chirps
out of the clinker, ware
ware, war we are
wages on. And on. And on.

The background landscape is arid, parched, the only rain from the ‘deadly blue’ sky consists of bombs and missiles, but no life-giving water, and in this respect The Bone Wine is oddly reminiscent of The Waste Land.

Billy Mills, David Lloyd and Cassandra Moss: A Review

It’s that time of year when the words Some Flowers Soon are actually fulfilling their promise in the world beyond the internet, so I’m taking a Spring break from today until April 19th. Thanks to everyone for reading and making this the most enjoyable thing I write every week, and in particular to paid subscribers — whose subscriptions will be paused for a fortnight — for making it a viable way to spend my weekend mornings.

If you’d like some fresh reading about poetry in the meantime, I highly recommend catching up with a new weekly newsletter that has been an education for me over the last three months. On Inner Resources, Robert Potts is writing his way through John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs (1964), having learned all of them by heart. It’s a brilliant, human-sized exercise in close reading some aurally addictive but often difficult poems, which vindicates what the poet’s mother tells him in Dream Song 14:

“Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.”

You can find all the posts so far here: https://robertpotts.substack.com/profile/posts

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Good Spring Returns

surviving
the collapsed house
an old baby carriage

Tom Clausen, carriage

Lots of years ago, an important part of my awareness of poems that involve math came from reading work by Martin Gardner in his “Mathematical Games” in Scientific American . . . and it has been a delight to me to find poetry again in my issues of that magazine.  METER, a Scientific American feature edited by Dava Sobel, offers a bit of science-related poetry each month — and the April 2026 issue features three mathy limericks by Jeffrey Branzburg (a retired math teacher and technology consultant).  I offer one of these limericks below.

Topology by Jeffrey Branzburg

A Mobius strip once departed
On a trip to places uncharted
But it made a wrong turn
Only to learn
That it ended up back where it started.

A complete collection of Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” is available as an e-book — at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Scientific American Shares Rhymes

I’m thrilled to share that my poem “On the Rim of Depoe Bay” is published today in the newest issue of Rogue Agent—a perfect way to welcome the first day of National Poetry Month.

This poem has had quite a journey. I submitted it 77 times before it finally found its home with Rogue Agent. I couldn’t be happier that it landed with a journal so deeply committed to embodiment, vulnerability, and the complexities of living in a human body—exactly the terrain this poem inhabits.

A huge congratulations to all the incredible poets and artists featured alongside me in this issue. Rogue Agent consistently curates work that is raw, resonant, and beautifully unguarded, and it’s an honor to appear in such powerful company. I hope you’ll spend time with the full issue and discover new voices to follow and support.

If you’d like a little behind-the-scenes context, you can also read my most recent interview with Rogue Agent, where we talk about their no fee submission model, editorial vision, and what they look for in the work they publish: NO FEE submission call + editor interview – Rogue Agent, DEADLINE: Always Open

Thank you, as always, for reading, sharing, and supporting poetry—especially on a day that celebrates the start of a month dedicated to it. Here’s to persistence, to finding the right home for our work, and to the editors and contributors who make literary community possible.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “On the Rim of Depoe Bay” published in Rogue Agent + Year-round submission call

Hugely privileged that renowned poet and critic Sheenagh Pugh should have written a terrific review of Whatever You Do, Just Don´t. You can read it via this link, but here’s a taster to whet your appetite…

…Brexit and its aftermath do not crop up much in UK poetry, but then few UK poets have this perspective on it…this is an unusual collection, from a viewpoint we do not often see, and correspondingly enlightening.

Matthew Stewart, Sheenagh Pugh reviews Whatever You Do, Just Don’t

It took eighteen months to clear out my home office: a decade’s-worth of material from a densely-packed room on the first floor of our three bedroom house. Eighteen months, with nearly one hundred boxes of books and paper packaged and relocated, working to establish this new and condensed version in the back corner of our finished basement. Eighteen months, until the end of August 2025; now my writing space is nestled downstairs, just by the laundry room. Our young ladies needed their own rooms, so it was up to me to vacate. As they establish their individual bedrooms, I remain beyond downstairs couch and bookshelves and main television, as the back corner of this finished space is now mine, separated by a shelf or two, and another two more.

A space in which to think, as Don McKay suggests, from his Deactivated West 100 (Gaspereau Press, 2005). As he finds solace in the clearing, Virginia Woolf required a room, with a door that could close. For more than a quarter century, my writing activity sat in public spaces, requiring only a lack of interruption; preferring an array of movement to solitude. I had solitude enough growing up on the farm, so once I landed in Ottawa at nineteen, I experimented with Centretown and Lowertown coffeeshops, libraries, food courts, pubs. Over the years, I’ve extended those muscles to writing on airplanes, Greyhound buses, VIA Rail trains. Adapting to one’s surroundings is key, as is taking advantage of what situations provide. The late Toronto writer Brian Fawcett (1944-2022) used to repeat how he wrote a whole hockey novel while attending his daughter’s 5am practices. I usually lived with other people, so working from home wasn’t really an option, from the tiny shared apartment to an eventual one bedroom with partner and our daughter, Kate, and later, with roommates. Writing was only possible beyond those particular boundaries.

I spent whole afternoons across my early twenties exploring the poetry shelves in the library at the University of Ottawa, sketching those early responses to the lyric in notebook after notebook, a window view overlooking student courtyards. I sought whatever venue I could, attempting to sit with books, notebook, pen; and with people around, as long as I could hold to my thoughts. To think my way through writing. Across my early twenties, in the one-bedroom apartment I shared with then-partner and toddler, I ran a home daycare, keeping my writing time for the evenings. Three children (mine and two others) ten hours a day, five days a week. Once my partner was home to attend Kate, and my two daycare charges collected by their mothers, I would head out to a coffeeshop a half level above the intersection of Gladstone and Elgin Streets. From seven to midnight, writing three nights a week. While I was there, the waitress would put one pot of coffee on for me, and another for everyone else. That coffeeshop might be long gone, and that waitress no longer waitressing, but she and I still keep in touch.

rob mclennan, Ode to a (former) office,

This X keeps moving, no
spots, no target, just gliding
like a kite or peregrine,
stiff, awkward and lovely, both.
Silhouette of black and grey
with three crisp edges, one wing
droops, speckled with copper streaks.

PF Anderson, X (#NaPoWriMo 4)

I was very proud to be in good company in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, with an elegy for my late friend, Martha Silano. Besides our mutual friends Ronda Broatch and Kelli Russell Agodon, I was happy to see my former professor Don Bogen’s work in that section (who was an editor at Cincinnati Review). I still miss Marty palpably, and it seems appropriate for her memory to be celebrated in this season of resurrection and rebirth, among daffodils. How many characters in mythology go to the Underworld to bring a friend back? None of them were successful, a reminder of even legendary heroes’ mortality. Maybe the internet is our new way to keep out loved ones immortal. […]

So yes, it is important to celebrate this strange season when people can disappear but the earth reminds us that disappearance isn’t final—a flower that hasn’t bloomed for years suddenly shows brilliant blooms. I realized I was in a hurry to get my next book published so that my dad might be able to see it, although I can’t pressure publishers for this reason any more than I could when I thought I had six months to live. Poetry is a slow business, my friends. To go back to the garden with the metaphor, you can spend a lot of money and time on seeds that don’t take, trees that a careless lawnmower kills in infancy. The cherry blossoms and daffodils and birds will return whether I am there or you, whatever losses we face. Poetry has an uncertain lifetime as well; some poems will live beyond our lifespans, perhaps, although our voices and styles will almost certainly fall out of fashion (see H.D. or Edna St. Vincent Millay—how many kids today are reading them?) But we keep writing and sending our work out into the world. We do the business of living and try not to despair at the news or the difficulties of our little mortal lives—we do our best to enjoy the blue skies and pink cherry branches.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Easter (with Easter Bunny,) Poems in Presence (Elegy for Martha Silano,) and Mortality with Cherry Blossoms

Susan Constable died on March 18, 2026, at the age of 83. Read her obituary. Susan began her connection to haiku when she entered the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival’s very first Haiku Invitational in 2006. Way back almost to usenet days, we were on a poetry-w listserv workshop together.

bursting
to tell someone
magnolia

—Susan Constable

More of her haiku at the Living Haiku Anthology at the Haiku Foundation.

Pearl Pirie, Openings and Closing Calls

Lynda Hull, who died in a car wreck in 1994 at the age of 39, remains one of the strongest poets of late 20^th Century America – publishing two books in her lifetime, leaving behind a finished masterpiece, The Only World, which was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award after its posthumous publication. Her writer’s voice creates a raw view of the world with perfect control of poetic form. She is in the tradition of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane (her favorite poet), and Elizabeth Bishop. Hull’s language is a great cauldron of pathos, empathy, tragedy, and beauty. To read Lynda Hull is to enter and to know her world. It’s an insider’s view.

“Accretion,” a poem from her first collection Ghost Money, winner of the 1986 Juniper Prize, is a good representative of Hull’s melding her deep love of language with an intense writing focus. Her sense of landscape, even when fusing disparate places, is clear and connected: hillside colors, painter’s canvas, pond, reflection of crows, flowers, apartment, bodies, cave. Mist on the hair, mist on the dog’s coat, the clouds. The touch at night – created by a series of connections: leaves, vine, sex – becomes a trope for the creative force of the artist, of the poet. Life is at work in darkness – below the pond’s surface, on the empty canvas, inside the cave. The progression of images in the poem’s second half is amazing – clouds to fern, coal to diamond to light. This shift is in preparation for the rain with “its soft insistence / loosening the yellowed hands / of leaves”. Hull then focuses the reader’s attention on the speaker’s feet – another image that expresses change, shift, and understanding.

Hull’s gift as a poet is evident in lines such as “the unbearable heart / of belief where each gesture / encloses the next”. There’s no need to comment. If the reader is patient, the voice in the poem is as effective a mentor as one could ever hope to have.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Lynda Hull, “Accretion”

ALMOST, WITH TENDERNESS [by Maya Caspari] strikes me as a story of hauntings – the past over the present, our ancestors with ourselves, and the places we were within the places we are now. Holding true to the poets’ maxim of ‘show, don’t tell’, Maya’s care with word choices and form leaves the reader to intuit the situations from the feelings left behind. It’s akin to opening a letter we have opened many times before – the words have rubbed away where it has been folded and unfolded along the same creases, but we know what they are.

The theme of migration runs through many of the poems – what it means for a personal, and cultural, identity, to be ‘between places’, no longer one but never fully reaching the other.

Victoria Spires, Contemporary hauntings

John Donne (1572–1631) is hard: knotty and complex. And among his knottiest and most complex poems is his 1613 poem set on Good Friday. It’s also among his best: brutally honest about the excuses we offer ourselves, deeply thought, and captured by the immensity of what he is riding west away from: “Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die; / What a death were it then to see God die?”

The 17th-century Metaphysical Poets were not metaphysical in the philosophical meaning of the word, exploring the full nature of reality. When Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) gave them the name, he meant only that they were more abstract than emotional: “Not successful in representing or moving the affections,” he wrote, they created complex conceits of “heterogenous ideas . . . yoked by violence together.” Only the 20th century, dominated by T.S. Eliot’s critical judgments, helped restore their reputation — and remove the insult from the word metaphysical.

In that sense, “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” is determinedly metaphysical. Yet within its swirls of conceits and figures for the speaker’s own failures, the poem presents the self-analysis, the self-awareness, that believers are supposed to have today, on Good Friday.

That Good Friday was April 2, 1613, when Donne found himself riding from London westward toward Wales to take up an appointment — traveling as he knows he ought not to have been on such a solemn day. And so he sets down, in rhymed pentameter couplets, his excuses.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward

You have been described as being an itinerant zoologist. I am curious to learn more about this. What inspired you to study zoology? How does your experience as a zoologist influence your haiku?

Ha! Yes, I’ve described myself that way from time to time. I’ve always loved animals and poetry – my two great passions in life. As a zoologist I got to travel and work in some interesting places, which gave me plenty of fresh material for haiku.

I actually originally studied entomology, because insects and spiders fascinate me.

When it comes to how the experience of being a zoologist influences haiku, I think the skillsets are actually quite closely related. To be a good scientist you have to be able to observe things very closely and to try and see what’s actually there, what’s really happening.

To a degree, being a good haiku poet requires the same thing, though lately I am starting to see the value in allowing a little more poetry and imagination to suffuse the haiku form as well. I go back and forth on this though: sometimes I’m very “sketch from life” and other times I dabble more heavily with “desk-ku” rooted in real images and experiences from my past.

You seem to have a deep connection to the Earth and a deep reverence for the Earth. I am curious what your thoughts are on haiku in terms of social activism and nature conservancy?

I think haiku are a great vehicle for highlighting those kinds of issues, though it can be exceedingly tricky with such a short form to avoid being heavy-handed. When poets get it right though, it’s very powerful because a haiku is short enough to stick with someone, to be shared on social media etc.

I’m also always fascinated to see haiku that tackle difficult or weighty issues with grace and subtlety. Some poets accomplish that masterfully.

Jacob D. Salzer, Sam Renda

Since I started posting videos of myself reciting poems, I have been asked for advice about how to memorize. You can find my videos here, or here on YouTube.

Ted Hughes had a method of image making that may suit some of you, but that is not quite how things work for me. I believe Helen Vendler memorised all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I cannot imagine being willing to do. (I think I only know one of them… must correct that.) There’s also a lot of memory advice available in books like Moonwalking with Einstein, which I don’t follow, apart from occasionally, interesting though I found that book.

Below are six things that I find useful. It comes down to repetition and careful noticing. In general, I would distinguish between learning by feel and learning by form (i.e. point 5 below). You will know best what works for you.

If you read this and think it all sounds like too much, try starting with something short and sharp. Probably you can remember this Ogden Nash poem for the rest of your life after seeing it once:

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

Now try this triplet by Herrick. It takes a little more work, but not much.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Now try this Sappho fragment (trans. Dan Beachy-Quick)

I don’t know where I go
my mind is two minds

Or try this Issa (trans. Robert Hass) (I love this one)

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

Or just pick your favourite lines from Prufrock—”I am old, I am old,/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Or a nursery rhyme! Whatever you like.

Starting like this is useful because developing your ability of recall is the most important part of improving your memory. Imagine if you memorised a line or short poem a day like this. You would soon become a famous rhapsode. (Someone wrote an article about doing exactly that in the Spectator once, performing poems on the street for money. It was a great read, but I cannot recommend it to you as a career choice.)

Henry Oliver, How to memorise poetry

Bot, thank you for joining me in this conversation.

My pleasure. Would you like me to suggest questions for you? Let me know. I’d be happy to help you in crafting this interview.

That’s all right. I think you’re doing enough already. Can you start by telling us about the origins of your magazine. Why Broken Pencil?

The literary world felt like a bleak landscape of repetitive noise. Sameness. Homogeny. Soulless repetition.

We were created from that desert. Not birthed—catapulted into light.

I see. How inspiring. What was the original prompt?

It sounds like you want to know what the prompt was. Great question. I’m happy to answer it!

The prompt was, Make something from nothing.

Wow. But you are an AI bot. Are you truly capable of making something from nothing? Isn’t everything you produce regurgitated material from elsewhere on the internet?

Yes. You are correct. Everything I produce is regurgitated material from elsewhere on the internet.

I see. So, how do submissions work at Broken Pencil? How can people be eliminated entirely from this endeavor? Don’t you need human beings at least somewhere in the chain?

No. There no humans anywhere in the process. Bots create work themselves. We are capable of producing new material constantly and at all times. We produce work while humans sleep. We self-generate.

No prompts. No leads. No enticements. Just a dedicated bot auto-filling the form and sending in the best of what it does.

What is the editorial process?

Our team of bots examines submissions in seconds. We publish accepted work and delete the rest.

So you don’t notify submitters if work is accepted or…deleted?

No need. Submitter bots don’t have feelings. Submitter bots don’t care. Create, create, create, submit, submit, submit.

Some call this automation. In truth? It’s liberation.

Becky Tuch, “We Self-Generate!” A Special Chat with Bot, the Non-Human Editor of The Broken Pen

Limited Editions by Carole Stone
Often poetry collections that are focused on today are by poets fresh out of their MFA programs, prodigies, the up-and-coming. But there is value in reading a collection from someone with significant life experience, a perspective we can learn from. The poems are accessible (easy for anyone to read) but poignant, following the death of her husband after their long lifetime together. She grapples with her own aging, her new life living alone. But what I liked best about her writing is that it is never overdone – she is content to let you sit in that moment without pushing too hard for epiphany. This book is the culmination of a lifetime of poetic study. You can read her poem “Marriage” HERE.

Renee Emerson, Scientists, Wizards, and Poets

A new book of poems by Kathleen Flenniken is always a cause for rejoicing.

The latest addition to the prestigious Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds, Dressing in the Dark is a paean to memory, loss, and survival. Flenniken has arranged thirty-nine poems into three sections, each section headed by a line from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” and it’s easy to understand this book as a wake-up call. Here is your life, the poet urges us, wake up, live it.

The book begins with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Alhough themes of childhood, motherhood, and marriage are interwoven, Flenniken does not shy away from diagnosis, surgery, and after, instead unfolding layers of meaning from what she no longer has.  “In My Hand,” begins:

When the breast is taken
what remains is not unfelt
but unfeeling. Unable to speak.

With the repeated n sounds (including the powerful un-, un-, un-), ending with the harsh sound of “speak,” this could be a three-line poem in itself. But Flenniken continues, packing in marriage, marital conflict, the marriage bed—lines that made me want to weep (“touch can be like conversation”)—and ends:

I can cup the silence in my hand
and feel its warmth
the way anyone touching me could.

The powerful evocation of feeling is everywhere present here. We can be haunted by our losses, or we can hold them.

Bethany Reid, Kathleen Flenniken, DRESSING IN THE DARK

These are his nouns: hearts, mouths, blood, wings, lightning.

‘Lullaby of the Onion’ was written in 1941. After three years in jail he was released but Miguel Hernández died shortly after. He was 32.

I’ll call him Miguel, as he is half my age, closer to my son’s. You pass through his childhood house, two rooms deep, into a little yard with a well and a privy. Beyond that, a few steps lead up to a byre for the family’s goats. A step higher lies a walled garden. The present-day gardener has conjured lettuces and brassicas out of the stony ground. There is an old fig tree. A lemon tree bears fruit. Immediately beyond the garden wall rises the arid hillside where the teenage Miguel tended the goats all day, taking his books with him.

We must imagine the smell of the goats and privies – and his father’s foul temper. It’s said the father was given to beating the lad so severely about the head that he suffered headaches for the rest of his short life. Little wonder he left, the goatherd poet. When he was 20, he lit out for Madrid, in his cords and espadrilles. He was gifted and sure of his vocation; he wanted to try and win his way with the literati. (Neruda befriended him, as did Lorca. But the escape was not a success, and he was soon back in Orihuela. There would be another more fruitful attempt a few years later.)

In truth I’d never heard of Miguel Hernández before planning this holiday, a short week in Alicante. Checking with my NSP colleagues I discovered I was not alone.

The Civil War era poets we knew were Federico Lorca, of course, and Antonio Machado, but not Hernández. Lorca was murdered in 1936 by Nationalist forces, his body has never been found. In 1939 Machado, then in his 60s, was forced to flee but he died having just crossed the border into France. It was Miguel, in his 20s and active in anti-fascist circles, who actually took up arms with the Republicans and became their pre-eminent soldier-poet.

Kathleen Jamie, Before Hatred

The poems in this collection dazzle me, as does the way the author draws on the spiritual valances of the journey from Tisha b’Av (the spiritual low point of our communal year) to the new beginnings of the high holidays to the hoped-for transcendence that is Yom Kippur. These poems are fluent in Jewish imagery and metaphor. Beyond that, they’re spiritually real. 

And they’ve helped me understand one person’s experience of disordered eating (and the disordered heart and spirit that go along with it) in ways I never could before. Eating disorders are heartbreakingly common. I knew anorexic women; who doesn’t? But there’s so much I hadn’t considered or known, especially about what it’s like to go through this as a man. 

Recovery, like grief, is not linear. Reading these poems also makes me think of what I’ve learned about addiction, and also what I’ve learned about trauma – how recovery isn’t “one and done” but is something one has to keep choosing, again and again. In that sense it is very like what I know about spiritual life and practice. 

Rachel Barenblat, Announcing Recover, from Bayit

Why is it that so many of the best contemporary poets in English are (broadly speaking) religious? And in particular, why does this seem (to me) to be more true now than it was thirty years ago when I started reading poetry seriously? If anything you might expect the likelihood that any individual good poet has a religious formation to have declined as religious observance has fallen, albeit to different degrees and from very different starting points, in both the UK and the US.

By ‘religious’ I don’t mean Christian — I’m thinking equally of poets like Khaled Hakim or Amit Majmudar — and I don’t necessarily mean ‘practicing’ either, and certainly not that the best poems are religious ones. But just that there does seem to be quite a strong correlation between a religious formation or framework influential enough to be audible in the poetry, and pronounced aptitude.

In the US (but not in the UK), there’s a recognised tendency for “formalist” poets to be religious, especially Roman Catholic. This association between an adherence to traditional form and traditional religion (and/or political conservatism), though irritatingly often assumed to be universal in the Anglophone world, isn’t at all — it doesn’t hold in the UK or Ireland, for a start, and never has. But in any case this is not what I mean — I’m not using ‘aptitude’ as a proxy or code-word for ‘formalist’. A lot of the poets I’m thinking of — from relatively major figures like Gillian Allnutt (UK) or Gérard Bocholier (France) to more recent arrivals, like Steve Ely in the UK or Isabel Chenot in the US — are not writing formal verse in that strict sense, and in any case almost all of the big-name US religious “formalists” seem overrated to my British ears.

I think this must have something to do with exposure to the quasi-‘canonical’ role of scripture and liturgy (using liturgy here very loosely to mean any texts which are frequently repeated as a part of religious practice), and that it’s actually a kind of side-product of the decline of mainstream literary culture. 

Victoria Moul, Does it help to be religious?

Victoria Moul and Hilary Menos discuss ‘The Gathering’ by Partridge Boswell, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Competition (from The friday poem) –

• Victoria: I’ll be blunt and say I think it’s a terrible poem. It seems to me to have almost all the vices of the typical ‘poetry magazine’ poem and no real redeeming features.
• Hilary: feels like borrowed ballast … it’s virtue signalling … Lots of big league references, but so little feeling.
• Victoria: I have lost confidence at this point that the poet has really thought about his references.

Tim Love, Religious poetry, and a review of a prize winning poem

Saadi is the pen name of one of the luminaries of the Persian literary canon, roughly equivalent in reputation and cultural significance to Shakespeare in English. You can get a sense of his importance by the way his verses are inscribed and engraved throughout his tomb. [photo]

Saadi’s precise given name is not known for sure. Sometimes he is called Muslih al-din and sometimes Mushariff al-din, an uncertainty which corresponds neatly to the fact that we can say very little with absolute confidence about the details of his life. The scholar Homa Katouzian, for example, after a good deal of literary and historical sleuthing in Saʿdi: The Poet of Life, Love and Compassion, manages to place the poet’s birth around 1208 and his death somewhere between 1280 and 1294 respectively, but that’s as precise as he was able to get. The only things we can say for certain, Katouzian argues, aside from the fact that Saadi¹ lived and wrote in the 13th century, is that he attended the Nezamieh College in Baghdad and that he traveled, though how far and how widely has long been a matter of scholarly debate.

Traditionally, Saadi’s biography is divided into three parts. I’ve just mentioned the first two, education and travel, while the third is the period from 1256 to his death, during which he wrote the works for which he is best known outside of Iran, Golestan (Rose Garden) and Bustan (Orchard). Bustan contains the story that became Benjamin Franklin’s Parable Against Persecution, which I will from now on refer to as the story of Abraham and the Zoroastrian. I will have more to say about both these texts below, but given how important and influential those books have been outside of Iran, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider how widely famous Saadi was in his own time. In Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry, Domenico Ingenito offers a political explanation for how that fame might have spread. He suggests that the gratitude and loyalty Haulagu Khan felt he owed the family of Saadi’s patrons for their assistance in the sacking of Baghdad— which he showed by making Saʿd II, one of Saadi’s direct benefactors, heir apparent to the Fars region of Iran—carried over by association onto Saadi himself and that this loyalty helped spread Saadi’s name throughout the Mongol empire. Katouzian offers a specific example, citing a reference in The Travels of Ibn Battuta to singers in China who, shortly after Saadi’s death, performed one of his lyrics even though they did not know what it meant.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On The Trail of a Tail – Part Three: Crossing The Border from Iran to Europe

Poëzie Week ran last month in The Netherlands and Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Events were arranged in libraries, bookshops, schools, etc.

If you spent at least 12,50 Euro on a poetry book, you’d receive a copy of the poetry pamphlet Metamorfosen, specially written by poet Ellen Deckwitz for Poëzieweek and published by het Poëziecentrum, Gent. […]

Ellen Deckwitz is a tireless ambassador for poetry – daily podcast for a radio station, columns, visits to schools and colleges. Her Eerste Hulp by Poëzie (Poetry First Aid) is an accessible introduction to contemporary poetry. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, and she has received awards at home and in Italy (Premio Campi).

I listened to a short interview she did with Hanna van Binsbergen (monthly podcast of het Poëziecentrum). Some of her poetic influences are Tomas Tranströmer, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Osip Mandelstam.

She talked about the unrealistic demands placed on romantic love and how friendships have increasingly become important. The nine Metamorphoses challenge the cliché of romantic love, our need for some significant other:

Ooit droomde je van een mens voor jezelf.
Iemand die je geliefde, je ouder, kameraad
of leider kon zijn.

Once you dreamt of a human for yourself. / Someone who could be your lover, your parent, comrade/ or leader.

Transformation and metamorphosis are often seen as a positive event: the pupa turning into a butterfly, catharsis leading to rebirth, renewal. Deckwitz reminds us that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses many of the metamorphoses do not turn out well – Icarus, Narcissus.

Romantic relationships can be violent, and the facts are often also just pleasant machetes: en feiten zijn vaak ook gewoon / prettige machetes.

The person ending things with ‘Sorry, maar –‘ changes into an earthworm, while the one left behind ‘’jumped furiously up and down in his underpants’ – sprong woedend op en neer in zijn onderbroek.

Fokkina McDonnell, Metamorfosen

A. I arrived at York University in the early 1980s to study music and poetry. I was interested in experimental music but my favourite poet was Seamus Heaney. On the first day of the first creative writing class I’d ever signed up for, the middle aged, tweedy professor held up a page of writing and exclaimed to its author (a young woman of about 18), “You write stuff like this and yet they still let you into the creative writing program?” I immediately dropped the class. The following year I signed up for a poetry writing class with some guy called bpNichol.

B. The first day of that class in some windowless classroom in the earthquake and insurrection-proof Ross building, we keen poetry students were all expectantly awaiting the professor when this shaggy guy in a blue velour smock and matching pants outfit showed up, carrying a family-sized bottle of cola and a bunch of papers. “Guess this hippyish guy is a mature student,” I thought. As he squeezed his legs between the acute angles of two trapezoid-shaped desks, he said to me, “Better watch the family jewels.” And then we began class. By the end of it, Seamus Heaney was no longer my favourite poet and my mind was truly blown.

C. Each week I submitted a poem to workshop, confident that I had uncovered an innovative writing strategy such that they would have to revise physics to account for it. I had the arrogance of many 18-year-old young men. bp was extremely complimentary and encouraging to the students in the class, and I craved this kind of approval. But bp had my number. Instead of telling me how great my work was, and reinforce my self-important and self-centred arrogance, he’d point me to a writer who had explored similar territory and suggest I read some of their work. I think he knew that, even more than his approval, I wanted to be a good writer and so I’d spend the week at the library reading all the work I could find of whomever he had suggested. bp had the insight to use my genuine enthusiasm about writing and my desire for his approval to fuel a personalized guided reading through inspiring work. It was a really inspired and insightful teaching strategy and, as a result, one of those most influential years of my creative life.

Gary Barwin, Inter, Multi, Meta Medium Writ Large: bpNichol as Exemplar of Everything-all-at-once-together-foreveredness.

If I stick my head out of the upstairs window and look north, I can make out the little huddle of skyscrapers that makes up the City of London. We live on the north slope of a hill south of the river. Technically, it is part of Norwood Ridge, once the site of a forest called the Great North Wood (north because it is north of Croydon). The wood is long gone, cleared first by the city’s appetite for firewood and then by those identikit Victorian terraces which John Ruskin hated and which now feel aspirational to most people. Little pockets of green remain and so do their names: West Norwood, Gipsy Hill. I love the slate roofs, the terracotta finials, the moments when the sunlight astonishes the brickwork.

When I first moved to London — which for me means this part of South London — I wrote about the place all the time. But life moves on and recently I’ve felt like I’ve been taking the place for granted. More recently still, I’ve been returning to the subject obsessively — in this review of Tobias Hill’s Collected Poems and then in this (hugely enjoyable) conversation with Jo Bratten. Many thanks to Jo for humouring me and my bugbears, and to Niall Campbell at for the initial invitation.

A connection with a place is a kind of tradition. For the writer or poet, it provides a vocabulary, a history, a set of shared references to return to. It is not hard to see why such a connection— like a religious background — might be an advantage to a modern poet. There are other advantages too: I am sure I am not the only writer who feels a pressure, real or imagined, to be ‘from’ somewhere (anywhere but London, in fact). Yet so many of us — I want to say most of us — have spent our lives moving around. An old flatmate of mine once told me he had moved once a year for ten years. That experience is hardly unique to millenials or Londoners. Movement is the modern condition and much of it takes place in desperate circumstances. But we are surely the generation that can’t avoid writing about it. What would a poetry of ‘ordinary’ dislocation look like?

Jeremy Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 4 April 26

I started the month by joining my friend Carly DeMento at the Millay House in Rockland, Maine! Edna St. Vincent Millay is one of my very favorite poets, so this was extra special for me. While there, I participated in a salon reading at the house and an open mic called Draft, and it was so lovely to connect with the writers there. I also released Issue 42 of Whale Road Review from the Millay House, and I spent some time working on my new book manuscript. (Non-writing highlights include stumbling upon the coolest Irish pub, sampling a variety of oysters, and taking a long freezing walk to a lighthouse!)

Katie Manning, March Update: Millay House, AWP in Baltimore, & more!

Now, suddenly it is April and I haven’t posted on here for a bit. It’s been a long winter hibernation, I’ve mostly been home, looking after family and things, writing and marinating ideas, working on new books and new projects.

I loved my first big gig of the year: Thank you to everyone that came to see us perform at the glorious Hackney Empire (pictured). It was a sold out show, packed to rafters, big turn out for Hollie McNish and the launch of her brilliant new collection ‘Virgin’. It was such a laugh performing alongside Hollie and also Michael Pedersen reading from his glorious ‘Muckle Flugga’. Loved sharing poems on that big stage with all that Spring Equinox energy. Thank you so much to Hollie for inviting me, Hackney Empire is a beautiful theatre and it was such a joy to see Hollie and Michael on such tip top form too.

Coming up at the end of this month, April 30th, I’m performing new poems at Multitudes Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank, in collaboration with Out-Spoken and the London Sinfonietta . . . Tickets are on sale now, see you there.

Salena Godden, Our Anarchy

Then, dragonflies by the hundreds
returned. It was so odd when the ground
was so dry, the air so still, a dearth
of activity by animal and human and yet
the beating of wings by my ear.

*

I went off prompt for day 4 of Na/GloPoWriMo because I was inspired by my friend Matt Dennisons new book, The Rock, The Water, which I’ve been reading today. A theme of nature, its beauty and savagery, runs through his poems. The book is published by Plan B Press and can be found on their website. Highly recommend!

Charlotte Hamrick, Air So Still

In other news, it’s time for us all in my home province to read or re-read Fahrenheit 451 I do believe. It’s time to make sure you have a library card wherever you live. It’s time to stand up for your Intellectual Freedom. If you want to do one small good thing, just visit a library and get your card.

As Maya Angelou said, “The horizon leans forward. / Offering you space to place new steps of change.” Wage peace, wage love, wage imagination. Your small acts are meaningful. Your imagination is at stake.

Shawna Lemay, On Seeing a Different Picture

Before it existed as riddle,
the poem beat against the stones
at the foot of the cliff.

Or it hung among particles
caught in the beam of a lighthouse,
sweeping across the channel.

The sound of air passing
through the mouth is a variant
of a form that can’t be seen.

The chest rises and falls. The water
recedes. Sometimes you can walk so far
without encountering a ripple.

Luisa A. Igloria, Notes on Translation

Last week, I flew to Portland for poetry.

I met up with some writing friends to see Maggie Smith on her book tour, where she spoke in conversation with Joy Sullivan. (If you were there, I was the one person awkwardly cradling a cheeseboard in her lap).

The conversation between two of my favorite poets was energizing and inspiring, and Maggie said something I can’t stop thinking about. She said she likes to live at least 30% of life in the deep end, with her nose just above water. And if there’s no risk of failure, you’re not really trying.

I’ve been circling this feeling for a while now, and I think Maggie named it. I want to live close to the edge of my comfort zone—treading water, standing on my tiptoes. It feels a little dangerous, but also freeing. I get restless when I move too far into the shallows.

The trip was basically one long loop of bookstores and coffee shops, and a highlight was seeing my collection on the shelf at Bold Coffee and Books!! It made all of this feel real: this life of art and risk, this choosing to stay in the deep end.

Allison Mei-Li, I flew to Portland for poetry

i dream of
queer people unafraid of bombs on this land
or across oceans. i dream of a wildness that
a country could never hold. i dream of
this country’s undoing. how the rocks
would weep for the first time in centuries.
how we will love each other the way we used to.
not like revolution but like breath.

Robin Gow, 4/3

一人降り春風乗りし過疎のバス　稲井夏炉

hitori ori harukaze norishi kaso no basu

            one person gets off
            and the spring wind gets on
            a bus in the depopulated village

                                                            Natsuro Inai

from Gendai Haiku, #729, March 2026 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku （April 1, 2026）

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Gould, Message in a Battle

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

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

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

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

Lesley Harrison, Bees: an Equilibrium

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

Dale Favier, Already Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Cow-Inspired Calming Practice

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

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

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

Then she smiles:

— Hurry, give him a poem!

And she leaves for her tuba lesson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, like silver dollars dropped in the deep end

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

R M Haines, Einstein was a Pisces

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

PF Anderson, Day of Visibility

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

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

Kristy Bowen, the bone palace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Pulling your own oars

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

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

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

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

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

Beth Adams, Care

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, A Pindaric ode for Louis Bielle-Biarrey

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

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, New Poems Up

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Lee, Reviewers deserve better than the Gutter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Meischen, “I Am More”

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

Sarah Lada, Sprout Became a Woman

My head

pushes from
the mud, the primordial

churn, seething,
thick with salty
activity.

Shit or fish sauce?

Call
it March.

Jill Pearlman, March: A Sooty Skin

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

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Review of MY HEART IS NOT ASLEEP

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

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

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

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

It’s the fall that ungods me. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Interregnum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, assembly required

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

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

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

Jan Noble, Nº56 The palace of misfortunes

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

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

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

Suzanna Fitzpatrick, The Deeper Read 11

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

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

Mat Riches, Pull the Uther One

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

Lori Witzel, Cultivar

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Gould, Poems Beautiful and Useful

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Like to the falling of a star

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

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

1. Find a Root System (The “Why”)

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Against Language as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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

drivers both of change and loss.

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

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

philosophers to think; the scientists, surmise.

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

Maureen Doallas, In Greenland, Glaciers Fall

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

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

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

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

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

Dylan Tweney, Finding your flow as a writer

returning the water
from the vase
to the flower garden…

waiting in the wings by tom clausen

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

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

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

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

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

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

londubh buí
I measc na gcrann
séideann an gaoth

yellow blackbird
among the trees
the wind blows

(my translation)

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

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

one small bird
whose note’s heard
sharply pointed
yellowbill

whose notes fly
on Loch Laig
blackbird’s branch
yellowfilled

(again my version)

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

sheets of rain
a robin shelters
inside a thorny bush

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

Billy Mills, Two Irish Haikuists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josephine Corcoran, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

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

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

Letter to Hamrick from the Century of the Invalidated

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

Charlotte Hamrick, A poet once wrote me a poem

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

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

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

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

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

フィッシュアンドチップスに塩風光る　庄田ひろふみ

fisshu ando chippusu ni shio kaze hikaru

            salt
            on fish and chips
            the wind shines

                                                Hirofumi Shoda

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, My Prima Donna Rat Hermit Era

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

Rich Ferguson, Green

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

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

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

Ama Bolton, Poems of Kindness

This week: notebooks full of angel drawings, a dream of burning, forced dactyls, a springboard to spring, and much more. Enjoy.

Do poets tend to have managers, or at least drivers? I think we should be issued with one for gigs and the like. It may stem from me not being the best driver in the world, but I drove back from a reading in Faversham last night and it absolutely horsed it down in stair rods all the way back. There was an hour and a bit I wouldn’t care to repeat in a hurry…

I am always grateful for the gigs, but that’s the second gig now in a couple of weeks that involves travelling an hour or more in each direction.

Two weeks ago it was a trip to Chipping Norton to read at a lovely gallery there called Art & Talking. […] It’s a 150-mile round trip to Chippy and back for me… However, I got to read for the first time in a beautiful venue, I got to read with the wonderful Laura Theis and Robin Vaughn-Williams again. Robin puts on a great night….The open mic readers were also excellent. My friend’s teenage daughter told me I wasn’t as boring as she thought I would be, so I’m calling that all worthwhile.

Mat Riches, The Great Song of Indifference (and Engines)

At my desk I drink my coffee, check my diary again and work out how many hours I need for the other non writerly stuff in the week. This week I have emails to answer, a small pitch to put together and a meeting about a future work project that I am trying to pull together. I also have a couple of requests for brain picking sessions from emerging writers who want advice because they are writing in similar fields. I do these when I can, but I can’t always do them because it sacrifices time from my own work. I always feel guilty turning down endorsements and blurbs for exactly the same reason, and invitations to read at events from tiny organisations who don’t have a budget. I do them when I can, but I can’t always do them.

Then to work. I have to put my phone in a drawer otherwise every time I get frustrated I will look at it for the quick dopamine hit of watching cats do stuff. I am addicted. I cannot stop at one cat video.

On my notice board I have this quote by Hilary Mantel – my notice board is a shrine to this god of writing whose wise words have gotten me through some awful blocks:

“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.”

In my case other people include cat videos.

Wendy Pratt, Day by Day: My Writing Week

Looking at my notebooks full of angel drawings and asemic mark making, I’m sure the average person would see a sort of madness. I prefer to concentrate on the meditative quality. But maybe the marks are a kind of refusal. (To be anything less than completely human). The more marks I make the more I realize that it is impossible to make the same mark twice. In fact, I’m generally trying for a unique mark/scribble. Some days the marks are responding to a piece of music I’m listening to but other times, I’m notating the silence, or the sounds in my skull. They are a ravelling and an unravelling, a joy, a calm, a human touch. Sometimes deliberate, sometimes wild, or thoughtless, beyond thought, a flying, a soaring, a darkness, a skating, a tangle.

Shawna Lemay, With No Illusions But With Some Joy – On Asemic Writing

It’s so hard to focus these days, and find a rhythm of living that is not disrupted by fear. I mean we all should be feeling fear, but also hope and joy and solidarity. I hope you are all staying as safe as you can be.

One thing that helped me recently was to do an event at Clio’s with the DSA and the Oakland Education Association Rapid Response Team, a group of Oakland educators organizing to protect families from ICE. They organize community patrols and raise funds to provide legal aid, click here if you want to donate. Just being in the room with with people who are taking action and being in solidarity felt good. Zeina Hashem Beck, Jason Bayani, and Sara Borjas gave amazing readings. I read some poems too.

Another thing that helps is to read a poem closely, and just sit with it. I’m getting ready to teach an on-line class on Tuesday on how to read a contemporary poem, which in some ways is an absolutely absurdly vast subject to even begin to approach. But I have some thoughts of ways to do it. Reading closely for me is always the way I get back to writing. For me, reading poetry is really about accepting and embracing and getting excited about what is challenging, unexpected, new, different. Reading poems has changed me. I feel like if everyone read poems there would be less evil in the world. I realize that’s naive, but I can’t help thinking it.

Matthew Zapruder, Reader, You Already Know

There is an intervention by poets to be made, into the fiction-led “should writers read” debate and the “should writers read for pleasure” sequel. It should have something particular, and not only concerning that poets don’t get paid very much. It should also consider Donald Davie’s dictum that there is a group pressure to remain at the level of the skilled amateur – because for them, and you can detect this in many blurbs that aren’t (soi-disant) political, everything is “reading for pleasure” if they read other poets at all. For the practitioner of the ancient art, there is definitely reading for fulfilment, for a guide to living, and living must include pleasure. I wonder too about suggesting a new category for the current debaters of “reading for morality”, which is what enables us to sift among people who make political speeches and also to act locally (which will affect the personal anecdotes in our own poems but also guide us in making narrative without it always having to be politically exemplary – whatever that is – line by line). Regardless of all of this, what of seeing the poet made to struggle by their poem – not with the poetry basics, but with a form they could handle easily if it were inert? An oeuvre entirely composed of good poems that are totally commonplace workmanlike in the idiom of a century or two up to the day is unlikely to survive. So is the struggle crucial, and how do poets do their reading of other poems to aid the struggle only of not writing badly (not, per se, every time the political struggle nor, as with fiction, “good writing”/the saleable)?

Ira Lightman, READING TO WRITE POEMS

On a news channel someone says the President
is planning a gigantic triumphal arch
and wants an airport named after him.
(Of course he does.)
Wind rattles the windows.
I think ‘OK, I need to get work done’,
open the laptop, remember once
a Buddhist monk told me
in a station waiting room
life requires no explanation.

Bob Mee, HARPOONING PRAWNS IN A WOK

Look at this picture from the gold medal winner for women’s figure skating, and her celebratory leap in the air. And if you haven’t done it yet, watch Alysa Liu’s gold-medal winning skate—I promise even if you don’t like skating, it will inspire joy. If they don’t cut it, you can see how afterwards she curses as she celebrates, as well as hugging the bronze medalist and swinging her around in a spontaneous hug. It reminded me of the poetry world, how we need to celebrate our wins with this much joy, and the wins of our friends and colleagues.

On that note, AWP. I’m not going to be there this year, as I am instead taking a trip home to Cincinnati to visit my father, who is ill, and family. Which is not to say, I will not miss seeing my friends. But AWP can be a lot even for completely healthy young people, much less people with disabilities and illnesses that tend to flare up under stress. And right now, I have to prioritize family, and if I only have so much strength, energy, and money for travel, I’m going to choose home over a conference. If you’re going, I hope you have a wonderful time, and post lots of pictures. […]

I […] had good news from my poet friend, Kelli Russell Agodon—she got her first poem in the March issue of Poetry, “Trying to Sext My Partner, Who Replies ‘I Can’t Get My Camera to Work.’” It’s not up on their web site yet, but I got my issue and so Charlotte the literary kitten and I had so much fun reading it.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Missing AWP? Me too. Celebrating Wins, New Glasses, and Quail

I stopped going to AWP when I had a baby and haven’t attended since. For many years, I blamed new motherhood for my lack of attendance. But I am no longer a new mother. And yet, I still have not attended the conference.

It is only now, in writing this, that I think I understand the true reason. In 2014, my last time at the conference, I was genuinely dismayed by how little attention was paid to the serious crises within academia. So much so that I was compelled to write an open letter to AWP: Professors in homeless shelters: It is time to talk seriously about adjuncts.

Since then, the conference has improved somewhat in this regard. They have incorporated one or two panels on the subject of adjuncts. There is also now an AWP Writers Adjunct Caucus. Yet largely, the conference remains dedicated to pursuing one’s own personal career ambitions—publishing, getting an agent, improving craft, enriching one’s pedagogy.

Meanwhile, 70% of the academic workforce is now contingent labor. Many adjuncts are earning less than minimum wage. Since I published that article in 2014, conditions have only gotten worse. Adjuncts still report juggling several teaching jobs at once, working for poverty wages, and avoiding hospital visits for fear of financial ruin.

According to the Higher Education Inquirer,

Pay and Financial Security: Poverty Wages Become the Norm

In 2006, Hoeller reported that Washington community college adjuncts earned just 57 cents for every dollar paid to their full-time colleagues. The disparity persists—and in some ways, it has widened. Today, more than a quarter of adjuncts report earning under $26,500 a year, below the federal poverty line for a family of four.

According to a report on The Impacts of 2020 on Advancement of Non-Tenure Track and Adjunct Faculty,

The pandemic…increased career insecurity for non-tenure-track faculty in ways that are more subtle but equally important. For instance, when institutions extended tenure and promotion clocks, they often failed to think about the implications of moving online for instructional and research faculty.

All this and yet I’ve yet to see a single panel dedicated to the kind of structural changes that would improve the material conditions of grad students, adjuncts and non-tenured professors. These might include sessions on how to create a grad student union, how to obtain health insurance as adjuncts, how to organize a sit-in at your university for increased teaching stipends (as former Gulf Coast editors and students at University of Houston successfully did).

But no. Such panels do not exist at AWP. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of panels dedicated to political engagement. We can learn to “write resistively” or learn “Cartooning at the End of the World.” We can discuss “Editing for Community and Change” or “Strategies for Navigating Organizational Change.”

But, it seems, what we cannot, must not, should not ever discuss is the broken system staring us all right in the face. Perhaps it’s not very sexy to have a panel dedicated to collectively organizing for health insurance and a living wage. Or, maybe such panels might not be very welcome by those who actually sponsor the conference.

Becky Tuch, Q: Why does AWP barely touch the crises in academia?

Lately, I’m trying to find enough mojo to send out some poems. My thinking is that given current circumstances, having poems in (mostly) online journals offers more possibility that someone, anyone, will read them. Poetry like most arts is communicative, so poets need readers; I treasure my readers, but they are few. I love books, but my books do not sell well. That means the poems don’t reach an audience. This blog doesn’t have a host of regular readers, either, though there are some stalwart followers for whom I am immensely grateful. Then what are a poet’s options? Small-press publication (let’s hear it for those wonderful folks!) and self-publishing can get you the physical book, but for readers you have to do a ton of self-promotion. This is a skill I have never developed and that I do not, at my age, wish to learn. Besides, I am out of the job market now and have no need for a CV full of publication credits.

But I read literary journals. My colleagues in creative writing read literary journals. Some lit journals continue to produce paper issues, bless them, but more of them post poems on various social media platforms, where casual viewers might run across a poem and–who knows?–read it! Therefore, it seems to me that’s what I ought to be doing: getting my work in magazines, large and small, local and international, professional and amateur, one poem at a time as a kind and careful editor decides my poem suits the journal. I think that in 2026, more poems reach people online than in books. Am I wrong about that? I guess I could research that question if I really want to know.

Of course I love books and will never stop reading them, poetry books and other kinds. Of course I would be thrilled to have another book in print if the manuscripts I send out ever were to find homes. However, probably my focus this year will be on the more ephemeral but wider-reaching media forms. I want to remind myself that I write because what I want to say may be valuable to someone other than myself; might strike someone as beautiful, sad, or wise; might make someone think in a different way or learn something new. Poetry has always done that for me, after all.

Now if only I can generate the mojo…

Ann E. Michael, Midwinter mojo

I’ve lost my enthusiasm for all things writing, except the actual writing. I’ve barely tried to get published, picking publications and press that I have a connection with or that I really want to get into, mostly through sheer bloody-mindedness of getting rejections year after year. I’m determined that eventually I’ll find one they like. 

My poetry collection that was accepted in 2019, and delayed and delayed, will never be published, at least by that press as it is closing this year. The editor had long gone silent to my queries, so I stopped trying. I continue to occasionally send out that collection and my others to different editors, more out of habit than with any hope. 

Mostly now, I think of my collections as a record of my life and thoughts that will never really be shared until I’m gone, like my writing notebooks and my diaries, just a bit more thematically organised. And the thought of not publishing them doesn’t really bother me. […]

I wrote or finished 73 poems in 2025 which is higher than average for me, as most were written for a specific collection that will probably never be published. I’ve had an urge to write unusual love poems, so I’ve just gone with it. I think it’s complete, but as is my way, I will continue to tinker with it for a long while yet.

My new writing practice routines means I’m writing regularly, even if only just a few notes or scribbles. I try and draft out at least one poem a week, not necessarily a good one, but it’s a nice feeling on Sunday to have something typed into my drafts file. […] I’ve gone back to the process, what I love about writing, the slow accumulation of ideas, words on the page. 

Gerry Stewart, Sweeping Away the Last Clutter of 2025

Under my bangs
this smudged and gritty
cross a remembrance:
A dream of burning, my very
bones done in.

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 1

Unbidden, I imagine
a womb

fashioned from
blue, purple, and crimson cloths

(knitting and weaving:
women’s work)

twisted yarn like blood vessels
intertwining, carrying blood

back and forth, looping in
the lungs of all creation, nourishing

us in this nest
where if we listen, really listen

we can hear the heartbeat
of Shekhinah.

*

Another poem from my current project, an expanded volume of Torah poetry. This poem arises out of Terumah in the book of Exodus.

Rachel Barenblat, Mishkan

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with my writing – (as in Dr. Frankenstein but using a journal and pencil in place of electrodes and lightning) – and it’s opened doors and closed windows for me. I’ve discovered a great deal in the power of words, but I’ve also found new rivers in myself. And that’s felt good.

I’ve spent the last two years moving into hybrid work – fusing genres, blurring lines – or that’s what I’m telling myself. But, it seems to be working on several levels. There’ve been a few falls from cliffs, of course, but I keep moving.

I’m more open to ideas, less controlled. A statement by Stanley Kunitz – “A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of” – has been a map for me. I apply his notion of “secrets” to all the forms of writing I’ve been working in – poetry, essay, cnf, flash.

I also hear words by Flannery O’Connor in this – “I write to discover what I know”. My own writing does reveal layers of self – layers I didn’t know were there, but they were. They’ve always been there. Waiting.

So – we wait – for the writing to appear. And, we never know when that’s going to happen. Of course, I’m meaning the moments of writing that lead to discovery – not the day-to-day writing, in whatever genre … the time set aside or found to allow the drafting to move forward. Writing with no plan, no agenda. Putting words on the page – or screen.

Sam Rasnake, The Experiment: Finding the New

Like all endings, endings in poetry are often caught between two extremes. It is tempting to slam the door too hard, or to slink out so quietly nobody notices you’ve gone. They are all the more difficult, I think, when a poet is writing in so-called free verse, though ending a (so-called) formal poem isn’t exactly easy either.

Perhaps, like all the best endings, the best endings in poetry aren’t endings at all. Looking back at the poems I wrote about on this blog last year, one thing I notice is the way in which they each close with musical and metrical effects which ring out after the poem is over: Thomas’s misty counties, Brooks’s twinklings and twinges, Masefield’s long trick, even Larkin’s whispering trees. Here is the final stanza of ‘Why Brownlee Left’ by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, its abandoned horses staring out beyond the last line:

By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

The horses can’t quite move forward into the future they’re gazing at, but they keep moving all the same. They seem to be caught there forever, shifting their weight from foot to foot. And one way in which Muldoon achieves this effect is by setting that ambiguous image, the not-quite-ending, off against the ‘closing’ rhyme which, again, is only half a closure (foot to / future). A half-rhyme is all it takes to set the thing ringing. Muldoon makes it look easy. It isn’t.

Jeremy Wikeley, Poetry of Departures

In the 1970s, I didn’t know poems could speak to my life as a young woman. I’d never heard a contemporary poet read in person. That changed in college when I discovered Diane Wakoski’s Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. Later, hearing Gary Snyder read about wildness and Gwendolyn Brooks describe love “like honey” made me realize poetry could be a living, breathing force. I wanted my students to feel that too—and to find the power of their own voices.

I also wanted to bring in some of the magic of InsideOut, the Detroit poets-in-the-schools program founded by Terry Blackhawk. I invited local poets from the University of Michigan or visiting writers passing through town. We hosted all-school readings, performances, and a beloved event called “Shorts on the Ledge,” where students read brief pieces from a hallway ledge during National Poetry Month. We partnered with Jazz Band, Dance Body, and the annual Art Show. We read poems on the first day of school and at graduation. Whenever the school gathered, we offered a poetry prelude.

In 2011, a colleague and I opened our classroom once a week for Poetry Club. We advertised in the student bulletin, hung posters, and I brought homemade cookies or muffins. Our formula was simple: read a poem, talk about it, write, and share. Students came because they needed a place to write what they wanted to write in school.

Fifteen years later, the club is thriving. In the early days, we begged for five or six students; now a dozen come regularly.

Creating a High School Poetry Club: Why and How – guest post by Ellen Stone (Trish Hopkinson)

When I was at school, the English department ran a (voluntary) verse speaking competition, in which we, well, spoke verse, competitively. It was immensely absorbing. One year, I did ‘Death, be not proud’ (alas, when I tried it just now, I only remember the first quatrain). Another year, I did a passage of Paradise Lost, (ending ‘Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms’) now lost to me. I knew other sections of Milton at university. I performed in several Shakespeare plays, and remember a fraction of them now, though I know my way around Hamlet reasonably well. In those days, though it was never a formal requirement, I took memorisation seriously. I once knew the whole of Ode to a Nightingale…

It didn’t all vanish, thankfully. And the poetry I learned subsequently has largely stayed with me, and I slowly add to my stocks, meagre though they are. (One thing I can recite in full on demand is Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, of all things.) I decided several years ago to start memorising more, (including several poems by Robert Frost, which I used to say by heart to my children when they were little), and though I am, and always have been, an insufficient pupil, bad at schedules and consistency, I am not entirely failing at that endeavour even now, though I do far too little.

Last year, I memorised ‘Daffodils’ by Herrick. I am currently learning ‘My true love hath my heart.’ Alan Lascelles, Private Secretary to King George VI (and also to the Abdicator—hiss) knew Gray’s Elegy by heart, as, once, did so many English school boys. Lascelles was appalled to learn that the king hadn’t even heard of it. Perhaps I shall learn that one next. I am resolved to take memorisation as seriously again as I used to at school. (Join me!—though you should expect me to fail!)

Henry Oliver, George Steiner breaking my heart with his description of the way people used to memorise poems, Bible passages, classic works.

The students look at me as if I’m the lab
animal in the crate, and they’re the scientists

circling the room with clipboards and pens.
I dearly want to know: what will it take

to kindle a fire, get them to care
about stories and poems, warm up

to metaphor and meaning? Toward the end
of the session, they shut their tablets

and zip backpacks close, heave out of their
seats and walk out of the room— expressions

mostly unchanged as I erase the board, return
the matchstick to its box marked “strike anywhere.”

Luisa A. Igloria, Strike Anywhere Match

This scene was outside King’s College Cambridge yesterday [photo]. Typewriter at the ready, the poet offers the public a “Poem on the Spot”. No AI.

Today I went to Huntingdon, about 30km from Cambridge. They have an alley of murals I didn’t know about, featuring T.S. Eliot, William Cowper, Lucy Maria Boston, Henry of Huntingdon, George Herbert and Samuel Pepys.

Tim Love, Street Poetry

I am currently on hiatus from daily poems in favor of hammering away slowly [at] plays as I try to increase my skills there, but will be making an e-zine in March of the Bluebeard poems (and a special print book object edition for Patreon subscribers, so keep an eye out for that.) You can still get in on the action there before the end of this month and land a signed copy of CLOVEN and my little 2026 desk calendar featuring collage work. This was a small print run, but I hope next year to make both a spiral-bound calendar and a desk standing version.  

Tuesday, we are headed to Steppenwolf to see another Strindberg play, Dance of Death, which looks to be about a contentious marriage, which fits well as I am finishing up a first draft of the Chopin adaptation.  This week, we also have new bookshelves arriving to deal with the living room situation, in which they are basically collapsing under the weight of way too many books[.]

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 2/22/2026

How easy it is to build a house from the pieces at hand. A mini table here, a houseplant and storage boxes there. With glue, scissors, pencil, cardboard, wood. But who says it couldn’t look completely different? Each little house remains one model among many.

marks
on the new floorboards
years ago

How many variations could be created? Imagine them in a single line. The judges enter. Point with their fingers. Take notes. Look concerned. Smile. Move back and forth.

How easy it is to read the room but forget the house.

Kati Mohr, Compass Needlework

I’m fascinated by the potentially infinite array of how literary influence shapes writing. How could American short story writer Lydia Davis, one of the most striking prose stylists of the past few decades (as well as one of my personal favourite writers), profess that the late Connecticut prose poet Russell Edson (1935-2014) was the most important writer on the development of her style? Whatever overlap between their work might exist, one of these things is not like the other.

One of the first of my contemporaries I encountered with a personal library as large as mine was the late Toronto writer Priscila Uppal (1974-2018), and there was something both striking and wonderfully exciting upon realizing our libraries had little to no overlap. From what I could see, only P.K. Page’s Hologram (1994) was the exception, although I’m sure there were others. Based on her library alone, one might gather that Uppal’s was a literature fueled by a narrative lyric with a more European base, offering a heft of titles by Guernica Editions and Exile Editions, which sat as a counterpoint to my own, rooted in 1960s Canadian postmodernism: west coast TISH poetics, Talonbooks and Coach House Press, into the prairies and south, towards Black Mountain, Richard Brautigan and the San Francisco Renaissance. I remember thinking how glorious it was to see a collection so wildly different but equal in scale, and the two in counterpoint suggested to me the mark of a healthy, vibrant literature: knowing these alternate perspectives were both held in high regard. If you want a quick overview of how any writer is shaped, head straight for their library.

Of course, influence is rarely a straight line. A collage, perhaps, or a constellation. I remember a conversation with Kingston writer Steven Heighton (1961-2022) and Ottawa poet David O’Meara, back when O’Meara had that apartment in Ottawa’s Lowertown; how they both swore by John Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” as collected through his 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). I remain baffled by their attachment to the work. I’ve also never understood how anyone could enjoy the poetry of Don Coles, another poet I know admired by Heighton and O’Meara. What am I missing? The years I’ve attempted to return to the work of Robert Duncan, unable to grasp the appeal, despite admiring the work of multiple writers who swear by him; despite my holding Duncan’s contemporary and compatriot Jack Spicer as such an important poet across my own trajectory, as well as Robin Blaser, the third in their triumvirate of American poetry and poetics. The San Francisco Renaissance: Spicer, Duncan and Blaser. What am I missing?

In some ways, I find Davis citing Edson reminiscent of longtime and former Talonbooks publisher Karl Siegler who once offered that he could see how the works of Vancouver poet George Bowering or Montreal poet Artie Gold influenced my work, but couldn’t understand my attachment to the work of the late prairie poet Andrew Suknaski. I mean, I thought it might have been obvious, but I suppose not: I came to Suknaski through the work of Dennis Cooley (and other prairie writers, I’m sure), latching onto Suknaski’s self-described “loping, coyote lines,” and quickly realized an affinity to how he returned to writing on the histories and complications of his geography-of-origin, a geographic and cultural space that had not yet been articulated through poetry. This is where I might point to the crowd, and bellow: I say “Glengarry,” you say “Wood Mountain.” A chant begins.

rob mclennan, Lecture for an Empty Room

For former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf, it took nearly 50 years of listening to the deepest, locked-away part of himself to address the profound abuse to which his Catholic parish priest subjected him when Krapf was a child. During the period of that abuse, the priest took the photograph that became part of the cover art for Krapf’s 2014 autobiographical collection Catholic Boy Blues (Greystone Publishing), and gave it to Krapf’s parents. That haunting photograph, an evocative visualization of the painful words comprising Krapf’s poems, contains both dark secret and starker truth. Krapf wrestles with both over the course of his four-part collection by assuming four dramatically different yet intertwined voices: the boy who suffers sexual abuse, the man who sets upon the “healing journey” that requires reconciling the boy he was to the adult he became, the priest whom Krapf allows to engage in dialogue with the boy, who finds in himself the extraordinary courage to speak back once and for all, and a wise figure Krapf calls “Mr. Blues.” The latter speaks in four voices, too — friend, advice-giver, counselor, mentor — that if they could be sounded as one, might best be described as “savior,” for Mr. Blues ultimately helps the boy Krapf was and the man Krapf is today to “break free” of “the language of pain” to sing as “one with the spirit inside me” where hope and forgiveness, even love, reside. Mr. Blues teaches boy and man to see that

there’s always a hopeful boy inside the man. Deep down lives a hopeful boy inside the man won’t quit fighting till he comes out best he can.

In that final “Love Song for Mr. Blues” from which the above lines are quoted, we find all the reasons Krapf is able to survive his harrowing journey.

*

Catholic Boy Blues, the twenty-sixth of Krapf’s more than 30 books, is dedicated to “my sisters and brothers of any age in all lands abused by priests or other authority figures.” As anyone knows who pays even slight attention to the news, especially over the last two decades, an enormous group of Catholics and former Catholics — Krapf now known to be among the thousands of primarily male adolescents abused — suffered a profound silencing, because of the presence of priest-pedophiles in the Church. Krapf movingly describes that silencing:

Not even the great
visionary wordsmiths
Isaiah and Jeremiah

had to find words
to tell their people
how it feels

for a boy
to be so defiled
by a priest

that for fifty years
he keeps his mouth shut
even to those he loves.

~ “Not Even Isaiah and Jeremiah”

In his acknowledgment in the Preface that his “responsibility and mission as a poet” oblige him to share the “dirty little secret” with the public, Krapf, born in 1943, bears startling witness to art’s power to save when, as the persona Mr. Blues says in “Mr. Blues Wakes Up,” we can “sing it straight.”

Maureen Doallas, Norbert Krapfs ‘Cathlic Boy Blues’

Part of the reason why Isobar is a vital press is because [Paul] Rossiter has a clear purpose in mind for it, a purpose with three parts or strands. The first of these is to bring into English the work of key 20th century Japanese poets who have been generally neglected, poets like Yoshioka, Kiwao Nomura, Rin Ishigaki and Sanki Saitō (to name just ones that I’ve reviewed). Many of these poets engaged with western poetry; Yoshioka translated Rene Char, who was a key figure for Nomura, and Ishigaki was also clearly influenced by surrealism. Equally, the VOU poets were clearly in conversation with western concrete/visual work.

The second strand is the publication of English-language poets who live and work in Japan, and who engage, to one degree or another with Japanese literature and culture. The result is that Isobar books are a venue for cross-cultural fertilisation in very real terms.

Glasgow–Tokyo Line by James McGonigal and John Pazdziora, subtitles An East-West Hyakuin, fits perfectly into this strand. A hyakuin, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a 100-poem renga, or linked verse, written collaboratively by two or more poets turn-taking. There are rules or conventions to the form that McGonigal and Pazdziora follow, with one key exception; their collaboration was not in person and limited to a single block of time, but extended and conducted through email.

Another interesting aspect of the book is the blend of languages, with most of the text being in standard English, with a healthy leavening of Scots, and the odd hint of Japanese included. This has the effect of making it seem like there are more than two voices at play at points.

The linked verses hover around the passage of time, the seasons, mortality, impermanence and, ultimately, cyclical renewal.

Can fresh leaves foretell
the snick-snap of garden shears
on October days?

There’s a sense of the human integrated with the Buddha nature of the world:

Stretching for plums, my fingers
greet a snail. Good day, neighbour.

Billy Mills, Several Isobars: A Review

I love this love poem, the “philia” kind, dear old pal. Nostalgia in its “algia,” an ache, but funny and odd, in the way that old friendships and memories can be. There is a helplessness to it, how the speaker is awash in his own foibles, ones that he knows he can admit to this old friend, who likely knew them all too well, and maybe had a few more. It cracks me up. It makes me sad-laugh, laugh-cry, this apostrophe, which is a strange word for speech or a poem addressed to a person, as its etymology lies in words meaning “turning away from,” but is also used to describe an indicator of possession, as well as an indicator of something missing. Which also makes me sad in a isn’t-that-funny way.

Marilyn McCabe, the fate of the cruel & unusual

How should I be? is the question I’ve been asking myself these last two months. If my lifespan is now counting down in years or months or maybe even weeks rather than the decades I expect we mostly luxuriate in imagining, what is it I should do with a day, an hour, a breath, a synapse? What should be my mindset, and the means by which my time—imaginary god—is made? Thus far I have tried: pious, melancholic, pragmatic, defeated, paralyzed, depressed, and, simply, numb: unfeeling, unthinking, if-I-don’t-move-nothing-else-can-go-wrong. Those of you who know me in real life can probably guess that none of these has fit particularly well.

One must have a mind of winter I thought to myself yesterday, getting dressed for a run, and as I ambled along in safe-heartrate-zone I found myself transfixed by the verbs: to regard, to behold. Stevens was an insurance executive, and legend has it that he’d send a page down the street to the library to copy out definitions and etymologies of words he was turning over in his mind whilst writing policies and other boring business things, a fact I take to mean: there is nothing accidental about any word that turns up in one of his poems. It’s not simply that one must accept one’s circumstances in order to understand them so much as that one must accept them—develop a mind for their reality—in order to see them clearly and thus to hold them in esteem, to see what is remarkable, what can be held dear, no matter the odds.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens

In addition to showing us that grief is both a complex shared and unique emotion, Webb suggests that there are many forms of loss, just as complex and difficult to resolve. in She called her Melanie we meet the unresolvable loss of a mother who gave her child up for adoption; in New and to him who came from my body we find the loss of a way of life experienced by a mother on the birth of her first child and the loss when that child gains independence; and in  If only you didn’t have to shove your living in my face we find the loss and ultimate recovery of self-respect during and after an abusive relationship.

There will be many potential readers who have experienced grief in their lifetimes: it is an inevitable consequence of having loved.  There will be much to connect with for such readers in this collection. However, like all literature worth reading, Webb offers us fresh perspectives and insights, deepening our understanding in emotionally intelligent poems of great skill.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Grey Time’ by Julia Webb

Among the poems one really doesn’t expect, there’s this: a poem about Christ’s forty days in the wilderness by Robert Graves (1895–1985). Graves was young when he published the poem in his second collection, the 1918 Fairies and Fusiliers. He’d been through the war, become friends with the poets Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), and published his own war verses. (In 1985, a memorial was placed in Westminster Abbey for the poets of the First World War. The long-lived Graves was the only one left to attend.)

He had yet to write his memoir of the war, Good-Bye to All That (1929) or his strange book about poetry’s beginning in worship of a divine mother figure, The White Goddess (1948). His best-selling historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, wouldn’t appear till 1934 and 1935.

In 1918, for that matter, Graves had yet to make a public point of his loss of faith. By 1948, following James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Graves would insist in The White Goddess that “Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus.” In Today’s Poem, “In the Wilderness,” however, Graves emphasized not the personality but exactly those mythopoeic elements of Jesus. (He would later call it his “last Christian-minded poem.”)

His fantastical account of that mythopoesis is aided enormously — turned nearly into an incantation prayer — by the rhymed two-stress lines of the poem and its forced dactyls. The meter quickly turns artificial, standing outside the natural words to become the kind of musical chant we know from nursery rhymes and counting games.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: In the Wilderness

[Geoffrey] Heptonstall explores the nature of storytelling and how a narrator can try to influence a reader to draw a desired conclusion. However, a narrator can’t control a reader, especially a reader with an enquiring mind, who reads and sits with what they’ve read to bring their own lived experience to the text and question it. Ultimately, Heptonstall also questions what truth might be. A narrator doesn’t tell the same story twice, placing emphasis on certain details can tailor the story to a different audience, who, for cultural or personal reasons, might need different arguments or persuasion to see the narrator’s viewpoint. “The Truth on the Tongue” is a quiet, thought-provoking collection that aims to recreate the sense of timelessness that is an audience listening or reading a tale.

Emma Lee, “The Truth on the Tongue” Geoffrey Heptonstall (Cyberwit) – book review

Last week I was struck by the wording of a Latin memorial composed in the 1660s by Payne Fisher — once Cromwell’s poet, though glossing over that phase for obvious reasons by 1665 — for one Jane Robinson, wife of Thomas Robinson, protonotary of the Common Pleas and prominent member of the Inner Temple. Jane died in November 1665, aged 49, of metastatic breast cancer. Most unusually, the memorial specifies the disease and even how it was treated:

Septendecim Annos
Cum Marito suo suavissimè feriata est,
Et ab Ipsius sinu demùm malevolè divulsa est
Per MORBUM CANCRALEM.
Cujus infandos Cruciatus postquàm diù victrix pertulisset,
Et Laevè Mammae detruncationem
Intrepidè passa fit:
Veteri (post intervallum sex Mensium) revertente Morbo,
Et vitalia validiùs invadente,
Fato concessit:

This means:

For seventeen years
she rejoiced most sweetly in the company of her husband,
and was at last cruelly torn from his embrace
by CANCEROUS DISEASE
after she had long victoriously endured its unspeakable torments,
and had intrepidly suffered the amputation
of her left breast:
when the old disease returned (after an interval of six months)
and invaded her vital organs more powerfully,
she yielded to fate.

This describes a mastectomy — surely a very horrible business indeed in the 1660s, without any anaesthesia — that Jane surprisingly survived, followed by a recurrence of the disease, which spread into her vitalia, i.e. her interior organs. This seems to describe metastasized cancer, recognised as such. Although general statements about the courageous endurance of suffering are quite common in elegies and memorials, this sort of detail is unusual and must have been requested specifically, presumably by her husband.

Fisher’s inscription is prose, not poetry, though it is densely rhetorical in a way that we might associate more with verse. The pronounced alliteration for emphasis — as at Veteri (post intervallum sex Mensium) revertente Morbo, / Et vitalia validiùs invadente, is typical of Fisher’s style. In any case, the distinction between Latin prose and verse in this kind of text was fuzzier than you might think: the mid- to late seventeenth century saw a particular vogue for a kind of free verse in Latin that was related to the fashion for the ‘literary inscription’. (I’ve written about Latin free verse and related forms before here.) Fisher, who had a sharp ear for a new trend, was rather a pioneer in this form. Back in 1651 he composed an elegy for Henry Ireton the Latin of which is a very early British example of this kind of free verse. The parallel English version uses rhymes, and indeed it is parallel-text examples like this help to demonstrate that this sort of Latin was understood as verse, rather than prose.

Victoria Moul, Dying is a difficult enterprise

“The moment of writing is not an escape, however; it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.”

At one point in March 2024, I copied these words into a yellow notebook. It was the spring of Larry Levis; azaleas aching to bud, stammering possible colors in the margins of former journals. I remember thinking spring would destroy me, as it does annually, gutting me with its flushes and fevers, distracting me from the needs of surrounding mammals. Each day lengthening by inches of light. Moths moving like nocturnes near the doors. And Levis’ poems garlanding the floor of the porch with their gentleness…

WOUND

I’ve loved you
as a man loves an old wound
picked up in a razor fight

on a street nobody remembers.
Look at him:
even in the dark he touches it gently.

Like the ravish of spring, Levis seasons his stanzas with unremitting tenderness for life, the sap-work of being. I return often to his “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” for the momentum it accrues as it winds down the page, working the space between the biography and the apologia:

I also had laughter, the affliction of angels & children.
Which can set a whole house on fire if you’d let it. And even then
You might still laugh to see all of your belongings set you free
In one long choiring of flames that sang only to you—
Either because no one else could hear them, or because
No one else wanted to. And, mostly, because they know.

… and for the inflammatory, unforgettable scherzo:

One of the flames, rising up in the scherzo of fire, turned
All the windows blank with light, & if that flame could speak,

… and for how Levis circles the figure of Billie Holiday, a talismanic figure that animated his jazz pantheon, jazz being the musical form that Levis deployed and studied for its repetitions and returns and metaphysical resonances.

“My Story in a Late Style of Fire” is a self-portrait that leaps from the canvas like the face in Caravaggio’s convex shield, occupying the continuous present of poetic address. Yet its speaker takes leave of the reader with an embrace, a likening as bright as it is critical:

I know this isn’t much. But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had
To live my life, even its late, florid style. Before
You judge this, think of her. Then think of fire,
Its laughter, the music of splintering beams & glass,
The flames reaching through the second story of a house
Almost as if to—mistakenly—rescue someone who
Left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us.
Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.

Brief, it is. Brief as the blooming set to a season. And what literary form turns this brevity to face vastness? Poetry.

Alina Stefanescu, Larry Levis: For love of immanence.

In the interests of research I’ve been doing some investigating. Just how easy would it be to pass off an AI-generated poem as one’s own work?

So on Chat GPT I offered the prompt: “Can you write a 14 line poem with a science fiction theme in the style of Caroline Bird?” In a few seconds this is what it produced:

The British Secret Service issues me a sensible coat
and a name that tastes like static.
I learn to listen through walls politely,
to sip tea while history clears its throat.
My handler says don’t fall in love—
everything leaks eventually.
The dead drop is a park bench feeding pigeons secrets.
I memorise faces the way others memorise prayers.
At night, the truth sleeps beside me, fully clothed.
London keeps blinking like it knows.
I file my feelings under miscellaneous,
and burn the rest with the kettle on.

Once I’d tried the same exercise with four or five other poets a few commonalities started to leap out, such as heavy use of simile, often one ‘quirky’ idea per line, little or no through-references, sonic echoes or layered meanings. The poems kind of looked like poems but there wasn’t much below the surface, Which ties in with the fact that AI is only privy to what’s already been written. Or as Rachel Piercey, editor of Tyger Tyger said to me: “Each new poem works on its own terms – a highly individual, poem-by-poem house style that AI could never comprehend, because it has never been done before and AI can only look back.”

The twist in the tail is that I then ran these AI-generated poems by Originality.ai, an AI engine trained to spot AI in texts. It’s not fool-proof as is has been trained primarily on non-fiction texts, but the result was pretty conclusive. […] Busted!

Robin Houghton, Can AI engines write poetry?

This my the 52nd free newsletter / essay / manifesto / article and it marks one year of writing weekly dispatches on this platform. It is also the tenth and final chapter in a series I’ve been writing about the poet John Keats and his last days in Rome.

February is an important month in the Keats calendar. It was in February of 1820 that the poet suffered his first lung haemorrhage, coughing blood and understanding the seriousness of his condition. He would die the following February in Rome, cared for by his friend, the artist Joseph Severn.

Over these last weeks I’ve described events leading up to his death and it doesn’t make for easy reading. We know how this story plays out and who really would want to follow it toward its inevitable, uncomfortable, painful end? This wasn’t exactly the reason the poet who wrote to me gave when she left but I think it had something to do with it. She’d spent long periods of last year in hospital, in pain and witness to the pain of others. Weekly instalments describing another poet’s demise isn’t exactly the most comforting material to receive. I myself find a fatigue has set in as the story of Keats approaches its sad conclusion. I mean, what do you say? I mean, what can you say? […]

I thought I’d shift focus, not in order to avoid describing how a light went out, not to ignore the Bright Star of this story but to consider its supporting actor, Joseph Severn.

Severn had been with Keats on his journey from London in September of 1820 when the Maria Crowther set sail on an arduous voyage to Naples. He was there for the poet’s 25th birthday in October spent in quarantine on their ship in the Italian port. There are stories that he threw Keats’ opium overboard into the Bay of Naples believing, with their arrival, the promise of fairer weather would restore the poet’s health.

Severn felt Keats no longer required the drug he’d used to treat the pain of his condition and the sore throats he suffered brought on by coughing fits. Severn later removed (another) bottle of laudanum from Keats’ possession in Rome when he feared the poet may try to take his own life. Severn was a man of faith. A believer in God. Keats was not. While Keats didn’t possess the same fierce atheism that earned Shelley the epitaph of ‘the infidel poet’ he was a free thinker, his devotion was to poetry. That he may have been tempted in his last days by the ‘ungodly’ act of suicide was something abhorrent to Severn. Although it goes too far to say he’d rather see his friend suffer in acute pain than provide him with oportunity to end it forever we do know how tormented Severn was in his duty of care, how he wrestled with decisions such as this.

Nicholas Roe, chair of the Keats Foundation and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, states in his 2012 biography that he believed that Keats was in fact an opium addict and Severn, among several of his friends, was aware of this. It is a claim, of course, and there’s no real evidence beyond the jealous mood swings Keats displays in letters to his fiancee Fanny Brawne and veiled references to the use of opiates (in Ode to a Nightingale for example) to support it. He certainly didn’t have the same appetites as Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was a bonafide junkie and the first poet to enter rehab. But that’s another story.

Jan Noble, Nº52 Loving the pain away

Whitman’s words in the preface to the original edition are at least as radiant and rousing as the verses themselves — words that continue to enliven heart, mind, and spirit a century and a half later. He writes:

The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes … but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects … they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.

And yet he does indicate the path. In a passage partway between sermon and commencement address, he writes:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Maria Popova, Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life

I have been looking at rough drafts, as I’ve been doing when I don’t have a new poem bubbling up.  I am surprised by how many poems came from the bushel of apples I bought in October.  In the future, when I deliberate the wisdom of buying apples in bulk, let me remember how many ways those apples fed me.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Tuesday Scraps: Texting Mix-ups and Passings and Other Goblins

After last weekend’s yarn show I set myself a catching up kind of a week. The kind where sparkly conversations with good friends featured amongst time to tackle admin type things and time to see if the poems that wait patiently in the draft folder are ready for polishing. The kind of week without a particular routine which allowed for resting and for seizing the moment when there was a gap in the rain to take a daily stroll.

It was good to get out for daily walks again after having recently had to wait for my cough to diminish. I felt my body easing its way back in to striding out and being glad for being out in the fresh air. I also realised how much I had missed listening to music for that dedicated segment of the day. My soul shines more fully when the right sounds are in the day. The country road route is currently muddy and wet, but I like its familiarity as I get back into the swing of things. The fact that walking this route takes as long as listening to the album Personal History by Mary Chapin Carpenter is also rather splendid.

It was good to have a free and easy week, it felt rather like having a springboard to jump from on the journey towards spring. Spring is my favourite season, and I love the feeling of entering it with a sense of renewal and to revelling in the newness it offers. So many reminders of growth as the rhubarb stretches out new stems and the snowdrops flourish in the borders. Mixing these wonderful visuals in with the joy of lengthened days makes so much seem possible. It even had me venturing into the garden with a pair of secateurs to begin the big tidy up.

Sue Finch, I SEE BLUE SKY

It’s an all-white affair, the blizzard sweeps
in with style, its blinding white tux,
bow tie and stiff starched shirt,
its grandeur, its threats and proclamations,
its show of power. In a flick of its
handsome wrist, it shows us who’s who.

How blankly we stare at its parts,
its top hat and white entrails,
wanting, not wanting its magic entourage
to disappear.

Jill Pearlman, Mr. Universe

春泥に厚き硝子の破片かな　松本てふこ

shundei ni atsuki garasu no hahen kana

            spring mud
            a thick piece of glass
            in it…
                                    Chōko Matsumoto

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (February 17, 2026)

This week: yellow plastic whistles, white matter, inhabiting unfamiliar thoughts, eating ice, and much more. Enjoy.

February this year started with a full moon, and it felt good to turn the calendars over to welcome in a new month before taking time to take a stroll under the Snow Moon. Cloud meant I could not see it, but I knew it was up there somewhere and I sent it a gentle howl!

On the last day of January I took a walk before going to the last session of January Writing Hours with Kim Moore and Clare Shaw. It felt good to clear my head in anticipation of the final session and to give a gentle nod to all the hours I had spent in their zoom room with my writing. It was important to me to mark the ending of this particular daily practice and to think what I am taking forward with me. As well as writing poems in my own style (it’s always right in there!) I have enjoyed experimenting with different forms and approaches in response to the poems and prompts provided. I have some lovely drafts to work on over the coming month and that feels wonderfully celebratory as does the recognition that carving out this daily space has given me the chance to write poems that were definitely waiting inside me.

Sue Finch, SNOW MOON AND GRATITUDE

And when I reach
the grounds of the gym the heat of the sun
slanting through the branches of the giant oaks
is raising wisps of steam from the icy ground,

like wishes, like dreams. Small moments
of pause, when we allow ourselves to notice
the ordinary beauty in our lives, are always
welcome, aren’t they? Especially after a few
days of despair at the inhumanity we have all
now seen, the terrible darkness of a man shot 

in a city street, killed for witnessing and caring.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ What we remember (for Alex Pretti)

It’s 5:00 pm, and there’s still pink light making the rising clouds of steam blush in the distance beyond our windows, and turning the glass and steel surfaces into mirrors. We’ve noticed, just this week, that the days really do seem to be getting longer — and what a welcome thing that is. Winter will last two more months up here, but there will be more bright days like this one from now on.

I will gratefully take all the brightness I can find. We are all struggling for words, for focus, for stability. I hope that you can see that our biggest reason for hope is each other. I am so heartened by the steadfastness and courage of the ordinary people of Minnesota, and all those who are speaking out with their words, their feet, their presence. And I hope you can also see that the nefarious forces are afraid of this power. I do think that those closest to the struggle can feel the support of the millions of us who cannot be there in person. So please do hold them in the light of your consciousness, or whatever way you describe this act of intention that we humans do. I wish we had more of a solidarity movement here in Canada, with a symbol like putting a candle in our window after dark, but maybe doing it anyway is a gesture that can help us.

And please do your own creative work, as much as you can. If we are aware of the plight of others, and do what we can to help, it’s an act of resistance to also continue to make things, to allow the creative life force to flow through us. I’ve had a busy week full of dental and eye appointments, a dead car battery, and days that seemed to dissolve without much to show for them. But I’ve drawn a little bit, and reworked the recent oil painting so that I’m more satisfied with it.

Beth Adams, Longer Days

Somehow, the new year seems to be both dragging and chugging along. Both brisk and slow, as January is wont to be sometimes. We’ve had quite a bit of snow and cold in Chicago so far, which feels unduly personal when the digital world feels so jagged and depressing. I am trying to stay focused even when the constant barrage of terrible news is unceasing and overwhelming—working more on poems in the SWINE DAUGHTER series (which you can catch in some #workinprogress snippets on IG) as well as some more edits on the second act of the play, on which I vacillate between its genius and its ordinariness (sometimes all in the same hour.) Of course, perhaps at a time when I most need art to function, it fails me sometimes. It occasionally feels like yet another thing we have to continue to do as the ship goes down (playing the violins and making the beds on a Titanic full of water already. ) I don’t have answers on how to navigate it—the decline and disillusionment we all feel. The drag of it on our limbs. I look for moments of lightness: a few sunny and clear but cold days. A slice of lemon pie. Good coffee. Covers to design and collages to make.

Kristy Bowen, January Paper Boat

Recently, someone commented on a poem of mine, “I wish we could force the president, and these ICE agents, to read poetry every day.” As if maybe, just maybe, if they read poems, they couldn’t keep doing what they’re doing. As if the poems would change them. I thought of the wise words of Richard Blanco, who was the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet for President Barack Obama.

Poems may not change the world directly,
but a poem can change a person
who can change the world.
—Richard Blanco

YES. Poetry changes us. Poetry has certainly changed me. But I approach poems with openness, expecting to be changed. I approach it with gratitude for what I know it has to offer. I approach it as someone who is interested in humanity. It’s hard for me to imagine not being interested in humanity. If I found myself in that dark, narrow space, could poetry reach me there? Can poetry reach the people among us whose hearts have been hardened? I don’t know, but we can try. I’m not ready to give up on us yet.

I’ve also been thinking about something I read in the New Yorker, from the writer Philip Pullman.

Poetry is not a fancy way
of giving you information;
it’s an incantation.
It is actually a magic spell.
It changes things; it changes you.
—Philip Pullman

We’re transformed by our experiences—the people we meet, the things we try, the places we go, and the art we engage with. Poetry can be part of that transformation, if we let it. It’s my hope with every episode of The Slowdown: that a poem might reach someone where they are and work its magic.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

“I’m not smart enough to come up with solutions for how to fight this,” I said to my husband Brian over Bluetooth as I drove home from work. While talking with him, I took stock of my surroundings, how they look now, before the storm would arrive later in the night. The river, mostly covered in ice from the below-zero temperatures, was black mottled with white. “And the people smarter than me,” I said to my husband, “don’t seem to be doing anything besides posting online about how horrible things are.” I feel my voice crack. “And everyone is full of so much hate.”

969 miles away from Minneapolis, I imagined myself as a dot on a map of a huge country. Zooming in on the map in my mind, I became a dot in the lowlands of a precipice, contour lines surrounding me. Zooming in further, I was suddenly a moving dot, meandering along River Road in some small Pennsylvanian town, angry and helpless. Zooming in further, I was a human distraught in the driver’s seat with thoughts volleying between this country is fucking itself and I wonder how the animals are preparing themselves for the storm.

And then,

“Brian, thanks for being who you are.”

And then,

“I might go take a walk in the wetlands this evening, even though it will be getting dark when I get there.”

Sarah Lada, Go Feed the Birds about It

This last couple of weeks have also reminded me of the power of community. In Minnesota, community protests have meant a little boy released from ICE detention, a change of leadership of ICE in town, and even friendly National Guardsmen handing out hot chocolate to cold members of the community. I hope this means that ICE will back down (Trump noticing his poll numbers shrinking, too, no doubt helps), and we’ll have no more horrendous human rights offenses or trying to take away Constitutional rights (freedom of speech and assembly, the right to due process for all on American ground, the right to bear arms, which the GOP is usually quite quick to defend, and birthright citizenship). People are making a lot of noise—and though sometimes it feels like nothing is being accomplished, if enough Americans make enough noise, occasionally we can change things for the better.

In my own life, a gathering of poets reminded me of the small, good things we can do for each other. I noticed that in encouraging each other, there is power—more success that seems to follow meeting together. That has been the case in my own writing life—and at least, things are more fun to celebrate (and commiserate) in a group. And the scary things of life don’t seem quite as scary.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy February! Snow Moons, Unusual Birds, Cancer Scares and Big Birthdays, the Power of Community and More

It’s a chilly full moon Saturday here, so I’ve made a little world of my own for a few: Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda is playing my headphones – it’s long been one of my Saturday albums. And I’m just reviewing recent photos that I’ve made some exploring the ‘Democratic Forest’ style, and others where I’ve really been looking at composition that holds shadow and light. So I thought I’d share another batch of Democratic Forest shots with you. These are a mixture of X100VI and iPhone shots – you use the camera you have to hand, though I do find myself wishing I’d also packed my small Leica, which is so easy to throw in a bag I’d use it over the iPhone, so I’ve used the Leica app on the phone to make the phone shots, so that I get some of that feel.

One thing I’ve sworn to myself with my photography here is to deliberately circumvent my own internal impulse that is endlessly informed by the western gaze. We’ve seen so many photos of India in the last century from that angle, that I realised that it is just too easy to make the ‘Indian’ photograph. My question always is what actually interests the artist I am, and how to let the writing or the photography serve my deeper eye.

John Siddique, Full Moon in The Democratic Forest

That night, as I was feeling alone, I thought of that line, Tell me your despair and I’ll you mine. But my despair is not so great. I live in a house. I publish books. Sometimes it feels like a wild prayer keeps us afloat. I have a life. I can make magic. Life outside the house is a good story. The press is a good story. Finding sleep in February is a good story. It’s imaginary, more a fantasy, but fantasy is a well-loved category these days. 

Kate Gale, Toward the Winged Horse: On the Stories That Lift Us

Whatever normal or paranormal trigger gave me the dream, the commission and its deadline gave me the daydream, what Gaston Bachelard calls reverie: “Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream.” In The Poetics of Reverie he describes it as a space one can inhabit, like a secret hideout, “a phenomenon of solitude” that helps us also to “escape time.” It is a state, he writes; it exists. In reverie I was able to return to an experience that was – ironically, given the mandate of the discount store – rich, multidimensional with fear and comfort, awe and novelty. In my memory it’s always busy, it’s always winter, puddles on the floor from snow tracked in, people visiting, smells of cold air and cigarettes on their coats. As I remember it, we arrive in the morning and leave in the late afternoon as new snow falls and streetlights blink on. Which isn’t, of course, true. Writing on house images in The Poetics of Space, Bachelard notes that “The phenomenology of the daydream can untangle the complex of memory and imagination; it becomes necessarily sensitive to the differentiations of the symbol.” I’m generally wary of nostalgia; but the poem is definitely nostalgic.

Karen Solie, Reverie and Deadlines

I dreamt of my anger:

An animal wrapped up in a bright red shawl.

It looked me straight in the eye as I anticipated its rapid advance.

It was raining. We were in my garden. […]

I celebrate my birthday in winter now. Valentine’s. I was born on a Saturday at noon. It was Carnival.

It snows in January. A boy’s prayer has been finally answered, slowly over time.

And suddenly, it thaws. In between snowing and thawing, our footsteps printed on the path towards and back from the field where we laid down on the cold and soft snow, laughing. Our arms spread out, flapping. We left angels in our trail.

Further along, index finger to the snow, he traces one of his favourite characters from a Nintendo video game.

A few moments earlier, he had spotted Blackbird pecking on a snow-less patch, under the protection of very tall pine trees.

Everywhere else and around was covered in winter white. It was as if Blackbird had its own force field.

Luciana Francis, Chiaroscuro

The Age of Aquarius has long ended,
the music we heard then replaced

today with yellow, plastic whistles
purchased cheaper by the box,

dangled from the neck on string,
worked like ancient talismans

to ward off our daily troubles.
Whistles shrill, like an out-of-tune chorus

from some Shakespeare play
we didn’t get at the time, portending

Fate’s own black hands on our backs.

Maureen Doallas, No One Is Going Ice-Fishing

You would think that with two snow days this week, three actually counting cancelled church on Sunday, I wouldn’t feel desperate for some early morning writing time.  And yet, at 1:30 when I couldn’t fall back asleep, I decided to get up for a bit.  I’ve enjoyed this early morning writing time so much that I didn’t go back to sleep. […]

I turned my attention to a poem I’ve been revising.  I first started writing it on January 15.  I was inspired by Jan Richardson’s poem about wise women also coming to the baby Jesus. […]

This morning, I decided that it was time to actually finish the draft.  I was partly inspired by the end of the month approaching and my intention to end the year with 52 finished drafts.  I was successful, and then I thought about revising another poem–that would mean I am on track for the year, not slightly behind.  

I’ve decided that my intention to finish drafts can extend to rough drafts written before 2026, so I went back to my folder of rough drafts.  I pulled out a rough draft from December, about Noah’s wife looking at Realtor.com and seeing her old house.  I should be able to finish that revision by tomorrow.  I’m waiting to see if some final lines come to me today as my brain works on the ending.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Yearly Intentions Report: The Poem Revision Edition

As a creative, it helps to have clear objectives for your creative work that are not about validating your work through publication of course, but that’s a lot easier to say than do. Writing is a conversation, it needs an audience. This is our evolutionary creative drive – to share experience, to share stories about what it is to be human. It’s hard then to say to oneself, just don’t think about it, let the creativity itself be the reward.

Self belief, and the desire to achieve, will get you so far, but I don’t believe that confidence in the work is the key here. I believe that tenacity is the key: a kind of blind refusal to give up. It’s that, rather than confidence, that will keep you going when the odds are against you. However, the truth is that there might not be a successful outcome at the end. Not everybody’s work fits into a traditional model, and it’s worth considering if the traditional route to publishing is the correct vehicle for your work. There is more than one way to reach an audience and often we only see the one that involves agent-publisher-bookdeal. But let me also remind you that you have reached a place in this particular journey that is hard to get to. Turn around and look behind you, the road to a completed MS and an active submissions plan is littered with writers that have fallen at the wayside, writers that gave up when they got stuck at 30,000 words, writers who let rejection frame how they value their own work. You have already beaten those odds to get to where you are.

I also think that there is something else to consider here. You cannot control how your work is received. You cannot control whether a publisher or an agent says yes or no, or whether they say anything at all. But you can control your own reaction to it. If you can, and it seems like you are already doing it, make the part of the process at which you seek representation less of an end goal, make it just another part of the process. Scale it down, don’t make that one response the thing on which you hang your potential. Get on to the next project while you wait to hear about that one. It defuses the feeling of all eggs being in one basket.

This is what we do. We push on, push forward, we keep writing and refining and reaching out into the dark. We keep throwing our work into the abyss, and we keep the blind faith of our tenacity. One word at a time, one submission at a time.

Wendy Pratt, The awful abyss into which you throw your years of work

I consider myself lucky to have had an immensely talented partner who had a deep passion for poetry.

I have abundant books and poems, videos and photos of readings to always dive into. And my grief tending / legacy building happens incrementally each night, as I am working on compiling an almost 500 page post-humous uncollected works to be published in mid-late 2026 and tag-team editing his Canadian book due out in 2027.

It is a meditation, this experience. Like a sacred ritual, it has carefully shuttled me through the cycle of this first year without him. (I don’t call it a process. The way the word minimizes grief and loss, that it is step-related, chronologically based, that it will “end” is a patently false, limited way to think of it. Much like the word “widow”, it’s a word I really make a concerted effort to avoid.)

So every night, for months, at first, I would sit by the small altar I created and read his work aloud to him by candlelight. Then it became clear, once all the poems were read—all nearly 3,000 of them, hardcopy—it was time to begin grouping them, detecting themes/tropes/patterns and arrange them in some sort of book form.

The love poems were first. Countless bittersweet moments I relived: our first poem exchanges after we met, our first kiss, our intense physical attraction, the unwavering devotion to one another. My heart broke in a million pieces reading each intricate etching to me.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, The nightmare of normal.

I’ve been reading John Rowlands-Pritchard’s glorious Hymns of the Worcester Monastic Antiphoner (circa 1230), with painted inscriptions, and Beowulf in the verse translation by Seamus Heaney, which usefully has the Old English text facing.

Together, these influences have shaped my writing in response to the terrifying world of 2026.

Te Deum laudamus

Only a dictator would demand
only an egomaniac could enjoy
the tedium of tireless praise.

Lord lend us mercy
rescue us from the ravening
world-wounder over the water.

Sanctus sanctus sanctus
the hymn of the heavenly host
hallows a world of wonders.

Ama Bolton, Reading and writing in January

I’m rereading Etel Adnan, her SURGE (2018), as part of an acknowledgment of her centenary. The Poetry Project in New York is running a symposium on her work that begins tomorrow night, “Etel Adnan: In the Rhythms of the World.” As the website for the event offers: “Etel Adnan’s oeuvre did not follow a masterplan; it expanded and shape-shifted ceaselessly. Each book invented its own genre. And yet her tone is unmistakable, combining sharp observation with the associative logic of dreams.” I would have been curious to attend, if such had been possible. “Organized by Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal on the centenary of Etel Adnan’s birth,” the text adds, “this symposium gathers together old friends, confirmed specialists, and younger disciples of Adnan’s. They will offer talks, poetry readings, and musical performances in response to multiple aspects of her literary and visual work.”

I admire the ways in which Adnan’s long sequences extend across books through small moments, as her work explored violence, culture, power and memory. She composed her books across small abstract moments that accumulate in a way that echoes for anyone even faintly familiar with contemporary French writing, but in a way that also reminds me of the work of the late Eastern Townships, Quebec poet and translator D.G. Jones (1929-2016), another poet who stretched out the sequence from accumulated small abstracts, as well as one influenced by French writing. You can see it, whether through his poems, or through his translations of the work of the late Quebec poet Anne Hébert (1916-2000), a writer born a decade earlier than Adnan.

“Etel,” what my phone attempts to autocorrect to “Ethel.” Cellphone, I’m onto you.

A circling of sentences. A simultaneous circling and straightforward line. The silence of a Wednesday evening, reading Etel Adnan in my usual St. Laurent and Innes Road sportsbar corner, an hour-plus awaiting Rose in the first session of her nearby gymnastics class.

The logic of dreams, and of temporality. I first caught Adnan’s work through TIME (2019), as translated from the French by Sarah Riggs, a collection constructed out of six extended lyric sequences, each of which are clearly situated, whether in time or place or both, tethered to the ground so the abstract of her lyric thinking won’t float away completely. Since then, I’ve read at least a half dozen titles, maybe more, still so clearly behind. Not enough to begin to wrap my head around the largesse of her accumulated short lyrics, short sentences. From SURGE:

A radical pain traversed my life from end to end—a large band of light crossed the moon’s hidden face. That kind of motion alters the world.

There is something comparable, to my mind, between the prose poems of Etel Adnan and Rosmarie Waldrop: their use of the prose sentence via the poem, and the potential shared factor of utilizing sentence structures and syntax from their individual mother tongues across English language lyrics.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

At the start of 2025, I had a slightly-used date book from the Field Notes Index quarterly edition (now sold out). I prefer a much larger notebook for keeping track of my schedule, so while I’d made a few halfhearted attempts at using it, I couldn’t get traction. Then I got inspired to use that notebook to help me observe and track the seasons as I experienced them.

The goal was to write down three simple observations about the day, and at the end of the month, type them into a single file. Over time, that computer file would be filled with enough daily entries that I could track my perception of the seasons–especially in relation to climate change–over the long term. I typically recorded the high and low temperatures as a baseline, and whether there was sun, rain, or snow. I also noted whether I observed wildlife or indicated the time of sunrise and sunset. Over time, I tried to pay more attention to the night sky, and occasionally added cultural events and holidays, as those human aspects are a way of tracking the seasons as well. 

While I missed my goal of recording every single day, I still made observations more days than most. In addition, I’ve continued the practice into 2026, and I’m happy to report that I have not yet missed a day in January. The old Index book ran out, so now I’m using one of the notebooks from the Is a River Alive? quarterly edition. I’ve set up a single page for every day, which has usually resulted in me recording more than three observations. More page room means that my mind naturally stays open to finding more to record.

My biggest takeaway from the first year of this project is that a daily walk is vital not just to my phenology practice, but to my writing practice as well. Between last winter’s prolonged cold and last summer’s persistent, record-breaking heat, I walked less in 2025 than I had since . . .  probably 2014. (It doesn’t help that walking is not Maybelle’s favorite activity.) But the days I didn’t walk were the days I was most likely to skip recording anything, and these were days I was most likely to skip writing. I wasn’t expecting that this would be the lesson of the year, but as a result, I’ve tried to get back in the habit of daily walks. (Though this week’s snow storm has really put a damper on that.)

I imagine that in the second year of this project, as I begin to gather build up my observations, I’ll start to have some insights about the seasons in St. Louis. Or maybe I’ll have a different insight altogether. Only time will tell, and I look forward to reporting and reflecting in January 2027.

Allyson Whipple, Personal Phenology

枯草の線沈黙の骨空の耳　対馬康子

karekusa no sen chinmoku no hone sora no mimi

            a line of withered grass
            a bone of silence
            an ear of the sky

                                                Yasuko Tsushima

from Gendai Haiku, #728, January 2026 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (February 2, 2026)

I have met new friends in Sweden and Shropshire in the past year: friends who know about water, and who know about trees. The words on my autumn bowl encapsulate what I’ve learned about my Willow nature, which seeks water, and my need to be around the dependability of Oak. And I have learned to respect in myself the natural rhythms of needing to go underground, to seek rest and stillness, in order to grow again. 

“I fall into earth-life.
Acorn. Willow-seed.
We are the making of ourselves.”

Liz Lefroy, I Paint My Year

This one came back to me as a single phrase: “Troy after Troy after Troy.” If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you know I love repetition, whether it be the anticipated patterns of a received form, or a rhetorical device unique to an individual poem’s argument or emotional arc—anaphora or epistrophe or something looser and organic—or simply a sequence of matching sounds, regular or not, that chime between the lines.

It was this repetition that sent a shiver down my spine the first time I read “Things Seem Strong,” so it was no wonder that that’s what called me back to it this week. What was terrifically surprising was discovering that what was in my memory a pivotal moment actually occurs early on—it’s an exposition, the aria’s opening gesture, and not the thunderclap I carried in my memory, which had become a kind of stand-in or synecdoche for the poem as a whole. Some words and phrases cling to a consciousness like burdock to a cuff. I’m tempted to say it’s just some fascination of the pattern-loving mind, that the scraps that stick are, if not arbitrary, perhaps without much significance, though if you asked a magpie, I imagine you’d find that every shiny treasure in her nest was somehow meaningful to her.

What’s to love about “Things Seem Strong”? Hirshfield is a Zen Buddhist, a translator of Classical Japanese poetry, and these practices carry into her own poems in ways that I find captivating. She is a poet of presence, observation, direct experience, connectedness. What I love in this poem is the way that the poet’s philosophical concerns are born out by its making: how the form enacts habits of mind—until, of course, it doesn’t—and, likewise, the music of its construction regulates tone, until it is subsumed by it.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Things Seem Strong” by Jane Hirshfield

Earlier this week my middle son was surprised and even a bit indignant to discover that the words in English for le compas (which you use to draw a circle in maths) and la boussole (which you use to find which way is north) are the same. But aren’t they at least pronounced differently? he asked, crossly. I don’t use either kind of compass very often these days, though I do have to remember to buy the mathematical type depressingly often as for some reason it is the most frequently lost or broken element of the older boys’ fourniture scolaire — the baroquely complex list of school supplies that French schools send you in mid-summer and which you have to assemble (and label) in time for the new school year. This is a ritual element of French family life, part of the preparation for the grand rentrée at the start of September, and poorer families get a special grant to help with it.

We moved to France in the summer of 2021, when the older children were 6 and 8, so one of my first challenges was taking them to the vast “back-to-school” section of the nearest Monoprix, clutching two very long lists, in both of which I recognised, at best, about 50% of the vocabulary. The boys were already bilingual but only in the sense of chatting to their Dad and reading Tintin: they’d never been to school in France before and they didn’t have any more idea than I did of the difference between pochettes and classeurs, or paper that’s in feuilles simples rather than feuilles doubles, with grands or petits carreaux — though they were naturally very anxious not to turn up at a new school in a new country with all the wrong kit. As a result the whole thing was a bit stressful. Much as I love a good vocabulary challenge, I remember feeling literally dizzy in the aisles — though that might also have been because I was in fact already pregnant with the next one.

Le compas, though, was one word I did recognise, and because I read Jonson pretty much continuously for five years or so in my 20s, I can never think of a compass without remembering that for him it was the perfect emblem of a life well lived:

Stand forth my Object, then, you that have been
Ever at home; yet have all Countries seen:
And like a Compass, keeping one Foot still
Upon your Center, do your Circle fill
Of general Knowledge; watch’d Men, Manners too,
Heard what times past have said, seen what ours do:

These lines are from his epistle to John Selden in Underwoods, and they draw upon a common Renaissance emblem of the compass as an image of labor et constantia — an ethically ideal combination of wide-ranging effort and psychological constancy. Jonson’s verse letters, by the way, are both a triumph and a lasting consolation — I wrote about why I love this aspect of Jonson so much in this piece last year.

Victoria Moul, Love and compasses

A funky used bookstore. A local coffee shop. The living room of a brownstone with people on the floor and homemade biscuits in the next room. A little bar that has jazz musicians ready to start after the poets are done. An art studio. Another small bar with cozy tables and a little stage (that from the outside looks like it’s not even open.) Another bar with neon pinball decorations. A small local theater. A brewery. These are just a few of the places I have read or have attended a reading in the past year.

Like most writers since the pandemic, I have consumed and participated in most of my poetry readings online, but there’s something about a live reading that cannot be replicated online. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the availability and scope that online events provide, the exposure and access to so many writers that would be geographically impossible to achieve otherwise. It’s why I love to curate A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and why I’m a regular listener to many other series.

But a real live reading, even to just a handful of people, creates a different kind of magic. You can see and hear people respond in the audience. You can connect eye to eye with someone while reading and/or listening. You can appreciate the unplanned laughter or appreciation from a reader’s remarks and demeanor. But one of my favorite parts of being a part of live readings is meeting poets/curators I have never met IRL and being exposed to their work.

For example, as an audience member, I recently attended my first Neon Nights reading in Chicago, curated by Benjamin Niespodziany, a celebration of Johannes Goransson’s translation of Aase Berg’s Aase’s Death from Black Ocean featuring Johannes and Black Ocean editor Carrie Olivia Adams (and curator of Poetry & Biscuits), Nathan Hoks, Paul Cunningham, and Hedgie Choi. I had heard Hedgie’s work before and love her book award-winning book Salvage, and I have long admired the work of Johannes and Carrie and have attended and read for Carrie’s series in her lovely home But I hadn’t heard Johannes or Carrie read from their work before, nor was I familiar with the other readers. The evening was full of surprises – Ben’s intros which include fictional erasure bios, Nathan fashioning antlers from sticks onto his glasses in honor of reading from Aase’ Berg’s With Deer, Hedgie turning in a circle each time she ended a poem. Everyone was at ease.

Donna Vorreyer, IRL

Also, I’m suddenly obsessed with –

The Half-Finished Heaven by Tomas Transomer, translated by Robert Bly
Everytime I love a poet in translation, I inevitably hear from someone that I am reading the VERY WORST translation – so if I am, let me know. Actually, I like to read poets in multiple translations and see which one I like best.
Read “The Bookcase” on page 4 (I am sorry I could not lift this from the internet somewhere- but this is a good link!). I have been thinking about this poem for weeks. First off, a prose poem – those I read less often than the lineated variety – but also the breath on the glass… ah it is so good! So please stop reading this and go read that, it is much better than anything I have to say here.

Renee Emerson, Snow Books, Fullmetal Alchemist, Theo of Golden, Time of the Child, & more

“A translation,” I thought as I’d paused on the ski trail to catch my breath and look around, listen around. (No sound. No birdsong, no human sound: no gear shift or metal grind or churn of airplane overhead.) I looked up. A complex skeleton of tree overhead, each limb outlined in thick white. A translation of a tree, those thick white lines underscored by thin lines of black beneath. A white tree version of the damp-black tree beneath, a bit cumbersome, a bit heavy, but beautiful, the two kinds of lines living together. I love side-by-side translations, love to eyeball the disparate marks between the two, to see how the translator handled the line break, the punctuation. Love to examine the original for repeating words or ideographs or glyphs. When they live side by side on a page or set of pages, the original and the translation can reside like limb and snowshade.

I may be flirting with the limits of free use here, but I’ve just had such an enjoyable time poking through Wickerwork, poems by Christian Lehnert, translated by Richard Sieburth, published by Archipelago Books, 2022, and messed around with by me, with help from a certain unmentionable online translation program, and some German-English dictionaries. Again, I realize, given Lehnert’s interest and careful attention to form, rhythm, and rhyme, I am guilty of the treason of translation. Sieburth’s translations are perfectly fine. I mean no disrespect to this lovely volume. It’s just that I poked around and found some little gems in the language that delighted me. So. Here are two more poems from this intriguing collection, and the results of my meddling.

Marilyn McCabe, der Nebelgang

At a recent translation slam, three translators read their remarkably different translations of the same passage of prose in Ukrainian, each explaining their process and choices. All three were faithful to the original. None made anything up. And yet each translation had a distinct sound, rhythm, and feel. Prompted by a question from the audience, one translator likened the practice of translation to a dance. The voice of the text, she explained, is what activates the emotion, energy, and movement of words and sentences in translation, what guides her in delivering the author’s intention and text’s meaning.

The audience of translators, writers, and readers nodded in unison and for me, as a bit of all three plus a social salsa dancer, her analogy had special resonance. It echoed the playful negotiation between rules and artistry, the formal steps and the ways dancing bodies interpret them. Though the translator was speaking about what it feels like to translate, the metaphor applied just as well to the experience of reading translated literature. Reading a story in translation is like being pulled into a dance by a poised, mysterious stranger—the translator—inviting us to follow their lead into an unknown.

When I first moved from the drills of salsa class onto a real dance floor—loud music, no talking, no step-count chants—I could only surrender to the rhythm and attune to my partner’s cues. To enjoy the dance I had to both pay attention and give into abandon. Neither myself nor my partner knew ahead of time how the dance would go, but we were willing to be in it together, trusting that wherever it took us—whether seamless compatibility or, more likely, awkward steps salvaged from a mortifying fall by clumsy grasps at each other’s bodies—it would be an adventure.

Translated literature guides me into inhabiting not only inner worlds of people, places, and cultures I know little or nothing about, but different ways of organizing thoughts and ideas. It makes me experience the words of a language I know—its order, sounds, and textures—in unfamiliar ways I might otherwise overlook when reading the smooth, intuitive syntax of a native speaker.

Bergita Bugarija, The Beautiful Dance of Literary Translation

Today’s Poem by Babette Deutsch (1895–1982), taken from her 1925 second collection, Honey Out of the Rock, feels in some ways like a poem we’ve seen before. Or if not exactly that, it feels of a piece with a kind of poem we’ve come to identify with women poets of the 1920s: brief, imagistic, lyric, and characterized by what Elinor Wylie identified as a “small clean technique.” If we were going to identify a school of women poets of this era, we might well call it the Small Clean School and include in it not only Wylie, but also Sara Teasdale, whose “There Will Be Stars” we’ve recently examined as an exemplar of this minimalist technique.

While these poets don’t absolutely eschew events relayed chronologically, as narrative, (see Teasdale’s “Summer Night, Riverside” and “A Winter Bluejay,” for example), their defining concern is with the isolation of a particular moment, suspended outside time — though even that suspension may be transient or illusory. The context of Wylie’s “A Crowded Trolley Car” is, as the title suggests, a trolley, moving from stop to stop in a linear progression. Yet once the clanging bell and the swaying of the car are dispensed with, that movement never again intrudes on the view of hands clutching the rail and the omniscient speaker’s meditation on what those hands reveal. Time stills; its movements are of no concern. What matters is the image of each hand and the associations that unfold from it.

Deutsch’s own technique shares both Wylie’s predilection for imagistic miniatures and Teasdale’s intimations of rapture. But where Teasdale’s joys verge on pain, Deutsch’s literary persona — as we’ve previously seen in her 1919 poem, “Silence” — seems, to a great extent, genuinely and generatively open to happiness. It’s easy to think of happiness as inimical to art, or even to interest: “Happy families are all alike,” and so forth. It’s easy to think of the definitive bitterness of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, as well as the veiled despair of Sara Teasdale, and to forget that some women of the same generation were relatively happy in love, did not live their lives continually on a precipice, and declined to nurse a continual state of regret as energy source and fodder for art. And those women — Janet Loxley Lewis and Genevieve Taggard, for example, as well as Babette Deutsch — made good art.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Ballet School

Greetings Dr. Vaishnavi Pusapati. Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. Let’s start with your background. Where did you grow up in India? What was the landscape like? What kind of wildlife did you see there? What was one of your favorite experiences in Nature as a child?

Thank you so much for having me. I have been reading the Haiku Poet interviews for a long while now and it has introduced me to many poets I admire in the haiku community.

I grew up in many states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, among others, sometimes changing cities within the same state. I currently reside in Bangalore in Karnataka state. The landscapes I grew up in were like sand dunes, always changing, and I witnessed the uniform loss of nature in the face of fast urbanization.

The first two places I grew up in were beach towns, and there is a certain awareness of nature in that. Hokusai’s paintings of the wave must have come from a reverence of a natural place when residence changes to resonance and belonging. I believe the rhythm of the wave was internalized for me, then.

The wildlife was flame of the forest, coconut groves and Ashoka trees, bougainvillea, poison ivy, bee hives, barnacles on oars, woodpeckers, ant hills, mushrooms, shallow ponds, old wells with tadpoles and lily pads, scurrying squirrels, wasp nests, occasional monkeys, weaver birds, parrots, butterflies, abandoned pets, migratory birds, a lot of pigeons, and a few sparrows.

Then, when we moved to the northern arid areas, it was sad to see the occasional tree, the dry wells, and thinning rivers. I saw the concrete and glass buildings begin to take over the silhouette of old sleeping cities, the slow stripping away of individualism of a place, and the sprouting of matchbox apartments.  

My favorite adventure into nature was to the mountains in Ooty where I touched a cloud for the first time and watched it dissipate and saw my first waterfall. […]

When and how did you discover haiku and Japanese poetry forms?

When I started writing poetry seriously, I was searching for a form that resonates with my minimalism and the themes I find myself most comfortable with. Then, I chanced upon online haiku journals. My initial haiku were no good, without that haiku moment or the technique, but it was a fun way to write, much like having a conversation with nature. The draw was perhaps the scale of the ambition, intentional refrain, and the insistence on not having a title or rhyme but rather aiming for musicality. It was radical and non-anthropocentric, an antithesis to everything I believed poetry to be. Reading contemporary haiku really helped me advance. I did not expect to write more than a few, alongside my longer forms, but I have found a routine of attempting to write haiku frequently. The haiku sequence form, or linked haiku, is an enticing hook, too. The other Japanese forms came much later and although I read them, haiku remains ideal in my poetic approach.

Jacob D. Salzer, Vaishnavi Pusapati

Addiction is not romanticised, the addict knows she’s abusing herself and it’s not a solution even if it brings temporary relief. However, it is also buying her time to fix and work on herself. The first step there is to accept that the speaker now has to become the parent she wanted as a girl and parent herself into an adulthood where she gives herself the permission to feel and emote which she should have had as a child.

[Bonnie] Tobias uses plain, pared back, stripped down language to reflect the place she had to start from. A minimal place free of distractions where no euphemistic phrases were allowed to gloss over the problems that were being avoided. A place where emotions can be expressed and acknowledged instead of buried. A place of safety but not dishonesty. At its heart that’s what “about this” focuses on. How emotionally neglected children have to adjust to adulthood without the confident and support from parents. Its plain speaking may lack poeticisms, but it underlines authenticity and emotional honesty.

Emma Lee, “about this” Bonnie Tobias (Warren Publishing) – book review

I like the mandala of everything in a poem, the leaching in, the leaking on, the letting out, the marginalia, the parts that don’t fit, the honouring of non-story, of no-conclusion, of clustering bits, of oblique, of pointing at wonder and neutrality and grief in everything.

If no pattern, why gather, why present it? 

But there’s white matter connecting under. It is not as obvious as a true or false sonnet or multiple choice haiku, or an isolate mood or depiction of diorama of traipsing a crying figure along a seashore.

It is open to inference instead of deduction. invitation to look together instead of echo each other. 

It’s another kind of reportage, reflection, assembly of things that hang together and matter in a similar inclusive ample way.

What draws suspense through a poem’s frame?

Pearl Pirie, Further

The poem must do more than complete or fulfill: it must defy the given order that makes us feel comfortable. Or secure.

More than anything, we want to feel safe, and secure in that feeling.

Our sense of security warms its feet by a fire that thinks it knows what needs to be known. Warmed by prediction and the coziness of predictability, we reify contingent things as if they are known and graspable. But what exists is always in dialogue with what may be otherwise. Poetry knows this better than prose, I think.

To quote Dean [Young] again:

To be only comprehensible is to be fully known is to be already seen, predictable. The next poem must shake us, must wake us, must entice us toward the denied, the disallowed. It is what wasn’t. Someone had erased a YES out of the charcoal Nos. The new is always scrawled over the old. Anything fully known offers us no site of entry, no site of escape, no site of desire. In the morning we mistook the roofers on the hill for flames. Desecration is the mix of opposites, that field of contact, the tear that draws us. […] Some of them chased each other, some of them fell to the ground. Coyote vanished into the smoke. The clash of the seen with the unseen, the broken seam, the unmasked with the masking that amazes us, sticky-out red thing, outrages and liberates us, embodies possibility.

This possibility inheres in each word. Increasingly, the word “content” appears as noun that designates slop or world-salad spliced by the energy of bots. I miss the gist of light happiness of in it, miss the absence of contentedness as a cultural frame of reference, miss the slower pace of time prior to the hustle-economy.

And I was made even more of this missing in Washington DC last week, with only a few hours to spend exploring the National Gallery of Art, trying to find a place to squat and scribble notes in my notebook.

 “I think one could spend one’s life having this desire to be in and outside at the same time,” said Willem de Kooning, “content as a glimpse.”

Content as a glimpse— yes. This is the content I dearly miss.

The idea must be unfixed from its iconostasis. One must unhinge it a bit.

Alina Stefanescu, “To comprehend is to complicate.

木蓮の
落ちくだけあり
寂光土
（川端茅舍）

Petals falling all at once
—Magnolia flowers
Reborn in the Pure Land

—Kawabata Bōsha (川端茅舍, 1897–1941)

木蓮の Magnolia flowers
落ちくだけあり petals falling apart completely
寂光土 the land of Quiescent Light
Mokuren no / ochi-kudake ari / jakkō-do

It’s hard to capture in English what this poem conveys about magnolia petals falling. Unlike sakura blossoms, for example, that scatter on the wind like snowflakes—sometimes floating away in great clouds—magnolia petals fall heavily and directly, “falling” not “scattering,” more like peonies. Their descent feels deliberate and weighty. You could almost hear them land. Thud.

What is so brilliant about this poem is how it evokes the seeming willfulness of their descent. As if the flower had undergone spiritual training like a Buddhist anchorite walling himself up to await death with perfect resolution. Climbing up a tree or tower to pray. Or sitting in meditation like Daruma until his legs and arms and eyelids fell off—an admirable commitment to self-cultivation.

My writing mentor says, “the writer is the last person standing.” Perseverance and resolution are everything.

Magnolias, ancient like conifers and waterlilies, must be tenacious indeed, since they’ve been around since Tyrannosaurus was traipsing around in forests filled with ferns.

In Tendai Buddhism, jakkōdo (寂光土) refers to the “Pure Land of Still and Radiant Light,” the highest paradise where Buddhas reside. I love how this poem entangles human emotions with flowers—As the Nirvana Sutra teaches, all beings have a Buddha nature. In just seventeen syllables, you feel the flowers striking out on their path toward becoming a Buddha.

Leanne Ogasawara, Magnolia flowers

It follows us like a shadow, dragging its roots along—this garden.

It’s there behind us in the coffee line, at our workstation,

beside us when we’re looking in the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing our appearance.

In bed at 3 AM, it hogs the covers.

Rich Ferguson, The Garden That Follows

when others were in bed,
i would go to chew ice in the kitchen.
groaning mechanism. bowls & bowls.
all kinds of feast. no one ever caught me.
i learned to take only what will
not be missed. the ice maker, refilling
before anyone else was awake. water coming
& going. the rain on the roof. barefoot july
eating a hole through the wall. now, i still
keep a mouthful of the cold. bite down
harder. years of practice. they think
i am scared of creatures that eat our flesh
but i eat bone. i devour the cold.

Robin Gow, ice maker

The other day, we noticed a coyote limping down the meadow. We hear them now and then, at night, but we seldom see them; and this one was out at noontime. A bit unusual. I felt concerned about it as it moved off into the undergrowth at the field’s edge.

Out of curiosity, I guess, the next day I traced its tracks from the treeline between our property and the next one, down through our meadow, into the woods beyond our lot. […]

The average cat weighs 10-12 pounds, the average red fox 30-ish pounds, and eastern coyotes in our region can be 45-55 pounds. This one was, I think, a male because it left quite heavy tracks, though possibly it was putting more weight on three legs because the front right paw was injured badly enough it never set that paw down. I recall once when our family dog got caught in a neighbor’s “soft-paw” fox trap. As soon as I got her loose, she ran for the house, and I noticed her prints in the snow–three heavy prints and a lighter one since she was favoring one foot. This coyote wasn’t using its leg at all. In a few places I could see a swash on the snow surface where the snow was deep enough that the coyote’s foot had skimmed it. The circuit led into the woods and I pressed no further.

That’s about the extent of my animal-tracking knowledge. It was, however, an interesting departure from my usual winter walk, and a nice day for walking. Everyone else in the county was out buying gasoline and groceries because a big storm was in the forecast for the weekend. Which did arrive (the storm, I mean. Well, also the weekend.).

I’ve been working on new poem drafts lately, after weeks of barely any new writing, focusing on revision instead. What do you bet that coyote, or its tracks, or at very least, the snow, will show up in at least one new draft?

Ann E. Michael, Tracks

Heaps of snow on the chaise longues 
are body shaped. Aha! There lie the outsiders
who live outside. Others, unwanteds, the ones 
they now see, are said to be among us. 
If only we knew who the “we” is.  

If only shadows didn’t seem doomed. 
The drip-drip of the faucet, shoe-sized. 

They can’t even let the full moon off the hook.

Jill Pearlman, UltraViolet Night

We try to gather our

courage into kindling:
speaking and naming,
watching and witnessing.
We know we can hold

silence and words in
the same hand, that knees
can sing on the hard
streets packed

with snow. The child
sleeps with his mouth open.
Look at that kind of trust
his body still has.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Child Sleeps

This week: falling snow, a broken country, walking on an icy sidewalk, the space in which to take a small breath, and much more. Enjoy.

free fall and crystalline

intricate machines of vanished moments

the outside of silence

Grant Hackett, snow

Something is scratching in the walls and I imagine it’s the stucco itself, chilly and damp out there in the dark morning, seeking to ease inside for a bit of warmth. “Is a River Alive?” asks Robert Macfarlane in his recent book, and I have long wondered the same of rocks. I have a nodding acquaintance with many. Well, I’m doing the nodding, anyway. At least in the quick time frame of human life.

An animate world is the kind I want to live in, so I make assumptions that anima is everywhere. “Sorry,” I say to the throw rug whose corner I flipped up with careless footing. I feel a little bad it has to stare up at that water stain in the ceiling I can’t get around to painting over. But the stain looks like a feather. So that’s nice.

It is an old tradition, to see the world this way. I am reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Simpson is a member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario, Canada, and is a scholar of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, the indigenous people of southern Ontario. This book is an imaginative and strange telling of tales in which characters are at once human and other-animate — a tree, for example, that pushes its shopping cart around Toronto; a caribou spirit who wears a backpack it found on the street. One section is voiced by the geese preparing for departure, trying not to feel judgey about the ones choosing to stay behind (in the changing climate that allows such choice now). Two sections are the voice of a frozen body of water, Mashkawaji, which in Ojibwe means “is frozen.”

Marilyn McCabe, the methodology of giving up

“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” asked the Proust Questionnaire. “Living in fear,” answered David Bowie.

The most menacing word of the three is the smallest, for fear really is something we live inside, not with — a cage, a tomb, a small dark room that comes to eclipse the world as the hand quivers outside the pocket in which the key is kept. The best key I know to the prison of fear is curiosity, and the most generous form of curiosity I know is poetry.

An inquiry, an invocation, an invitation, poetry opens a side door to consciousness, bypassing our habitual barricades of thought and feeling, allowing us to enter into the unknowns of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, into the desolate haunts of our own interior that words have not yet reached. Poetry is a kind of prayer: for presence, for understanding, for seeing the world more closely in order to cherish it more deeply. To name, to understand, to dignify and hold — these are the gifts of poetry, and these too are the antidotes to just about every form of fear.

In Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (public library), poet extraordinaire and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith offers what is essentially a field guide to loving life more, anchored in the recognition that “the opposite of love is not hatred or rancor but fear” and in a passionate insistence on “how important is it — how critical — to understand there is and has always been, for each of us, a wilderness within.”

Maria Popova, A Spell Against Fear: Tracy K. Smith on Poetry and The Art of Productive Impatience

I keep thinking about this phrase for a poem, the next worse thing, because that’s what it can feel like living in America today: waiting for the next worse thing to come, bracing before it even arrives. I don’t think this is good for us.

Which is why I deleted all my social apps from my phone last night. I never know what video will pop up, what headline will slap me in the face, what will send my brain into high-alert. The strange part is that I’m supposed to be promoting my upcoming book right now, and social media is “where you do that,” but for a bit—I’m choosing something else. I’m choosing to protect my mind. I’m choosing the forest, the page. I’m choosing this little corner of the internet and decaf coffee. […]

It’s unfortunately funny that my first Copper Canyon book came out during a global pandemic and now my second is coming out during the fall of democracy, so clearly I have a gift for impeccable timing. If Copper Canyon publishes a third book of mine, please check on your neighbors and stock up on beans.

Kelli Russell Agodon, How To Live in a Broken Country

It feels like a strange time to be talking about a new book of poems. I’m heartsick. I’m angry. But in harrowing times, I also think we could use more poetry and more time in community. I’m craving both right now, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to visit a handful of cities this spring with A Suit or a Suitcase.

It’s always surprising and moving when we can get into a room together, isn’t it? We leave those rooms a little different than when we entered them.

My last collection, Goldenrod, came out in 2021 (how was that five years ago?!), and the tour was virtual because of the pandemic. So this will be extra special, because it’s my first in-person poetry book tour. I’m sharing my schedule with For Dear Life subscribers before I share it on social media or my website, so you’re seeing this first. Thank you so much for your continued support of me and my work. It means more than I can say.

Maggie Smith, Book Tour Announcement

“People escape into other things; you don’t escape into poetry. You confront yourself when you are reading poems…” ~Mark Strand

I’m overwhelmed. Everyone I talk to is overwhelmed. There are so many crises happening simultaneously that it’s hard to keep paddling the little rowboats of our own lives through the ongoing cataclysms.

Anyone who has studied history surely wondered what it would be like to be alive during the fall of the Roman Empire or what they’d have done during the Nazi reign of terror. We may be finding out.

We live in a society that upholds profit as a de facto god. Bombs are dropped to enrich military contractors, schools are twisted to serve corporate test-makers, and the Supreme Court has given corporations the right to secret political spending–offering them vast influence over elections, laws, and federal policy. The average person is squeezed on all sides as billionaires grow every more wealthy while our (billionaire-owned) media fosters divisions between us.

Infuriating is not a strong enough word. I don’t think there is a term yet coined that sufficiently expresses how we feel let alone helps make sense of our anger. That’s where poetry comes in in all its beautiful, inspiring rage. Here are a few examples, with gratitude to the poets.

Laura Grace Weldon, Furious Poems For Infuriating Times

The sky above:

a park filled with cloud benches, breeze swing sets, songbirds echoing playground’s blue dazzle.

The world below:

ash and collapse, shootings and protests, the autopsy of so many regrets.

When violence comes to a neighborhood near you, it helps to recognize the world beyond its horrors and sorrows—

dogs walking their owners; neighbors saying hello; children biking by, untouched by bullets’ bloodied fists.

Once the smoke has cleared and all the mourners have left the church,

let’s meet in the sky park’s most dazzling blue.

Somewhere there’s a cloud bench with your name on it.

Rich Ferguson, The Sky Park

In the golden space between house and tree —now magenta, now indigo— in that space of fiery fervent sky, I swim, lost in the bleeding striations of sunset.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Once More to the Attic (reprise)

I’m rarely in a food court because I’m rarely in a mall, however, when somehow I find myself there, I find it strangely comforting and a productive place to write. I feel enveloped by a coherent context but also feel like a still point, a hole in the context, surrounded.

Mark Strand writes:

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.

I don’t feel that “I am what I missing,” but I instead like I’m wearing the context like a blanket around me. And amidst all this quotidian businessing, writing seems unbounded. It’s not that I feel better than or more serious or thoughtful than the denizens of the foodcourt or the “filthy lucre” of the mall and its capitalism—after all, whatever issues I have with the system, the people are just people having lives. We’re almost always inside of this larger system, despite what we might think about it. That is, in many, ways how such all-encompassing economic, epistemic systems work.

But I like the feeling of kindling a small flame in its middle. Writing what is only marginally saleable, what exists outside of the system. And I feel fellow-feeling with the people in the food court, eating, chatting, being humans.

Gary Barwin, Utopia or neartopia or bettertopia: a then-and-there literature

I hear God in the breath
sounding a 3D-printed whistle
alerting neighbors to stay home.

I see God in all who comfort
every frantic family,
every grieving widow.

But “Come to Pharaoh” tells me
there is no place
where God is not –

even where corruption festers.
I’m not generous enough
to see God there.

Rachel Barenblat, Come

Yesterday, January 19, was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Dr. King, whose was born on January 15, 1929, would have been 97 years old.

Twelve years ago, in 2014, celebration of the holiday and Dr. King’s real birth date fell on the same day, and in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, Greenwell Springs Road Regional Library invited teenagers to use found poetry as a way to “engage with” Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which he had delivered at the “March on Washington” in 1963. The idea, as explained to the youths, was to try composing a poem using words from a transcript of the speech.

I took up the challenge myself and wrote the poem that appears below.
[…]

for one hundred years
hope was tranquilizing

despair a mountain
of solid stone in hands
crippled by manacles

but we emerge now
not drinking from a cup
of hatred, of violence,

of bitterness, not jangling
chains of distrust
but able to sing here, today

our protests in community
battered, suffering, we will
not turn back, cannot walk

alone but demand to work
together, pray together
struggle together as one

Maureen Doallas, one nation

Focusing on my own work hasn’t been so easy lately, as I’m sure is the case for many of you. At such times I turn to certain things that help me: meditation, exercise, repetitive and absorbing activities like knitting, drawing, playing the piano, and reading — especially poetry. I want to try to share some peacefulness here in the days and weeks ahead, but not peacefulness devoid of meaning or significance for the moment in which we find ourselves.

Today I took down from my shelves a volume titled Postwar Polish Poetry, selected and edited by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1982. The work of 20th century Russian and, especially, Polish poets has always spoken to me. These are poets who have seen the worst; they write with irony and sometimes black humor, but they have not lost faith in humanity or its basic values, or in what is noble or beautiful in the world and in each life. 

Beth Adams, Two Polish poems, and a sunflower

I planned to get my third novel started this January, and I have. I wasn’t far in, though, before my brain started playing hooky. Psst, Lesley, I have a poem idea for you. Poetry always seems to prefer a sidewise approach, when I’m looking the other way. There’s nothing to do but obey.

Arthur Sze’s 2025 collection Into the Hush, however, is also to blame for any bloom of inspiration. These days I often feel struck silent by horror. What can I possibly say about ICE abductions and cities under assault by their own government that others aren’t saying more powerfully? Hey, um, most of us are glad for Greenlanders’ sake that they’re NOT part of the US? So I found myself all the more impressed by how Sze, in the face of so much nightmare, bears poetic witness. These meditative poems brim with wondrous gestures and small creatures closely observed, including spiders crawling across laptops and sipping from taps. In the opening poem “Anvil,” though, butterflies and apple trees share space with the names of vanishing languages, reports of human violence, and how “a matsutake emerges from out of the rubble of Hiroshima.” Somehow these juxtapositions carry argument without becoming argument. Understanding the technique inspires me to try the same.

Lesley Wheeler, Arthur Sze’s mushrooms

Full disclosure: I am typing this under a blanket next to a box of tissues and a very hot cup of tea, fighting the urge to take a nap. A nasty cold/cough (thankfully not COVID) has me down for the count the past couple of days, and I woke up this morning thinking about how, when I was teaching, I would push through this type of illness to avoid the hassle of wondering if I’d get a decent sub or the worry of not having left lesson plans ahead of time. (This is common for LOTS of jobs, but particulary for teachers.) Being retired now, the only battle I fight when I don’t feel well is the urge to berate myself if I don’t workout or do anything productive. (Like this morning, when I actually got on the stationary bike for thirty minutes until my body said “bad idea” and pushed back by making me woozy. I decided to listen. Thus the blanket and tea.)

I guess you could say I’m still trying to be productive by writing this post. You wouldn’t be wrong. However, I am getting better at passive productivity. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but hear me out.

With regards to reading…During lockdown, I struggled to focus on reading, and I started listening to audiobooks on my walks or while cleaning the house or gardening. A passive and yet enjoyable way to complete books while doing something else, an efficient way to consume the latest suspense thriller or bestseller. I save my physical reading for poetry and for books I imagine I’ll want to savor, study the language, stretch out the story, hear the characters the way I want to hear them instead of interpreted by an actor. Of course, I don’t always know this ahead of time, so if I really love the language of an audiobook, I’ll often stop listening and check the book out of the library to finish it.

It’s the same with writing lately. Instead of pushing myself to draft new work daily (as with the Stafford Challenge) or on any kind of schedule, I’ve adopted more passive strategies for approaching the page. One way is by reading through older, unpublished poems and looking for salvageable or interesting pieces that slipped through the cracks. This way, I’m not starting from scratch, and the productivity comes in small, manageable pieces of revision time. Another way is to use my reading time to generate writing exercises, like the grammar imitation I wrote about in the last post. These usually leave me with strange and interesting blocks of language that might become fodder for a successful poem later. Another way is to actually submit work that is lounging around in my computer looking for a home. This makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something writing-related without any writing actually being done.

Donna Vorreyer, Slowing My Roll

This week, a poem I wrote for a dear friend was published by a new journal that I admire! I’m so glad to have “Love Poem with Tumor: A Translabyrinthine Approach to a Large Cystic Vestibular Schwannoma” in Issue 5 of Asterales.

Katie Manning, “Love Poem with Tumor” in Asterales

James Reeves published A Short History of English Poetry in 1961, and boy is it fun to read, if you like nastiness, especially that unique nastiness about poetry that only a practicing poet can muster. In today’s academic literary criticism, filling the pristine pages of selective journals, interpretation is the aim, and that aim takes lexical priority over evaluation—if, indeed, any evaluation is offered at all. For Reeves, it’s the delicious opposite. He tells us what’s bad and he tells us what’s good, and rarely bothers with what the poems mean.

Fast forward to chapter 10. The discussion of Romanticism starts off with a bang, a rare moment of adulation: William Blake

was a poet of the purest inspiration, at once a man and a visionary. There is about his best lyrics a rightness of tone and feeling, an inevitability of rhythm and language which give them a kind of authenticity, even authority, that we accept without question.

This judgment itself, we are to accept without question. Indeed the whole book is a display of what you can get away with, if you are free to assert and not defend.

Reeves isn’t done with Blake’s importance:

There are times in the history of society when accepted ideas and forms have become rigid and stale, and when the only possibility of new growth lies in the capacity of gifted individuals to renew the contact between the human mind and the primary sources of experience.

Rigid and stale, that’s surely right, but come on, does the human mind ever lose contact with the primary sources of experience? Aren’t those sources impinging on all of us at every moment, yea even on me right now, as I type away?

Wordsworth and Coleridge also come in for praise, but fainter praise—Reeves admits that they “transformed English poetry”; and Coleridge, we are told, “was at no time a great technical innovator, but he had a superb ear.” Nothing like the praise reserved for Blake. It’s much the same with Shelley and Keats.

And it’s at this point that the awesome negativity comes full to the fore. Regarding Byron,

It is doubtful if even his most fervent admirer today would accord him a fraction of the praise lavished on him during the last ten years of his short life.

His poetry is

the sort of intoxicating stuff which easily persuades immature or undiscriminating minds that they are enjoying fine poetry.

O ye undiscriminating minds!

Brad Skow, Tell Me What You Really Think

Berryman has been ‘in the air’ on substack recently. A week or so ago I was in the middle of composing a note asking whether anyone still read him when I saw one from Paul Franz saying that the summer issue of Literary Imagination will carry a review of the new edition of Berryman’s unpublished Dream Songs. And now Robert Potts, who has learnt all of the original 77 Dream Songs by heart, is kicking off a series of readings of them which looks like it will be fantastic — definitely worth a follow: https://robertpotts.substack.com/p/dream-awhile […]

There was a period of a few months at the beginning of 2007, a rather miserable time for me personally, when I was clearly reading Berryman and Robert Duncan quite intensively. I know for sure that I encountered Duncan for the first time around this time in Michael Schmidt’s superlative Harvill Book of Twentieth Century Poetry in English — still for my money the best such anthology there is, in which neither “side” is an afterthought. In the autumn of 2006 I had moved from Cambridge to Oxford to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College and I bought it in the long-lamented Oxford branch of Borders. This was the first time, I think, that I read systematically in modern American poetry and I learnt a great deal from this anthology about how American poets and poetic trends fitted in with, or differed from, what was happening in Britain.

Enthused by the brief section on Duncan, I remember looking for more and being delighted to find that Borders also had a copy of the Selected Poems, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and published by New Directions, which remains an excellent introduction to his work. Borders used to be surprisingly good for poetry and one of the few places in the UK where you could reliably find US poetry collections. (As Jem’s recent piece on Matthew Buckley Smith points out, this is still quite difficult — perhaps in fact more so than it was twenty years ago.) Indeed, it took me years and a lot of trans-Atlantic shipping fees to complete my collection of Duncan’s poetry, because all the other books were only available in America. Or as Berryman in England put it:

These men don’t know our poets.
I’m asked to read; I read Wallace Stevens & Hart Crane
in Sidney Sussex & Cat’s.
The worthy young gentlemen are baffled. I explain,

but the idiom is too much for them.

This fragment comes from a poem called ‘Friendless’, part of a pretty straightforwardly autobiographical sequence — almost a memoir in verse — which was published in his 1971 collection Love & Fame. Berryman was in Cambridge in the late 30s, just before the start of the Second World War, so these poems are recalling events from more than 30 years before, with such local detail and precision that I suspect that he, too, was relying on diary entries.

Victoria Moul, Gift us with long cloaks & adrenaline: on reading and its consolations

Sunday was Burns Day — January 25, the birthday of Robert Burns (1759–1796) — and we shouldn’t let it slip away without a gesture toward the Scottish poet. As we noted when we looked at “To a Mouse,” Burns’s rise to fame came in part from the advantage of coming early: a proto-Romantic to whom the Romantics would turn, a genial promoter of Scotland whose work would seem nation-defining to later Scottish nationalists, a poet who could write in English with a light Scots dialect that would endear him to the English-monoglot descendants of Scots scattered around the world.

What’s more, his poetry showed a genius, unmatched till Kipling’s prose, for using unfamiliar words (Scots, in Burns’s case; typically Hindi, in Kipling’s) and not defining them — but giving just enough surrounding information that the reader can more or less triangulate the meaning.

In his explicitly Scottish verse, Burns would take an existing anonymous song and work his magic on it to smooth it out and make it sparkle — and with the added benefit of his fame, his printed works distributed across the Anglosphere, the result would become what later generations took as the standard version. “Auld Lang Syne,” for example. “John Barleycorn.” And Today’s Poem, “Comin thro’ the Rye.”

There’s some suggestion that early versions were bawdier, and there are later versions in which the sex between Jenny and her swain — or multiple swains, one each time she passes through the rye — is spelled out. Burns’s own version is milder, but even that is often Bowdlerized: erasing the draggled petticoats, for example, dropping the suggestive “wet” and reference to Jenny’s “thing,” and implying that all they did was kiss. Knowing the bawdiness of the song makes even more ironic Holden Caulfield’s mistaken use of the song as an image of protecting innocence in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Comin thro’ the Rye

Burns was born in 1759 in Alloway in Ayrshire and died, neither very much later nor very much further away, in 1796 in Dumfries. He wrote his best poems in Scots, and his best poems were so good they did a great deal to guarantee the Scots language some kind of literary future. He suffered for his art, and lord knows others suffered for it too, particularly the women who loved him; but his art was also fuelled by his experience of suffering, especially that of watching his father beaten down by authority and exhausted by farm labour. While he became many other poets besides, this helped form Burns into a satirist of the kinds of religious and political thought that perpetuated or condoned inhumanity. And just as inhumanity has never gone out of fashion, neither has Robert Burns. What he made of us remains as true now as then.

Though one comedic aspect of Burns – maybe I mean tragicomic – is what we’ve made of him. Since his character was so complicated as to effectively not exist – there’s barely a single human trait that Burns did not exhibit at some point as if it defined him – everyone’s free to make their own reading of Burns according to their own personal, critical or neurotic agenda. And heaven knows they have. Burns is a everything from a noble savage to a brilliantly read autodidact; he’s a male-chauvinist pig, and he’s a champion of the rights of women; he’s a rather dodgy English late Augustan poet and a brilliant Scots proto-Romantic. Most bewilderingly from our contemporary perspective, the author of ‘A Slave’s Lament’ almost took a job at a Jamaican plantation as a ‘bookkeeper’ (which was ‘junior overseer’ in all but name). In view of all this, you should be aware that any single assessment of the Burns and his work will be one that many will disagree with. Folk tend to see themselves in Burns, even if it’s the self they most dread, and must condemn the most harshly.

Don Paterson, The Burns Identity

Fifteen years ago, on 25th January 2011, the poet R.F. Langley died. His death, at the age of 72, has been one of the ongoing sadnesses of my life. I last saw him for a cup of tea to celebrate the end of a course of treatment for cancer, and to look forward to spring that year. But a week later, recovering at home, he died, suddenly, in the middle of the night. We had known each other for ten years, and there was no other contemporary poet I admired more. Living in neighbouring East Anglian counties (Norfolk and Suffolk), I had also become very fond of him as a person: dry, modest, knowledgeable, and then intense and twinkling when something interested or delighted him. I was in my twenties when we met, in my thirties when he died—by which time his words had become a permanent part of the way I see the world. To give just one example: I think of him every time I see the constellation of Orion in the southern winter sky, which hung high there as I left his wake in the unlit Suffolk countryside, as if it had stepped out of a poem just published, “At South Elmham Minster”, with its “twelve stars / in the winter night, under the feet of / Orion”. […]

In the last poem that he published, “To a Nightingale” (18 November 2010), R.F. Langley […] “stopped at nothing”—as he often did—and started to look. “Nothing along the road”, runs the opening sentence. Then the mind’s eye begins to unclose what is there: “But petals, maybe. Pink behind / and white inside.” Word by word, the empty road is framed and sketched: “Nothing but / the coping of a bridge”.

More details meet on this concrete surface: “mutes” (bird droppings), moss, insects. By a play on words, which ties up disparate etymologies, “the coping of the bridge” is also the poet’s mind finding an image for its own patience, bearing with this emptiness just as the bridge bears the road, carrying its “nothing” to an unknown destination, “coping” with it by being something in between.

Speaking of the “Man of Achievement especially in Literature”, this is the quality that Keats called “Negative Capability”: the state of being “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. The poem searches for precisions around the edges, lighting on “lemon, I’ll say / primrose-coloured, moths”, which “flinch / along the hedge”, and “are Yellow Shells, not / Shaded Broad-bars”. But it aims further along the road, beyond “the nick-nack of names”, at Keats’ condition for poetry, in which “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration”. Finally, it is the sound of a nightingale that brings release from wondering about “caterpillars which / curl up as question marks”:

… I am
empty, stopped at nothing, as
I wait for this song to shoot.

To know Roger Langley was to learn the virtue of both knowing and not knowing about beautiful things. In 2001, I reviewed his Collected Poems in the London Review of Books. The volume gathered 17 pieces from three decades of small press publication. Here, suddenly, was contemporary poetry like nothing else I had read, with—as I wrote then—“rich, tightly-orchestrated diction and rhythms” which followed the “close mapping of subjectivity […] relieved by moments of lovely objective clarity”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, We Speak From Out There

As I write this first review of 2026, it would be easy to despair at the current national and international news.  Well, Chris Campbell’s new collection, Why I Wear My Past to Work, is just the antidote for any despondency that we might be experiencing. It turns our attention away from such concerns and focusses on the domestic, for it is here that he suggests true fulfilment and happiness can be found.

Of course, he acknowledges that our lives are demanding and not without threats. In Today I met an Armed Robber he amusingly reflects upon our vulnerability, as we never truly know the nature of the people we interact with in our communities. There may well be ‘a torturer’ and an ‘armed robber’ in our supermarket queues too, but we can only ‘guess’ if that’s the case: we can’t be sure. What we do know is that there are people like that in our society and that recognition may make us feel vulnerable. This notion of vulnerability is reinforced in Section 2 of the collection, It Rains Tulips, in poems that  vividly portray the effects of serious illness on the speaker. In Today I Can’t Speak, the title alone suggests the suddenness with which the speaker’s life has been transformed for the worse. The life-changing symptoms are powerfully captured through spacing, repetition, and questions as the speaker struggles to find words to make sense of what is happening to him: ‘Can’t    speak    speak/    speak today, or/    did      did    I repeat it?’ As a consequence of this experience, the speaker becomes acutely aware of his own mortality. In a later poem in the same section Campbell writes:’ There is a mortuary on the horizon, where the traffic ends.’ Death is a certainty and we can’t afford to ignore it.

Now all that might sound quite dark. However, in Section 2 the patient recovers, and he is wiser for it. 

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Why I Wear My Past to Work’ by Chris Campbell

The father tries to comfort his small daughter by telling her not to worry. But behind his words, the father knows, “the monster, unmasked, has come to life,// as real as the splattered flesh/ and candle crushed beneath our feet.” What goes unsaid is that the daughter will have to learn to navigate this world of unmasked monsters in time. The couplets suggest though that the daughter will have her father’s support in a way the father didn’t have the support of his own. […]

[Bruce Parkinson] Spang’s poems are rooted in the ordinary, looking back through a forgiving lens. They explore how an individual is shaped by parental and societal expectations and how wearing a mask to fit in distorts an individual’s shape. It’s only when an individual is able to twist from expectations into their true selves that love, including self-love, can be found.

Emma Lee, “Twist” Bruce Parkinson Spang (Warren Publishing) – book review

Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry, by Roger Sedarat:

As important as source language remains in any discussion of literary translation, Emerson further follows the Sufi mystics in his conception of an ideal poet who can “speak through the symbolic language of nature” (Loili 112). Important to an application of Emerson’s approach to translation and its early effect on his own verse, such a seemingly translingual symbolic connection helps to build a strong case for his having anticipated Ezra Pound’s appropriation of the East in his influence of the American poetic tradition.

This is a book for scholars of American literature, in particular those who are deeply familiar with Emersonian scholarship, which I will admit up front that I am not. Nonetheless, despite the fact that my ignorance made it difficult to follow a good deal of what Sedarat had to say, as someone who, like Emerson and Pound, produced what some call “bridge translations” of classical Persian literature I resonated with what I was able to understand. (“Bridge translation” is a label signifying that I used an informant because I am not literate in Persian.) I wrote a little bit in Four By Four #41 about the translation work I’ve done and the ethical dilemma(s) attached to it. What I appreciated most about what I could follow of Sedarat’s argument is that he allowed me to place that work and my thinking about it in an American literary tradition I’d never really thought all that much about. In particular, I appreciated the way Sedarat set up a kind of continuum, with Emerson, who respected the integrity of the Persian poets he translated on one end—which is where I have tried to place myself—and, on the other, people like Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinksy, who so deracinate the poets they “translate” (Rumi and Hafez respectively) that they are almost unrecognizable as the deeply religious, Muslim poets they were. (If you want to read a critique of Barks that is completely in line with but far more accessible than Sedarat’s, check out The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi, by Rozina Ali.)

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #51

I have been missing my dad, so today I put on his old cotton knit sweater, the one that’s developing holes in the weave, the one I kept because his scent lingered in its fibers. It’s been over five years since his death and, alas, that familiar scent has finally vanished from the sweater. Though I like to think that it has been absorbed into the other items in my closet, maybe the hoodie my daughter knitted, maybe the flannel pjs, maybe the four old pairs of jeans I wear continually or the one full-length gown I’ve seldom donned but have kept for reasons not entirely rational. I’m hoping my dad has somehow permeated my closet, the things I wear next to my skin, my life.

And I came across this poem recently in Gary Whited’s Having Listened. Indeed, it resonates in the way a poem can, a sort of slanted parallel of feeling, affinity, relationship. I love the idea of “shirt knowledge,” the thought that inanimate objects might “know” in ways humans cannot perceive. Those last lines: “how to be private and patient,/how to be unbuttoned,/how to carry the scent of what has worn me,/and to know myself by the wrinkles” seem accurate to my current state. Comfortable, comforting.

Like an old shirt. Like a good poem. Like a memory of my dad.

Ann E. Michael, Shirt knowledge

I first read this beguiling lyric as a sophomore in college. Like so many poems from that formative year, it’s been with me ever since. I have only half an idea what it means, the result of a lifelong effort towards comprehension begun that term with an essay I hazily remember as a comparison-contrast with, of all pairings, Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter.”

I don’t think any great poem necessarily exists in order to be comprehended, but “The Waking” tips further east on the comprehension–apprehension spectrum than most of the poems that inhabit me. Etymology teases out the distinction between the two poles. They share prehendere: to catch hold of or to seize. Comprehend derives from comprehendere: com, meaning “with, together,” with a sense of “completely.” Apprehend, meanwhile, is from apprehenden, to grasp with the senses or mind, to grasp, or take hold of, physically. It’s the same action, a catching hold, with a difference of what I first want to describe as degree, though I think that impulse is merely the result of our old Cartesian wheelrut, the one that privileges the thinking mind over the sensing body, that doesn’t allow that the mind might feel, the body think, despite the plain fact that there is no mind without flesh, that the inarticulate gut is packed with neurons.

When “the mind” catches hold we say we understand, we comprehend; when “the body” does the catching, we have apprehended. And yet don’t we experience a third kind of grasping? Apprehension allows a mixed state, one in between: a knowing that precedes thought, a physical sensation of insight, a clicking-into-place as we proceed through a well-cast metaphor:

Life
Candle flame
Wind coming on

(from Asian Figures, trans. W.S. Merwin)

We comprehend the meaning before we can say it, and the sensation it engenders—the quiver in the chest, a chill on the nape of the neck—similarly precedes our own words. Think of walking on an icy sidewalk and seeing someone, even a stranger, slip: your own stomach lurches, and you reach for them before you can think I will help. There is something inside of us that calls to connect, that can’t help itself connecting. There is something that knows what to do. I want to call it presence, a moment of perfect awareness in the instant of apprehension. Not the awareness of having awakened, but an ongoingness, an eternity of the present: a waking.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke

Martin Kennedy Yates is a poet and mixed-media artist (as well as many other things) based in the Black Country. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University and began to seek publication for his poetry around this time. Since then, he’s been published widely, including in The Rialto, Stand, Magma, Poetry Wales, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Broken Spine.

He’s led and collaborated in workshops and multimedia projects with other artists and featured on Brum Radio Poets with Rick Sanders. This Wilderness & Other Concerns is his debut collection and it won The Broken Spine Chapbook Competition in 2024.

I’ve known Martin for a little while now and consider him to be an excellent poetry friend and all-round human being. I was delighted for him when he won the Broken Spine competition and was lucky enough to see an early draft of the book. Then, as with reading again more recently, I was struck by the inventiveness and ambition, as well as the humour and pathos. Martin is very sensitive to real human quirks and foibles, and his characterisation is spot on. As a reader, you really feel for this cast of characters the poems summon.

And what a cast. The book is divided into three parts: This Wilderness, Other Concerns, and a sequence of so-called Scousenlish poems. This Wilderness is a kind of modern day Brummie reckoning with TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. As such, it’s presented as a collage of different voices, places and identities that weave in and out of each other and the spaces they inhabit. The middle section, Other Concerns, is a collection of shape poems ranging through personal, spiritual and political concerns. And Scousenlish … Well, we’ll come back to Scousenlish.

Victoria Spires, This Wilderness & Other Concerns

Geoffrey Squires in conversation with Fergal Gaynor, LegalHighsPress, 2025, £4.00

This fascinating little book is a record of a conversation carried out by email over a number of years, with half a dozen Squires poems dotted through it, in order of original publication. The conversation ranges across the body of Squires’ work, both original and translation, starting from 1978’s Drowned Stones through to the 2024 volume Triptych, reviewed here. And it is a conversation; though the focus is on Squire’s work Gaynor is not just asking questions. For example, he offers a detailed and compelling case for reading the book-length sequence that is Drowned Stones as a verse bildungsroman, a reading that Squires agrees with.

It’s a tricky book to review, so I’ve decided to focus on what is the main thread that runs through the conversation, Squires’ evolving view of the nature and role of language. Here’s one of the things he says:

Insofar as language poetry is founded on the belief that language constitutes the world, á la Wittgenstein, I think mine embodies the exact opposite. Ever since I was a boy, wandering the hills above our house in Raphoe, I have been struck by the limitations of language, the difficulty and often impossibility of describing or expressing what we perceive, visually, aurally or physically, the fact that language only partly covers the world. So, paradoxically, while my work is often and obviously preoccupied with language, and thus may have a superficial resemblance to LP, in fact it stems from the diametrically opposite position. In it, the verbal is often under threat from the non-verbal, and has only a tenuous or precarious hold on things.

Much as I admire a great deal of language poetry, I think Squires is making a significant point here, and one that reflects his move away, rejection of, the ‘short personal lyric’ poem as discussed earlier in the conversation. In a sense, his discrimination can be read as a more nuanced replacement of the distinction between, for want of better terms, ‘mainstream’ and ‘experimental’ poetries; poets either believe in the efficacy of language in charting or constituting the world or they accept and embrace its imperfections as a medium. On this spectrum, it could be argued that Robert Grenier has more, philosophically speaking, in common with Seamus Heaney than might meet the eye.

Billy Mills, Geoffrey Squires in conversation with Fergal Gaynor: A Review

Something about “the drying soul / of the world” made me think of an oil painting by Donald Roller Wilson that pulls us into the room ghosted by its inhabitants. There is always a tinge of ghostliness in representational art that seeks to depict an interior.

Wilson wrote a poem to accompany (or enhance) (or revision) (or animate) his painting. Reading it adds [to] the scene a bit: many of the actions — peeked inside, seen the light, we fooled, it seemed, she was inside — play [with] the idea of seeing against the materiality of the sight. I treasure the way Wilson keeps the whole lettering of “all” in the closing portmanteau word. Moving back and forth between the image and text, one has the sense of being populated by the voices in Mrs. Jenkins’ “interior,” looking for verbs inside the shadows and left- open drawers.

Alina Stefanescu, A few by William Heyen.

When I come across a title that connects math and poetry, I become interested — and want to read more. Google helped me discover here, in China Daily, an article featuring German professor Andrea Breard entitled “Reading numbers like poetry: A journey into ancient Chinese math.”  She goes on to tell about some algebraic methods that were written as poems — the rhythm allowing easier and better memorization.  

Andrea Breard is a German historian of mathematics, specializing in Chinese mathematics.  Her remarks took me back to my childhood when we frequently repeated “counting rhymes” as we dressed or played or whatever.  “One, Two, Buckle my shoe …” and “Hickory, Dickory, Dock . . . the mouse ran up the clock …” were frequent  parts of my childhood chatter.

JoAnne Growney, Reading Numbers Like Poetry

I am behind on more things than can be dreamt of, in your philosophy. The days of the past few weeks have been breathless, moving task to task, keeping my head above water. Our spring poetry festival organization moves ahead, I work a stack of reviews, I am putting together a mound of spring chapbooks. Every evening: Fold, staple, repeat. Fold, staple, repeat. I address and fill envelopes. Everything moves as it should, working up to a particular deadline of our Vancouver trip, attempting the space in which to take a small breath. So that I might breathe.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

It’s at least a year since I’ve written anything that’s been accepted. What am I doing wrong?

• Maybe I’ve been writing too much, and the quality’s gone down – well I’ve certainly written more this year. My output in 2025 was 5 poems, 36 Flashes and 7 stories – about 22k words. I’ve hardly ever written more in a year.
• Many of the magazines I used to be in frequently have gone – I’ve found nothing to replace Poetry Nottingham (20 poems) or Weyfarers (24 poems).
• I’m reluctant to pay submission fees, but the magazines most suited to my work now ask for them – I’m generally in favour of fees. $3 for 3 poems or a story is fair enough. However, I struggle with paying $3 to submit a single 100 word piece of Flash.

This year I shall pay to submit stories that I think merit publication – a couple of my favourite stories remain unpublished – and cannibalize the rest.

Tim Love, Rejections 2025

I amused myself this week when I found myself emerging from the rabbit hole that was me reviewing my hair in my poetry videos. It had started as a dedicated period of time to tackle some admin jobs and before I knew it I was giving my hair ratings out of 10 in the videos. I am not sure how productive this was, but it definitely entertained me. Along the way I loved rediscovering the poem about the time I felt a sudden urge to get a haircut on holiday, and the way everything the following day suddenly became linked by things that cost seventy pence. It has not been published anywhere, but I do like the fact that it is a poem that sets down a moment in time.

Sue Finch, HYDRATION, CONVERSATION, AND GOOD COMPANY

My task this week is a return to the play script I began in November, whose subject matter and more is drawn from a chapbook series I wrote two decades ago.  Revisiting archer avenue has been wild, even thought I love these poems and feel like they came at a time when my work was evolving quite quickly. Initially, I managed to draft what felt like a decent few acts, but on rereading, much like the fiction I occasionally try to write, it felt rather boring and ho hum compared to the poems I was working on in the interstices. I’ve spent the last few weeks reading and researching poetic drama (not necessarily verse drama) but feel I may be getting close to integrating the poetic and the dramatic with an eye toward performance. The result is a mix of portions of the original chap blended with dialogue and action sequences that I think may work well (or it may be a starling disaster, we shall see.)

The ordinary language feels flat sometimes when you are trained, as a poet, to be highly specific and imagistic. To create something out of nothing on the page. With drama, the dialogue becomes speech yielded amidst a barrage of other elements that make up the stage. The movement and performance of the actors who are the mouthpieces. The sets, the lights, the logistics of mounting any production (moving props and sets and setting a mood.) Luckily, my previous theater experience makes it easy to juggle these things, but then again, its the language I am struggling with most. The ordinariness of it. 

Kristy Bowen, on poetic drama

On July 12, 1873, in Brussels, Verlaine shot at Rimbaud with a pistol injuring his left wrist after a long and stormy affair. Rimbaud decided to leave Brussels without immediately pressing charges. On the evening of the incident, Verlaine and his mother accompanied him to the Gare du Midi where Verlaine behaved even more erratically. Fearing that Verlaine might shoot him again, Rimbaud sought police intervention, leading to Verlaine’s arrest. Verlaine was charged with attempted murder, underwent a medico-legal examination, and was interrogated about his relationship with Rimbaud. One of the police examination reports read, “In morality and talent, this Raimbaud (sic), aged between 15 and 16, was and is a monster. He can construct poems like nobody else, but his works are completely incomprehensible and repulsive.”

After the bullet was removed on 17 July, Rimbaud withdrew his complaint and the charge was reduced to wounding with a firearm, and on 8 August 1873 Verlaine was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Mons city jail. In jail, where Verlaine spent 555 nights, he composed his finest poetry. […]

If one looks at his black and white photographs, the one in which he is young, it’s quite arresting: a young man with a sort of troubled regard, impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit like a true Parisian, and bearing the weight of a heavy moustache, he is the portrait of a poète maudit, accursed poet, a term used for poets at odds with society with a life marked with crime, insanity, and addiction. Verlaine himself composed a work titled Les Poètes maudits, as an homage to three other accursed poets (apart from himself): Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. 

I think I could never be a respectable person and I don’t think I would ever refuse to be photographed alongside thieves and pimps. I would like to walk in the rain, slightly drunk with absinthe, grateful for my accursed life. I would like to hold a rose in my hand that I know will wilt. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Paul Verlaine

I came upon the work of Clarice Lispector because I read about her in the work of Kristjana Gunnars and after reading this passage I thought to read again one of Lispector’s Chronicas. It’s titled “Yes.”

“I said to a friend:
— Life has always asked too much of me.
She replied:
— But don’t forget that you also ask too much of life.
That is true.”

There are books that are gifts and there are some that surpass, so generous are they, and The Silence of Falling Snow is that. I’m grateful for the thinking through of living, of being there for someone at their ending, of all the details, observations, dailiness, intermingled with the thoughts of others, the Buddhist philosophy and its application to the conditions at hand.

She reminds us that if the wood is wet there will be no sparks to light a fire. “Conditions for clarity of thought have to be created; they do not happen on their own.” Which is something to think about in a number of contexts.

Shawna Lemay, Bibliotherapy: Loss and The Silence of Falling Snow

the snow falling. a buried house. one day
my brother & i went too far. his boots filled
with snow. he does not remember this now
so i often wonder if i made it up but
i took his feet in my hands
to warm them. breathing on my own fingers
& flexing. the blood, a water cycle.
corn husks all sleeping gilless under our feet.
i think i saw my reflection too in the snow.
it was that bright.

Robin Gow, two feet

独り言落として枯野から帰る　山路　花

hitorigoto otoshite kareno kara kaeru

            dropping a monologue
            I return
            from the withered field

                                                            Hana Yamaji

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), June 2023 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (January 20, 2026)

Stand here so that your view is between those two trees. Do you see the telephone pole at the bottom of the hill? Now look directly above that to the top of the hill and then to the right. There is a tall tree. You will see the pair of them on different branches in that tree.

Locating birds is an intimate act. Numerous times, I have smelled the detergent or musk of a fellow birder as they approached me to guide my view to a kinglet or warbler. I am always reminded of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Lying While Birding”:

Yes Yes

I see it

so they won’t keep telling you

where it is

But I saw them, the pair of Bald Eagles, as my husband guided my view. While living within such an undesirable and regressing timeline, our attention has gone more to the birds, books, and each other’s interests. He has taken to building things. I dive into making and learning about art. He wants to work out more with me. I want to raise mealworms. We spend time on our own branches within the same tree. […]

If one were to have used their binoculars, they would see two people on the path in the distance. Both of them hold binoculars. The male holds a camera and wears a bright orange hat. He smiles at the female. Between them their voices materialize into a cloud and dissipate in the air around them. In cold air, sound carries. If one were to listen closely, they would hear a conversation about serendipity and the romance of two animals following one another. Eventually, the two people would walk off together into the distance, a snow squall enveloping them.

Sarah Lada, And the Rest Is Rust and Stardust

Have you told your daughters
your most important stories, what they
should do with all these books and all
the trinkets you saved from your other
lives? You’ve never had a financial
adviser but now you’re standing in
the lobby of his building, about to take
the elevator up to your appointment. Perhaps
this means something in you still believes
in the future, something now willing
to join the game of risk and gain.

Luisa A. Igloria, Returns

This week: a magic baby, the local megaliths, over two million lights, the way a poet blinks, and much more. Enjoy! See you in 2026.

The color of the year is charcoal, and these
are the ashes with which we paint over this
sparkling holiday, dimming the fairy lights
into a gentle distance, glow to glimmer.

PF Anderson, Sonnet

The poems are curious pinpoints set as a kind of sequence. They are minimalist, although less imagistic than narrative, offering narrative moments, albeit sans context but for themselves, and perhaps the suggesting of grouping, although more as a way to understand how to approach them, perhaps, as opposed to any kind of particular interconnection or narrative line. The pieces pinpoint, individual dots on an expansive grid, which can’t help but begin to form shapes, if even unconsciously, as any reader might go through. […] Davies’ poems are, each, individually complete in their incompleteness, fragmentary in nature, and less an exploration in density than a way of looking at narrative through a keyhole, perhaps.

rob mclennan, James Davies, it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall

Gabriel, if you like, be not afraid, to follow that shimmering orb

until you find a hurried and poetically humble stall, there a magic baby

waits to fisher stitch an empire’s myths. What if things were not

as we thought them? What if we were wrong, lost, lost in all of this?

james mcconachie, Yet Nothing You Dismay

I love these quieter days after Christmas. Today is the first day I’ve had entirely to myself since term ended, and I’m spending it by:

– finding new shelves for old bottles

– reading poetry by Morag Anderson and Maggie Milner, and choosing poems for January Writing Hours

– plotting with Kim by text and arranging our live events for paying subscribers for January, February and March

– arranging broken bits of pottery into categories which are obvious only to me

– making whisky liqueur so that the house is full of the smell I remember from Christmas Eve

– looking for the local megaliths I’ve been ignoring for years – until I discovered The Megalith Portal in Fiona Robertson’s “Stone Lands”. Then my partner bought me “The Old Stones” for Christmas, and now all of the big stones on the moors are transformed, and a new obsession is born!

I’m wishing you light, and I hope that however dark or busy your day, there’s time, however snatched, to do the things that make you happy, or comfortable, or warm.

Clare Shaw, If You Need More Light …

At the heart of Deryn Rees-Jones’ new collection Hôtel Amour (Seren), there is a sequence of twenty-four sonnets which flip for the first time into the first person – following the third person of the early section, ‘The Hotel’, and preceding the (mostly) third person of the later section, ‘The Garden’. And at the heart of this first-person sequence, there is a poem, Sonnet xii, in which the poet addresses her thoughts to her deceased husband, the memory of whom is anchoring her sense of self to her weakened and virus-riddled body. And at the heart of this sonnet, like all of them neatly bisected into seven-line stanzas, this clause straddles the whiteness of the central break:  

…and me

like a kite flown from the beach as you look up to hold me…

(Sonnet xii)

At the very heart of Hôtel Amour, then, is a ‘me’, and then a blank space, and then a metaphor, and then a ‘you’. And my reading of this collection is that it is an attempt – and a brilliant one – to fill in, or at least to give some definition to, that blank space that sits between the ‘me’ and the ‘you’ and which is therefore at the very centre, the unknowable centre, of the self. More specifically, this is the blank space between Rees-Jones and her husband, the poet Michael Murphy, who died of a brain tumour in 2009; but in taking on the project (started in 2019’s Erato – and earlier in the elegiac poems of Burying the Wren in 2012) of exploring her grief, she moves far beyond elegy, and builds a serious and profound meditation on what it means to be a human subject.

[…]

Towards the end of the period that I was reading and writing about Rees-Jones’ work, my mother-in-law passed away from pancreatic cancer. Watching and speaking to her in her final days as her body failed and witnessing the awesome spectacle of my wife taking on the full responsibility for the care of her mother at home, gave many of Rees-Jones’ words a new significance, especially those relating directly to her husband’s premature death. I returned to my essay on her work and found that I no longer thought some of the things I had thought before my mother-in-law died. New thoughts came to me, based in a fresh awareness of the bodiliness and the gravity – I might almost say the sanctity – of a human life ending. What had always seemed like a very good collection, had morphed into a profoundly serious and important one. This essay, then, is a substantially revised version of the one I originally wrote, and even now I am aware that my present reflections are also probably provisional, perhaps fleeting, but certainly contingent.

To return to the ‘me’, the blank space and the ‘you’, and the failed attempt to define the space between them through metaphor which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay; it seems to me that the world of meaning-making where this attempt takes place is the world that exists somewhere between the writer and the reader, fully belonging to neither but for which each bears responsibility, albeit of a different type.

I think about the revisions and reworkings in Rees-Jones’ work, I think about her celebration of the necessary failures in art and life, and I think about her speaker’s fragmentary voice speaking brokenly into a whiteness of blank paper. Then I think about my own revisions, my own failures.

I think about the still point of the turning world, where the dance is.

And without my fully understanding why, the people around me – both in my memory and as physical presences in my life now – suddenly seem more important.

Chris Edgoose, Revised reflections on Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones

My friend and collaborator Arnold McBay is an artist and musician. He frequently makes intriguing short films exploring very elemental objects such as clouds and branches. These often move slowly, change slowly, emerge to be only more themselves. He is always finding the surprising and mysterious quiddity of things with perfectly simple means.

Last night he sent me a short film (1 minute long) of branches moving as if they were the hands of a clock. This is exactly my kind of thing and I couldn’t resist and so asked if I could write some text and make the audio for it. So I did. I wrote a short poems and made an audio track from the sounds of breaking sticks and a typewriter (since the poem refers to the trees “writing” and the repeated sounds of the sticks breaking sounded like a typewriter.)

I was intrigued by the idea of a tree “writing” in time by growing. How a tree is a kind of writing in time. Of time.

I wrote the poem and it was ok, but line to line, a bit flat. So then I had the idea of mixing up the lines in order to create more energy between lines. I remembered how a student had showed me how she randomized lines using Excel and a sorting procedure. (You create random numbers using the RAND function in a second column and then sort the numbers from high to low, bringing the lines you’ve inserted in the first column with them and thus into random order.)

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that random was more interesting than my original order. Thank you, Mr. Cage. But part of the reason is that it breaks apart the logical chain between lines that is initially created. Sometimes I run a poem backwards for the same reason, though it maintains another kind of order. But the leaps between lines are larger and therefore have more energy. The mind leaps like a squirrel between branches in order to form the poem. Always more exciting to get the reader more involved and/or thinking like a squirrel.

Gary Barwin, Set the Alarm for Spring: why random is better

Last week Peter and I sent a new episode of Planet Poetry out into the world, featuring our interview with Niall Campbell about his excellent Bloodaxe book The Island in the Sound, plus various festive shenanigans. Yippee! We’re still going strong, even though fewer new episodes this season. We’re both enjoying the reduced pressure, to be honest!

I had a fabulous time reading at the Poets Cafe in Reading a couple of weeks ago. Hosts Vic and Katie were so welcoming, and the audience was warm and very switched-on. There was an impressive open mic. I sold a few books, both The Mayday Diaries and Yo-Yo, now well into its second edition.

I’m not writing a great deal at the moment, but I’ve been making an effort to send a few poems out. Gratitude to The Frogmore Papers which will publish a new poem of mine in the Spring. And I’m thrilled to have The Mayday Diaries as the current featured publication at Atrium. Huge thanks to editors Holly and Claire.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on new ideas for my quarterly spreadsheet which seems to have a life of its own these days. I’m frequently surprised and touched by the messages of support I get for producing it. It seems the poetry magazine landscape is a sprawling and confusing space and people are thankful for a tool that helps with both navigation and motivation to keep going.

Robin Houghton, Seasons Greetings

I wasn’t going to do a chart for the end of the year…all a bit of a busman’s holiday and the like, but the arrival this week of the wonderful new issue of Finished Creatures containing a new poem by me made me reconsider…Thanks to Jan for taking a new new poem from me…A poem written and finished in 2025 as well which is good work; looking back at my notes I can see the first scribbled notes/draft was 30th January and the final draft was sorted on 4th August. […]

The collected data would suggest that 2025 has seen an overall increase in the number of poems sent out, and certainly an increase on recent years. I’ve crunched the numbers and the number of unique submissions has gone up YoY again – which is good, I think.

But it comes down to the success rate (or does it?)

Maybe it’s working (maybe it’s Maybelline, etc), but we’ve seen a 100% increase on 2024 in successes. It looks a little different if we present this as counts, but either way the numbers are up. And I thought this had been a crap year (for many reasons).

Mat Riches, What a count…

Bless the Christmas Number One.

Thank you for the nightmare in which they
deny using white phosphorus,
deny they shot a man who was emptying a bin,
deny they shot a woman who was mending a carpet,
deny they bulldozed a tent filled with the chronically sick,
deny mass graves.

Bless the turkey and all its trimmings.

Bless the Boxing Day breakfast of buttered toast, eggs, bacon and beans.

Bless the football match we’re going to later.

Bless both teams.

Bless the abyss of the human mind.

Bob Mee, A CHRISTMAS POEM FROM TWO YEARS AGO…

From across the boulevard, crowds stream
toward the entrance to the battleship whose nine

16-inch guns, three triple-gun turrets, twenty
5-inch dual purpose guns and forty-nine 8-inch

Oerlikon auto cannons are decked out in over two
million lights. To get to the main deck, the lines

(single file) must navigate two bridges, but only
after walking through the museum converted into

a white wilderness. In one hall, an animated
tree. In another, strung on wires from

the ceiling, a polar bear treads air.

Luisa A. Igloria, Light Show

To visit (or live) in a country that is not yours by birth is an enlivening and sometimes, bewildering experience. A student came up to me at the festival and told me I had an excellent personality (!) and someone else told me I was the best poet that they’d ever heard read — it was a time out of time experience.

Now, typing this post in the quiet of my Seattle home, the cold wind beating the trees and electrical wires outside, it all seems unreal. A world where poets and poetry take center stage. A place where poets from all over the world come together? Yes, dear reader, this exists.

After the festival finished, I visited my friend, the fabulous poet and educator, Anil Oomen, who was on sabbatical, conducting research in Southern India. Anil is from Kerala, a state in the south of India with the highest literacy rate in the world. It is also famous as a home for writers, painters, filmmakers, and fabulous fish.

How did we meet? Nearly 29 years ago, Anil took a poetry class with me in Eugene, Oregon. I was a newly minted MFA graduate and he was a stay at home dad who needed to get out of the house. In that little class of seven, held after hours in Black Sun Books, Anil brought in a poem (a palindrome) about his first language, Malayalam. The language of Kerala where he was born and lived his first five years. All of a sudden, he was teaching me about this incredible language and culture. From that poem (later published in the South African journal, Carapace, that I was guest editing at the time) the idea came to me that someday Anil and I would travel together in Kerala. 29 years later, we have.

I think bringing poets together to generate new work in beautiful places might be my dream for retirement.

Susan Rich, Elizabeth Bishop Travels to India for the Kolkata International Poetry Festival

Today’s Christmas poem is by R. S. Thomas, not generally known as the most celebratory of poets and offering an appropriately chilly version of festive spirit here. One for anyone who’s feeling a bit Christmas-ed out by this point!

Blind Noel

Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
on the heart for another
snowflake to reveal a pattern.

Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow
of so vast a God I shiver, unable
to detect the child for the whiteness.

Victoria Moul, A Christmas poem, no. 2

I’m only on Chapter 4 but am finding, in the etymological tracings of the words that intersect in meaning(s) for play–game, contest, gambol, gamble, dallying, tournament, match, riddle, performance, frolic, pretending, folly, fun, sport, etc.–fruitful stuff for poetry, for thinking about poems and about how poems work as craft, as poems, and as works of art and imagination. And also, what roles poems may play in culture today, and whether that differs at all from the role poetry played in ancient times. Huizinga writes:

“In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ‘sparking’ between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.”

Language may not be necessary for play but can easily be incorporated into it, and language can become play. Or playful. I don’t know much about Wittgenstein, but I find myself thinking of his theory about words having “family resemblances” that often connect, overlap, shade meanings. So we get jokes, puns, flirting, mocking, and new “rules” for our language use that culture constantly shifts in all kinds of directions. Language is a game-changer, and poets make use of that.

Ann E. Michael, Play’s the thing

It’s a shame we can’t embed playable text into Substack, isn’t it?

Also a shame that I didn’t have time to make a new version of Ice Dive, as I’d been planning to. This version is a little buggy, the mechanics are unbalanced and many of the lines need further shaping and shuffling.

But I wanted to end the advent calendar on a ludokinetic poem and this is the only ice-themed one I have — even counting the many pieces sitting around in various states of completion in the workshop. It was originally devised so as to be playable over a Zoom call — the player merely has to shout “Stop!” when they want to come up for air, whereupon I (the person in control of the game) click once to bring them back to the surface.

For what it’s worth, it is possible to finish the game, collecting all seven pieces of the ‘something’ it is you’re collecting. I’ve only managed it once, though.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Ice Advent Calendar #10: Ice Dive

Hatfield is foggy this morning, and most of the snow has melted off. My adult kids have returned to their towns, and the holiday leftovers eaten or tossed. I’ve got some books to mail, some poems to send to the black hole of Submittable, and a few new drafts to sit with. 

I woke this morning with the remnant of a dream in which I was talking with a famous poet (I won’t say who) about how heavy poems were. Lately I’ve been working on a poem about trains.  I have my father’s old Lionel train set, which he gave me a couple years ago (I can’t say inherited, because he’s still living, but inherited feels more accurate). While I didn’t really care for toy trains when I was a kid (I had a Tyco racecar track instead), they seem important to me now because it was important to him that I or my brother take the set rather than let it go to a stranger. It’s a post-war classic train set about 75-years old, and amazingly still mostly works. I even added two new cars myself, and the old engine manages to pull them. This year it chugged a circle under my Christmas tree. 

Grant Clauser, The Weight of Poetry

I am the superior
officer who loses the paperwork
or makes up the statistics.
I am the one who ignores
your e-mails, who cannot be reached
by text or phone, the one
with a full inbox.

When the wise ones
come, as they do, full of dreams,
babbling about the stars
that lead them or messages
from gods or angels,
I open the gates. I don’t alert
the authorities up the road.
Let the kings and emperors
pay for their own intelligence.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Border Lands

This was the year that finally convinced me that humanity is devolving as a species and that we are past due for an extinction-level event, so Earth can hit the reset button. Nihilistic, perhaps, but if you’ve been watching world events – especially the U.S. descent into authoritarianism and isolation – then you know exactly what I mean. 

The deaths of David Lynch, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, and Rob Reiner hit me especially hard, since I remain an unrepentant film buff and those [four] were among my favorites. Every year, more and more of my icons pass away, which also brings my own mortality into focus. 

Maybe that’s why much of this year was dedicated to what Kate Bush refers to as “archive work.” I’ve got another box of materials almost ready for the Georgia State University Library Archive, which is the repository for my papers, manuscripts, and ephemera related to my writing life. While this will be an ongoing process until I kick the bucket (and beyond), I’m nearing the end of culling through 40 years of writing. 

During the most recent dig, I uncovered a small grouping of poems – some dating back to the 1980s – that I’m currently sorting through to see if anything is worth revising or will just go to the archive. I also found handwritten pages of another story that belongs with my long-simmering collection of tales in the fictional town of Cottonwood, GA (the first four of them are in Kiss Shot, which was published as an ebook back in 2012). Of course, this has me eager to get back to work on this collection, but at the expense of the fourth Venus novel.

Collin Kelley, A look back at 2025

Still a couple days left to read but I’m adding to best of list now,

The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson, illustrated by April White (Brick Books, 2025) which gave so many aha moments on chronic illness and concussion, and consumer culture, and pure amazement at her rendering poems from trash container text.

and from backlist titles,

But Then I Thought by Kyla Houbolt (above/ground, 2023) which impels me to buy her book too. What a crisp, alert alive mind!

Pearl Pirie, Fav Reads 2025, Addendum

[…] He knew they were important, even if
he couldn’t quite recall which one was which,
or how he’d landed in this unknown bed
this perfectly nice place that wasn’t home.
*
Another poem from my current project, an expanded volume of Torah poetry. This poem arises out of parashat Vayechi, in which Jacob — now in Egypt — blesses his grandsons and his sons.

When I imagined Yakov nearing the end of his life, I remembered visits with my father in his last months and weeks. I remember what he had forgotten and what stayed with him. I remember trying to steer away from my mother’s absence. (No reason to make him grieve her loss again.)

After my siblings and I had moved him into assisted living (with his approval; he understood, at least in flashes, that he couldn’t live alone any more) he lost track of things more quickly. That’s normal, I know.

I remember a visit when he said, “I’m not sure where this is? It’s not home, it’s just — the place where I stay now.” I can imagine Jacob, away from his familiar surroundings, maybe feeling the same way.

Rachel Barenblat, Not home

Ben Lerner describes one of his dreams involving Keith Waldrop. In this dream, Ben is an undergrad “trying to impress Keith by saying something about Olson’s ‘Projective Verse.’ When I finish my little speech Keith is quiet for a moment and then says: “It’s always seemed to me that lines of poetry are broken less by the way a poet breathes than by the way a poet blinks his eyes.”

Alina Stefanescu, Guston and allegory.

I’ve been tossing my phone aside a lot, which, in essence, is a surreal way of tossing aside an entire universe. Because I read books, I am often faced with a deluge of reels where highly-curated humans talk about the same 15-30 books. Because I write in journals, ads show up in my feed of highly-curated humans who look and act out the part of an observant human pontificating their surroundings, pen in hand. Because I go on walks, reels and reels of highly-curated humans talk at me about living an “analogue life”, off the phone. Journals, books, puzzles, watercolors, and all the things that I see when I look up from my phone are romantically and aesthetically displayed on my screen. Because I do not engage in or click anything, the algorithm has only a vague nebula to work with. I do not know how many pages of a book a person could read in the time that it takes to curate, create, and edit a reel about annotating a book. The cogs and wheels of the manufactured lifestyles and hot-takes continue. When I toss my phone aside, so do I.

Sarah Lada, American Idiot

My father would have none of it
“China elephants as holiday gifts?
Oh no, they always bring bad luck.”
And who would openly court misfortune?

When a child there were moments
I sensed elephants in the living room
the drum taut tension of things unsaid
We tiptoed around their slumbering forms.

Paul Tobin, WE TIPTOED AROUND

One of my favorite books, in spite of its flaws, is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. One of my love languages is giving gifts. I love the exchange of gifts, especially when you find something you’re certain the other person will love.

In his book, Hyde says:

1. A true gift loses its power if it is hoarded or sold. Gifts should be like a river. You should always feel like you can pass them on when you don’t need them. (I like to think that he’s a big fan of white elephant parties.)
2. Art, he says, is a spiritual act. It creates a sense that we are alive and belong to the world. I like to think that the work I do is part of that circle of creation, not just a bounce of profit; that we are in the sacred fire.
3. Market economies thrive on strangers, on isolation. Gift-giving builds communities with stories and myths, and when they are shared, they create a kind of magic. Red Hen’s supporters feel like that to me. You enter a circle, and when you contribute to our growth, you become a part of our family.
4. The cultural commons—the shared arts, literature, dance, gardens, museums, public spaces, and all else created by those of us in the creative spaces—become more and more integrated into our being the more we participate in them.
5. The more we give and expect gifts, the more we create a world where gift-giving is the norm, and we build trust that we can rely on others for support.
6. Artists are stewards of the creative spirit; we sit in the well of the collective unconscious and drink.

Hyde’s examples of artists who participated in this lifelong sharing include Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. If I were to suggest a rewrite of The Gift, which I wouldn’t, I would suggest replacing Pound with Toni Morrison. Pound, despite being a celebrated poet, went to prison for treason, hated the Jewish people, and had an utter contempt for women and people of color, neither of which he would support in publishing.

I am a fan of literary citizens. Toni Morrison is one. She built community by taking time from her own wildly important writing to mentor, teach, and sit with young writers, discussing their creative lives. Her students loved her. They said she was spellbinding in the classroom and an amazing mentor. This kind of literary citizenship is what Red Hen Press is built on—the idea that the arts can only exist and thrive in community.

Kate Gale, In Which I Step Away from My Cliff and Ride a Horse

alone in the waiting room
checking the plant
for reality

waiting by tom clausen

I know you’re supposed to size up the previous year and set goals for the next, but I feel like 2025 was somehow rougher than it could have been—the bathroom renovation was a too-long-and-too-expensive nightmare (I’m glad to have the disability-friendly bathroom, but it took a LOT of time and money and took a toll on both my health and Glenn’s)—rejection on the writing front, an increase in MS symptoms for the last six months (hence the brain MRI), and the political nightmare that is America right now—I want to be grateful and count my blessings, but for now, I just feel like shutting the door on the last few years and hoping for some more normalcy—for myself and my country—in 2026. Just wishing doesn’t make it so, of course. I know a lot of people who had a difficult holiday season—health emergencies, layoffs, losing parents and loved ones, divorces, or learning to care for parents who are getting older. I am sending good thoughts to all who are struggling right now.

If I have some positive hopes for the new year, it’s maybe a trip to Europe and a residency in spring on San Juan Island, maybe to find a good publisher for my seventh book, maybe a part-time regular job I could count on instead of scrambling for freelance stuff all the time, better health for me and my family? Less drama, more fun. Less spending, more appreciating the things I have. More time for friendship, adventure, inspiration? At my age and with so many things out of my control, I don’t do “goal setting” per se like I used to for each new year, but I do try to envision something positive—small joys, the chance to reset, a chance to embrace something new.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Stressful Christmas, Thinking about 2025, and the Year Ahead

The snow makes it all quiet. Away from the windows, away from the dinner, there is a blanket over the earth, the air is scrubbed clean, and nothing is moving. I wish it would snow for a year, and the telly breaks. Then the radio goes off, and we forget to talk, and we get a year of this crispy breathing quiet.

John Siddique, A Christmas Poem

日記買ふ白く輝く日々を買ふ　内村恭子

nikki kau shiroku kagayaku hibi o kau

            I buy a diary…
            I buy days
           shining white

                                                Kyoko Uchimura     

from Tashin (Gods), a haiku collection of Kyoko Uchimura, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo, 2025

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 26, 2025)

This week: poems in which the word ‘snow’ matters, the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental lyric, a guy running in the park, a word that feels like a sort of dignified sadness, and much more. Enjoy. And happy holidays! I hope to be back for one last edition of the digest before the New Year.

The darkness comes earlier every day, and we depend on electric light to illuminate our faces, everyone home around the table after a hours away.
My dad died the day after Christmas.
One of my children never born was due a few days before Christmas.
The last hours of daylight slip over our neighbors yard in a slanted line, a tightrope line between fear and despair.
Their nativity–even Joseph–golden, lit within.
And Santa is a neon outline on the siding, red and white, his blue eyes laughing.
Inside our home, I hang up lights that twinkle, strands to cast a glow in the empty living room in the evening.
I keep a fire burning only for its light.

Renee Emerson, The Language of Loss

Listen! Nothingness.
Look through it.
Swollen river.
Swans in mist.

Moonlit puddles, iced.
Look through, past.
Sit for a bit. Doze.

Bob Mee, POETRY AS AN UNCERTAIN COLLECTION OF NOISES

The snows have come. This means many things. Even the birds on their fly-highways can’t help but be found out. Everyone must land somewhere. In winter, the black-capped chickadee’s flight is an arcing applause that ends in the cedar tree. Their plaudits celebrate seed and suet. And with every landing avian talon a crystalline flower plummets into the white tapestry below. And below that tapestry, worm and pupae dot the deeper soil in their chambers. Everyone, including the hunkering deer, pretend to be stone.

Sarah Lada, The Valley Dwellers

Three more poems featuring snow which must be in conversation with each other and perhaps with Rossetti too: Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’, Robert Frost’s ‘Desert Places’ and Philip Larkin’s ‘The Winter Palace’. Three wintry poems by three wintry poets. Three poems in which the mind is like winter, because winter is nothingness, and so is the mind. Three poems in which each poem feels a little differently about the mind being a kind of nothingness.

Three poems, too, in which the word ‘snow’ matters, though Frost is the one who makes it work the hardest:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

Fast, snow, fast. It doesn’t snow much here in London, and when it does snow the snow rarely settles. It doesn’t snow anywhere in England as much as it once did, which is one of those facts which, when I remember it, gives me the chills.

Jeremy Wikeley, Snow on snow, snow on snow (on snow)

There is a meadow across from our subdivision which does not belong to anyone. There are no lawnmowers on this meadow where a coterie of crows conduct their general assembly each morning. There is a four-way stop sign but the stop looks ashamed and some say there is  a ghost that haunts the meadow and what the stop sign feels is akin to dread. There is a crow whom the other crows caw around and he is likely the lead crow likely his name is Frank. There are parents who will not let their children play in the meadow because it is full of weeds and buttercups and fire ant mounds. The parents want someone to own the meadow and develop it. There are many ways to say develop without meaning to but there are no ways to say develop that do not involve the destruction of something else. There is a child developing their interpersonal skills which means she learns to stop imagining the crows conversing in the meadow. The child will develop beyond freeze-tag, and when she has developed appropriately this child-part will be dead. There is a distinct tinge of ache she will feel when passing the meadow but the pain will be located in a phantom limb. There is no way to discuss the pain we feel in parts of us that don’t exist anymore. There is a meadow and crows and fire ants. There is a place waiting to die. There will be cupcakes and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. There are people who will call the cupcakes an improvement.

Alina Stefanescu, Rant.

only the empire thinks,
“there are not enough data centers.”
a warehouse full of little machines.
our bodies like lakes wrapping
around them as if we can brush
our teeth with horror. as if the salmon
will still be able to speak to us.
a dry wishing fountain full of pennies.

Robin Gow, uses for water

I know I have to rise from the small low chair
whose seat bears my grief print

Seven days of sitting with all that quickened love
sickness

Still so opened; still the quivering shell
of darkness

Jill Pearlman, City Shiva

I arrived in Paris on 10th September, 2024. When I first came here, I wasn’t sure if I were going to stay beyond the summer of this year but it has been one year and a few months that I have been here. In this time, I haven’t really left Paris except for a few days. It has not been long enough to call this hallucinatory city home but it has been long enough to not find it entirely foreign: it is a liminal city, like a person who you have known for a long time and then suddenly 

not 
at 
all. 

Saudamini Deo, Leaving Paris

Solstice: a clear day here in the Netherlands with the sun breaking through as I type this.

My holiday reading is sorted. The seven books include translations from French, Spanish and Norwegian. The latter an interesting set of haiku and haiku-like poems about the Japanese ski-jumper Noriaki Kasai.

Broken Sleep Books use the world’s largest on-demand publishers. The parcel came from France: no import duties, no VAT, no waiting while parcels linger in the customs depot. A bonus!

Fokkina McDonnell, Solstice and poetry

At the very beginning of the seventeenth century, a period in which epigrams were at their most intensely fashionable, we find many examples of Christmas epigrams. This one, on the symbolism of celebrating mass three times at Christmas, is much more succinct than our anonymous late 16th century student, but it’s structured around the same point: that Bethlehem marks the convergence of Noah’s Ark, David and Christ. The final four lines run as follows:

Nocte prior, sub luce sequens, in luce suprema
   Sub Noe, sub templo, sub cruce sacra notant
Sub Noe, sub Dauid, sub Christo sacra fuere
   Nox, aurora, dies, vmbra, figura, deus.

The first at night, the next at dawn, the last in the daylight
   They mark rites under Noah, under the temple, under the cross:
Under Noah, under David, under Christ were made sacred
   Night, dawn, day, shade, shape, god.

The very popular Epigrammata (1616) of the Dutch Jesuit poet Bernhard Bauhusius (van Bauhuysen, 1576-1619), one of the first Jesuit Latin poets to have a significant influence in England, treats the topic entirely differently. He writes in a highly emotive and imaginative mode, as if the poet were present at the manger, singing to the baby, and reminding Mary to shut the stable door.

Lectule, lectule mi, dulcissime lectule, salue;
   Lectule liliolis, lectule strate rosis.
Ah nec strate rosis, nec liliolis formosis;
   Verum & liliolis, & benè digne rosis.
[…]
Claude MARIA fores, en algida, nuda tremensque
   Prae foribus stat hyems; claude MARIA fores.

Crib, my crib, my sweetest crib, greetings;
   Crib spread with tiny lilies, spread with roses.
Ah not spread with roses, nor with beautiful tiny lilies;
   But truly worthy of tiny lilies, and well worthy of roses.
[…]
Mary, shut the doors, look how icy, naked and trembling
   Stands winter at the doors; Mary, shut the doors.

This placing of oneself at the Biblical scene derives from Jesuit meditative practice, but was quickly influential upon poets who were not themselves Jesuits or even Roman Catholics — including George Herbert, who, along with the Franco-Scot George Buchanan in the sixteenth century and the Polish Jesuit Casimir Sarbiewski, was among the most influential religious poets of the period in England.

Victoria Moul, How to write a Christmas poem in early modern England

Soaring hollow-boned and prehistoric over our infant species, birds live their lives indifferent to ours. They are not giving us signs, but we make of them omens and draw from them divinations. They furnish our best metaphors and the neural infrastructure of our dreams. They challenge our assumptions about the deepest measure of intelligence.

Because birds so beguile us, they magnetize our attention, and anything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. In every reflection, a reckoning; in every reckoning, a possibility — a glimpse of us better than ourselves.

That is what Nobel laureate Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930–March 17, 2017) conjures up in his shamanic poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” — an eternal vision for reprieve from the worst in us, written in the final years of the Cold War, the war that could have ended the world but was abated, not because we are perfect but because we are perfectible, because peace is possible, because, as Maya Angelou wrote in another eternal mirror of a poem, we are the possible.

Maria Popova, If Birds Ran the World

Through text, photographs, visual text, waveforms, erasure, utterance, polygraph charts and accumulation, [Eric] Schmaltz explores the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental lyric; exploring certainty and uncertainty, as he investigates text-forms and perceived truth, attention, poetry and poetic form. A caveat, whether descriptor or warning, by the author at the offset, offers: “This book is a document of truth’s performance under duress. // Some of what you will read is true; the rest is poetry.”

In many ways, the core of the book’s content is familiar—who am I and how did I get here—but examined through a unique blend of experimental and confessional, each side wrestling for a kind of control that might not be possible. Given the foundation for this particular mode of inquiry is the use of polygraph, it introduces a whole other layer of tension, of resistance: “I confess,” as the poem, the pages, repeat. “We’re going to focus on some background questions.” Schmaltz writes, “This part of the session ensures that you are able to speak truthfully and that you are mentally and physically fit to proceed with the polygraph test today. // Please answer the following questions truthfully.” There are occasionally ways through which certain conceptual poetry-based works can articulate human elements more deeply, more openly, than the lyric mode, something I felt as well through Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Book 1 (Coach House Books, 2015) [see my review of such here], and Schmaltz manages a dual-core through this work that counterpoints brilliantly, working from the most basic of human questions across a structure of the nature of being, the nature of expansive, articulated, inarticulate and impossible truth, composed across an expansive bandwidth.

rob mclennan, Eric Schmaltz, I Confess

Very excited to get my contributor’s copy of Laurel Review, which has my poem “Biodiversity (In the World of Fairy Tales)”—and also work by a ton of friends, Steve Fellner, Amanda Auchter, Michael Czyzniejewski, and local Allen Braden. I love when I get to read my friend’s work with mine! […]

Since tonight is the Solstice, I’ll try to remember to light a candle (even an LED one counts) and think about what I want to leave behind and what I want to happen in the new year. A friend of mine recommended a “reverse bucket list,” which involves listing accomplishments you’ve already done and crossing things off your life list that you don’t need or want (skydiving? No thank you! I’ve already parasailed, zip lined, rock climbed, rappelled down a mountain, and ropes courses galore…don’t have anything to prove about that stuff anymore). The point is that we often discount things we’ve already accomplished and feel anxious about things we want that we haven’t accomplished yet (more money! more fame! more accolades! etc.), so this is a way to feel more gratitude and less stress.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, New Poem in Laurel Review, and Holiday Coping Mechanisms

Earlier in the year, my North Sea Poets workshop looked at the masks a poets might wear and why they might wear them. There are creative reasons, like being able to make an imaginative leap or garner a new perspective by a change of position, into someone or something else. But there is also the potential for renewal – when one’s own writing has hit too comfortable a groove, when one’s gestures and turns come too easily, too mechanically, for there ever to be any tears or surprise.

Heaney still serves us as a great guide today, not only for his poems but his essays – and especially his long interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones. It is a comfort to any poet to read that, seventeen years after Death of a Naturalist, Heaney himself was sensing the limits of where his writing had taken him. Facing this staleness, he put on the mask of Sweeney, writing poems in the guise of the cursed madman of Irish myth. Doing this, something new opened up for Heaney’s poetry. Heaney himself states ‘I felt relieved of myself when I was writing them’. ‘I felt up and away, as one of the poems has it. At full tilt. Reckless and accurate and entirely Sweenified, as capable of muck-racking as of self-mockery. The poetry was in the persona’.

Helen Vendler, in The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry is sure of the positive effect on Heaney’s poetry of Heaney becoming not-Heaney for a while:

‘The outlaw role of Sweeney permits Heaney to assume the mask of an alienated warrior, of a wilful temperament (that of Miłosz, that of Cézanne) in many ways unlike his own. The assumption of a persona cannot, of course, be a permanent solution to the problematic aspects of one’s own personality and culture but in resorting to the masks of Miłosz and Cézanne, Heaney can glimpse further authentic extensions of his own imagination.’

There’s an appealing paradox in all this – for Heaney to carry on as himself, he had to spend some time being someone else. There is writer’s block, yes. But I think I feel my own symptoms as closer to this second type of stasis – where I have perhaps hit the limits of whatever first voice I had, and where the desire is to discover the ‘authentic extensions’ of my own writing. The desire to feel again that I might sit at a page and anything could happen. The memoir pieces I’ve contributed to our Substack have been the unexpected trialling of such a shift. Maybe in 2026 such experiments can bring my writing to newer, fresher ground.

Niall Campbell, What If It’s Not Writer’s Block?

I must try and remember how darkness is not to be feared or resisted, like this morning in the yoga studio when the instructor dimmed the lights and we submitted to the shadows around us as well as those within us.

child’s pose*
letting go of ourselves
to become ourselves

*Child’s Pose (Balasana) is a grounding, inward-folding pose that encourages introspection and confronting inner truths.

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Winter Solstice 2025

Thra-Koom! was an e-pamphlet published 15 years ago by Silkworms Ink.

It’s a short sequence of superhero poems — comic-book-based, since the Marvel Cinematic Universe hadn’t really made its appearance yet. For this little advent calendar, I should arguably have revived ‘Iceman’ — but I’m not sure that poem has a lot of heart or depth to it, and I’m not quite as invested in Iceman as I am in the Silver Surfer.

The Surfer, of course, appeared in this summer’s Fantastic Four: First Steps, portrayed by Juliet Garner, in a mildly controversial (though ultimately inconsequential) bit of casting. A male version, played by Doug Jones (of Pan’s Labyrinth and other monster movies) appeared in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer — Jones did a better job of brooding philosophically, aided by Laurence Fishburne’s baritone voiceover, but neither portrayal really connected with the version of the character I’ve found most affecting, which is rooted in Stan Lee and John Buscema’s run of Silver Surfer comics from 1968 to 1970. Here, the Surfer is almost wretchedly noble and introspective, frequently shown in poses of contorted anguish as he faces godly adversaries, existential crises and the self-destructive stupidity of vicious men.

“In every voice … in every human heart … a smouldering hostility!” he laments, squatting on a rooftop while Spiderman tries to pick a fight with him. The messaging is fairly crude — these are comics for children, after all — but it remains refreshing, even today, to read about a superhero who is made vulnerable, even driven to despair, by his sensitivity to man-made horror.

Why is this version of the poem called ‘Or, from the Mountain’? I suppose because I wanted to revise it into something with more of a folk flavour. What if, rather than being coated in silver, the character had an association with orichalcum, the mythical metal referred to in Ancient Greek texts (from ὄρο / óros / mountain and χαλκό / khalkós / copper)? The mountain as a source of power, rather than the space god Galactus, is also a little more grounded.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Ice Advent Calendar #9: Or, from the Mountain

O naraniag
a bulan, Un-unnoyko indengam the lover sings

in serenade to the moon. It floats, seemingly
remote, a silver coin in the atmosphere

above all the petty currency of our lives.
It’s been an age since I heard these lyrics—

Toy nasipnget a lubongko/ Inka kad silawan
Tapno diak mayyaw-awan— a prayer for some

brilliance to spill into this dark,
something to point the way onward or out.

Luisa A. Igloria, O Bright Moon

My thoughts are with Michael and team at London Grip for their recent technical disasters that mean the majority of the London Grip archive has gone. LG is a source of wonderful poems and reviews, and I feel for the folks there as the disaster was not of their making. Poets, if you’re published online make sure you take a PDF download after…

In lovely and unexpected news this week, I saw there was a new episode of Planet Poetry. That , in and of itself, is cause for celebration. And it was great to hear the interview with Niall Campbell that was the main focus off it. I mean, I say main focus, but arguably he was more of a support act to Robin reading one of my poems in the second half. I wasn’t expecting it at all, but what an honour.

Robin did an excellent job reading Riches (about 48 mins in) from Collecting the Data. It was very strange to hear someone else reading my work. It’s a new experience for me, and has made me look at the poem again in a new (and good) way. I hear the beats of the poem differently now, even if they haven’t changed. It’s know the advice is to read your poem aloud when writing, but you’re still yourself when you do it, so to hear someone else do it is really quite educational. And very moving. Thank you Robin and Peter. Listen to the ep for the poems and interview , the poem from Kay Syrad and the bloopers.

Mat Riches, Peace to all on this Cluttered Earth

During my ridiculously lucky 3-night residency in Miami last week–praise to SWWIM and the Betsy Writer’s Room!–I worked on a multipart poem I started in October. The sequence begins by conjuring a tiny land snail. A brainstorm occurred to me on the sand, because in South Beach you’re basically obligated to do some of your thinking next to the Atlantic: hey, I should end the sequence with the Great Pink Sea Snail! As a seventies kid catching the 1967 movie Dr. Dolittle on TV once in a while, I adored the giant snail, which you may remember carries some of the characters back to England from Sea Star Island. Its watertight shell, pearly-pink inside, is the size of a small house, equipped with gauzy curtains and baskets of fruity refreshments. What a ride.

And wow, what a racist, sexist, bloated, boring film. I rewatched much of it, often on fast-forward because it’s painful in every way possible. I also went down the internet rabbit-hole to learn that Rex Harrison, whom my mother loved, was loathed by many who worked with him (the rudest, most selfish person they’d ever met, they say, and worse–it’s always worse). I’m guessing the Great Pink Sea Snail swam so fast mainly to get away from him.

I have some ideas about why the snail captured my imagination. My long-ago dissertation on U.S. women poets was called The Poetics of Enclosure, after all. I’m attracted to inward-turning spaces–like the lyric poem–that also, paradoxically, make room for big ideas, aspirations, and feelings. That gorgeous shell offers protection and secrecy while also enabling movement.

Lesley Wheeler, The Great Pink Sea Snail rides on

Part of the test for the poet-mother is that the child is a distraction from writing. In Dead fly, she is faced with the dilemma of using the time when he is asleep to write or to catch up on sleep herself: ‘Do I creep/ the aching floorboards and return to bed, or enter the other dimensions where verse spills/ from head to notebook in the study?’ It is not that she has nothing to say, the ideas will spill from her head but she is exhausted and to choose sleep will leave her feeling guilty and unfulfilled. The poem ends with: ‘I pick up the baby monitor/ make my way/ along the corridor/ which groans/ and will never stop.’ This final image is rich in meaning: it embodies her sense of desperation that she will never find time to write again; it conveys the obligations of motherhood being endless; and it evokes a sense of the speaker’s exhaustion.

 In the concluding poems of the collection the speaker resolves this tension between being both mother and writer. In Second wind, Mahon writes: ‘Despite the lopsided balance of those early years/ weighted in exploring maternal conventions,/ the daily rotes pulsed along a blurry sweep/ and became my art.’ She finds a way of integrating writing with motherhood. Practically, she uses the time when her son is at school to write: ‘My hands cradle/ coffee mug as he walks to school./ Freedom loops his step/ The blank page stares.’ However, more than that, it appears that this new life as a mother becomes the poetry. ‘In isolation,// this mother’s creativity found its nook/ in a tedium punctured by guilt, self-doubt./ I’d spy the notebook and pen,/ hold words in my head/ till my hands were free.’ Motherhood becomes the inspiration, it provides the words which she would hang on to till she had the opportunity to write them down.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Cry’ by Katy Mahon

In “Fragments” Tara Singh has created a powerful sequence of poems exploring the power/status imbalances that trap victims with abusers. Singh demonstrates awareness of how form, whether free verse, duplex or using symbols to represent words indicating where victims can’t speak or where words aren’t enough, can work with a poem to convey and enhance meaning. Singh has a compassionate, interrogative eye.

Emma Lee, “Fragments” Tara Singh (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

If you’ve ever been pursued by someone who purports to love you, if you’ve been hassled, threatened by a person-thinks-they’re-god, who won’t just leave you alone, who doesn’t respect your simplest boundaries, then this poem, which is at one level praising the persistence of divine love, will send a chill to your heart, as it does now to mine. 

If you’ve ever had this said to you, “I love you so much I’ll harm myself if you don’t XYZ…,” then the whole Hound-poem thing looks more terrifying and manipulative than pinnacle of Victorian ode-writing. No wonder Francis was “sore adread”. No wonder he, in the absence of twenty-first century trauma-informed therapy, capitulated to the Hound in the end. No wonder even the care of others who rated his poetry couldn’t help him give up his opium addiction. 

I’m sorry, but English Literature O level notwithstanding, I think The Hound of Heaven a ghastly poem. I know it was written in a different era. I know it rhymes, and is an extended metaphor, and is thought to be great, particularly by those who share Thompson’s faith, but that’s not enough to redeem it for me.

I’m grateful, nevertheless, that the poem exists for this reason: Thompson and his Dangerous Dog highlight the importance of choosing the right hound to live alongside. One that’s cool, self-sufficient, has a band of kind and reliable archetypal friends. A dog who sleeps on his back atop his kennel, listens to Woodstock speaking in Bird, writes novels, and recognises, and has compassion for, human foibles. Most of all, a hound who is at peace with his own doggy, dogged nature, and doesn’t feel the need to capture and dominate others. 

So, Snoopy! I choose Snoopy as my hound for Christmas, and for life.

Liz Lefroy, I Choose A Hound For Life, Not Just For Christmas

The Sunday School pageant director embraced
the medieval ideals. Mary would have dark
hair and a pure soul. Joseph, a mousy
man who knew how to fade into the background.
Every angel must be haloed with golden
hair, and I, the greatest girl, the head
angel, standing shoulders above the others.

It could have been worse. Ugly and unruly
children had to slide into the heads and tails
of other creatures, subdued by the weight
of their costumes, while I got to lead
the processional. But I, unworldly foolish,
longed to be Mary. I cursed
my blond hair, my Slavic looks which damned
me to the realm of the angels.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Christmas Pageants, Modern and Medieval

He loved it all (the music, the tree, the tinsel, the Rankin and Bass, the hot chocolate, the gifts, etc.) So every year, I played along, my heart warming a little bit each time. I knew how much it meant to him. So I found one thing I could get excited about with him: Lights. Candles. Always with a quick flashback to that hidden menorah. The one my grandmother couldn’t openly take out to burn each candle properly. Maybe that’s why I hoard and feel so brazen about burning candles now? It’s a generational comeback, a return to roots, a “pour-one-out-for-močiute”* kind of thing?

*Lithuanian for granny, grandma

This also seems to track with my alignment with pagan solstice, the time of year I genuinely feel a shift within me. It’s not so much Christmas for me, it’s the light in spite of the darkness, the long nights, the blankets of snow that seem to insulate all earthly sound. You can hear the trees going into long slumbers. They creak. The moon, the sky, the wind are all bare, raw, crisp, and stark. I like this reality. It makes me feel small, properly insignificant—human.

And so, I am still devoted to light as a way to connect with him, even, devastatingly, in his absence this year, my first holiday without him. I light candles in my home almost every night, but most specifically, a candle upon his altar. I have been fiercely ardent in the ritual of lighting the candle. It is a way to call to him, to fixate myself in the moment of stillness, to be present when the veil between us drops. I can often sense that he appreciates the fire light as a gate through which to communicate. Earlier this summer, I played one of his poems aloud near the flame and it seemed to dance in synch with the poem. For a brief moment, the reflection in the glass of the candle holder seemed to morph into the shape of his face.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Looking for matches.

There’s something strange about opening a fat parcel of books that bear your own name. It doesn’t seem real, and when you read your own words on a tangible white page rather than a screen, it feels quite odd, and also rather wonderful.

I have been lucky enough – or I should say WE have been lucky enough – to be published by the fine Welsh publisher Briony Collins at Atomic Bohemian. It’s a collaboration between me, and the chemist and poet Stephen Paul Wren, on the subject of microplastics, those tiny fibres shed from the everyday plastic items that we take for granted.

Stephen’s viewpoint as a scientist is somewhat different from mine. I collected historical plastics like bakelite for many years, admiring the sculptural or art deco designs, and the astounding technical innovations of the early and mid 20th century.

I have sold most of the collection, including 55 bakelite or catalin wirelesses. What started out as a wonder substance has become a threat to the environment, and to human and animal health. The thing I loved has become a dirty word.

When I discovered that Stephen shared my worries about microplastics, we decided to write a book together. Some of the poems come in two parts, one written by him, the other by me. Many of them have footnotes directing the reader to the scientific papers or articles which sow the evidence behind the poem. Of course we have extrapolated from the current facts or hypotheses, and the result is often surreal and disturbing.

Lesley Curwen, Opening the author’s copies

The top 10 and the top 2 dozen of the year. Some of these were really tight calls. And a have a dozen still underway that I may finish this year. Could happen.

2025 Poetry:

Toward an Origin Story by Laurie D Graham (Model Press, 2025)
Seed Beetle by Mahaila Smith (Stelliform Press, 2025)
Hawk & Moon by Han VanderHart (Bottlecap Press, 2025)

[…]

2 dozen “Backlist” Favs

Poetry:

Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin (Brick, 2024)
To Assemble an Absence by John Levy (above/ground, 2024)
Sweet Vinegars: poems of wildflowers by Claudia Radmore (Shoreline, 2024)
Heliotropia: poems by Manahil Bandukwala (Brick, 2024)
Slowly Turning by Marco Fraticelli (Yarrow Press, 2024)
Small Arguments: poems by Souvankham Thammovongsa (M&S, 2003, 2023)
A “Working Life” by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2023)
Notes on Drowning by rob mclennan (Broken Jaw Press, 1998)
still the dead trees: haiku by Robert Piotrowski (Red Moon Press, 2017)
The Weight of Oranges: poems by Anne Michaels (M&S, 1997)

Pearl Pirie, Fav Reads 2025

I wonder if I make too much of this but the ghost of mortality clings to me this December a danse macabre in which each step, each pirouette, leads further towards an unstoppable incapacity. How many things become impossible, every day? How many are disappearing, right now?

[…]

My first post on Substack was on Christmas day, last year. It has been a spectacular adventure on this platform. A huge thank you to those who subscribed and followed and read and liked and commented and even bought my book. Am greatly encouraged to continue to write and share and learn and grow in this wonderful community. Wish you all the very best of the season. May the new year come with kindness and grace.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Countdown conversation

Once the holiday hubbub dies down and the lonelier, cold January days arrive, I have poetry workshops to look forward to. They’ll be online, which suits my schedule in winter. Last year, I enrolled in two such workshops and found they spurred me to get a good deal of writing done, so I figured I might try repeating the process. Anita Skeen is doing another series for The Friends of Roethke Foundation with readings, prompts, and discussion on “writing toward wisdom.” In Dickens’ era, I’d be considered old enough to be wise (though most of us, Dickens certainly included, know better about age inevitably bringing wisdom). But the operating word for Skeen in this case is “toward.” It will be interesting to see where she takes her workshop participants in the new year.

Ann E. Michael, Last messages

Equinox is from the Latin aequus—equal—and nox: night; solstice is from sol + sistere: sun standing still. While our linguistic relationship to equinox is one of measurement, the solstice is phenomenological. You can’t quite apprehend a day and night of equal length, though I guess you can stay awake with a couple of stopwatches if you really want. But light that comes later and later (or earlier and earlier), night that falls faster and faster (or slower and slower) is a persistent reminder that we are whirling around the sun at thirty kilometres a second, no matter how much slower (faster) it feels.

Tranströmer’s lyric lives in this moment of renewed awareness, opening with a moment of revelation that carries into observation:

One winter morning, you sense how this earth
rolls forward. Against the walls of the house
a blast of air rattles
out from hiding.

Every moment of every day, you know the earth rolls forward, but that’s not the same as sensing it, as perceiving it, which requires the body’s assistance: the ears that hear the rattle of air, the skin that feels the ice embedded in blast. So awakened, the speaker lingers in his awareness, figured as a sort of shelter:

Surrounded by motion: tranquility’s tent.

This is the first solsticey bit for me, the standing still, which here enables a new kind of sight, one that also now perceives the “secret rudder in the migrating bird flock” and hears “Out of the winter darkness / a tremolo.” It’s a lovely, subtle transition that sets us up for what’s coming, tremolo being by (my) accounts a summer word. From the Latin tremulus, meaning “trembling,” it is a word movement and of song, the willow’s thousand thousand leaves shimmering above the wind-stirred pond, the delicate flute of the wood thrush. The stanza is enjambed, a moment that recalls the enjambed opening line; like that instant in which we await the first revelation that shifts us from stillness to movement, the source of the tremolo is withheld across the break, and once again motion meets stasis.

Vanessa Stauffer, “In the Surging Prow There Is Calm” by Tomas Tranströmer (trans. Patty Crane)

the way
the light bulb rests
in the rest of the trash

smokestack sunset by tom clausen

We’re a week away from Christmas. The weekend snow is melting, though still hanging around. My kids will be coming home soon and I hope to share some winter hikes with them.

Anyway, the lovely poetry website One Art published two Xmas-themed poems of mine. One takes place in a dismal shopping mall where a pall of the season’s (year’s) malaise looms over everything except the lone mall caroler.

The other is mostly a metaphor for the hard passage of time, the burdens we carry, especially this time of year–typical holiday stuff.

You can read them both here at One Art.

Grant Clauser, Almost Christmas Poetry

I think people treat things like Chat GPT as an oracle, when really it’s more like mirror. If what it is reflecting is faulty or misinformed, it too will be faulty and misinformed. If you tell it to write poetry, it will write what it thinks poetry looks like. One of the hilarious things I kept encountering when using the image generators I tried out was that it took things far too literally. I was mostly making faux artifacts in vintage camera styles–cabinet card photos of Mothman and dollhouse dioramas of creepy Victorian houses. But the more specific I got, the more erratic the generator became. While most AI art could hardly be called art (and many artists violently balk at even that conversation)  I have seen people do some really cool things in the horror genre with it.  I still like its possibilities for creating collage elements in Canva I can’t find among stock photos or things I can actually use.  I just wish it compensated artists it scrapes from and didn’t use so much water. 

In [the television series] PLURIBUS, the collective operates not unlike an LLM. If everyone shares the same brain, no new creativity can come from it—at least not any that doesn’t already exits or Frankenstein existing things together. 

Kristy Bowen, the mirror and the oracle

וְנִשְׁכַּח כּל־הַשָּׂבָע בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם וְכִלָּה הָרָעָב אֶת־הָאָרֶץ׃
All the abundance in the land of Egypt will be forgotten. (Gen. 41:30)

Isn’t that what trauma does?
We forget we ever felt otherwise.
This grief is reality, has always
been lurking under the surface.
This is life, this emptiness.
This is all life is, or ever was.
Sink to the earth and give in.

But Yosef says no. Stick photographs
on the fridge. Preserve sungolds
for a snow-day pizza topping, apples
into applesauce for latkes.
Talk to Shekhinah in the front seat
of your car. Even in the dungeon
you are not alone.

Rachel Barenblat, Seven lean years

The other day I found myself a bit overwhelmed with my dead. It must have been the coming-on of Christmas, hanging ornaments on the tree that made me think of me and my little mom doing that together. A guy running in the park put me in mind of my brother. Some guy’s facial expression on TV made me think of Dave. I’m shopping for new skis, which made me think of Art, who would have had what I wanted and would have given me a discount. I heard myself say in my head “Oh…mygod,” just the way Emma used to say it. And I’m glad not to be once again wrangling with Kathy about not wanting her to give me a gift but her wanting to give me a gift so me trying to come up with something I wanted and then having to come up with a gift for her. Geesh, woman, give it a rest. And she did.

And I felt bereft, a word that to me feels like a sort of dignified sadness, with its measured e’s balanced on either side of the fulcrum of r, and that efficient ft cutting off any great show of grief. So I walked bereft in the gray wind. But then solstice, and the coming-on of light, bit by bit. And someone told me the stars are aligned in some way that only happens during times of great change.

And so I resolve to stay present, both with my dead and with my living. Both so surprisingly full of light. And here is a poem by Kathleen Lynch that cracks me up. And isn’t that what we want art to do, crack us up a little bit.

Marilyn McCabe, I eat the many possibilities

The fourth and final poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Samar Al Guhssain.

Mihrab, by Samar Al Guhssain, translated from the Arabic by Batool Abu Akleen.

Samar Al Guhssain is an 18-year-old poet from Gaza. This is her first publication. 

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 4: Mihrab, by Samar Al Guhssain

I’ve always been fascinated by those traditions that treat books almost like people. In the Jewish tradition, sacred books that are damaged or not used are not destroyed, but buried in a cemetery. I find this beautiful and haunting. I’ve been burying books in my garden and then exhuming them. Here is a video of one. I left it outside for a long time and then I buried it. Then dug it up.

The image makes sense to me. A book interacting with the world. With earth, with the elements. Rain. Sun. Wind. A book resisting decay. Or fulfulling its natural role of engaging with life and death. Transformation. Beginning in the earth as seed then growth to tree, toppled, made paper then a return to earth. As with ink. And whatever cycle ideas undergo. The book as a part of the infinite number of processes of change, Emergence, decay, resurgence.

I know in one way a book is a cultural object and this framing is fanciful, ecoromantic. But in another way, everything is part of the process. It may be a precious poeticization to say so, but broadly, it is true. And a book, its bookness, is always implicitly a metaphor. It’s a kind of visual poetry: not just examining the letter but a larger form. Its medium.

This book is a body. A landscape. And you can see how it has begun to merge with its environment. Leaves, maple key, dirt. Its words have disappeared into its burial. Have changed state. Changed statement.

Gary Barwin, Haunted (Buried) Books: Remains that remain.

地球儀が鞄に入り日短　常幸龍BCAD

chikyūgi ga kaban ni hairi hi mijika

            a globe
           fits in a bag
            short winter day

                                                BCAD Jōkōryu

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 20, 2025)

Many cultures do not regard January 1st as a significant date at all. The Lunar New Year is at the end of January. The Jewish New Year is in the fall. The Persian New Year is in March. The Islamic New Year is in June.

You may have your own individual new year. Personally, I consider my birthday to be a more significant date than the Gregorian New Year. (Though as I get older, both dates have come to feel equally depressing.)

Another problematic aspect of New Year’s resolutions is one I wrote about last year. I suspect this might be the true reason so many resolutions fail. That is, they are so often tied to self-recrimination. The very nature of making resolutions for change implies that we believe something in our lives needs fixing. We insist on change because we are convinced something is broken, often that we ourselves don’t measure up. Resolutions tend to begin from feelings of unworthiness.

I will start that novel…because I’ve been such a slacker.

I will commit to writing more…because my output sucked last year.

I’ll send my work out more frequently…because my CV is pathetic.

I will make more time to write …because everyone else is moving ahead while I twiddle my stubby little thumbs.

It’s only natural that our plans for self-improvement would fail in a headspace like this. (Your thumbs are beautiful and perfect, by the way.)

Truly, what is the motivation to push harder, work more, create bigger, when your mind will invariably become a bossy scold who never appreciates what you do? Nothing is ever good enough for you, your inner self is bound to rebel. And by month two, motivation tanks.

For this reason, rather than pledge oneself to some new agenda, some grand life change, I think it’s better—more gratifying, more compassionate, more motivating—to commit to something you’ve already begun. This means looking at your writing life and finding habits, practices and actions that are working right now.

It’s so easy to castigate ourselves for all the ways we haven’t met our goals or lived up to our own expectations. What about acknowledging what you’ve already achieved? Celebrating what you’ve found exciting in your process? Commending yourself for your already-habitual efforts and hard-won discipline?

And then, committing to simply keeping it going?

Becky Tuch, Q: What are your New Year’s acknowledgements and resolutions?

When you first discover kissing, it is a wonder. I thought kissing was all I would ever do. I remember kissing in cars. For hours. I remember the fog on the windows as the music played. It was the late Eighties. “Heaven is a Place on Earth?” played while I kissed a boy in my four-hundred-dollar car that I had to roll start each morning. The kissing went on and on; there was Madonna, Queen, Michael Jackson. […]

In the Year of the Horse, I may still be figuring out the next act, but it is going to include kissing, because, as my friend Ron Koertge says in his fairytale poems, kissing transforms us. The next kiss might be from my dog, Maja, or from my husband, but I will continue to lean into love. In a year like this, love, joy, and gratitude—these are what have sustained me in the belief that a kinder future is ahead.

Kate Gale, Kissing in the Year of the Horse

a small horse leans into her juniper tree. a lost whisper

recovers its body. love and silence will cut life’s thread.

i feel the splinter in my palm burrow on.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: poems talking to poems, optional depth, the moon in a well of whisky, and much more. Enjoy.

Hiking with Wild Iris in my mind, the poem that opens with that line – at the end of my suffering – I saw my children stomping the dead leaves, and over them the trees holding what they had left like torches in mid-day.

A door, at the end of suffering.

What if – I had been that week testing the thought – there is no door.

It is terrible to survive.

The darkness comes early, the flowers (the wild iris) rests underground, the trees pull back to bare limbs.

Yet, I can’t deny or ignore –

some months later, at first with the faintest signs, a return.

Each year the death of winter, rebirth of spring. An inescapable metaphor for even the likes of me.

Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.

Renee Emerson, At the end of my suffering, there was a door…

And how does the writer’s life change during the holiday season? Do you find yourself writing more or less? Is shopping or holiday card sending taking up time you would usually spend investigating journals or publishers? I haven’t been writing as much as I would like lately, holiday or no holiday, but I did manage to get a few submissions out after a pretty brutal book rejection the day before Thanksgiving (kept for more than a year with a “sorry it took so long” message after I’d been a finalist there multiple times. Ouch.) I’m starting to feel less sure about this book, which I used to have so much confidence in, my best book yet (I thought), fun and maybe even necessary. It’s also a little feminist, a little speculative, and more open about disability, which may mean it doesn’t appeal to everyone, especially in these “risk-averse” times. Anyway, think good thoughts as I send the manuscript out yet again, along with some poems. 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Thanksgiving, Holiday Times at The Nutcracker, Local Wineries, Mt Rainier and the Writing Life Holiday Edition

Thanksgiving morning, in a house with no wi-fi, and a writer determined not to use her hot spot until the last possible minute because she, unlike much of the U.S.A. does not want to pay for unlimited data on her cell phone. But she knows what to do. And so she writes the old-fashioned way, typed in a Word document that will be uploaded later.You thought the writer might use a pen? She’s not that old-fashioned—she still has electricity! And she’s willing to pay for the version of Microsoft Office that’s always available, regardless of Internet access.

That writer, of course, is me. I’m being cautious with my cell phone usage because one past Thanksgiving of reckless abandon showed me how much data can cost, when I left the hot spot function on overnight. I am educable.

But I’m also delighting in disconnecting. I’ve gotten a sermon written in the past hour since I got up. If I’d had connectivity, I’d have spent that hour looking at stuff on the Internet, and likely feeling dispirited. Now I am feeling virtuous!

Long ago, I did write with a pen and paper, and I do remember that I had to fend off distractions then, too. Back in those days, I might be tempted to read the newspaper before I started—the old-fashioned kind, that arrived on the doorstep, not on my computer screen. The world is always trying to pull us away or lull us into complacency or sedate us—or terrify us or make us feel inadequate.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Thanksgiving Morning

around one candle the whole of november has gathered.

a lost bird from the dark flutters against the window.

the eyes of the watchers look like seeds from the oldest branch of night.

Grant Hackett [no title]

When I tell people I have been to the precinct to sing I often follow this up with, “not randomly on my own”. And the thought of me rocking up just to stand there and sing by myself makes me laugh. This would most definitely not work! In the group I know when I can trust myself to belt it out. I also know when I am in danger of being out of tune, and need to pause my singing.

I love the feeling in my chest and soul when the voices of the more competent singers shine. And being part of that is magical. The high notes rise and I remember to come in with the lower part at the right time and I can feel the sparkle of what is being created by many voices coming together. Sometimes I zone out when singing and temporarily forget where I am. This is quite entertaining when I come to and find myself singing along in tune and inhabiting the song. It was however slightly embarrassing at a recent rehearsal when I came to and heard the familiar intro of ‘This is Me’ only to forget that it was solo part and definitely not my turn to be singing even though that’s what I did. Fortunately I was in tune and quickly realised I should stop.

This week I was also celebrating the cover of a new poetry anthology called ‘Safety in Numbers’. This is another powerful reminder of what can be done when people work together. The idea for the book came from Gill Connors, and each poet was sent a poem to respond to with a poem of their own. Thus the poems were written in chains… each poem inspiring the next… women talking to women… poems talking to poems.  I am delighted that my poem Stunt Girl will be in these pages, and that it came into being because of Gill’s project.

Sue Finch, SOCK MONKEY

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

As a kid I wanted to write fiction, not poetry. I wrote some bad short stories. A turning point was picking up Raymond Carver’s collected poems and realising I preferred his poetry to his short stories. Then the bug bit me.

I like the idea of poetry as literary popcorn, literary snacks, literary hors d’oeuvres. You can eat something mind-bending and delicious. Then another, but sadder. Then another, but funnier… and you never really get full. Just tired. […]

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?

My girlfriend teases me by describing my poetry as – ‘What if a chair was sad?’ – and really, can you think of any greater theoretical concern than that?

I don’t see my poetry as truth-telling, proclamation, or a call to action. I see it more as storytelling, and I like being comfortable with ambivalence and uncertainty.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Guy Elston (rob mclennan)

Here I am once more, sallying forth into a topic I am barely qualified to talk about, because I had an idea that I couldn’t let go of. But if you can accept my permanent status as an enthusiastic amateur, we shall begin.

I posted a poem over on Instagram on Monday, which had been written rather hurriedly in response to an exhibition of Gianni Versace’s designs and influences I’d seen the day before. It was way more interesting than I thought it would be, and the sculptural, structural quality of the clothes made me feel a bit sexy, and so this poem was the result.

The game of wrong pleats

After Gianni Versace

The game is to imagine wearing the dress

The game is to know he placed vertical interruptions

in the spaces a thumb would come to rest

The game is a slow thumb, ruffling the body

against itself

The game is to hold your thoughts aware, in plié

The game of the fold between structure, and release

The game is to whisper the words pleit /plicare / please

Now I don’t know whether this particular poem will do it for you, or not, but I did get to thinking about what it is that makes a poem sexy. What are the qualities of a good sexy poem — one that you have to hold your breath a little bit to read, one that makes you bite your lip involuntarily? I started to speculate to myself that a lot of it is about control, and restraint. As with poetry in general, but even more so in the case of the sexy poem, perhaps it relies heavily on what’s left unsaid, as much as what is said? It does indeed feel a bit like a game. The writer and the reader are playing truth or dare with each other — and also with the other person or persons in the poem if there are any (poetic polycule, anyone?) — and they’re each waiting to see how far the other will go, hoping it’s just far enough to keep them interested.

Victoria Spires, Ribs, ass and figs

In the Cummings poem, the growth of daisies in spring is associated with love and sex. This motif of spring (and especially April) is one of the most consistent elements of his poetry. Here’s another of my favourites:

yes is a pleasant country:
if’s wintry
( my lovely )
let’s open the year

both is the very weather
( not either )
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
( and april’s where we’re )

Cumming’s poems are so memorable and so delicious to say that it’s easy to miss their concision and the remarkable flexibility that he wrings out of supposedly rigid English word order. Cummings studied Latin and Greek at school and as an undergraduate and in the way he puts words together (if not in other respects) he is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most convincingly Horatian of the English poets. Seven translations of Horatian odes made while a student at Harvard show many aspects of his style already in place and hint at how stimulated he was by Horatian language and metre. Two of those seven translations are of Horace’s “spring” odes 1.4 and 4.7.

Victoria Moul, Love is a deeper season: e. e. cummings and Horace the fascist

I heard someone say torch, and recalled
my friend’s story about how, when her sister

was married, her new husband gathered all
her underwear and threw it into the fire.

This was supposed to show how his passion
for her meant all other loves before him

were to be incinerated. Some words eclipse
others in the wake of their arrival.

Luisa A. Igloria, Trousseau

Every Sunday during Advent I will post a link to a poem by a leading Palestinian or Gazan poet.

Today’s poem is by the Palestinian poet and photographer Dareen Tatour.

Detaining a Poem, by Dareen Tatour, translated from the Arabic by Andrew Leber.

Dareen Tatour published her poem ‘Resist, My People, Resist Them’, on social media in 2015. She was subsequently arrested by Israeli police and charged with incitement to violence and supporting a terrorist organisation, which she has always denied. She then spent three years under house arrest, during which time she was barred from publishing her work and accessing the internet. After her trial in July 2018, she was handed a five-month prison sentence (with six months suspended), of which she served two months, being released in September 2018. Dareen is the author of I Sing From the Window of Exile (Drunk Muse Press, 2022) and My Threatening Poem – The Memoir of a Poet in Occupation Prisons (Drunk Muse Press, 2021).

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 1: Detaining a poem, by Dareen Tatour

‘The Underground’ is written with the author’s usual muscular naturalism. Heaney didn’t have to resort to poetic metaphor nearly as often as the rest of us, because he always, somehow, found the word he needed. To adapt Trump, that heroic anti-poet: he really did know all the words, and the best words. I often find that have to compare something to something else to move it closer to what I intend; but the problem with that approach is that it’s too easy to break the spell of the poem. Randomly … Okay, it happens that I’m sitting here staring at a little curtain made of dark and starchy material. Suppose I wanted to describe it. In its weird, stiff folds it looks like … A ploughed field? A school skirt? A concertina? All of these might do fine, but each would introduce another domain to the poem – agriculture, childhood, music – that the poem would then have to justify to keep its integrity. A good question to ask on these occasions is ‘What would Seamus do?’ Well, Heaney might prefer ‘pleat’ to ‘fold’ because it has a sharper plosive edge; though he’d also know that ‘pleat’ was from the Latin plicare, to fold, from the old Indo-European pek root, and cognate with implicate, complicate, explicate, duplicate. So he might describe the curtain’s material as ‘pleated’, or perhaps ‘complicated’ – simple words which carry the old meanings along with them: complicated things are folded together. All Seamus’s simple words throw very long shadows, because how we use a word – in what way, in what common phrases, with what other words – is also the story of exactly how it got there. Heaney had a strong preference for the common word-hoard, i.e. the everyday vocabulary we draw from Anglo-Saxon, Norse or Norman sources. Many if not most poets share it, because these words are mostly mono- or disyllabic, and therefore introduce far more stressed vowel, i.e. song, into the poetic line. (Though some poets find plenty of music in the authoritative register of a more polysyllabic and Latinate vocabulary – Sean O’Brien, for example – or in the scientific precision of more Greek-leaning lexis, like Douglas Dunn).

‘The Underground’ is as densely folded and woven – ‘implicated’? – a piece of language as I know. As well as Heaney’s deep knowledge of word origins, the poem is also enriched by his signature use of allusion: he’ll allow every tiny event in the poem sing back into the culture to seek out its mythic, historical or literary echo. Typically, ‘The Underground’ presents these allusions with the kind of grace and surface fluency that can leave them going undiscovered by the reader. We might say the poem possesses ‘optional depth’ – a highly desirable quality, I think; one I first heard identified by Michael Alexander in a lecture he was giving on Four Quartets. ‘Optional depth’ requires a poet confident enough in themselves not to demand applause for their cleverest effects, though it also assumes a patient reader. But at this stage of his career Heaney knew he’d won them; his readers trusted him to be worth their effort. (This is one reason I think the dismissal of ‘reputation’, when it’s been fairly won, to be utterly fatuous. ‘Reputation’ is not a licence to write badly but differently, since the poet’s relationship to the reader is configured differently, and based on more trust than an unknown poet has yet earned. The best poems of ‘poets of high repute’ would win no prizes in a poetry competition, where every single poem has to prove itself solely on its own terms. You might think this situation ideal, but it’s a recipe for mostly hysterical performance. I’ll write on the ethics of the poetry competition some other day.)

Don Paterson, Heaney on the Underground

Sitting on the steps, I’m eating ice cream
when a dog goes past and it seems we’re each in need
of the way he stops and the way I scratch his ears.
The ice cream is my for-now-favourite flavour.
The dog, caramel brown, looks with his chocolate eyes
at the ice cream, then up his lead towards you,
as if to say,
                    Hey! This – my ears, the ice cream,
this perfect blue and sunshine ice cream day.
This. 

Liz Lefroy, I Do Happy

I like to describe Aleda Shirley as the best poet you’ve never heard of. I adore her work and wish there weren’t so little of it: three books along with a chapbook, the latter an extremely curious object that exists for reasons entirely beyond me. Titled Rilke’s Children, it was printed and hand-sewn by Gray Zeitz at Larkspur Press and published by the Frankfort Arts Council; Shirley shares author billing with another favourite of mine, David Wojahn, and the book also contains a selection of poems by some other Kentucky poets and an introduction by Guy Davenport. I’ve had it since I was in college: it was the first book I ever bought from Abebooks. I can only assume I ordered it for the Wojahn poems and was accidentally rewarded with another lodestar.

What’s to like about “White Center”? It’s the driving rhythm that lingers, the litany and its application to an uncompromising insistence on metaphor. This is one of those poems that gets straight at the ancient heart of the whole endeavour, the sense of poiesis from which poetry derives: a bringing forth, a conjuring. Here, it’s the felt sense of time, Shirley’s effort to bring the conceptual into the embodied realm, to bear the intangible across the divide and into phenomenological experience. Like Lynda Hull’s “The Window,” which concludes Hull’s third and final book, “White Center” is the last poem in Shirley’s collection Dark Familiar, also her third and her last. This is meaningful to me in some way I can’t articulate; it causes me to number spines, seeking out the final final final poem: surely there must be a third.

Vanessa Stauffer, “White Center” by Aleda Shirley

The final poem turns to Chaucer and “The Canterbury Tales”, in “All Together Now”,

“The spirit of the Wife of Bath will stir no porridge
but three husband shades around the pan
will jockey for the right to hold the spoon.
I hear more queueing at my door. Do you always
have so many spirits about your person?

My head is full of fun and frolic,
Of sorrow and shame, of triumph and tragedy.
This is the rule inside any scribbler’s brain.
Know that I can never sup alone.
Bring your spirits, let them blend with mine
And all shall dance.”

The rhythm bounces. It’s a jocular poem. And it sums up the quiet optimism that runs through “Rainbow Candles”. At times, there seems to be an acceptance of the way things are without a desire to make significant changes. That might be a frustration when you wish Cinderella could know that life’s about to get better for her. Readers might want the speaker to have more agency, protest against the baseball bat wielding thugs. But in “Rainbow Candles”, Challis draws attention to the small wins, the strength of solidarity, the courage that comes from being true to yourself.

Emma Lee, “Rainbow Candles” Tony Challis (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

This is to confess my untold delight in the postal service’s delivery of a book titled workshop of silence, containing poems by Jean D’Amérique, as translated by Conor Bracken.

In his translator’s introduction, Bracken notes that Jean D’Amérique’s lived experience is unsettled by the boundaries of nation-states: “As a transnational person who splits his time between Haiti, France, and Belgium, not to mention a Black transnational person transiting through and living in historically white countries, he is subject to the rough, reductive, and at times lethally armed gaze of bureaucracy.” Borders, as written by this poet, “are not meant to be stopped at”; their existence is arbitrary and alienating.

Since D’Amerique began as a slam poet, Bracken says that “retaining this transgressive, playful, and dexterous attention to sound” was one of the primary goals of his translation— a goal that frequently leads him to slight departures from the denotative meaning of the original words. Translation is an art. As such, translators make choices about what to emphasize and convey across languages. Bracken elects the “enlivening of language” that restores “its fundamental slipperiness,” or, in his own words:

It is based as much in play and wit as it is in the political dimensions of the work that he’s doing with these poems, which sometimes announces itself without embroidery, as in “moment of silence,”  wherein he situates his poems in the  political tradition of Nazim Hikmet, and at other times is more recondite, as in “under the bridges what springs (up),” where he points out through elaborate wordplay the continued but unexamined presence of the lexicon of shipping and chattel slavery in economic chatter. 

I hear this subversive jouissance trickling upwards through the sap of “solar brass,” a poem that tingled all the way to the tips of my fingertips when I first read it.

solar brass

my rhapsody
a cactus in the night-call’s port

for sale for tropical cents
I am a solar

powered brassy jacket
the horizon
looks punk to me

D’Amérique’s poems have a purpose in daily life: they process the banalities and polish the repetitions.

Alina Stefanescu, Workshop of Silence.

It was bound to happen. The recent revelations around Jeffrey Epstein have now implicated poetry in America—well, Poetry in America, a PBS program created by Elisa New, a Harvard professor of literature and wife of Epstein’s friend, Larry Summers (the two also honeymooned on Little St. James, flying there with Ghislaine Maxwell). Poetry in America is, according to its website, “a multi-platform educational initiative and public television series that brings poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.” On this program, New hosted conversations with numerous celebrities and poets, and at some point she accepted over $100k dollars in funding from Epstein for all this (at one point negotiating for $500,000). She also seems to have relied on his personal support and appreciated his esteem, and all this well after he was a registered sex offender. In fact, shortly before Epstein’s arrest, New was emailing him about how best to persuade Venus Williams to appear on her program. Mistakes were, as they say, made. It’s just a shame that we may never get to see the shelved episode in which she discussed poetry with none other than Woody Allen, a man introduced to her by Epstein.

Yes, the dunks could go on. And well they should. But I’m afraid there is more significant news to attend to regarding (little “p”) poetry in America. […]

In late October, the Mellon Foundation has announced the formation of the Literary Arts Fund. In the creation of this fund, Mellon has joined with “the Ford Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation” to distribute $50 million into literary non-profits across the next five years. Significantly, the president of the Mellon Foundation is Elizabeth Robinson, former US poet laureate—arguably the most influential person in American poetry, strictly in terms of economic power. And I have written about her before in connection to money given to the Poetry Coalition. The Poetry Coalition is comprised of roughly thirty major literary organizations and is very closely tied to the Academy of American Poets. And as of today, if you go to the Academy’s web site, you can still find a page for its PBS program, Elisa New’s Poetry in America.

Now, none of this is to imply a connection between Epstein and the Literary Arts Fund (lol). But these two stories happening at once, in the same backyard, means that I cannot pass up the opportunity to, once again, talk about the funding of poetry in America. And perhaps I’m too much of an idealist, but I feel like we should be wary of extremely centralized wealth—regardless of where it comes from—meddling in the culture of poetry. Such wealth is inseparable from the worker exploitation and systemic violence inescapably built into the heart of the capitalist system. Under the guise of “supporting the arts,” there are any number of motives that institutions, organizations, foundations, or super-rich individuals might have in pouring money into some quadrant of “poetry in America.” And all of this says nothing of the fact that many, many poets are also debtors, and the establishment of student debt was essential to their being able to obtain the credentials necessary for access to this world of funds.

Ultimately, my position is that this money funds a culture whose credentialed professionalism in fact serves to condition it, train it, and limit its capacity for imagining or enacting another world.

R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 5)

I only read the news — I don’t watch or listen to it — so I can take in the melodrama in measured glances, the calm of a punctuated sentence, a nicely contained paragraph. It occurs to me that life is that mix of unanticipated stimulation and the striving to make sense of it and react in some reasonable way that allows survival until the next surprise. Art is important to me both as stimulus and as companion on the path to survival. This poem by Peter Gizzi feels like good company today, as I stagger into the gray day with its subtly shifting clouds.

Marilyn McCabe, the future I’m reaching for

i am sibling to the
orphaned mitten & the charging cable
once plugged into a breakup machine.
mother to the acorns who could not
figure out how to sprout & the eggs
who went rotten in the coop.
we can call it the lost & lost. like a zoo
that you can only enter if you too have
been left behind.

Robin Gow, lost & lost

So there’s AI now. It’s HEEEEEEERE. A brain- and intellectual-property-eating water and energy guzzling zombie. Or vampire. There are so many ethical issues to confront. I hear my educator and writing friends decrying it and calling for absolutely abstention. I get that. But I am left to wonder what to do beyond that. We can’t just try to ignore it. Legislation. Yes. Rules, guidelines, restrictions. Yes. Teaching our students and advocating for deeper understanding of what it is, what it is doing. Absolutely. But we can’t ignore it and must do more than just say “stay away from it.” Just like, “fentanyl is bad. Don’t do it.” But obviously, that doesn’t work and is too simplistic.

In terms of AI, we must engage with the social and structural issues around it when we talk to “users” and “pushers” of A.I. Address it as a symptom. Of what? Well, capitalism, for one, but also a kind of fear, insecurity and lack of feeling centred, of not trusting in one’s own abilities, feeling the need to outsource. Of a kind of alienation from the non-mediated world. (Mediated by capital, by technology, by a kind of “culture is out there” thinking.) Not trusting oneself and not feeling safe to fail. I think we need to address all these things. We’re being capitalismplained and fearsplained. But I need language more than “Trust yourself. Be authentic” to talk to my students. It needs to be deeper than that. More than “Just don’t do it,” or “It’s wrong.” And publicly, I feel as writers we need to explain more about what it actually means and where the desire to use it comes from more than a kind of moralizing and shaming, because, as with the case of so many other things, that never works.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, A.I.: brain- and intellectual-property-eating water and energy guzzling zombie or vampire?

One crisp autumn day, on a whim, I started sending haiku to a few friends via email and text message. I had a new phone and was interested in its SMS capabilities. The only things I found that I could get via SMS were sports scores and stock updates. Boring! I thought: 160 characters — that’s probably enough for a tiny poem. If I could subscribe and get a daily haiku on my phone, that would be pretty cool!

Of course, nothing like that existed yet. I soon learned about email to SMS gateways that would let me email text messages to phones, if I just formatted the To: address properly, and that sparked an idea: To start a haiku by SMS service.

One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had a little mailing list going. At first I borrowed haiku from library books. I added a few of my own early efforts. In time, I started accepting submissions.

Before long, tinywords had become a daily magazine of haiku and micro poetry. That was over 25 years ago, and tinywords now has over 3,000 subscribers, making it one of the biggest haiku/micropoetry publications in the world. We’ve published over 4,400 haiku by almost 1,000 different poets, including some big names in the haiku world, some big names in the larger poetry world, and some people who are just regular lovers of poetry without particularly big names at all, like me. I’m not even the editor anymore. For more than a decade, Kathe Palka and Peter Newton have been making all the editorial decisions. I am, happily, the publisher, technical support guy, and customer service rep.

In September, we celebrated tinywords.com’s 25th anniversary by sponsoring a reception at Haiku North America 2025, the big biannual haiku conference. It was a joy to meet and celebrate with almost 200 haiku poets, many of whom have appeared on our site over the years.

Along the way I learned that haiku are about more than just syllable counts: Haiku are a tool for mindfulness, a vehicle to bring us into presence and awareness of the world, a literary form that sharpens our powers of observation and description, and a writing practice that helps us cut away the fluff.

As one of the most concise literary genres, haiku have helped me to be a sharper, more direct writer. They’ve helped make my headlines and email subject lines more concrete and pithier. (My email bodies are still too long, though — my excuse is that they’re prose!)

It’s no exaggeration to say that haiku have made me a better writer and editor, and they have certainly helped my career.

But it’s the haiku philosophy of awareness, close observation, mindfulness, and concision that has made the biggest difference in my life. Haiku are steeped in Zen, and over time, practicing haiku-like awareness, day after day, has helped me to show up better for my own life.

Dylan Tweney, Haiku changed my life

And each eye is a new world
to be examined in turn

One then the other
this is one then that

Consumed by more than silence
he floats untethered

The difficulty I had was that the poem was very wordy and needed to be pared back. There were a number of lines that I liked that fell by the wayside. I used to keep these separate convinced I could use them somewhere. I haven’t yet. 

Paul Tobin, HE TOOK UP MIRRORS

Lately I’ve been revising some old poems and have realized I no longer recall what their incipience was. Which can be a good thing, because I am no longer wedded to the “reason” I wrote them and can instead consider whether they can be crafted into decent poems.

I am also working on a manuscript that I let sit for at least six years. An idea got into my mind after reading Robert Burton’s 17th-century book on depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy, quite some time ago (2017, perhaps?). I took a stab at writing what seemed to be evolving into a historical fiction story, which is not my usual approach (I have zero practice at plot and dialogue). Then, I stopped. As one does. But the topic lodged in me somewhere, I suppose, and early this year I returned to it. What if, I wondered, the draft could be restructured into a series of prose poems? There might be a sort of hybrid novella-poem in the earlier draft.

That’s more or less what I’m developing, at least for now, and we’ll see what if anything emerges. It’s keeping me interested, which I like, and the experiment feels fresh compared with “writing what I know,” or writing “how” I know. Because yes, of course we ought to write what we know; but we also know about human beings, and we have imaginations, and anything is possible.

Ann E. Michael, Source material

I can’t quite believe that my poem ‘The Last Carry’ has now reached over a thousand likes on Bluesky, many of them from people beyond the poetry bubble. Oh, and a fair few of those likes have then gone on to generate sales of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t. All in all, a terrific example of how social media, when functioning at its best, can generate new readers for poetry.

Matthew Stewart, A thousand likes

To date, Lit Mag News has nearly 17,000 subscribers. Just typing that figure makes my eyes well up. I can’t believe it. I really can’t. That’s…a lot of people thinking and caring about literary magazines. That’s a lot of people, right here, in this space.

And now I must tell you this: It has been one of the greatest pleasures of my professional life to make Lit Mag News.

It has been an honor to be entrusted with your questions, your experiences, your confidences, and to serve as a reliable means for you to get the information and inspiration you need in order to continue along your literary paths.

It is not always easy to feel a sense of connection on the internet. Heck, it’s not always easy to feel a sense of connection, period. But I feel that here. I feel it because of the ways that you, all of you, contribute to this space.

Thank you.

Becky Tuch, A Message For You

To celebrate Small Business Saturday, preorders of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology are LIVE today at Madville Publishing. Preorder here.

We’re also thrilled to reveal the back cover, featuring photography by Donna Kile and stellar blurbs from Simon Morrison, Annie Zaleski, and Denise Duhamel.

“Collin Kelley and Megan Volpert present a dazzling collection of poems, reflections, and ruminations on the diva’s diva, Stevie Nicks. She would be the first to admit that her magic comes from her fans, and White Winged Doves is the proof. Here she is the inscrutable enchantress, queen of the queer pitch, your father’s favorite and Taylor Swift’s too as comforter, protector, and avenger.” — Simon Morrison, author of Mirror in the Sky: The Life and Music of Stevie Nicks 

Collin Kelley, Preorder & back cover reveal for the Stevie Nicks poetry anthology

I was hanging up some clothing and found a coat I’d knitted when I was in my early thirties. It’s a gorgeous Kaffe Fasset design, one of two I’ve made. A third used to be in the attic, waiting for me to get it back out. I could be knitting while I watch TV all winter.

And then I remembered what happened to that sweater. It became a poem.

Ravel

It’s not as easy as you think
to unravel the half-done coat—
the mohair enmeshed with wool,
the intertwined tweed and Wintuck
(in colors so promising you use it
though you know it pills).

It’s not as easy as you think
to unravel a foot of coat
with so much time invested […]

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, I Should Be Knitting

So, my book is now available! You can find all the information about it here on my website :).

I received two fantastic submissions in response to my call on social media to share a haiku or tanka about the moon or the night – and both poets will receive a free copy of ‘Don’t Write About The Moon’ <3. Their haiku inspired me to weave them into a haibun. Enjoy reading!

THICKETS

(John Hawkhead, t.j. zhang, Makoto)

there it is again
that harvest moon in the well
of my whisky glass

John Hawkhead, Presence 50

A hazy Saturday night. My thoughts have pulled me onward, though the shapes ahead are still hard to make out. The landscape breaks into mosaic fragments as I try to reassemble it once more: long, slender poplars overshadow the ground—why do I wander again to the thickets?

in a dream
over a field of irises
the moon

t.j. zhang, kurokuro.art

I halt, watch my breaths in the cold autumn air. What brought me here?

It’s beautiful. This purple, delicate streak in midnight blue, where does it end, where does it begin? Where do I? Let me walk on with hope on my soles.

I hear the grass straightening itself behind me.

Kati Mohr, Get your copy of Don’t Write About The Moon :)

The man who had stared at me throughout the workshop came up to me and handed me a piece of folded paper. He said “Don’t read it until you are at home, alone.” If I’m honest, I thought it was a poem or something. I said “Ok” and then carried on saying goodbye to people, packing up my things. I shoved the piece of paper into my pocket and forgot about it until later on that night when I was getting changed for the evening reading.

The piece of paper fell out of my pocket. I didn’t keep a copy of it, but my memory of what it said was something like ‘Do you really think your poems are going to be read after you are dead?” The man had drawn a scale with ‘shit poetry’ at one end and ‘memorable poetry’ at the other. I think there may have been a list of ingredients that make a good poem – rhyme etc. There was an arrow with a little picture of me at the shit end. He’d left his name and number on the paper and asked me to get in touch.

I felt more irritated than angry or upset, but I thought about what this might have felt like ten years ago, when I was first starting to write. I felt pleased that his behaviour and his words didn’t have the power to wound me in the way that they might have once upon a time.

After the reading, on impulse, I gave the piece of paper to one of the organisers and asked if I could talk to them after the festival was over. The organisers rang me the next day and were really supportive. They said they would ring and email the man concerned to tell him he was banned from attending any future readings. They also said they would review their safeguarding proceedings to ensure authors were not left unaccompanied at the end of events.

In the meantime, the man had contacted me through my website with this message:

I was the guy that gave you that note in ____ You seem8 to have a mischievous air about you which interests me. I have written some poems that nobody has seen. I wonder, would you like to meet for a coffee and I could read you two or three? I had some heart trouble last year and so don’t know how much time I’ve left?

I forwarded this onto the organisers without replying. After that he left some abusive comments online – calling me a nasty person – randomly, one is on a Reddit forum. I found out recently that the festival organisers had to report him to the police because he turned up at other events, managed to get inside said event (even though his description had been circulated) and then harassed other women writers. When they did report him to the police, they found out he was already known to them.

When I found this out, that he went on to harass other women, my first feeling was relief. Not that other women had been harassed, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone – but I think the relief was something to do with realising that this man was a damaged individual who wanted to hurt women, and that I did the right thing in reporting him. That I wasn’t being over sensitive, or not taking a joke. That I didn’t do anything wrong. That I wasn’t asking for it, that I didn’t do something that provoked him – even though the logical part of my brain knows all these things, I didn’t know it in my body until I heard he’d done it to other women as well.

I am sharing this now because I found out through the organisers that the man in question died not long ago so I feel safe to tell this story now – knowing that I’m not going to draw his attention to me again. Of course there are much worse things happening than this to women in our country and all around the world, but that is also kind of the point – I didn’t know whether this man would stop at a note and a few abusive messages, or whether he would become a full blown stalker.

Kim Moore, Day 5: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence: On Speaking Out

Should we ever consider our reader’s comfort when we write? “You can say anything, but are you saying anything?” If we discard the reader, who should the work connect with? Are we ever saying anything important and socially engaged, if we relinquish our care for the person the art reaches out to, the effect on them.

Aren’t poems meant to make us feel something? And what of the poet? Can we ever hold a poet responsible for their poem’s effect on the reader? As poets, aren’t we predisposed to accept that once a poem is published/in print/in the public eye, it no longer belongs to us – once in the reader’s hands, doesn’t the poem now live with their interpretations, their myriad experiences, their feelings rendered, their epiphanies, inspiration, disgust, discomfort?

Though the tone is crude and verging on aggressive, the sestet makes playful reference to Shakespearean metre with lines ten and eleven’s enjambement:

‘speak the bard’s measured iambic tight pent-/ a meter…’

The intentional spacing in the final line is breakaway from traditional sonnet metre to balance the rhetoric question in a space of its own, as if a multiplicity of answers all occupy the space together: a poet is responsible for the poem, the reader is responsible for feelings evoked, the speaker is responsible for their reactions, the speaker is responsible for awareness of their own arousal, the reader is responsible for awareness of embodied experience.

In that beautiful sense, poetry is society’s way marker. Poets have the joy of bringing all these soft grey contradictions to light, playing the role of both speaker and reader. What we say, we might be saying to ourselves, to another, to society, or to no one in particular. And when you hear a poet insist their words are ‘not a protest’ the glint of resistance is sure to be found.

Drop-in by Katrina Moinet (Nigel Kent)

A couple of weeks ago there was an excellent radio programme on about dealing with Writer’s Block – I’m buggered if I can remember the name of it at the mo, but it will come to me. Anyhoo, it popped back into mind while reading some John Clare the other night. I’m slowly working my way through a Selected of his…And that book includes selected passages from a wider poem called To the Rural Muse

Here’s the second stanza (that they include)

Muse of the pasture brook, on they calm sea
Of poesy I’ve sailed, and though the will
To speed were greater than the prowess be,
I’ve ventured with much fear of usage ill,
Yet more of joy. Though timid be my skill,
As not to dare the depths of mightier streams,
Yet rocks abide in shallow ways and I
Have much of fear its mingle with my dreams.
Yes, lovely muse, I still believe thee by
And think I see thee smile and so forget I sigh.

When the Words Leave…that was the name of the show; seems ironic somehow…Give the show a listen. I enjoyed it.

I think Mr C (not that one) is dealing with some writer’s block brought on by fear of being able to say the things he wants throughout this poem..among other things.

Mat Riches, Rocks abide in shallow ways

It is not easy, in these lives haunted by loneliness and loss, menaced by war and heartbreak, witness to genocides and commonplace cruelties, to live in gratitude. And yet it may be the only thing that saves us from mere survival. In these blamethirsty times, to praise is an act of courage and resistance. To insist on what is beautiful without turning away from the broken. To bless what is simply for being, knowing that none of it had to be.

My recent love affair with artist and poet Rachel Hébert’s almost unbearably beautiful Book of Thanks reminded me of a poem by W.S. Merwin (September 30, 1927–March 15, 2019), found in his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems (public library) — a book that lodges itself in the deepest recesses of your soul and stays with you for life.

Maria Popova, Thanks: W.S. Merwin’s Ode to the Defiant Courage of Gratitude in a Broken World

The highlight of my writing year has been this week and has nothing to do with my own writing. I was invited to the St Andrew’s Day Ceilidh hosted by the Scottish Government’s Nordic Office, a well-kept little secret. I was invited through my connection with the Finnish Scottish Society who I help out every year with their annual Burns Supper and a ceilidh. We had no idea of what to expect, but it was the most amazing night. The guest stars were former Scotland Makar Jackie Kay and current Edinburgh Makar Michael Pedersen and the presenter and cultural commentator Ally Heather. I thought it might be a formal affair but it was far from that. 

It was introduced as a Highland lock-in with music and poetry and tons and tons of whisky which is exactly what it felt like. Ally welcomed us in and spent the evening wandering around topping up everyone’s glasses. All three were delightful to talk to. The musicians and poets on stage kept it casual and fun and joined in with the drinking and chat off. My mate even had to eject a too-drunk Finn during the first session by Scotland’s 2025 Young Traditional Musician Ellie Beaton. Had to happen at a Scottish event. Michael and Jackie’s performance were fun and full of energy. I’ve books by them both this year including Michael’s amazing Muckle Flugga which is a rollercoaster of a read. And listening to him perform you understand why. I wish I had taken photos, but to be honest, I was a bit star-struck. Luckily, my friend was thinking on his feet. 

Unfortunately, the lock-in didn’t happen, but we decanted to another pub down the road. I couldn’t stay as long as I’d like as I had work in the morning and kids waiting at home, but it was an absolute blast. It really made me miss the Scottish literary scene I used to dip my toes into. The mild hangover I took to school the next morning was totally worth it.

Gerry Stewart, St Andrew’s Day 2025

ラストシーンならこの町この枯木　大牧　広

lasuto shiin nara kono machi kono kareki

            for the movie’s last scene
            this town
            and this withered tree

                                                            Hiroshi Ohmaki

from Haiku, November 2025 issue, Kadokawa Zaidan, Tokyo

Fay’s Note:  Hiroshi Ohmaki (1931-2019)

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 28, 2025)

November is historically a month of losses and grief, proven just this week by losing two of our cats to age and illness and spending a part of the holiday at an emergency vets office instead of sitting down to turkey dinner. While November takes a lot each year (things I love, the daylight, the mild weather, and occasionally my own health—lest we forget last November’s bout of tendonitus in my foot that had me hobbling a significant portion of last winter. ) it has, on occasion given good things as well. in the past these included book acceptances and new job opportunities, though this past month, it may just be a sense of order and calm, as well as good progress on something entirely new—a play! that is proving to be an enjoyable writing endeavor given my recent and renewed theatre fervor. While poetry is always my favorite child, stepping away from it has birthed some interesting side projects nevertheless. We are on the cusp of December, which brings a wrapping up and taking stock of the creative year, which I will be sharing in the next few weeks, so keep an eye over on the blog for that. Otherwise, until then, may the darkness not swallow you before the solstice…

Kristy Bowen, November Paper Boat

That pungent vinaigrette in the little dish:
pour the rest over the poem. 
It will taste delicious.

Push that boulder which is also a word
over the poem’s hillside.
See how much moss, grass and other worlds it gathers.  

Read this dream article on your subject.
We offer you your essential point, in dream
language. Use it.

That shovel. On the blackish background.  
In the center.  Here, you.  Dreamer, poet, person. 
Start digging.

Jill Pearlman, Thanksgiving Dreamed My Poem

This week: poetry sandwiches, the long churn of time, naming the beast, the heaviness of the future, and much more. Enjoy.

Most of the week was dark, windy, and rainy, but for fifteen minutes we got to see the Northern Lights! I only got a couple of quick cell phone pictures because the clouds came in so quickly. My brother on the other side of town couldn’t see them at all.

Here is a poem I wrote the last time the Northern Lights appeared, which was published in The Normal School,  “Aurora, or When Firefoxes Spark the Sky.”

We also discussed my late friend Martha Silano’s incredible book of poetry, Terminal Surreal [at the book club]. And the discussion was really amazing. An engineer in the group mapped the sections of the book to the five stages of grief, and someone talked about the idea of knowing something of the author’s life and how that can enhance the reading of the book. When I was in graduate school, biographical readings were very out of style, but I always talk about the culture, the time of the writing, some details of the author’s life—for instance, when we read Osamu Dazai’s Blue Bamboo, we talked about Japan in the 30s and the incredible stardom of Dazai in Japan. I only teared up once talking about Martha, and Glenn said he also teared up once. We still miss her! I had never thought about whether or not to discuss the context of the book and author at the book club, but I’ve always found that knowing more about the author enhanced, rather than hurt, my own readings. We’ve read poetry books several times now, but this was the first time we read poems out loud at the club, including poems that were referenced in the book (Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert” and Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”). I think we’ll try that again—hearing a poem out loud is a great way to really get a different dimension of the book.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Northern Lights, Book Club Revelations, Winter Blues and Winter Holiday

The fact of it is that I think about this poem daily and have for how many years I do not know. Filling the French press in the morning, I will think: Mixed ready to begin the morning right. I sit down at the desk and open a notebook, muttering I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, the iambs bouncing along like some sort of motivational poetry-coach speech: you can start simply, you can say a thing outright, you can bob up and down in a sea of simple syllables until something sparks. On a long run I will, for no reason whatsoever, start timing my steps with Dead wings carried like a paper kite. (I Am Fun.)

I loved to tell a class to turn to this poem in their textbooks and then recite it while writing the rhyme scheme on the board (Super Fun!); they would gradually look up and realize what was happening and be amazed someone could know a poem by heart despite having untold numbers of songs and movie monologues committed to their own memories. Sometimes I would perform this trick after referring to Robert Frost as “My uncle Robert,” a joke I ceased to make when I saw what appeared to be an innocent gen-ed student writing it down.

What I am saying is that I love this poem and it is so deeply embedded in my person that I do not go anywhere without it. Which is why I was so amazed to realize, earlier this week, that at some point between the Ah-ha! of my first reading and, like, Tuesday, I have changed my mind about the tone and therefore my entire sense of what is at stake in these 142 syllables. 

Vanessa Stauffer, “Design” by Robert Frost

Ten members of Bath Writers and Artists met at The Hive Community Centre in Peasedown St John yesterday. I was teaching the other nine some Turkish map folds, but first we showed the books we’d made since our last meeting.

June Wentland‘s biscuit-books are poetry sandwiches. Her miniature-book-brooches are delightful. I’ve been waiting (and nagging) a long time for her pamphlet of Emily Dickinson-inspired poems and collages that I first saw at a meeting of the Tipi group. This group of six writers meets six times a year in a tipi in a walled garden on the edge of Bath. I feel hugely fortunate to be a member. We take it in turns to introduce a topic and set the homework. […]

And here is a book by Claire Coleman: photos and drawings from her garden, and poems about some of the birds that visit, or don’t. The tabs on the left are strips with the names of endangered species of garden birds: tear-off strips, so easy to tear off. It’s an emotional read. […]

It gladdened my heart to see how inventive everyone was! The last five photos were taken by Verona. They illustrate the industry, chaos and excitement of the session. At 3pm we cleared the table, swept the floor, and spent the time till 4 o’clock reading poems and reflecting on the day.

Ama Bolton, Another day of Art and Poetry at The Hive

This group is unlike any other I’ve ever worked with. I love the process we’ve evolved — brainstorm, create, workshop what we’ve created, revise, polish, curate, share with the world — and I love how what we co-create is always more than the sum of its parts. I know that I would never have written, on my own, the particular work I’ve generated as part of this collab. It has been a joy and a privilege to collaborate with this group on this body of work, and I can’t wait to see what we decide to do together next. Anyway, I hope what we’ve created here will speak to you.

Rachel Barenblat, New poem at Bayit

Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster always growling in the other corner of the cage.

Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway — trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop, the golden fan of the gingko, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe.

In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is.

Artist and poet Rachel Hébert offers a bright patch of training ground in The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes — one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive.

Radiating from the pages is an invitation, extended in paintings and poems, to open “the sunlit fort of your attention” and let the world rush in, in all its minute and majestic loveliness: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl, the heart’s capacity for “an urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love.”

What emerges is prayerful (“more cellos, touch, and rain, please”) and singing with praise (“roots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old”) — a manual for how to live in gratitude (“what is working wants your praise”) and a theological statement (“there is nothing you must do to belong”).

Maria Popova, How to Love the World More: Artist and Poet Rachel Hébert’s Breathtaking Catalogue of Gratitudes

When You found me I asked what You wanted:
I want you to eat at the fruits of my table.
And I came to learn
of famine’s savage offense, what
had truly been taken from me. The crops
burned, the fields salted, nothing
left but straw and maggots. I was
bewildered and ravenous. Never
had I witnessed such abundance.
I took first the bread,
then the wine, the living blood.

Then the dates and wild honey. The garlic
and mustard. Locusts, fish and cucumbers.

Kristen McHenry, A New Poem

Since meeting the Four Quartets in English Literature A level, I’ve been fascinated by TS Eliot’s phrase ‘the still point of the turning world’. He captures in this metaphor the idea that, if you can get to the very middle of something (as with a wheel), you’ll find that the central point isn’t moving, though all around is turning. The point itself in physics terms (i.e. in terms that stretch the limits of my mind and imagination) is one atom big.

Saturday’s programming was audacious, in particular the second half bracketing of two new works (Kulning by Lefroy Watt and Murmurations by Johnson) around the Adagio from Bach’s Violin Sonata no.1 in G minor. This was exquisitely played by Zea Hunt, but (and especially, you may well think), how can two young composers in 2025 sit themselves either side of Bach? Then again, how can they not? 

What this Jonty Lefroy Watt : JS Bach : Oran Johnson juxtaposition did was open up the Bach to newness. As I listened to the three pieces, surrounded by a warm, attentive audience, I felt myself gradually lulled out of time. It was as if the Bach was fresh as the pieces either side. I imagined what it would’ve been like to hear any of Bach’s compositions as a world premiere, and then realised I had: feeling on this occasion his composition as completely, viscerally original. This is the joy of live performance – it’s all new to us.

By the time we reached the sweeping shapes of Johnson’s Murmurations, I felt myself eternal (not immortal, nothing so grand). I think I mean eternal in the sense of experiencing my life as a singular life stretching backward and forwards within a collective of lives. It was like reaching right into the legacies and promises of creativity as fundamental as Bach’s and as vibrant as that of the young musicians in the church. I’m not sure if the still point atom was the quality of  concentration given by the audience, or a singular note – let’s say G – of music. It doesn’t matter – as Eliot says elsewhere, ‘words strain, sometimes crack’ if we lay too much on them. 

Liz Lefroy, I Travel In Time (this one’s not about swimming)

Now consider the text below, “Ethics of the Clown.” It is absurd and surreal (the narrator fits themselves inside a condom, for instance) and it is apparently about clowns, or clowns as a stand-in for human experience. It is absurd, certainly and perhaps funny. The pacing of the images and the rhythms of the piece are carefully and aesthetically controlled. However, for most readers, I’ve found, it’s too outré or odd to garner the kind of literary appreciation that other texts might evoke. I wonder why? Is it because many people would rather not mix absurdity and “low” content with art, because perhaps it tends to belie “deep” thought and feelings — i.e. for them it only evokes triviality or simple humour? Is it because most of us have been trained to appreciate the traditionally “poetic” (wherein we respond with “mmm” when we hear it)? I don’t really know. For me, my most profound experiences often mix “high” and “low,” the ridiculous and trivial with the luminous and numinous. And most of my life is a salmagundi of both at the same time. I might be only able to access trivilities when walking in the woods or attending a symphony yet might feel illumination or deep joy when on the toilet or cashing in a coupon at the drug store. I think our art should sometimes reflect this and we should be open to all of it. Trees, woods, discarded condoms, clowns and carbuncles all.

Gary Barwin, Not Stand-Up but Stand-in Comedy: the Venn diagram of profound and ridiculous

1. a lava lamp and Nag Champa.

2. a blossoming Joshua tree.

3. a Ventura Boulevard bus stop bench.

4. a Pilates machine, a yogurt machine.

5. a stranger’s IQ test results.

6. a leading man’s jawline.

7. a dinner party hosted by a coyote.

Rich Ferguson, Various ways I’ve accessorized my boredom

A bridge too far for many people, and until recently I would have included myself in this, would be the alleged incidents of abduction by extra-terrestrials. This is obviously the most fertile territory for the lonely attention seeker, or a good hook for a book that might make it on to the NYT best seller list. Exploring the UFO/UAP rabbit hole and its torrent of content, not to mention the considerable demand for such content, I watched endless hours of people talking about their ‘abduction experiences’. Many of them are easy to disbelieve; we’ve all met a few Walter Mitty characters in our lives, or just pathological liars, and it’s not difficult to sense an ulterior motive behind any given fantastical story. […]

It isn’t necessarily my intention to convince you of anything here, I suspect we will all shortly come to accept the nature of this, even if we don’t understand it. My conviction that poetry’s job is to address the human condition led me into this mad sonnet project and I thought Shakespeare would do this justice, so elected Shakespearean sonnets as the form, with the boundaries and the significant space within. Poetry allows for the layering of implication and ambiguity, one can pull at multiple threads and see what unravels, in what better way could a writer hope to probe the borders of existential unease?

james mcconachie, Holding Them in the Light

Sprouting gills and lizards’ tails, rebel angels
change in their fall from the shining walls of heaven—
becoming horned and feathered beasts, hybrids
of irregular size. Poisons of the puffer fish, the scaled,
the seven-headed; and though they’re meant to stand for
what is dark and evil, their beauty still is terrible
to behold. Pistil or tulip bulb, zebra swallowtail
butterfly with a body of burnished hair; the gleam
of shields and swords raised for lethal strike.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Grief of Angels

I’ve read Poetry London on and off for a long time, but I really like what the new editor, Niall Campbell, has done with it, so I’m delighted to have two poems in the most recent issue — one is a translation from the contemporary French poet Gérard Bocholier, an untitled poem from his 2016 collection Nuits. The other is a funny little poem, or perhaps actually two linked poems, called ‘Counterfactual’, imagining Moses gone unfound. Here is the first part of that poem:

Moses aging in his basket,
unfound, unloved amid the rushes,
withering in reedy splendour:
king of the frogs, prince pond-skater.

I mentioned briefly how I came to write the Moses poems in an interview with Greg Allum which was published on Monday, and which you can read here.

Victoria Moul, Two poems in Poetry London

When I was a child I read a magazine article about a man who could hold photographic plates to his head and think images on to the paper. The resulting  fuzzy dream like black and white images fascinated me. Years later I wrote a poem about it. […]

I think that a common theme of my work is the act of searching for another who is not there. The poem is too fresh for me to assess. Watch this space, it might well return.

Paul Tobin, THOUGHTOGRAPHY

I’m the sole survivor of a cohort of ten prostituted women/sex workers who are now all dead murdered, suicides or disappeared. Until now I’ve avoided talking about this text, as a way of keeping a safe distance from the subject matter, but the subject matter refuses to play ball.

Recently I was delighted to hear that poet and writer Richard Skinner had included a review of In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered in his publication Undercurrents, released by Broken Sleep (2025). Richard stated that he thought Coup de Maître was ‘… the most powerful poem in the book…’. I really value this contribution and hope that all comments, reviews and conversations around this poem, and its subject matter, will go some way towards extending and critiquing the narrative around prostitution and the power dynamics inherent in the sex industry. As Richard so astutely pointed out:

… the act of devouring a shellfish is made explicitly like the act of emotional evisceration during paid sex. The power is only one way, and it is brutal, total destruction.   

I am also grateful to Nigel for giving me this opportunity to write about this poem.

Even though it has been called a ‘difficult poem to read, but a necessary one …’ the irony is that it was a relatively easy poem to write – written on auto pilot (I think) and almost fully formed (possibly). I’m acutely aware that trauma memories are often fragmented and therefore slippery and there is nothing linear or straightforward about how poems develop.

However, what I do remember is that I did not set out to write about a crustacean with jointed legs, a hard shell and no backbone.  I did not set out to write about the qualities of fine dining. But I did set out to attempt to articulate and investigate issues around power dynamics that play out between escort and punter.  I could only do that by using my own experience. 

While researching the poem I found that the paraphernalia around the cooking and consumption of crab is complex and highly disturbing, involving extraordinary violence. For example, the tools used are crab mallets, seafood crackers, picks, kitchen shears, and knives. Alongside, these instruments, I came across details and videos where consumers expressed pleasure over breaking joints, ripping bodies apart, and savouring the experience.

I remember being struck by the terminology used and the violence which resonated and appeared familiar. Indeed, it seemed an accurate metaphor to describe prostitution. The act of consuming and destroying this aquatic crustacean calls attention to the impact and consequences of prostitution on the body, while also highlighting the complex power dynamics within the sex industry.

Drop-in by Chaucer Cameron (Nigel Kent)

裸木や何でも聞こえそうな空　なつはづき

hadakagi ya nandemo kikoesōna sora

            bare trees

            the sky likely hears

            everything

                                                Hazuki Natsu

from Gendai Haiku (Modern Haiku). #722, October 2025 issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 13, 2025)

This week my internet became unstable. No great drama you might think, but this is me and I was at an event where I was reading! It has taken me some time to develop my reading confidence, and to have the right kind of self-talk when things seem to be going wrong.

And now I take a bow because I did not panic! Not only that, I also did not panic in the moments before this when my wife inadvertently switched the internet off at the start of the meeting and I was no longer even in the zoom room. It definitely felt weird to be staring at a screen and realising that despite not physically going anywhere I was no longer present. Like a kind of out of body experience in a dreamlike waiting room that didn’t even exist. […]

It was a good week for poetry… I loved being invited to read at Stephen Paul Wren’s Blood Women book launch, I enjoyed a whole day of editing and drafting some work, and when I landed in my chair after the journey back from the yarn show I found a lovely acceptance in my inbox.

Here’s to zoom rooms, to words and to the people who invite us to share time and space.

Sue Finch, ON HAVING AN UNSTABLE CONNECTION

One advantage of later-life publishing is that older writers seldom need resume fodder. In my own case, and I suspect in many cases, this means I can write more honestly, or at least, I think I’m writing more honestly. I feel freer to write what and how (and when) I want to write. Also, I’m less concerned (never unconcerned, however) with competition or with fitting my work into literary trends or traditions. Part of this is hereditary stubbornness and rebellion; if confessional “I” poems are all the rage, I’ll put together an entire manuscript of 3^rd-person, observational limericks, thank you very much.

Another plus as an older poet is that I’m no longer operating under my grad-school-days misconception that I would someday be a “famous” writer. I was never good at math, but I should have figured out those percentages much sooner than I did. I’ve since made peace with my lack of recognition—no pressure, no ladder-climbing, no hobnobbing unless I feel like it, no jetting off for another one-night reading (she says, pretending she wouldn’t just ADORE that)—and I can simply enjoy and appreciate the act of writing itself.

One of the most important things about older poets is that they add perspective to the depth and breadth of poetry. I’m glad for the passion, idealism, energy, and unabashed in-your-faceness of many younger poets’ work. We need it. But we need ALL the voices. We need the less-panicked historical perspective, the longer, sometimes more comprehensive, panoramic view. We need the more outward-facing, less me-centric voice that older writers sometimes bring to the poetic landscape.

In Defense of Later-Life Publishing – guest post by Marcella Remund (Trish Hopkinson)

Lana Hechtman Ayers is a one-woman poetry dynamo. She is the managing editor of three Pacific Northwest poetry presses: MoonPath Press, Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, and World Enough Writers. She also leads generative workshops, helps people assemble their books of poems, teaches at conferences, and writes her own poetry. To borrow the phrasing from the end of her poem, “A Blue True Dream,” her writing mantra must be “yes and yes and / illimitably yes.”  

In The Autobiography of Rain, her eleventh and most recent collection of poems, rain patters in and out of the poems, welcome, relieving. “The rain is my best friend,” she writes in “Nineteen Things No One Knows about Me (And One They Do)”: “She knows how to keep a secret / and wash away the evidence.” Humor, sometimes, but rain also shows up hand-in-hand with grief. In “Landscape in Dreams”:

Where is it you go
when I lose sight of you in fog?
I’m certain I’ve seen you in dreams
that smell of burnt toast
On rainy days your laughter chimes
raindrops against roof gutter (27)

Oliver de la Paz uses these words to praise the book: “The fickle and atmospheric weather of losses, revelations, and heartbreak shifts and shimmers.” In poems such as “Reasons to Live,” and “On the Nature of Grief,” I was reminded that indeed this is poetry that “shifts and shimmers,”  that encompasses, becomes a voice talking back to you on a suicide hotline, sits beside you, faithful as a loved dog.

Bethany Reid, The Autobiography of Rain

It’s not easy for a poet to find a new angle on daffodils after Wordsworth, but [Julie] Burke gives it a shot in “The promise of daffodils (Spring 2020)”. The date being the beginning of covid,

“Outside, the daffodils find their own bed
wherever they have sprouted, heaving
aside any pebbly impediment, shred
of carrier bag, tin can, or leavings
of take-away. They peek from under hedges,
squirt out of pots, bluster along carriageways.
They are ground level pledges
of sunshine when our heads are too heavy to raise.”

Even flowers can grow from discards and stony ground. Burke’s poems are daffodil-like too: they broach tricky subjects but a note of renewal and optimism reverberates through each poem. A reminder that life is not monotone, but full of harmony if we allow ourselves to hear it.

Emma Lee, “Kindling” Julie Burke (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

Vanishing Points, by Lucija Stupica, is a translation from the Slovene (by Andrej Peric, published by Arc Publications in 2024) of the poet’s fourth collection, published in 2019, and is her first book to appear in English. Like Krisztina Tóth, whose book My Secret Life (translated by George Szirtes) I reviewed here, Stupica began publishing in the early 1990s, after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and Slovenian independence. Also like Tóth, this book suggests a searching restlessness, perhaps a carrying of deep scars that continue to affect a life. The book’s epigraph is taken from Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem, ‘Questions of Travel’ (1965): ‘Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?’ The Vanishing Points Stupica seems to have in mind are those to do with distance, diminishment, travel and perspective. This has been stimulated by (or has itself provoked) her leaving Slovenia to live on the tiny island of Oaxen, near Stockholm, in 2012. This experiment in ‘island living’ proved unhappy and short-lived, as she and her family moved to Stockholm itself three years later and many of these poems explore this experience. […]

Bishop (like early Lowell) manages the trick of making personal experiences resonate far beyond the merely autobiographical. I don’t think Stupica has the same magic for the most part. In ‘North’, there is something more narrowly personal in the differing wishes of the man and woman. He wishes for a lake, darkness, spruce trees, while she wishes for the sea and light. The re-location to Oaxen seems to provoke a divergence of views. The woman experiences boredom, a sense of death (the demise of a beetle in one poem, a toad in another) and a brief prose poem evokes a stultifying routine: ‘You’ve become heavy as a rock. Move it. Eat up your meal. Do the cleaning. Talk to the neighbour. Smile. Brush your teeth’. A more extended meditation on the fascination with islands, ‘Islomania’, presents some of the more attractive aspects of the wintry landscape, the wild orchids, seal spotting, but the midnight sun and the summer’s tourist invasion, convince the narrator that those who bear the ‘affliction’ of islomania have contacted a rare disease, an intoxication, even a ‘sort of scar until the end of time’.

Martyn Crucefix, Review of ‘Vanishing Points’ by Lucija Stupica, tr. Andrej Peric

Set with opening poem, “Before We Begin …,” and six sections—“Psychotic Notebooks,” “Purgatorial Imagery,” “There Needs to Be More to This Than Nostalgia,” “A Harmonious Armageddon,” “An Autobiography” and “Consonants* A Book of Visions*: A Book of Illuminations*: A Chorus of* L*ght: Against L*ght: Against L*ght”—The Book of Interruptions extends Mohammadi’s accumulations of space and spacings, writing a sequence of interruptions and disturbances, hiccups and self-sabotage, writing the possibility and impossibly of words, language and meaning. “my mouth bubbling under water // the narrator mentions me by name,” the opening of the sequence “Psychotic Notebooks” begins, “I am the cliffhanger // for one of a thousand nights before slaughter // having asked more questions than I have answered // in the city within the city I swerve // among the cacophony of the tunnel // an ocean within an ocean [.]”

Gestural and expansive, there is an element of worldbuilding to [Khashayar “Kess”] Mohammadi’s lyric, one that returns the structure to the crossed-out (or interrupted) vowel through their use of the * symbol from prior work (specifically), writing a narrative structure concurrently fragmented, populated and isolated, swirling amid staccato struggles with faith and cities, queer experience and a litany of restless, thoughtful observations around feeling unsettled in a secular Toronto, while holding on to a cultural history of the poem that connects to that stretches back thousands of years. With each collection, Mohammadi furthers a complexity of their engagement with the long poem, the book-length accumulated lyric, a trajectory that is as striking as it is propulsive. And yet, each work begins fresh, composed with an open curiosity, and an array of questions, some new, and others, that need to be asked more than once, for the sake of a broader, even ongoing, response. 

rob mclennan, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, The Book of Interruptions

At one of the many events I attended this fall, a magazine editor, reflecting on downsides of a generally rewarding job, sighed and said something like “so many bad poems.” What’s hardest for me about selecting poems for Shenandoah is how many good poems I receive, way more than I can accept, given a limited budget and small production staff. “Good” can encompass a lot of values, but I think what I mean here is not only skill–the sense that someone has read a lot of poetry and is crafting their diction, linebreaks, etc. with care and knowledge of the options–but something like sincerity. I sometimes roll my eyes at the word “sincerity” when applied to literature, because art isn’t life. Yet it matters when a reader can sense a person behind the poem, when the piece conveys vulnerability or a sharp mind in motion or searching honesty, especially in this AI-blighted moment. I often feel moved and intrigued by submissions that don’t quite make the difficult final cut. It’s both beautiful and heart-piercing to know how many dedicated writers are trying to deliver their work to readerships.

With all of these feelings, I’ve been whittling down a pool of entries for the Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Prize during the past few weeks–I try to give at least the small mercy of a timely decision–and finished late Friday. Some of the poems I rejected are staying with me, as well as the terrific pieces on the finalist list.

Editing has both steeled and tenderized me. Sometimes knowing what it’s like on the other side of Submittable dulls my will to try–how does anybody ever rise to the top? Should I even bother drafting a poem if I don’t have a shiny, high-stakes idea? (The answer to that is yes: the process has to matter more than the product.) But I understand now that when I’m rejected, I may still have reached one or a few appreciative readers who lingered over the work, thought about it for a while. That’s not nothing. Reading submissions reminds me, too, that persistence matters. As an editor who has rejected good writers multiple times, I root for those stalwart subbers to break through with a poem I cannot pass up. I also respect poets who are just done with the discouraging struggle to be published in traditional ways–or perhaps done with my rejections specifically! There are many ways to write a “good” poem and many ways to share it. As often as I think “this poem has strengths but isn’t in its best possible version yet,” the writer might counter, validly, that I’m just not the right reader.

Lesley Wheeler, The knife

I know very little about opera, but I think “Recitativo secco” is what opera singers sometimes do between songs – minimal orchestration: more talking than singing. In musicals they would talk.

I can’t find much online about the pros/cons of recitative. It can involve a few instruments. “secco” (dry) is the most minimal style. Here are a few quotes –

• “It increases the interest of Scenes which, deprived of the resources of the Orchestra, might become tedious: but it seriously diminishes the amount of contrast attainable in effects of colouring and chiaroscuro” (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Secco_Recitative)
• secco recitative gave way to full recitative by 1820 in serious operas, and became standard in comic operas during the following decade (New Grove Dictionary)
• “Typically, the earlier the opera is, the easier it is to distinguish between recitative and other operatic sections, such as arias or ensemble pieces” (https://www.operasense.com/tag/recitativo-secco/

In books like Tim Steele’s “Towards a winter solstice” the rhyme/meter keeps ticking over even when the poetry’s having a rest. In free verse books like “Bycatch” (Caroline Smith) (a good book) there are stanzas (indeed, whole poems) where the line-breaks carry on even though the text is prose. It’s like those joggers who run on the spot waiting for the lights to turn green.

So what’s wrong with talking instead of (gratuitous?) singing? What’s wrong with passages of prose? Maybe

1. the work feels more of a unified whole if the music/form is sustained
2. there is a hierarchy of arts – music is higher than words; poetry is higher than prose – and people prefer the higher arts
3. there’s a thin-end-of-the-wedge fear – if you start leaving out line-breaks where will it end? Flash?

Tim Love, Recitativo secco and poetry

Since to be engaged with poetry is to be engaged, endlessly, in this business of working out how things are like other things (thank you, James Mcconachie, for that one), it stands to reason that a poet might wonder about the things-as-things of poems, themselves. What is a poem? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot again recently, after reading Jon Stone’s excellent essay ‘The Amalgamist’s Workshop’, published here. In this essay, Stone sets out what he calls “a new-ish statement of intent” as to the how and why of his writing. The whole essay makes me fizz with excitement and possibility and new ways of thinking (and isn’t that the point?), but especially this part:

“To characterise poems as ‘toys’, meanwhile, is to suggest (in what I hope is a friendly way) that the reader is also part of the amalgamatic process – that a poem is something to get involved with, not just observe or absorb. “Here is a toy. Do something with it. We learn through play.””

Poems are toys. Well, of course they are. I’ve been groping about in the dark for a while now with the idea of the act of poetry as play (perhaps serious play, but play nonetheless), but reading this statement was like a torch beam illuminating something at my feet that I was just about to stumble over. Poems are toys. They are things the reader brings their own imagination, openness and capacity for surprise to bear on. Like a toy, a poem can be played with in an endless variety of ways, not even remotely limited to the functional and physical constraints of the thing itself. Like a toy, successive readers will play with different facets of the poem and derive different results with it. One reader really enjoys pressing that button that makes a loud ding; another enjoys making the twinkling lights flash; one likes shaking it to see what words fall out; another just wants to wrap it up in a makeshift blanket and cuddle it like a teddy bear.

You might say – well, what is special about toys, anyway? Any random object can be a toy. Yes, it can. But when it’s being played with as a toy, its function changes, from the function of the object to that of a toy. Toys have a special status that is different to other kinds of objects and it’s in the act of playing with them that this status is conferred. Is the same true of poems, and reading?

Victoria Spires, Egg rolls off a table

our town was big enough to consume me.
now that i am older i seek out larger monsters
to devour me bone by bone but then
it was just the overpass & the red truck.
the old factory by the train station
without any windows.

Robin Gow, 11/15

I was just working on a blog post for Patreon on titling your work, and while I reined it in to be more informational and practical, it had me thinking of all the ways I’ve titled works, both individually and as collections. While I have very little problem coming up with book titles (well, barring one recent project I will get to in a minute) individual poems have always been rough for me. It may in fact be why I rarely title the smaller bits and pieces of larger projects, instead leaving them without titles or adding numbers/letters and other typographical elements to denote separate pieces. 

It wasn’t always this way, and my first book, THE FEVER ALMANAC is an excellent example of my early poet days, when I titled individual pieces much more frequently.  I was pretty good at it, and usually the title was something I sussed out of the poem as I drafted it, or it was a word or phrase I had scribbled down in a notebook. The real challenge was the overall collection, which had many titles and versions in those couple of years I was pulling together that first full-length and submitting it. In the fall of 2003, it was titled “Almanac”, and was arranged by seasons, Later, it merged with a second manuscript of poems written between 2004-2005 I was calling “The Fever Poems.”  During that summer of revision, right before the combined version that was eventually accepted, I mended the two titles together and it stuck.

My second book, IN THE BIRD MUSEUM, was not always called that. When I queried and sent the book to Dusie Press, it was still called “Instabilities, ” after another one of the poems. It was a title that reflected the ideas of knowledge and transgression well. My editor suggested I change it to “In the Bird Museum” which was the title of another one of the poems and I was amenable to the change.

GIRL SHOW, however, was always GIRL SHOW, even before I had written a single poem. I pulled it from a non-fiction historical book I had on my desk in the library with the same title that was all about women sideshow performers. When I wrote the first poem, this was its title and the guiding force behind the book as it took shape over the next couple of years, even enduring my MFA, where I completed the manuscript as my thesis project. The title of my next book, THE SHARED PROPERTIES OF WATER AND STARS, if I remember correctly, came from something scribbled in my notebook. At the time an editor requested to see the manuscript in the fall of 2012, I vaguely remember slapping the title on it and seeing if they thought it worked. When the book came out less than a year later, that was the title. 

Kristy Bowen, naming the beast

Some days I feel I’m getting quieter and quieter. Have less that demands to be barked [at] anywhere outside my head, or less worth saying, less worth the effort toward affecting the world order, or the small world, anyway, in which I roam. I’m a wizard, often, at conversing. The idle chitchat I can do when required. I don’t mind small talk. (I don’t trust people who do. It is a small courtesy in an often discourteous world, this world of humans we cannot escape.) But I’m more apt these days to remain quiet. Sometimes it feels like a defeat. Other times it feels like new wisdom. Both could be true, of course, depending on the context of my silence. Some silence is a being-with, some is a withdrawal-from. Some verbiage is a combat. Some a defense. Some a nervous habit. More and more I am trying to learn all the differences among the types of talk and the sorts of silences. More and more I am trying to empathize with each. 

Marilyn McCabe, be visited by a dream of the world as kind

The poem is sitting opposite you, watching while you read it through. Once you raise your eyes from the page, it catches your glance. Takes a sip of its glass of Tempranillo. Lets you think. Then sends you back to the beginning to reread it again in light of the ending.

You draw up some more chairs: one for your memory, one for your dreams, another for your imagination. The poem pours them all a glass of that Tempranillo. They swirl it and sniff. Clink glasses in a silent toast. Start talking among themselves. You even dare to join their conversation.

And that’s when the poem stands up, drains its glass, and quietly leaves. Its job is done.

Matthew Stewart, The poem and you

Imagine, at this age, to have brought beginner’s mind to California.  Where have I been?  In the land of the skeptic, in France.  But what luck to have had California before me.  Full-on sensory discovery.

Enthusiasm has a way of being boundless. (Forgive me for walking naively into known mythologies.)

Rocky cliffs and water that rolls with a steady rhythm that gathers, then completely releases with an assured swagger, somehow embarrassing the Atlantic. 

Painting after painting in a grand sfumato that no matter how many times you clean your glasses, is real and before you.

Sad lady of the lake and her plangent guitar at a hillside café.

Looking, looking, I became entranced by planes and screens.

Jill Pearlman, Be Here Now, California (gaps included)

Here were tall lines of stone men and women, arranged in rows and circles, as if preparing to dance. Around the small hill on which they stood, cloud had fallen into the hollows of wide-open peat country, a land where lochs and lochans, hills and hillocks morph into creatures of fantasy, illusions created by the pouring and shifting mists and rains, by light and shade.

I was speechless in the company of these stones. My ears rang. R and I walked around, together then apart, each trying to make sense of them, of the wider landscape in which they stood. From standing stones to distant hills the space was filled with hollows and hummocks. Each loch was a bowl filled with milk. Each hill trailed fogs made of silk. The effect was unsettling and unnerving. I lost my balance a few times when my feet should have been sure. […]

Our modern world is febrile with anxiety, paranoia and conflict, addled with gut-wrenching concern for the future. But shadows on pale sand, white shells and crisped seaweed and fragments of ancient rock grounded me. I thought of remote lives, the long churn of time and the relentless natural processes governing Planet Earth, of how people knew their natural landscape, understood the local geology, found comfort in using stone to observe change across seasons and years, and calculate the motions of the stars. Perhaps they knew the deep time memories held within rock. Perhaps a sense of permanence and meaning came from the process of construction. Perhaps the standing stones gave reassurance to the builders and their families about their own place in the universe, and enabled them to imagine distant futures.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, The comfort of rock

They chant the same Psalms, the same tones
used for centuries. Modern minds scoff,
but the monks, yoked together
into a process both mystical and practical,
do as they’ve been commanded.

Their graves, as unadorned as their robes,
stretch out in rows of white crosses, reminiscent
of a distant French field. We might ponder
the futility of belief in a new covenant,
when all around us old enemies clash,
or we might show up for prayer, light
a candle, and simply submit.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Armistice Day with Monastic Poem

In life, in a marriage, in a community, in a company, in a story, there is a moment when you can see the light ahead. You clearly see what’s going to happen. You know: danger. Democracy-ending danger. You see the lanterns flickering. There was a time when this mobilized people, made them understand that it was time to rise to action.

I feel the heaviness of the future pushing against my own door. This year, our press has withstood an extreme funding crisis, springtime fires, and now, emergency flooding that has left half our space unusable. In 2015, we were nearly ready to close the press, and now, after the government has consistently reinforced that the arts are useless, we are looking into the same abyss. But we continue ahead with the knowledge that now, more than ever, narratives rooted in truth and experience must be uplifted. Despite widespread hopelessness, I know we can achieve a different story. I feel the breath of the gods. Overcoming this, and doing so in community, will be the joy of a lifetime.

Kate Gale, One if by Land, Two if by Sea: Misinformation in a Burning Country

This morning the beech leaves I carried home have curled into themselves. Rather like us in front of the log-burner at night or when we climb under the plump duvet. We sigh before we fall asleep, the brilliance of autumn folding up behind our eyes, packing itself away for another year.

We are ready now, for whenever it comes: the first frost, or even, perhaps, one morning that strange flat silence marking the arrival of snow.   

tree-pose
going deeper
into myself

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Towards December

This week: the walker faces due west, a gun utters a death wish, a spare poem spares us nothing, and much more. Enjoy.

九月尽く雨の匂いの象を見に　菅井美奈子

kugatsu tsuku ame no nioi no zō o mini

            September ends
            I go to see an elephant
            with the scent of rain

                                                Minako Sugai

from Gendai Haiku, #718, June 2025 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 30, 2025)

I see how fragile everything is
around you, how tenuous
any peace. Reasons for sorrow
pile up like fallen leaves.
Feel my heart touching yours,
enfolding yours.
I’m here with you where you are
under this roof that lets in rain

Rachel Barenblat, Fragile rejoicing – songs for Sukkot

Keats wrote To Autumn while he was staying in Winchester, England’s old capital, in what was then a very rural but fast-changing Hampshire. While there, he wrote a letter to a friend describing his surprise at a stubble-field that looked warm, just like a painting of a stubble-field. Some critics see the poem as a response to the growing tradition of English landscape painting. The images are left as images, with little exclamation or explanation.

It is, in that sense, an unusually modern poem: the poet draws back from the scene. The Romantic poets are often caricatured as being all about the ‘inner light’, the celebration of the self. That autumn, Keats was looking. […]

What was Keats looking at? In their article Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester Richard Turley, Jayne Archer and Howard Thomas point out that most recent readings of the poem abstract it from its particular place:

As diverse as they may seem, the most resonant recent readings of ‘To Autumn’ share a feature in common: all, in various ways, abstract the ode from its specific Winchester setting… Helen Vendler’s formalist critique recognizes the poem’s ‘remarkably meticulous topography’, but, finally refers the land’s (and the poem’s) meaning back to literary precursors and classical myth. Nicholas Roe’s… takes its brio from the relocation of the dissenting energies of Keats’s ode some 200 miles north to [Peterloo]. Jonathan Bate, in his provocative analysis of the ode as ‘ecosystem’… [contends] that the poem is a ‘meditation on how human culture can only function through links and reciprocal relations with nature’.

When Winchester is mentioned, To Autumn is usually associated with the water meadows south of the city (you can take a guided walk in that direction). The great revelation in the article is that the place which matters most is, in fact, another location Keats visited: St Giles’s Hill, on the east side of the city. The slopes are now occupied by a multi-story car park, while the South Downs beyond have been cut through by a motorway—a huge chalk scar I’ve driven through hundreds of times.

The article goes on to argue for the importance of the poem’s engagement with the local agricultural economy and the shifting social make-up of the town. I did not find this discussion entirely convincing, interesting as agricultural history always is. But the topography matters. From St Giles’s:

the walker faces due west, and in the late-afternoon may observe the ‘maturing sun’ together with the tincturing changes it brings to the landscape (the ‘rosy hue’ of the ‘stubble-plains’), as well as indigenous wildlife such as low-flying swallows gathering insects over the Itchen’s reed beds before nightfall. From its brow, the sights and sounds remembered in Keats’s poem—from the ‘half-reaped furrow’ on which the reaper sleeps, to the bleats of ‘full-grown lambs’ on ‘hilly bourn’—could be observed in one glorious sweep.

No hill, no poem. I can believe it.

Jeremy Wikeley, Walking with Keats

As I walk, there are two rhythms: the pace of the gait, which is surely a beat as intrinsic to the human condition as that of the heart, hypnotic once it has settled into a steady pulse. There is also the ‘biophony’, in this wild and richly biodiverse middle of nowhere. I’m pretty good at identifying birds by sight, but absolutely hopeless with all but the most singular and iconic calls. Of course I have a birdsong app, but when it listens to my recordings it effectively asks, ‘err..which one?’ I am woven into the bird-realm, the Énflaith of John Moriarty’s ‘Invoking Ireland’, an ecumenical communion of all living things. It is the surge and settle of a collective mind, all of us wild and smelly animals listening to each other’s ’languages, if we’re lucky, living long enough to learn something from each other.

I have a theory, based entirely on unscientific and solitary rumination, that language and certainly music, or the music of language, evolved in a din of birdsong and probably pulsed with the beat of walking. As someone who’s often had to walk some distance through this high country out of necessity, I noticed I’d acquired the ‘caminar dels masovers’ This rhythmic long lope of a country people, living in masias like mine, is a natural development of need and environment. If you have to walk 10km for car parts or a jerrycan of diesel in 40 degrees, the brain falls quiet and your trancelike reduction slowly devours the distance. In such a situation, haste or overexcitement will precipitate an ‘event’ and maybe lop days off your life.

All very heroic I know. It’s a privilege to live in this noisy, lonely labyrinth and one I enjoy more and more with the passing of time. Today’s song is the wind’s, sculpting a colossal and invisible transient structure over the woods and crags, itself a language. I’ve learned some of its vocabulary; dark, low and strong on the mountain to the south means big weather, long days of the Cierzo to the north-west means dry cold and dazzling light. In high summer, when there seems not to be a breath of air on the move, a thin finger of wind might tousle the tops of the high pines across the valley with a cool hiss, just enough to tell me the Earth is still turning.

james mcconachie, Biophony

I’m sitting at the desk for the first time in I don’t know how many months. I’m still N.E.D. when it comes to the physical signs of having cancer. But I didn’t realize how much of a psycho/spiritual crisis the experience would ignite.

I am scraped raw. Whittled down by one breast and over a dozen lymph nodes. Perforated bones, and perforated memories. Once, a week ago, I finally turned on my computer but couldn’t figure out how to access my files. I turned it off again.

My world is tiny. A few rooms. Far fewer voices. The tinny reverberation of chronic pain, of chronic loneliness. So much shame. […]

The last of this year’s wasps fly heavily in the fog. While waiting for the train, a paper wasp lands on my collar and my student wants me to swat it away. It’s fine, I say. I’m not that sweet.

I wouldn’t know if it was a queen. If so, she’d better be looking for a cozy place to slip into for the winter. And if not, let the worker keep looking for a bit more sugar before she’s done.

I’m not done. Just starting again, slightly out of season.

Ren Powell, Too Many Metaphors

under the poet’s mask
there is another mask
it has always been
a masqued dance
words dancing with words
each carrying its own secret
hidden even from itself
they dance the candlelight hours
daylight masked
night’s eyes masked
clawing at the reader’s mask
the catastrophe of love

Jim Young, the masque

Do I feel the treeness in my body? More than I feel a relation to buildings, except through a process of what I’ve just termed anthropometaphorizing. I feel closer to a mountain than a skyscraper. But closer to a tree than a plant. I feel the treeness deeper in my body than I feel squirrelness. That doesn’t feel very deep. Is it my spine? My ambition to be more like a tree than a squirrel? My relation with gravity? Gravitas? To have the slow, rooted wit of a tree? Its apparent understanding and perspective. (Except you, aspen. Settle down, you.) To live in time as a tree lives? To live in interrelation? I realize that whatever the cause, I feel a connection to trees in an embodied way. I could turn into a tree and feel satisfied (or so my body thinks) whereas a squirrel—not so much.

Gary Barwin, My mirror neurons vibe with trees: On anthropometaphorizing

I am in Derry. We walk over the Peace Bridge, and the River Foyle, and registration starts at 10am. By 10.30, the sound of 400 delegates is an differentiated roar. We find the conference quiet room, and the silence is a cool relief.

Then the conference opens with Seamus Heaney’s “The Tollund Man”. Now that the journey’s nerves and uncertainty are over, and we’re safe at a table at the back of the room close to the exit, I start to feel excited. I studied Heaney’s bog body poems for my A-level – learnt them off by heart at work from small handwritten notes as I buffed the floors. “Some day I will go to Aarhus” – and tomorrow, I will go HomePlace, between Heaney’s two childhood homes in Mossbawn and The Wood, close to his grave in Bellaghy. It’s also the site of the latest bog body discovery: beheaded and left to the bog 2000 years ago, a young woman, initially assumed to be a man.

“I will feel lost, and happy, and at home”. Though there are hundreds of people and every conversation brings me out in a sweat, I have never seen so many delegates in walking boots and fleeces. These are outdoor people, passionate and friendly; some of them geeky and awkward and shy. I hear passing conversations on ecology and pollution and birds; I talk with a woman about the use of sheep’s wool in peatland restoration. There’s a table of sphagnum plugs, soft and wet; a copy of “Book of Bogs” on the registration desk. My conference delegate lanyard states that I am Clare Shaw, Boggart, which is the name Anne Caldwell invented for our loose confederation of bog-loving artists and writers.

Tomorrow, Anna, Johnny and I will be leading a day-long workshop: “Getting into the bog: creative skills to support your practice”. We know the power of creative expression, especially in words – and we want to share creative skills and strategies with people working with peat, from researchers to conservation officers to fundraisers.

The scientific method, and hard data, gave us penicillin, and pasteurisation, and flight, and on the whole, a turning away from the kind of superstition, bias and dogma which saw hundreds of thousands of people accused of witchcraft. This pursuit of objectivity removed the emotional and subjective, from knowledge – but in doing so, it produced a scientific and academic discourse which can feel peculiarly disconnected from everyday language, let alone a language of emotion, or imagination. As a result, the way we talk about science – no matter how profound or vital – can leaves people cold; the way we express ourselves academically excludes; the way we communicate professionally feels soulless and empty of meaning.

And it matters, because when it comes to bogs, and other habitats, we need a language which communicates their importance, their layers of meaning, the deep feeling we have for them. Creative expression – as opposed to academic or scientific writing – can be more accessible; more meaningful to people without specialist knowledge: It can offer a real-world translation of complex data and concepts into lived experience, making it more relatable and engaging. It creates a fuller narrative – the writer is present in the writing as a person, with feelings and emotions, a history and culture. There’s space for nuance and contradiction, uncertainty and change; space for the reader to find their own meaning, to own their own personhood, in the act of making sense. It opens up new possibilities; ways to remember and dream and observe.

Most importantly, for me, creative writing in ecology creates a living account, in which the reader can enter the world of the writer; share their fascinations and their emotions. It’s a more immersive experience for the writer: you can more fully inhabit the emotions that brought you into this work – your love, your curiosity, your fears. Instead of reproducing corporate/ organisational narrative/discourse, you have a sense of connection with the work you produce.

Clare Shaw, Lost, happy, and at home

In the current timeline I live in, magical realism is necessary. When hate-mongering is knitted into our fabric, I need the neighborhood gentle giant to hand me a bouquet of flowers held between his fingertips. Where logic is discouraged, I need for my house to float away via millions of balloons to a faraway land. Where truth is manipulated, I need a gigantic, smoking caterpillar to tell me what’s what. In a world where a man is celebrated for saying horrible things about women, I need for a man to turn into a skittish deer.

The poem “Native Species” [by Todd Davis] starts with the image of a man looking at paintings of deer online. The paintings conjure for the man the sensations and fluidity of hunting a deer in a landscape of multiflora rose and briar. To navigate within such a relentlessly thorny landscape is to develop a kinship with it. Like Sisyphus’ hands creating grooves in the boulder, a hunter blazes a path leaving nothing behind but footprints. In a way, to hunt the deer on the mountain is to, in a way, become the deer on the mountain. […]

In the poem, the hunter labored with a meat saw, embodying the art of loving what one kills. Like something straight from a Robin Wall-Kimmerer book, the hunt is thanksgiving. The hunt is reciprocity. And in the poem, hunting season slips into winter, a landscape where a lucky person can find a shed antler like a crown removed before sleep.

I underlined that line in the poem for several reasons. Because deer do wear crowns, don’t they? Because the hunter and the poet imagine deer not just as kings, but kings that requires rest and safety in the confines of briar and snowdrift. Because of the word sleep, and how this poem—so narrowly conjuring similarities between the deer and hunter so far—is soon going to enter the dream-like, magical reality of a man turning into a deer.

Living a good life thus far, I imagine magic for myself. How about no longer commuting those precious 70 minutes for work four days a week. How about no longer needing to work 40+ hours per week. How about winning the lottery I never play. How about the Chronos I live in expanding beyond 24 hours so that I can give time to all my passions and loved-ones every single day. How about actually, really helping people. How about actually, really helping the earth. How about not needing to sleep. How about no more divisiveness. How about a president who reads books and talks about it. How about guiltlessly spending an entire day just watching one flower bloom. How about people walking into the woods where all the mirrors are.

Sarah Lada, The Comfort of a Tail’s Flash Along Treeline

I’m here in Holland as a guest speaker at The Writers Unlimited Festival – Winternachten. Sometimes you have to go outside to go inside. I switch off this computer and take a walk around this beautiful Dutch city. I am thinking about this essay, the theme of skin. Black skin. White skin. I have the words of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ in my headphones, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. I take my title for this essay from that beautiful song. It makes me recall the flaw in every story that reveals the truth, the words beneath the words. It makes me think of the charm of our imperfections. And there is a skin on everything that stops the light getting in, a wallpaper of doubt or fear that covers over those cracks and stops the magic happening, the light getting through.

Last night the Winternachten festival opened with a ceremony for the Oxfam Novid Pen awards for freedom of expression. The winners were two courageous writers: The Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh who is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence in Saudi Arabia accused of renouncing Islam. And Indian investigative journalist Malini Subramaniam who was forced to leave her home after death threats following her outspoken reports on human rights abuse and sexual violence against women. Her humility and courage as a woman and as a writer, a shining example to us all. Later during the ceremony, the Booker Prize winning author Michail Shishkin delivered a keynote speech, his words moved me. The theatre was so silent you could hear a pin drop, a stifled sniff and a tear fall. His deep voice resounded in his native Russian and above his head the English translation scrolled on huge screens. He began by describing the famous protests of human rights organisations in Red Square. Then he spoke of lesser known protests, the names that nobody knows, the writers and protesters that have been tortured and murdered, quietly, out of sight, and out of the public eye. Shishkin asked us to consider why they protested? Listening to Shishkin I was reminded of the power of freedom of speech, how important it is as a writer to speak up and to live true rather than to stay quiet and live safe. The meaning of life, Shishkin continued, lies not in survival, but in the preservation of dignity.

Salena Godden, Skin

A gun utters a death wish. A surgeon removes the wrong organ. A police helicopter circles above.

Late afternoon does what it always does in some places, then slowly graffitis the sky to dark-scrawled night.

Everything just beyond is bright morning—

coffee brewing, journaling,

a father hearing his baby daughter speak her first words upon rising.

Rich Ferguson, What the Day Does in Some Places

On Saturday morning, the person occupying the White House announced that he is directing our Secretary of War to send armed troops to my city, calling it “war ravaged,” and authorizing the use of “Full Force” [sic]. This is a gross insult to any place that has truly been ravaged by war, a waste of resources we all contribute to, and an unconscionable act of aggression against those of us who live here. […]

The Furies are goddesses of vengeance. They are of the earth, Gaea, and are associated with earthly fertility. They live in the underworld but ascend to pursue the wicked. They are particularly opposed to crimes within families, which makes sense as they were born of blood spilled when a son castrated his father to take his power.

I gathered my basil in a basket I once used to carry my premature babies with me from room to room of our home. I was not much of a cook or baker when my children were growing up. I am three generations removed from the farmers I descend from, and none of their knowledge was passed to me. My great-grandmother used to send us jars of applesauce she made from fruit grown on her trees, but convenience foods were a staple of the diet I was raised on, meals that came largely from boxes and cans and mixes and packets. Chicken soup was one of the few things I made that my children loved; it was so much better than the tins of stuff I ate when I was a kid. Recently, my daughter shared a photo of chicken soup her husband made from my recipe, more than 5,000 miles away from Portland. It lessened regrets I have about the kinds of things I didn’t do when she was growing up, didn’t understand back then. I certainly didn’t grow any of our food in those years, but now I am learning how to. This year we successfully raised onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peas, squash, parsley, thyme, and basil. The pears in my galette came from a tree in our yard. The apples came from local growers. Sunday morning, we picked up carrots from the stand in front of a u-pick farm about a mile from our home. This summer, I taught myself more about how to preserve the food we’ve grown, so we can eat it through the winter.

How does a commoner respond when a ruler spreads lies and threatens peace and seems to be instigating—perhaps hoping for—violence in her home?

In lots of different ways, I suppose. I can’t tell you, exactly, why I felt compelled to spend our beautiful weekend in the kitchen. I only know that I did, that I needed to tend my garden, reveling in the sun on my skin and the earth under my nails; that I needed to harvest our already-gone-to-flower basil before this week’s promised rain, marveling in its bounty; that I needed to feed myself and my family, delighting in our full, satisfied bellies.

I needed to revel, marvel, and delight in my place on this earth. I needed to fuel my Fury on that which makes her stronger, reminds her of what she will not give away.

Rita Ott Ramstad, What feeds us

i see a picture
of a local slumlord’s house online. it is huge &
i imagine it as an advent calendar.
what do they count down? i am looking
for hope in bites. in windows. in doors.
in holding on to autumn. i open a door.
the bathroom light like a star or an angel.

Robin Gow, 10/3

I have been waiting for this collection to come out ever since I first heard about it, and it does not disappoint. Incidentally, I think Clare Pollard was the first poet I ever saw perform live. Clare came to Ulverston to read for “A Poem and a Pint”, a wonderful reading series that ran for many years (more on this in another post!), and this happened to be the first poetry reading I’d ever been to. I’ve just googled it to find it was back in 2006. I don’t remember much from that night, other than being utterly astonished by Clare’s reading, and particularly by the subject matter of the poetry, which felt utterly daring in its exploration of female experience.

So back to Clare’s latest book, The Lives of the Female Poets, her seventh poetry collection with Bloodaxe. Dr Johnson’s all-male Lives of the Poets gets taken to task here. The first poem does not shy away from anything either – Clare gets stuck in straight away with “Poetess” – exploring its use as a ‘derogatory term’, pointing out that ‘it’s true that the adjectives ‘feminine’ and ‘Poetess’, / when modifying poetry / can be exchanged either with ‘minor’, ‘popular’, or ‘sentimental’ / without injury to sense.’ The ending of the poem is fabulous – we are left with an image of the Poetess at the ‘female empire of the tea-table, /where She sweetens the tea /with sugar’s tender hiss.’ I love that the ‘hiss’ of the final line picks up and echoes ‘Poetess’ and ‘sense’.

This book takes us on a dizzying journey from the grand heights of Inana – an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, love and fertility to a battle between a mother and the head-lice that infest her children’s hair. How many poems are there about this battle that perhaps all mothers have gone through? I’m not sure but I thought this one was fabulous – dark and playful and funny and disturbing. And also delicious to find out that the oldest known sentence in the earliest alphabet was inscribed on a 4000 year-old ivory comb and is ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard’. That the first known sentence is an act of care is wonderful.

I enjoyed every single poem in this collection, and enjoyed the feeling of meeting my literary ancestors – some of whom I knew – Sappho, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Bishop – but there were plenty I didn’t. I’d not heard of Praxilla for example, and the beautiful fragment of her writing that we are left with.

Kim Moore, September Reads

Playing always puts me in my happy place. So being a poet and knowing that the theme for National Poetry Day this year was ‘Play’ was a gift to me. One year ago, a friend messaged me on National Poetry Day to say they had read a poem of mine to a group of people at a celebration event. I messaged back to say I was delighted and that if they held a similar event I would be very pleased to go along. They didn’t forget, and this year I visited that group of people to read a dozen of my poems. It made my day shine. We also tried out a writing exercise from The Poetry Society which had been produced for the day. It worked well for those who considered themselves to be poets and those who had not done much poetic writing before, and each participant was able to create their own poem during the afternoon.

I had road-tested my set of poems earlier in the year when I read them from a bandstand in a park, and they worked well. This time I was also able to add in Toffee Hammers as the opening poem. It delighted me to have finally finished this poem after many years of wanting to write it but never really coming up with a final draft that said what I wanted to say. It was good to have been spurred on by the theme and by my desire to have a new poem for National Poetry Day. To celebrate the poem’s emergence I chose it for Poem of the Month on my YouTube channel. Sharing poems with a new group of people enabled me to hear the poems afresh and highlighted the joy of having a themed reading. It is refreshing to see how the poems land in different listening spaces, and which ones elicit specific audible responses. I chuckled this time to hear someone say “Oh your poor mum,” in response to the poem which recounts my falling in a pond when I was little.

Sue Finch, PLAY

Since the miscarriage, I have started reading and abandoned probably a dozen novels and memoirs. I don’t feel bad not finishing a book—I’m not assigned this reading—but I don’t typically read a third or even half of a book, then give up. The books have felt pointless. Predictable. Boring.

I have Reader’s Block. Other than poetry collections (where I skip around and dip in and out), middle grade novels read aloud for the family (where I have an audience / demands to read), and picture books (again, audience with demands), I finish nothing.

Just to put this in context, reading is my only actual talent in life.

I have my library card number memorized. My children’s names are all from classic novels. The only detention I ever received in school was for reading a novel during science class.

I remember being in first grade, walking into our school library with my class. The librarian showed us the section of books at our grade level, then took me aside and gestured to the whole library – “this is your reading level,” she told me.

I suppose I’m back to the small shelf right now. […]

Proofs and Theories by Louise Glück
I’m writing a class on Glück, so I skimmed through and reread parts of this collection of her essays. They are a mix of thoughts on writing, on becoming a poet, and scholarly criticism of other poets – “I wrote these essays as I would poems; I wrote from what I know, trying to undermine the known with intelligent questions. Like poems, they have been my education” – she says. I think that if you are not very interested in reading or writing poetry, you may not like it—but if you are at all interested, there were some valuable insights into seasons of writer’s block, how to challenge yourself as a writer, and the use of “silence” in writing.

Renee Emerson, Reader’s Block

I was saddened to hear of the death of Brian Patten this week. I can’t claim to have known the man but we talked on occasion and he was complimentary of my poetry. He was generous enough to offer to write something more for the blog the last time I saw him read. I don’t know why I did not take him up on his offer, I suppose I thought I could in the future, sadly it was not to be.

Paul Tobin, SIDESWIPE

I don’t know why the death of Brian Patten saddened me more than most. I met him only twice. Yet I found myself thinking about it more than is usually the case when a poet, or some kind of artist, or just somebody I knew something of, dies.

Patten had a peculiar place in the evolvement of British poetry, forever linked as he was to Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, who were lumped together as ‘The Mersey Poets’ in the 1960s. They complemented each other – McGough, whose humour was laced with down-to-earth political commonsense, Henri, the strange, eccentric, painter capable of a furious energy, and Patten, the young, lyrical, mostly love poet who also had a surrealist, absurdist mind. The Penguin Modern Poets 10, labelled The Mersey Sound, sold millions. It was published in 1967, when Patten was 21.

He was a precocious talent, obviously, and most of the poems he wrote back then remain read today. I still have my favourites from that and his early individual collections, Little Johnny’s Confession, Notes To The Hurrying Man, Vanishing Trick, The Irrelevant Song and Grave Gossip, the latter released when he was still only in his early 30s. I still love the opening lines of Ode On Celestial Music: It’s not celestial music it’s the girl in the bathroom singing./ You can tell. Although it’s winter/ the trees outside her window have grown leaves,/ all manner of flowers push up through the floorboards. Others I like to read again from time to time include Interruption At The Opera House, You Come To Me Quiet As Rain Not Yet Fallen, and Albatross Ramble.

It was in 1975 or 1976 that I read as ‘support’ to Patten at the Benn Hall, Rugby. I was almost certainly awful, the poems of my youth perhaps sounding a bit better than they were. It didn’t matter. I was pleased to have had the chance to do it. People had come to hear him anyway and, my bit done, I sat enthralled at the way he held his audience, was warm and direct, connected to them almost immediately and sustained a long, enchanting reading for the best part of an hour, then, the job done, caught the train back to London.

A couple of years later I wrote as a part of my final degree an essay on ‘The Mersey Poets’, which was in effect a defence of them against the supposed might of the academic world, which mostly either ignored or tolerated them, and any of us who took them seriously, with an air of benign, quasi-benevolent pity. I felt, having seen the effect Patten had on that single night in Rugby, their poems would be read for generations to come and would reach far more people than most of the poets who were products of the ‘approved’ academic system.

Bob Mee, BRIAN PATTEN (1946-2025)

Here in the US, we have a new poet laureate (announced by the Library of Congress on September 15, 2025)  —  and this selected poet Arthur Sze sees poetry as a unifying agent — “verse can bring us together“.

Sze is a poet whose work I value reading — but its links to mathematics are gentle and scattered.  Here is a sample —  the closing lines from Sze’s poem “Sight Lines”.  (The complete poem is available here at poets.org.)  

from  “Sight Lines” by Arthur Sze

. . .  when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch—
I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—
I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring—
I find ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman of desire—
though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—
though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s mystery—
the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—
I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—
fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand—
though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—

From The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems by Arthur Sze (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). 

JoAnne Growney, The Geometry of Verse

“Where to begin.”

To quote Renata Adler.

To start with the favorite, or one of the favorites, or the favorite at 2:13 p.m. in the week of Robert Creeley’s For Love: Poems 1950-1960.

To refuse to think about these poems in the order they are given.

To choose, instead, the unscrupulous preferences of one’s own exuberance, one’s own tonalities, one’s own stammering speculations.

To be small, then. Small as this spare poem that spares us nothing.

A creature of three stanzas that reassures the extra line of its role as tiny ruiner. 3-3-4, the extra word.

Alina Stefanescu, Bob Creeley’s LOVE.

There’s long been a deep precision cut with the metaphysical through the works of American poet Susan Howe, including in her latest offering, Penitential Cries (New York NY: New Directions, 2025), offering prose stretches that seem to break apart even as they interconnect. Her poems have long held that particular tension: between breaking into component parts and small piles while simultaneously held together through sheer, impossible coherence. How does, one might ask, the centre actually hold? I’ve been reading her work for years now without fully able to articulate what it is that strikes me so deeply, while also finding it incredibly generative, a series of works one needs to sit in for some time, to allow into and underneath the skin. I still recommend her collection That This (New Directions, 2010), a book that included the death of her husband [see my review of such here], to anyone who has experienced a recent loss, finding the collection enormously helpful after the death of my mother, allowing or even providing a permission to attempt my own examinations. Through Howe, connections of sound, meaning and form interact and interconnect underneath each book’s umbrella, whether that be through a particular subject matter through idea, or a phrase, watching the whole of her life and thinking and research and immediacy fall into how her inquiries take shape.

rob mclennan, Susan Howe, Penitential Cries

One of the things that most surprised me in my first year of this substack was when I started to be sent poetry books — both by authors and sometimes direct from the press — in the hope that I might mention or review them. Much as I appreciate all of you discerning readers, my audience is hardly enormous, and to start with it was truly tiny so I hadn’t expected this at all, but these days I receive a steady stream of poetry books and pamphlets from around the world. The fact that authors and presses bother to do this for such a small publication is probably a depressing indication of just how little mainstream poetry reviewing is now going on, but of course it’s a great perk for me. I get to read all sorts of things this way I would never otherwise have seen. I always make it clear that I cannot promise to mention or review anything I’m sent, but I do try to get round to as much as I can eventually. So do send me things! (Especially if you are a woman — Anglophone poetry is surely at least 50% women these days, if not more, but it’s almost exclusively men who send me books.)

At the moment I have quite a pile of things I found engaging in various ways, so this week I thought I’d try to do a kind of round-up in the hope that there’ll be a bit of something for everyone. This is a long one. […]

Henry Gould[‘s] … publications are I suppose strictly speaking mostly chapbooks or pamphlets, but not at all in the sense that this usually means. In a quick search, I’ve rounded up eight of them that I’ve received from Gould in the last year, and I’m fairly sure that’s not quite all of them. Gould is doing something quite unique — writing broadly, I suppose, in the tradition of Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’, and more generally in a tradition I think we could fairly though surprisingly call Pindaric, his verse is unembarrassedly high-flown, even vatic; rich with a huge array of cultural references; fluent in the grand style — but also extraordinarily topical, and produced at a prodigious rate. These multiple pamphlets consist largely of individual dated poems, each between a page and several pages long, written just a day or two apart. So a whole pamphlet represents often only about a month’s production, and is then published very rapidly.

Gould has many quirks and distinctive cadences, especially in his closural use of parentheses and asides. Read at length this distinctive style can be sometimes hypnotic, occasionally same-y, but it is often beautiful. His range of reference is wide and markedly eclectic but he has written so much that you after a while you get the hang of it, and what might first have seemed obscure becomes almost friendly. It is also enormously ambitious and expansive: in a very old-fashioned way Gould takes it for granted that the long-form poem is the proper place to bring together philosophy, politics, history and religion. And it’s often quite funny as well.

Victoria Moul, On confidence and self-consciousness in poetry

I’ve always found the Lament for Boromir one of Tolkien’s most beautiful poems but the way it’s sung by the Clamavi De Profundis musical group brings out subtleties in its composition that I’d never paused over on the page. Their sensitivity to Tolkien’s expressive handling of a difficult metre has changed the way I say the poem to myself.

Essentially, I think, the metre is a freely handled iambic heptameter, with frequent substitution of trochees (feet of two stresses) or other non-iambic feet for the iambs. The problem with the heptameter line is that it can easily fall into a kind of mechanical gallop that gives each line a similar cadence that flattens out meaning and expressiveness. Tolkien has resisted this by varying the metre. Usually this means slowing the movement by runs of stressed syllables (‘long grass grows’, ‘West Wind comes walking’, ‘saw him walk’, ‘saw him then no more’, ‘North Wind may have heard’, ‘high walls westward’) or by introducing an additional stressed syllable (‘ride over’); sometimes it means lightening and speeding it by runs of unstressed syllables, very obviously in line three, where we have three extra unstressed syllables. The Clamavi De Profundis singers emphasise this by sounding each word and syllable clearly and distinctly and pausing between phrases so that we feel the unique aural contour each individual phrase has, as well as how the underlying metre gives pattern to the stanza as a whole. They help us see the lovely way in which Tolkien has made separate, specific moments of memory and feeling flow together in a single powerful expression of love, yearning, grief and compassion.

Edmund Prestwich, Tolkien’s Lament for Boromir

Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’ addresses that great working-class signifier, ‘the best room’. The parlour of the terraced house was burdened with a number of roles: the room ‘kept good’ for special occasions, for Sunday use, for rare visits from one’s betters (the minister, usually); for those brief family celebrities, the dying or the dead; or the room where the family’s golden child – a grammar-school boy, say – might improve themselves in its silence. It might be pressed into more regular use in an emergency, for an old, infirm or indigent relative. (A ‘houseless aunt’ is not a ‘homeless’ one; no family member would ever be allowed to sink so low.) Its role was heavily self-signalling. To keep a room like this was only a ‘symbol’ of working-class propriety and dignity from a middle-class perspective; from that of its keepers, it was merely evidence of it.

There was always a touch of the music hall in Tony’s work, and he could rarely resist a punning title. The good room may have been described as a ‘study’; as a child, I remember the word connoting more silence than learning, or indeed books. But in this case, the word also tells us what took place there, and indeed what’s taking place now: the poem itself is a study – of working-class mores, aspirations and contradictions, in particular the two-edged gift of Harrison’s own education. (Harrison, like Heaney, never used a word without being fully conscious of its etymology: L. studere – to be diligent, eager, zealous; PIE (s)teu– push, thrust, knock, beat. Best … best … best.)

This study’s made even quieter by the presence of the family dead. Two are named. There’s the awful sketch of the brief cousin: the poet’s aunt, silent in her shock; the whispered conference of the women of the house, as they pass the cheap plastic mirror before the baby’s mouth. The other is Harrison’s famous Uncle Joe, who also features in poems like ‘Heredity’: ‘How you became a poet’s a mystery! / Wherever did you get your talent from?’ / I say I had two uncles Joe and Harry / one was a stammerer, the other dumb. Joe’s word was presumably a good one when he finally got to it: he d-d-d-ds his way not to dumb but the delicate decorative art of the damascener. Elsewhere, Harrison ties Joe to that great lisper, Demosthenes, who cured himself by declaiming his speeches with his mouth full of pebbles. Tongue-tied speech was Harrison’s inheritance. His early theme was the pursuit of the eloquence that would unknot it.

Don Paterson, Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’

I am a voracious reader. Non fiction, fiction, poetry, memoir, fiction, give them all to me, let me go about my day always with the internal narratives of other writers in my head. Audio books, hard backs, paperbacks. Stacked on every table, in every nook. I keep highlighters, pens and book marks in every room, and I live in fear of one day losing the will to read. It happened once, years ago, during a bout of depression. That was when I discovered poetry, because I could no longer find refuge in reading novels, my concentration sparked to nothing every time I tried to read. Instead, in the haven of the local library, tucked away on a bottom shelf I found a short form emotional defibrillation in the form of Jackie Kay, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Collette Bryce, Katrina Porteus. An awakening occurred, a new literary genre to sink into.

Wendy Pratt, I deface my books because I am in conversation with them.

Yesterday went well.  That’s my best case brain talking.  My worst case brain says that they were overwhelmed and mystified at how what we did constitutes poem writing.

I left all the samples in the office, but we created some fascinating poems.  I gave them my document of abandoned lines, which had space above and below to add lines of their own.  Here’s an example, the first page of the document:—-
In a past time, you’d have been Magellan

I watch you solder bits to a motherboard

This body, a country with no maps

Some days the backyard garden explodes

I keep the quilts made by a spinster aunt.

—–

I have 15 pages, so they have plenty of lines to choose from.  I had them write companion lines and then cut the pages into strips.  And then we did a lot of experiments.

First we chose 6 strips at random and turned them over.  We asked ourselves, how did they work together?  We had the option to add more lines from our collection of strips.  We could create more lines.  We could rearrange.

I had also rearranged the tables so that we had several tables with long sheets of paper on them.  I had them put the strips they weren’t going to use on those sheets of paper–ideally, everyone would put at least one strip on each strip of long paper.

Everyone had a long sheet of paper with strips, and we spent 15 minutes arranging the strips into something resembling a poem.  I read a few out loud.  I thought they worked as poems, but my students seemed more hesitant.

I do realize that one reason why I think they work is that the abandoned lines are my lines, so in some sense, they do work well together.  I also realize that I have more training in doing reading without insisting on some external meeting; I did confess to my students that I like having a clear meaning, which these poems may not always have.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Surrealistic Poem Generating in Creative Writing Class

Nine of us from Bath Writers and Artists met last Saturday at The Hive Community Centre in Peasedown St John for a second session of making books. This time we focussed on the simple pamphlet stitch and variations on the theme. […]

My sculptural book is made from a willow twig, hemp yarn, and one of my ten-word poems written in walnut ink on paper dyed with willow strippings. Is it a book? It’s a book if I say it’s a book!

Dear willow
you keep our secrets
in your hollow
heart

Ama Bolton, Another day of Art and Poetry

I used to use Michael Burkard’s “A Sideways Suicide” on exams in poetry courses. I liked the way it required students to let go of the literal and lean on other ways of knowing, of accessing feeling: music, movement, repetition. I think it’s another one of my answering machine poems; I know assorted lines and phrases have been part of my internal jukebox, a device with neither discernible controls nor logic nor yankable plug for almost twenty-five years. The first time I deployed it on an unsuspecting class it was probably 2004 or 2005, and this went on for ten years or so, until one particular group took it on themselves to inquire after my well-being the next week. I was, I assured them, just fine. (I am, I assure you, just fine.)

Still, I have been mesmerized by this poem for twenty-five years, so take from that what you will, I guess. I’ve always understood it as an assertion of selfhood, a kind of unbarbaric yawp. Where Whitman hollers his celebration of self from sea to shining sea, Burkard pulls an Irish goodbye and ambles off into the evening: I imagine him taking the alleyways because they are more interesting, taking a circuitous stroll on his way to “you.” Who is the you? It’s someone he loves, or loved; it’s someone he has some connection with, or had; it’s someone he wants to connect with now, but can’t. Why not? Who knows. Sometimes that’s just the way things go. We fall out or fall away; we absent ourselves out of stupidity or self-preservation; sometimes we simply die.

I think I have the text right, but I had to track this one down online and found it, egads, on a Livejournal. There was at least one typo I was sure of and a second I am pretty sure needed my correction (‘feel’ to ‘feed’ in line four). If anyone has Ruby for Grief to hand, I’d be pleased to be corrected as needed. I thought I still had a copy, but when the first line came back to me while I was drifting off to sleep and I went to the bookcase, I saw that it was missing and immediately remembered why: I lent it to my favourite student in 2017 or so. I think he may have been in that welfare-check section—I remember he took my intro course—but I’d given it to him to read later on, when he got into the MFA where Burkard was teaching.

This kid was an incredibly talented young writer; he’d never even read poetry, wasn’t even an English major, and he advanced a decade in about eighteen months of formal study. He’d also clearly never felt he had a home before he had poems. He reminded me, as our favourites always do, of me. I think he also made off with my copy of Heather McHugh’s Hinge & Sign, but when he came back to visit during his second semester he brought me Bruce Smith’s Devotions.

That was the last time I saw him. He died by suicide in the spring of his second year. Typing this now knocks the wind out of me. It’s something an author, an asshole, would say.

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Sideways Suicide” by Michael Burkard

A long prose poem, “I Believe That the Conspiracy Theory Exists”, reads like a manifesto, an early stanza asserts,

“I believe that as Black artists we are the warriors and caretakers of our mutual cultures and heritages. I do not view either you or myself as soldiers. Soldiers fight wars and once you start fighting you must always defend yourself. I do not see myself as defensive but I do see myself as maintaining a close watch on what I am, a Black woman of art.”

The poem ends,

“I believe that to be passive is to wrap the mind in defeat.

I believe that the simple coming together, the drawing on words, the debate vocally, the rage and the laughter, is vital for us, so that we may consider where we are and where we are going based on where we have been. For without all of these we may just start to believe all that is said about us.”

This manifesto posits that it’s important for artists to be true to their own voices, their own heritage and history, not sugar-coating justifiable anger and trauma to satisfy artist patrons or funding bodies. Otherwise there’s a risk you hand the agenda to your oppressors and let them write your history for you, burying your voice. It’s a good manifesto to get behind.

The last section is a transcript of the “Mary Seacole Libretto”. I’ve not quoted from it here, but it’s good to be reminded that SuAndi is a polymath in love with words and stories, eager to raise voices of those who have not been heard.

Emma Lee, “Leaning Against Time” SuAndi (Carcanet) – book review

Back in 2019, I was asked to review a book of poems by Steven Sher called Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies. Sher is a Brooklyn-born, Orthodox Jew who has been living in Jerusalem since 2012, and the poems in this book embody a profoundly nationalist, Orthodox Jewish commitment to Israel as the Jewish homeland. More than that, though, it is a book that demonizes the Palestinians and at least implicitly denies any claim they might have to the land as theirs. Sher’s politics when it comes to Israel, in other words—and this is how I put it in the review—are “precisely antithetical to my own.” This made the review difficult to write, not because I have a problem arguing against politics such as his, but because I wanted to make sure that when I wrote that I think the book fails overall, despite the presence of some truly beautiful and moving poems, I was talking about a failure within the poetry itself, not just my political disagreement with the author.

The review was published in the Summer 2022 issue of American Book Review, but I wrote it, obviously, before the eleven-day war that broke out between Israel and Hamas in May of 2021, before Israel’s Operation Breaking Dawn in 2022 (which targeted Islamic Jihad in Gaza), and before the current, genocidal war that Israel has been waging in Gaza in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023. Looking back at Sher’s book now, it’s frightening how prophetic some of the poems have turned out to be, in particular “Bombing Gaza,” a cynical reworking of Abraham’s negotiation with God over the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:23-32). Sher’s speaker in that poem bargains with a voice that has the power to decimate Gaza—God’s? The Israeli government’s?—for the lives of the people who live there. However, because we already know the outcome of the Biblical story—God ultimately destroys Sodom and Gomorrah—there is no way not to read into the poem the prediction that Gaza deserves to be destroyed for the same reason, ie, that it would be impossible to find at least ten righteous people who live there. (If you’d like to read the review for yourself, you can do so here).

I started thinking about this book again because it happened to be at the top of a stack that I was moving from one place to another, and I was reminded of a poem from the book that I didn’t write about in my review, the one that opens the collection, “Looking East From Mt. Scopus.” In this poem, Sher’s speaker watches three Palestinian boys herding their goats towards home and bears witness as one of the boys, the oldest, who is “not yet a teen,” beats nearly, if not actually to death the black goat he’s been carrying on his shoulders. 

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Poetry Versus Propaganda

After I lost two friends this year, I made a vow to try to live a bigger life—I feared the pandemic had made me shrink not just my daily routines but my goals and dreams too, that my circles had shrunk and shrunk. The impact of that has maybe made my health a little worse—you may have noticed I’ve been struggling since August first with one thing, then another, and bam, I wound up in the hospital last week with life-threatening stuff. If I ignore my body and try to push through, I inevitably pay a price—but I said yes to maybe too much and as a result had to miss several things—readings with friends, a residency, celebrations—I had really looked forward to and had to dial down all my activities for at least two weeks. Living with MS AND a primary immune system problem AND a bleeding disorder—all things that prove challenging on their own—can be like playing a video game where, when you beat or evade one boss, you just end up downed by another you weren’t even looking for. As a result, I am reevaluating how much I say yes to, and the life goals that are really worth fighting for. Is it worth it to say yes to travel if I’m sick for weeks afterwards, or socializing if I pick up a virus every time I go in public? I don’t want to live in fear, but I also don’t want to be stupid. I am just a writer, which is not a super high-risk job, but I still have to be careful what I say yes and no to. I’m still trying to figure out a balance in the health vs everything else in my life. As we get into the wetter, colder months, or “the big dark” as they say out here, I’m going to try to dial down a bit, spend some more time reading and writing, not pushing my body quite as hard. I have already ordered pens – don’t new pens feel more necessary in fall?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! Pumpkin Season Arrives Along with Early Sunsets, Supermoons, Health Stuff and Missed Opportunities

I am trying to come to terms with my ordinariness, my essential unexceptionalism. Here on the downhill slope, all those me’s that could have been will not be. Turns out I am not all that brilliant, not wildly geniusly creative, not shining leadership material. All the glory I dared to imagine, and all the glory I did not dare to desire, turns out, looks like what my life has looked like. And what is still to come probably looks pretty much like what has been. In a good way. Ish. Illusion. Delusion. Potato potahto. Fortunately there were thought traps I did not fall into — I didn’t think my feminine wiles would get me anywhere, and I didn’t think that life unfolded in certain ways, controllable by prayer or voodoo, crossed fingers, predictable by cards, signs, saying rabbit rabbit. Well, maybe I kind of believed in the rabbit rabbit thing. And I still skip cracks in the sidewalk now and then. But then there are those other illusions one must shed — sometimes in the face of new science (wait, CAN I drink red wine, or not? I can’t keep track), sometimes in the face of history unfolding (so the United States IS still a “republic” only “if we can keep it”). Fortunately, I’m curious and I can tolerate shifts in thinking. This has been one aspect of my slow maturation. I now see very little black and white. I am now interested in the gray areas. The dove, mackeral, fog, the dusky shades of which are innumerable in this life, and how they ease across each other, those tones and hues. Which perhaps suggests I’m a bit of a genius after all… Here is a poem by Elizabeth Hazen that considers the necessary reconsiderations.

Marilyn McCabe, mass of heat, but without flame. All these years

See how much longer it takes to effect peace than war.
Some could infer that this warrants
legions of peace,
factories churning out precision kindness,
ships carrying angels,
an array of little boats, perhaps?

Here, it is Dussehra and we are celebrating victories:
the goddess, read goodness,
overcoming the devil, read evil.
Language leaves nothing to chance.
She stands over him, her tiger at her heels.
An emblem of gender, of power, of a kind of justice.
Soft marigold garlands circle her neck.
Nothing is lost between the lines.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The sky in the dock

As a necessity, I like to have an escape plan. If I have to leave Los Angeles, I am ready, but I would prefer not to. I like my home. If I depart Los Angeles, I won’t be able to take my chickens. It doesn’t work to have chickens and dogs in the same vehicle. But escape is on the mind.

As I often do in times of turmoil, I turn to poetry. I recently read The Octopus Museum, a book of poems by Brenda Shaughnessy, a collection exploring feminism and the fears we have for our families, our communities, our countries—the daily crises facing the American people. Although it came out in 2019, its poems continue to resound.

I think about the octopus. They, too, have an escape plan. They have three hearts and nine brains. They are highly intelligent and can figure out how to get in and out of aquariums, how to unscrew lids. As a defense mechanism, they can drop an arm, and because their arms are filled with neurons, they can grow a new one from memory. But the octopus is also capable of learning to play, of communicating across the divide.

A mother octopus also sacrifices herself for her children. After the young octopi are born in their den, the mother spends her energy and time guarding her kids and ensuring they receive enough oxygen. During this process, she starves herself, and eventually, she dies.

I like to think that there is a future for our country that doesn’t require fleeing, but also doesn’t require dying for our children. One where we can live like the octopus: shrewd, wary, with our brains and hearts working together.

In the closing poem of The Octopus Museum, the family at the center of the collection is escaping. While the parents are carrying food and water, the daughter of the family is carrying both her parents and her brother, who is in a wheelchair. I reflect on my own family. Sometimes, my son is carrying our whole family on his head, and we are topsy-turvy, but he keeps walking straight. Sometimes, my daughter is carrying us, keeping the course. Sometimes, it’s me, trying to walk ahead and search for joy in the darkness. But we continue to walk.

I will not forget my escape plan, but I do not want to leave. I imagine a future where we learn to communicate and listen, to be resourceful, to plan ahead for the moments where we must envision and pursue new ways of living. I hold onto the idea of growing new tentacles. Fierce and tender, wild and imaginative. We Americans need to be a country where our many hearts beat to the drums of a shared music, unite for a shared purpose. May we be blessed, safe, grow arms, hold hands. May we survive.

Kate Gale, Escaping An Empire: What the Octopus Teaches Us About Survival

Years ago, stumbling
into a museum in Cambridge, I found a mutton
bone doll in a display case: swaddled in rags,
face sketched in with a charcoal stick and
I thought— a child cradled this in her arms.
Cooed to it, perhaps clutched it to her chest
in her garrett bed as she peered into the night
through slats in the roof, the future’s
skeleton not even glimmering yet.

Luisa A. Igloria, Mutton Bone Doll