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: picnicking on ice, clock-time vs. earth-time, the enormity of the world’s grief, the sound of a fountain, and much more. Enjoy.

I’m sitting here, still in bed because it is my birthday and on your birthday you get to work from your bed. It’s a misty morning in North Yorkshire but the sun is breaking through.

Spring is arriving.

Wendy Pratt, Dawn and Dusk Chorus Write Along Sessions

This lake surface is flat-with-rising-places. These are mini alpine mountains, where expanding ice has pushed itself into Mont Blanc-resonant peaks to alleviate the pressure that comes with expansion. There are fissures too and in some places, there are small portholes to the next layers down, and these are mysterious with interlacing crystals and thin pastry layer accumulations. 

We sat, P, L, and I, and talked of rootedness and our lives (which, I’ve just thought, add up to a small-large 188 years). We ate and drank, looking outwards. It was peaceful, and there was a white silence as backdrop to these connections. 

And all the while the sun warmed us without the interruption of a single cloud.

Liz Lefroy, I Picnic On Ice

“April is the cruellest month” is the first line of TS Eliot’s Wasteland, which has always puzzled me. April is bluebells and swallows and hares, the dawn chorus, waking in a downpour of song. April is life returning, showy and cheerful and loud after the white silence of winter, the muted February gloom: “Lilacs/ out of the dead land”.

Which is, I think, the speaker’s problem – he prefers the silence, the soft, quiet protection of snow. Especially when the snow hides wreckage and ruin – Eliot wrote the poem in 1921, recovering from a breakdown whilst Europe reeled in the aftermath of the first World War. And yes, the March insistence of crocus and daffodil can seem at odds with world events, but oh my God, how welcome is that March sun, warm, soft, golden; the first buds on the willow, like tiny paws? So much so that my third collection, “Flood”, contains a response to Eliot’s famous line – you’ll find it at the end of this article.

Clare Shaw, The Cruellest Month is over!

There is no one left to sing to so I
sing to the water: From where do you spring and
how will you slake me?
How long must I return
with jar and tattered rope, bearing
the dry sockets of my bones?

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 4

“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river,” Borges wrote. “Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Most of us are not Borges. Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes, burning with the urgency of being alive while waiting to start living, wandering the labyrinth of life with wayward presence, wishing that time ran differently as the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience.

And all the while, our time is nested within our times — the epoch we are living through together, born into it with no more choice in the matter than the body and brain and family we have been born into. In his magnificent essay on Shakespeare, James Baldwin countered the commonplace lament of every epoch: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” A century before him — a century of unrest and transformation — Emerson issued the ultimate antilamentation: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” […]

If time is the fundamental problem of human life and poetry is our most precise technology for parsing the aching astonishment of being alive, then time is the prime subject of poetry. Neruda knew this — time is the subterranean current coursing beneath his vast and varied body of work, the substrate upon which all of his stunning love poems and his meditations on the inner life grow. He reverenced the stones for how they have “touched time,” reverenced the minute for how it is “bound to join the river of time that bears us,” reverenced “the inexhaustible springs of time,” longed for “a time complete as an ocean,” then made that ocean with his poetry.

Maria Popova, Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time

I have a bit of time here and there to do the activities that nourish me:  reading and a variety of creative work.  I have time to see friends.  My family members are in good shape.

We are bombarded, day after day, with stories of women who have not been so lucky, reminding us that we still have work to do.

I’m thinking of the multitude of poems that I’ve written about gender and history and all of those intersections.  Here’s a poem that I wrote years ago that says a lot about the life of a certain class of women in modern, capitalistic countries.  It’s part of my chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction.

The Hollow Women

We are the hollow women,
the ones with carved muscles,
the ones run ragged by calendars
and other apps that promised
us mastery of that cruel slavedriver, time. […]

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Poem for International Women’s Day

Time accumulates and erodes as we spread ourselves thin over work, people who don’t deserve our energy, constant complaints, addictions, and pettiness. Those who step out of Kronos (clock-time) and into Kairos (earth-time) may find that time slows and stills like a warm, shallow sea. Here, when you pay the currency of your limited attention, you will feel how the sun shines down on your face. With your valuable attention, you will notice that the waters are warm and the creatures, they just do their business of making the first pathways on this earth. Please do them no harm. And look at those clouds. Look at how they come undone in their becoming. Soon enough, as always, and forevermore, something big will happen, with or without you. It is all a continuous happening. A continuous genesis of building a becoming and initiating an ending. All of us. Every one. And all the ones after.

Sarah Lada, Orogeny

broken, broken world
or is it me
seeing cracks on still water
seeing wounds instead of flowers
seeing blood where sunset
should drip behind the ears of trees

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Broken

I keep seeing discussion online about how artists and writers function in a world that is, if not completely falling apart in front of us, in danger of toppling.  On one hand, you have those who find the terrors of everyday living have a dampening effect on productivity (even for fun things), a lack of concentration, and a lack of purpose. On the other hand, and this I see too in myself, the drive to keep on going. To keep making and loving and creating something beautiful or interesting in a world that not only doesn’t seem to want it, but fights its very existence. Either through distraction or making things like art less likely in the struggle to survive (metaphorically or actually.)

And yet, art can be sustaining. It can often be the only thing which seems bearable. It may feel like playing the cello while the ship sinks or straightening the beds while the world is on fire, But it is also, in some ways, an act of persistence and resistance. 

I’ve been channeling my energies into the press. Into poems and plays. Into art experiments that have lesser to more degrees of success. These things are surely harder than they would be not under duress, and yet I do them in spite of a world that seems unbearably cruel and deeply stupid.  I suppose that is all we can do…

Kristy Bowen, creative life amid the doomscroll

Maggie talks about poems as a stone we carry in our pockets. I’ve had this one in my pocket a lot lately. It’s a poem by Derek Mahon. He writes:

There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.

I love that line because it doesn’t shy away from the suffering. It names it directly. Loss is real. It’s always been real. But Mahon doesn’t let that truth swallow the whole poem. He refuses to.

I tend to do the opposite. I take the hardest thing I know and carry it into every room. I rehearse it. I turn it over until it fills the whole day. You might do something similar. Most people I talk to do.

But we are not able to solve the entire human condition before lunch. (Probably not even by dinner.)

Eric Zimmer, Guest Pep Talk (Maggie Smith)

The one hundred sixty girls
won’t be watching the long-armed

yellow-bodied machines scooping
the dirt from between white lines

that lessons in geometry would show
make rectangles from imperfect ground,

or how the diggers know just how big
to make the depth and width of every hole,

or even why the digging must go on
once time for talks has ended and azan

— the call to prayer — has come too late.

Maureen Doallas, Who Counts

Updating Descartes: I travel so I can talk to strangers.  Updating Descartes again: I travel so I can reality-check the words of writers’ against the wisdom of Uber drivers.  Using that as a measure, AWP was stupendous!

No wonder we pay drivers to sit in their cars for twenty, thirty minutes, through traffic snarls and horrifically inflated rates.  One driver, slung back in his seat of his Toyota Corolla, reeled off a lovely phrase about not recognizing what privilege is when we have it.  That line could stand in any poem, I said, as I’d been sitting through a lot of poetry readings.  He told me his line was borrowed; I added that we pick up a lot of folk wisdom through pop songs, rap, movies.  He upped me: through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius.  

Getting into another Uber, I asked the driver how he was.  “Any day I’m still alive is a good day.”  What an opening line, even if we’ve heard it before. I got to hear about Mamma in rural South Carolina, his 94-year-old mother-in-law, the whole array of sisters down there, the food and beverage that comes with visitors, the testifying, the cigarettes and coffee that fortify the old lady.  He was beaming the whole time.

When I told the first driver about an award-winning book of poetry written about conversations written by a taxi driver, he was incredulous.  “Are you telling me that book won awards?” Indeed.  “Bor-ing,” he said.  “I’d shut that in a second.”

Jill Pearlman, Uber Drivers at AWP

I’d like to so say a huge thank you to Stephen Claughton and Mark Randles for having Matthew [Stewart] and me in St Albans to read at Ver Poets. if you look now, we are at the top of the news page. It was an early kick off (I think to avoid crowd trouble, and not to avoid me having a few liveness/straighteners beforehand – Thank you for that suggestion, Matthew Paul)…I think it was probably the earliest I’ve read, but very civilised. Lovely to read in a library, and to a warm crowd. We both had two slots, one at 20 mins and one of ten, which was a nice way to do things.

Matthew leant into his two collections, including some of the wine poems form Knives. I leant into CtD, including some that rarely get read like Tea Hut. I also tried out some newer poems…including a longer one (for me) that I think acts as a complement to Clearing Dad’s Shed (in a way). Not sure if it’s not too long for a reading, but we live and learn.

We also had an open mic, including a poem from Tim Love who’d made the journey up (Thanks Tim). I did take notes about the readers, but they seem to have got very wet in my bag on the way home, so alas they are illegible…Nay, more illegible given my handwriting. Sorry folks, but I enjoyed you all.

Mat Riches, And roast of all, thank you to you for coming

It might be an obvious thing to say but as far as poetry is concerned… well, my poetry… truth is an awkward subject. Every poem I write has what I believe to be a truth at its core. If I sense that anything I’ve written is dishonest, or in some way fails to tell the truth I intend it to tell, I chuck it out.

That said, the truth in poetry is often hidden behind masks, stray voices, even downright lies. A reader might have to search for it (if you can be bothered). The key, I suppose, is to write something that people feel they want to explore and discover what the particular truth might be.

That’s part of the attraction of poetry for me. OK, I can lie and deceive. Take the Ezra Pound’s Trombone poem I wrote a while back about visiting a museum in Genoa and seeing the legendary man’s trombone in a glass case. It was a piece of fun if you took it at face value but the truth, not too hard to see, was in our need for a quest, in the way we need to find things that feel of value to us, to honour people we might (even begrudgingly) admire. At no point when I was writing did it occur to me that somebody might be so excited by it that they would want to travel to Genoa on an actual quest to find the trombone. When the person contacted me to ask for the name and address of the museum I sheepishly had to admit I’d made it up, I’d never been to Genoa and as far as I knew there was no trombone…

Diane Wakoski had a similar experience when a radio interviewer gently asked her for the background to her poem Some Brilliant Sky from 1972 which begins ‘David was my brother/ and killed himself/ by the sea’. The interviewer was probing for the effect the death of her brother had on her – and on her poetry. She had to admit she’d made the poem up and she had no brother. The so-called ‘facts’ of the poem aren’t the point. They’re the tool which the poet is using to tell their truth.

Bob Mee, TRUTH IN POETRY? WELL, YOU HAVE TO LOOK FOR IT…AND EVEN THEN…

Eavan Boland, one of the most important voices in Irish literature, was as strong a presence in poetry as one can read. Her gift of craft is evident in every poem. Her use of language, blending the historical, mythical, and the personal, is beautiful and startling – adept at drawing in the reader.

The speaker’s voice in “A Woman Painted on a Leaf” is muscular and convincing in creating a moving, lingering ambiance for the piece. The work is the closing poem in Boland’s brilliant collection, In a Time of Violence (W.W. Norton, 1994), and serves as a perfect glance across the acute observation of the human condition that precedes it. A consideration of a poetry that is a manifesto:

“This is not death. It is the terrible
suspension of life.
I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.”

Boland forces the reader to consider the world and culture – like the “hammered gold and gold enameling” in Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” – that left these fine lines of art among the “curios and silver / in the pureness of wintry light”. The narrator’s voice in Boland’s poem is declaring the “terrible” act of any attempt to confine or limit women to any state short of real.

This is the holy grail of all poetic endeavors – a poetry that defies time, place, and history. A poetry that lets us live in the grandeur and in the tedium, and – yes – lets us die.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Eavan Boland, “A Woman Painted on a Leaf”

Some of the most enduring poetry in the English tradition draws on classical myth, literature, and folklore. Daniel Hinds’ New and Famous Phrases (Broken Sleep Books, 2025) participates in this lineage with remarkable originality. Although deeply informed by literary history, Hinds never imitates; instead, he revitalises inherited forms and narratives through a voice that feels strikingly fresh, imaginative, and contemporary. His encyclopaedic knowledge of language and literature serves not as ornamentation but as the foundation for ambitious poems that operate simultaneously as homage, dialogue, and innovation.

The Siren Star offers a clear example of Hinds’ distinctive approach. By echoing the seven‑day structure of the Book of Genesis, the poem presents a cosmological reversal: a creation story rewritten as an account of extinction. Each day charts a further step toward the end of human life, beginning with the death of an astronaut and the suicide of another, who “Downed tools / Unlatched the white umbilical cord,” a moment that suggests both the inevitability of mortality and the futility of technological mastery in the face of cosmic forces. As the poem progresses, the erosion of human presence becomes stark—by the fifth day “there were no seeing men left,” and by the sixth, “no women.” These apocalyptic developments unfold within an unmistakably contemporary world, one populated by children with telescopes purchased by affluent parents and dominated by “concrete Cities.”

It is in the seventh day, however, that Hinds turns decisively to myth. The final human encounters “three copper women,” figures who recall the ominous sisters of Greek mythology but are reimagined as “citizens of the sun,” their bodies marked by “three black holes at their necks.” This fusion of classical symbolism with astrophysical imagery evokes the terrifying grandeur of a dying star pulling Earth into its expanded orbit. The title’s reference to the sun as a “siren” encapsulates this duality of allure and annihilation. The poem culminates in the haunting image of extinction described as a kiss: “She lifts his heavy glass mask / And makes first contact with her lips.” The moment is at once intimate, inevitable, and profoundly unsettling.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘New Famous Phrases’ by Daniel Hinds

Maybe this is about darkening pink things, and the power of raspberry jam to evoke involuntary memories. Maybe it’s all in the imprint. One could say the unexpected photograph is a segue into thinking about how poetry moves, or how the distance between the poem’s opening line and the poem’s closing can narrow into a specific yet unexpected place. Maybe I need the ellipses of William Heyen’s “The Berries” to wound their way through me.

Alina Stefanescu, Imprints in absence… and a motif in raspberry.

Darkness pervades each couplet—the atmosphere of fable, of fairy tale—each compact narrative moving inevitably toward the word home, each repetition of this single-word refrain adding resonance to the narrator’s ambivalence about the very meaning of home.

The third couplet features ravens. Given the company this ghazal is keeping—Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson—this reader feels the presence of Poe, subtly established in the previous couplet: “A leaden shadow is tethered to the heart.”

David Meischen, No Porch Light On

“Something In Nothing” uses fairytales, often dismissed as children’s stories, to explore their original purpose: as warnings of the darker side of humanity, as the title poem suggests,

“All the world revolves in it
and it is no more than a grain of sand.
For that is all I have –
a story that is something in nothing.”

That’s what the best stories are: a handful of characters, a few words that conjure an entire imaginary world. How many daydreaming children have been told they are ‘wasting time’ when they were creating a rich inner world and trying to make sense of something that was strange to them or finding safety in a world that felt dangerous.

Emma Lee, “Something In Nothing” Zoe Brooks (Indigo Dreams Publishing) – book review

Henry Gould’s work has always been suffused with Christian hope and love, but here it’s becoming ever more urgently the surface of the poetry. There are moments when the writing takes on the quality of prayer, as in these lines from the end of ’17 Fahrenheit’:

It’s taken me forever, to reckon the price
of ancient JUBILEE. Beyond my ken.
God is divine kindness : we must be kind,
cease making war against our kind… and then
restore our sunlit planet – for they praise!
So chants your silver turtledove, O smiling Moon.

Gould’s physical location in Minneapolis has long been central to his work, and this has become even more the case since the ICE invasion. Mayflower Table, a single poem in 22 numbered sections, is at heart a response to this situation, with part 12 dedicated ‘i.m. Renee Nicole Good’ and 17 ‘to the people of Minneapolis’. 12 ends with lines that restate Gould’s ongoing belief in the potential of America:

Sulfurous tyrants grieve us – but we shall not fear:
for we the people are created equal – in the mind of God.

Billy Mills, Two Pamphlets by Henry Gould: A Review

The Rose is the fifth collection from the wonderful American poet Ariana Reines. In the UK, Penguin are publishing it and I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. This is what I like to call a desert island book – a book that you could take with you if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island for twenty years because there are enough layers and ideas to keep you going for a long time. It’s a book that interrogates and reinvents our ideas and preconceptions around female desire, power and submission and argues for the possibility that sometimes there is no easy or single answer.

The figure of Medea (who in the most famous version of the myth murdered her own children after being abandoned by her husband Jason for a new wife) haunts this book in a sequence of poems with the title Medea – none of which tell her story, or at least not in a linear way. The Medea in The Rose is utterly contemporary and mythic. In the first poem called ‘Medea’ of the many that run through the collection, she says “I’ll find another woman / Somewhere inside me /I’ll humble myself / I’ll try”. There is a beautiful recording of one of the later ‘Medea’ poems on poems.org where Ariana explains ‘I kept asking myself what it would mean to be the worst woman in the world.’ I loved this poem for the way it lists all the good things that must be forgotten in order to both endure violence and to carry it out.

One of my favourite poems is ‘Hellmouth’ with its repeated insistence that we must build a secret room inside ourselves. The first iteration of this has such a surefooted line break ‘If you fail to build in yourself a secret /Room’. We must build secrets in ourselves and secret rooms. Later in the poem she writes ‘The little / Room in the middle / Of me. Where I see / What I can’t say’.

Many years ago, I had ‘A Room of One’s Own’ tattooed on my arm – inspired by Virginia Woolf’s essay of course – I longed for a physical room of my own that would be my writing room, but I also wanted to have a room inside myself, a place that nobody else could touch, that could not be controlled or known or owned.

Kim Moore, February Reading Diary

Last week we were away for five days, and just before leaving I picked up a few books to take with me, almost at random, including Margaret Drabble’s The Middle Years (very enjoyable) and C. H. Sisson’s English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (first published 1971). Sisson is always a bracing and engaging read and I was struck by this paragraph from his first chapter, on the 1890s:

Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, John Davidson and Yeats himself were workmen of importance by any standards which would be reasonable in a history of fifty years, and their technical practice was important, in varying degrees, for the writers who followed them. The vague and notorious aura of the period matters less.

None of Johnson’s poems are included in any of the anthologies of English verse I had to hand, and if anyone mentions him now, they generally do so for just those ‘vague and notorious’ reasons to which alludes, and which he then dismisses. Johnson was a sensitive Englishman who wished he was Irish, was taught by Walter Pater at Oxford, became early on an insomniac and an alcoholic, converted to Catholicism, ‘notoriously’ introduced his friend, Oscar Wilde, to Lord Alfred Douglas, and then died suddenly of a stroke brought on by excessive drinking, aged only 35, in 1902. A more wholeheartedly 1890s biography is hard to imagine. Nina Antonia’s 2018 edition of Johnson’s selected writings (which I haven’t read, though the free sample of the introductory biography looks quite fun) is accordingly titled to hit as many of the ‘vague and notorious’ targets of high decadence as possible: Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era’s Dark Angel. The Amazon summary makes Johnson sound, frankly, unbearable.

A vague sense of all this had in the past rather put me off Johnson. But I was interested by Sisson’s focus, not on any of the seedy drama of decadence, but on his ‘technical practice’. What makes Johnson’s poetry of interest in a technical sense for the literary historian?

So this week I sat down and read Johnson’s complete verse, and found rather a different poetic personality from what I had expected.

Victoria Moul, The saddest of all kings: reading Lionel Johnson

A recent read I have thoroughly relished is this memoir by my friend Sally Evans.

I first met Sally when she invited me to read at her 70th birthday party in Dunblane. Many poets were invited, and the idea was that there would be short reading slots for invited poets, so plenty of variety. It was one of the best parties! The food was fantastic, as was the company. Sally offered me a day of bookbinding lessons with Ian King, and that was my first visit to their incredible bookshop on the Main Street in Callander. So I knew very little of Sally’s earlier life, how she came to be a bookseller, how she met Ian, apart from the fact they had Grindles in Edinburgh, a very well known second hand bookshop, and had ‘retired’ to Callander. So it was fascinating to hear about her earlier life, her work as a librarian, how she came to meet Ian, and how they started their business.

Sally is a very generous person, and this comes across in her writing, as well as her annual Poetry Weekend hosted in Callander, to which many of us flocked year on year, finding the most attentive poetry audience and best book-buyers, as we all supported each other. For me, it was an extension of the 70th birthday party, and many of the same people attended. They were all good poets. When I first went to StAnza in 2014, invited to bring The Lightfoot Letters up by then director Eleanor Livingstone, I had felt rather shy. However, I soon found the streets and the venues were full of people I knew from knowing Sally. (in that way it resembles Whitby Folk Week). People like Judith Taylor, the late Sheila Templeton, late Brian Johnstone, Elizabeth Rimmer, as well as friends from home. Sally is generous about the people who come into the shop, dealing with irritating customers firmly but politely.

Angela Topping, Driving in the Book Lane, a memoir by Sally Evans

You authored a unique collection of haiku and illustrations, titled Faunistics. Would you be willing to tell us more about this book and the inspiration behind it?

Faunistics was my way back into haiku, essentially. I’d had a brief foray in my early twenties but hadn’t quite mastered it and then I got sidetracked with other things. Fast forward to my mid-thirties, and I’d been through a very long period of not being able to write and/or writing trash. I’d always had this goal of publishing a collection of haiku, and had an old manuscript, which I forced myself to dig out, redraft, and publish. As a result, I ended up completely immersed in the haiku community and soon learned to write it properly. The more I wrote, the more embarrassing my old haiku became and most of the original haiku were discarded. The ones that were any good were related to animals, so I made that my focus. I began grouping them by animal type to get a roughly equal amount of each, then grouping them as per their native continents, if not where their population is the highest. Within these continental groups, I divided them up into countries, so that the book is ordered like a page-by-page worldwide safari. I’ve always loved writing about nature. So, this was a good excuse for a deep dive. I think maybe one haiku from my original manuscript survived, but even that was redrafted.

You also co-authored an interesting book with Hifsa Ashraf titled Infinity Strings, which explores much of humanity’s attachment to modern culture, space, and technology. What did you enjoy the most about working on this project? What inspired you and Hifsa Ashraf to write this book together? What did you learn from the experience of writing collaboratively?

A big part of haikai is collaboration. I’d written with a few haiku poets at that time who I’d connected with online. With Hifsa, we started writing on spontaneous subjects. Then, I introduced her to the tan-renga and I recall her getting really excited about the form. We tried our hand at something more experimental in terms of subject and liked the result, and so it snowballed into a potential sequence, then a potential pamphlet, at which point we felt we might as well take it to collection-length. We became obsessed with how far we could go down the rabbit hole and push the collection to its limits. Infinity Strings is the polar opposite to Faunistics. I think it’s fair to say it’s an outlier amongst both our repertoires. It has its own personality entirely, and every now and then we meet someone brave enough to follow its disconcerting path.

Jacob D. Salzer, R.C. Thomas (Richard)

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

Uche: My first book, Dark through the Delta, was inspired by oil exploitation in the Niger Delta and the environmental devastation that followed. Writing that book convinced me of literature’s power to spotlight various forms of plunder of both human and nonhuman worlds. My most recent book, We Survived Until We Could Live, is different, in tone and theme. It’s less ecological and much more intimate and explores postwar memory, historical and family traumas, domestic violence, grief, healing, and love. In some way, both books are still very much about devastation. While Dark through the Delta examines the devastation caused by an oil behemoth and its effects on both human and nonhuman life, We Survived Until We Could Live reveals the devastation of war and its toll on human lives and relationships. I think this book is my most ambitious and certainly my most vulnerable. I couldn’t have written it without the generous support of the entire team at the University of Calgary Press.

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

Uche: I came to poetry by accident, in my late uncle’s house – a biochemist, but an avid reader of literature. He had a storage full of books, including British and Roman poets and playwrights. One day, I went to the storage to get something and stumbled upon a small book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I opened it almost at random, and the rhyme scheme, its imagery, and its lyric intensity captivated me. It’s funny, because before that, I’d never been particularly interested in literature at high school. That Shakespearean moment, or rather, encounter, is what really started me writing poetry.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike

i come wrapped in
plastic. tear here. tear here. the tongue
is stuck in the gutter. i fish it out.
i don’t bother scolding it anymore.
instead we go into the kitchen
in search of salt.

Robin Gow, cheese pull

I had an interesting experience recently trying to write a braided essay, that is, an essay that intersperses subject matter such that each thread sheds some light on the others. I had it as an open file on my desktop for two weeks or so, and when thoughts occurred to me on any of the threads, I jotted them down. After a while I braided the whole thing, snipped out some stuff, was kind of happy with it, but thought it might be confusing or confused. Trusted Reader took a look and didn’t like the illogic of it all, so reordered it into more of a sandwich than a braid, and I realized two things. One was that the braid itself lent, to me, interesting energy to the piece, and two, that, all in all, the energy was undeserved, as I really hadn’t logically said much at all. So, I’m walking away from it, wiser, but still like the approach I took, and maybe could use a few bits and pieces again. This is writing work: Look around, think stuff, try stuff, let it sit, revise, wait, snip, relook, get a different perspective, turn it upside down, ask yourself what you think you’re up to, repeat.

I hate the precious idea of a “muse.” Ideas may float like waves of pollen or surge up like the snags of skunk cabbage, they’re not sprinkled on you like fairy dust by some fucking lady in a diaphonous gown. You have to be alert, maybe on the hunt like a mushroom tracker, or a garbage picker looking for discarded treasures. You have to squint your eyes, rest your mind, look to one side of the dim stars. You have to listen through the din for a faint peep. And then…and THEN…you have to figure out how to make something of it. And then make it.

The muses were the daughters of the head god dude and memory. (Which is actually kind of interesting, memory as a mother of muse.) But mythology is just a bunch of made up stories. And those ancient Greeks were just more misogynists who made up female gods but kept real flesh and blood women well under control. So I say to hell with the idea of “the muse.” And yes to the inspiration of being a body-in-the-world, flailing about. And a restless, doubt-filled, querulous, messy, glorious mind.

Marilyn McCabe, Still, I listen. I search

Against the backdrop of Emersonian philosophy, albeit from the vantage point of thirty years’ hindsight, Today’s Poem, written around 1867, becomes, like nature itself, an extended metaphor. It offers a description of the various behaviors of water, but its true burden, like the true burden of nature itself, is to analogize the human mind in all its constructive and destructive potential.

Its twelve trimeter lines begin to resolve, by line 3, into rhymed couplets, only to dissolve again — or to mimic the widening ripples in the surface of the water — by way of an envelope quatrain at the end. In the course of these twelve lines, water, that fundamental element, accumulates sapient qualities, for good or for ill. It begins in understanding. Ask the water what it knows about “civilization,” and presumably it will tell you, if you have ears to hear. Its physical qualities are dispatched in the first rhyming couplet; yes, yes, it can make you wet and cold, but “prettily” and “wittily.” It doesn’t mean you any harm. In fact, it’s downright cheerful. At least, it’s neither “disconcerted” nor “broken-hearted,” as the second rhymed couplet, in pleasing feminine rhymes, has it.

Its natural state, in other words, is to be good and ordered toward “joy,” as the third rhymed couplet emphasizes via its repetition of that word. But water’s capacity to “deck” and “double” joy is bound up — as the next rhyme suggests — with its destructive potential if “ill-used.” Its power can tilt both ways. Its beauty should not reassure; “elegantly,” with “a look of golden pleasure,” it may sweep everything you love away. And in the face of the water, as the poem tacitly implies, being of a piece with the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the human beholder may find a mirror for the state of his own soul.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Water

Keats was born on the fringes of the city, at Moorgate, spending early years in present day Hoxton, but his school in leafy Enfield and his grandmother’s home in Edmonton close the River Lea provided a rural idyl flush with bubbling springs and swimming pools. Think also of the Fontana della Barcaccia in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna, the sound of its waters soothing the poet on his deathbed and offering the source for his epitaph. From his room, restored in Keats-Shelley House, I do not hear the sound of the fountain. By day it is drowned by the bustle and mutter of tourists flooding the piazza. By night, where I am staying, in the room above where he died, it comes, gently and I sense all is well.

I take a shower, wash the journey from me. In the square glasses are being filled and raised, toasts to health are given, drink is taken. We are familiar with the first part of the motto, “In vino veritas,” but less aquatinted with the second, “in aqua sanitas.” While in wine truth may be revealed, in water we find salubrity and I, I have come to seek clarity, to pursue restoration through poetry, to wash the drudgery from me.

I rise early, before the crowds come, before the police whistles sound out in the piazza. I walk a little, ascend the Spanish Steps, alight on one of the landings, lifted but not yet arrived, rising from the civic, between the public and the sacred.

Jan Noble, Nº54 A postcard from Rome…

the breadth 
of a water breath
a sky breath
a mountain breath of
a shore line’s breadth
it was all there
held in a held breath

Jim Young, on looking at a mountain lake

A so-called FB friend (who will remain anonymous, so no fishing!) told me to my face the other day that my promotion of my books was far better than the poetry inside them, implying that I was less of a poet for getting my stuff out there. I can fully understand why a poet might feel uncomfortable about promoting their work, but I can’t comprehend how this might then lead to their denigrating other poets who do so.

I was stunned by his words, though I recovered sufficiently to reply that his attitude was representative of the worst of U.K poetry. Which reminds me. Anyone up for a signed copy?! If so, just drop me an email. The address is in my blogger profile…

Matthew Stewart, Less of a poet…?

I was very pleased to see my poem Canada is as far away as bibles are on After. Many thanks to Editor Mark Antony Owen. You can read the poem here.

After publishes ekphrastic poems and my poem was inspired by The Avid Reader, 1949. Rodney Graham (1949 – 2022) was a visual artist, painter, and musician. He made the lightbox in 2011.

‘We see the middle-aged man / carrying a hat, smoking a pipe, / because Graham inhabits him.’

The Avid Reader, 1949 was one of the works on display at Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, the Netherlands in the major exhibition of Graham’s work titled That’s Not Me. An ironic title as Graham appears in all the works – as a builder having a smoke, a lighthouse keeper, historical figure.

Voorlinden is a fabulous museum – more about it some other time.

I was struck by the attention to detail and the scale of the works. The woman is ‘his wife, swing coat, high heels, walks past on the right.’

Fokkina McDonnell, Canada is as far away as bibles are

I collect phrases I like, ones that I hear or read in books. The trouble is I usually do nothing with them. The other day though, I decided to use one that has been knocking about for some time as a writing exercise. I do not remember where the phrase the unpopular provincial museum came from but it sparked this. […]

This one it is claimed won a Bronze,
another a cap for his country,
here it is secure, pinned to the wall,
for the few who visit to see.
It all adds up to a feeling
that nothing has ever happened here,
which given the times we live in,
adds to its attractiveness
and makes it a desirable and safe place to live.

Paul Tobin, THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

After that, we visited the Museum of Things Left in Cars Overnight—

books, random receipts with poems written on the back.

Smells of vinyl and dust preserved under glass.

The Museum of Instructions Without Context was far too confusing,

and we got totally turned around in the Museum Without Exit Signs.

A stranger on the street recommended we visit the Museum of Objects That Remember You—

a chair that recalls your weight, a mirror that reflects an earlier version of your face,

a key that insists it belongs to you.

Rich Ferguson, I’ll Always Remember The Day

My trip to Baltimore for the AWP Conference Book Fair didn’t happen; my immune system decided otherwise, with a resurgence of a nasty respiratory virus and a flare of fibromyalgia. I guess I can look on the positive side and say I saved a lot of money, right? Plus I can purchase most of those poetry collections online, I suppose. Still, there really is nothing like browsing through thousands of luscious books for something that grabs me, that takes the top of my head off, to paraphrase Ms. Dickinson. Through social media platforms, I can see colleagues-in-literature making connections and meeting one another face-to-face, which is what conferences are for. Another year, maybe.

And after days of necessary spring rain, drizzle, and fog, the long-awaited thaw eradicated most of our snow. Crocuses bloomed, and bees came out to visit the snowdrops.

I felt much better today and was able to take a walk in the mild sun, listening to robins, mourning doves, song sparrows, woodpeckers, redwing blackbirds, bluebirds, house finches, Carolina chickadees, American crows, Canada geese, mockingbirds, cardinals, bluejays, masses of starlings…I watched the high-flown antics of redtail hawks and turkey vultures.

In other regions of the world today, people listen and watch for fighter jets, torpedoes, drones. There but for fortune may go you or I (Phil Ochs). Meanwhile I remain grateful for feeling slightly better as the days lengthen into spring. It’s March–we could still get snow! But the spring peepers sense the warmer temperature and trilled a bit last evening while the great horned owl was hooting. Here’s a poem I wrote in 2012 about DST. […]

I am glad for the extra hour
among long shadows as my dog
chases a woodchuck, as the wood-
pecker pounds in metrical progressions:
trochee, trochee, spondee. […]

Ann E. Michael, Snowdrops

Despite the misleading cherry blossoms at the top of the post, we’re supposed to have cold rain AND snow this week, so spring seems like a false hope at this point, a thing which will never arrive. Winter Blues are a real thing for me in November, February, and yes, March. I wish for some dry warm days to shake up my physical miseries (colds never seem to be made better by cold wet weather, I notice). I missed AWP and saw all the happy pics on Facebook and sighed to myself. I don’t go every year—I don’t have the means, as a non-academic, to do it, even if I wanted to. But the news has also been so miserable, the weather, the fact that we’re planning a trip home to visit a very sick family member…it’s hard to just snap back to my usual cheerful self. I wrote a few poems about how I felt about America. Will these poems change anything? Probably not, but sometimes you need to write them anyway.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Time Changes and Winter Blues with Cherry Blossoms, Academic Women in Pop Culture: Vladmir

We didn’t really plan this, you know. We began, and indeed still persist as, ‘Thrums Chums’ (blame Glenday) – an informal workshop organised around little more than that we are all old pals, and all more-or-less in driving distance of a kitchen table in Kirriemuir, Angus. For your geocultural orientation: immediately behind us is the cemetery where JM Barrie lies buried with Peter Pan; just behind that, the frozen storm-surge of the mighty Cairngorms. From kailyard to eternity.

The advantage of our being friends first is that we don’t feel the need to agree on everything, or indeed anything. We’ve no common political stance or aesthetic. None of us give a toss for ideological compliance, and we would rather run on trust. Differences are good. Besides, what we have in common is far more important: poetry, for some reason, has placed itself at the centre of our lives.

As North Sea Poets (with the indispensable help of Miriam Huxley, our wonderful administrator), we’ve sought to extend that circle of friendship and share what collective expertise we’re accumulated in our many years of avoiding the right margin – whether as poets, tutors, workshop leaders, essayists on Substack, or just as fellow readers. Despite what London or Edinburgh or NYC might tell you, poetry has no centre. Not even Kirriemuir. It’s wherever you’re reading this. The best gift of the digital age is that being remote needn’t mean feeling remote. Now we can all gather in the same place, and yet still be anywhere. While I bang on and on about metonymy.

Don Paterson, A Year of North Sea Poets

Although I try to stay connected with my readers, I haven’t written you in close to three months. The truth is, with all the upheaval in the world these days, it has been hard to know what to say.

On the one hand, I know I’m not obligated to say anything about the news—no one really expects artists and poets to analyze the political events of the day. Somehow the New York Times still hasn’t phoned for my take on the war in Iran! On the other hand, it seems oblivious at best to chatter about my creative projects and my happy little life while the regime is locking up children and murdering US citizens in broad daylight.

How to navigate these dystopian times? I know many of us attend protests.* We’ve got our reps on speed dial. We donate to help people in Gaza, Ukraine, Minnesota. We stay informed as best we can without drowning in the horrors of the day. Yet faced with the shocking cruelty and corruption of this administration, it never feels like enough.

Still, I take heart from these words by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, interpreting a part of the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief . . . You are not expected to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Under an administration that stokes fear and hatred of “the other,” I believe that connection, creative expression, and celebration are all forms of this work. Whether it’s taking in a beach sunset, writing a poem or petting a stranger’s dog, joy is an act of resistance.

copper-tinged waves
trying to fit the ocean
into my camera

Annette Makino, How to move through a broken world?

                            Without 

having known what it’s like to fumble 
through darkness, would the pearl-

light of morning feel less of an 
astonishment? Bodies that bore 

a hundred hurts, that carved of 
themselves an offering. A warbler 

balances on the tip of a branch, 
its weight barely enough to break it.

Luisa A. Igloria, On Blessing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Broken Things.

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

Sarah Lada, Donna

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

Dale Favier, Fetch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, MY YEAR IN REVIEW

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, football tv

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Collected Poems 1964 – 2016, Barry Tebb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Primer” by Bob Hicok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Katy Mahon (Nigel Kent)

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, Getting to know your own collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | the final stretch

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

For further details: click here. 

From the blurbs:

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

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

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

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

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

Kelli Russell Agodon, Dropping in Briefly with Beauty

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

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

Bethany Reid, Happy 195th Birthday, Emily Dickinson!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fokkina McDonnell, If there were no wind, cobwebs…

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

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

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

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

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

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

May we all survive asymptotic times unscathed.

Marian Christie, Asymptotic Times

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

deer flying overhead. branches delicate, vibrating.

veins of this world. blood splattered across the snow.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

otter dusk
what’s left of the light
slips downstream

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

Annette Makino, Glimmers in the dark

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

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

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Bringer of Light

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Providence, Numb and Number

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Light – even now

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, About two-thirds

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Red

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

*

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Dusk, December

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Siddique, A Wintery Poem

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Moonset and Midwinters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nin Andrews, A Good Year for Son of a Bird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Stars, luck, and revelations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.M. Haines, “The Other Century”

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, How to break through a writing block:

winter wind
the voice of one tree
after another

three of a kind by tom clausen

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, Recent readings and reading

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

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

Tim Love, CB1 – Stav Poleg and Leo Boix

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

Tresha Faye Haefner, Poems and Prompts from Our Community

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

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Poetry Worth Hearing

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

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

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

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

Wendy Pratt, The Fear is on Me

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

PF Anderson, On Resilience

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

Marilyn McCabe, the eloquent purple, those heart shaped leaves

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

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Honeycomb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Artemisa Gold – an Essay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Boyle, Teeth: On negative reviews

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Mee, ANDY FLETCHER

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

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

How to remember origins,
where we began.

Luisa A. Igloria, Long Night Moon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Still life

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

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

[…]

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Post Amusement Park Visit Syndrome

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Lada, Old Bone

This week: the miracle of chance, fluff under pressure, a man in a shattered house, a charm against the inconceivable, and much more. Enjoy.

It is the season of unloosening: the chaos of high winds, torrential rain, sudden squalls. Each day’s a contradiction: beauty and decay in the carpets of fallen leaves; bruised skies suddenly punctured by bursts of a retreating sun. Time to prepare ourselves for the exodus of light and the night’s imminent veil.

shavasana*
we all take a little longer
to return

*shavasana = ‘corpse pose’ in yoga, usually the final pose of a practice session that allows for mental and physical rest and recovery before re-entering daily life.

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Almost November

The frenzy of fall 
after ceding all 
to the sun 

we walk into the pause
rapt, the minus, 
not the slightest jangle
of cicada

silence
sucking down
into earth’s own navel

Jill Pearlman, Silent Fall

I would like to believe in signs — the owl in the tree right outside my bedroom signifying something momentous is about to happen, that period in my life where I kept dreaming of birds, that rock I found that looks like a road map. But I don’t. Shit happens and it just is, without reason nor the benefit of foresight. Is that a sad way to be in the world? I don’t mind the miracle of chance, or chemical combinations plus time and pressure, or the odd ways in which the brain works its own chemistry. It’s all a wonder to me, even without a message. I’m human too, though, and yearn for some advance notice, some way to foretell whether I’m about to make a good decision or disastrous, some way to catch a glimpse inside the unknown of something I can know and clasp to me like an umbrella in the face of possible rain. But I’m pretty much left with the old death and taxes thing. And whatever I can pick up with my five-ish senses, imperfect as they are, and what mind I carry around from day to day in my head. The other day I looked down and saw a tiny manhole cover, a perfect circle with radiating lines. If I lifted it up I might find a tiny sewer into the center of the earth. Turns out it was the lopped off head of a mushroom. One of those little pointy-headed gray ones stuck upside-down in the grass. Hunh. You just never know, though. Anything’s possible.

Marilyn McCabe, I stay up late listening

As I filtered out of a particularly fun workshop-reading-open mic at BookTree in Kirkland, Washington, one of the participants called back to me as he ambled down the dark street, “Thanks, Professor Mushroom!” The featured image above with its weird reflections, taken at a booth at the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival, conjures, for me, that slightly wacky persona I inhabit when I bard around with Mycocosmic–as if I know things about fungi (I’m an amateur); am relaxed about performing (ha); and really feel kind of mystical and hopeful about our underground connections to each other (well, that one’s true on a good day). […]

On the trip’s last leg I stayed with Jeannine and Glenn Gailey in Woodinville. Jeannine asked about my favorite moments from the adventure. A few hikes came to mind, but I also found myself saying “talking to strangers.” I’m an introvert who has to pay herself back for socializing with hours of quietness, so this isn’t my usual answer! Maybe it feels true because the “talking” involved a lot of listening. A reading with Matthew Nienow organized by Michele Bombardier, both terrific poets, felt special, as did the open mic that followed and my side conversations with audience members. Open mics feature wide variations in poetic skill, yet they’re one of my favorite formats. There’s something electric about so many people listening hard and taking risks, putting strong feelings out there. The Kirkland one ended with a performance that pinged between witty poetic lines and harmonica riffs–I won’t soon forget it.

Lesley Wheeler, Professor Mushroom listens to strangers

Blah blah blah went the (very well written) review until bang there you were coming alive in your own words (I do like a review that quotes the actual poems): ‘be one who / when the lightest breeze / thrills through you / takes note’ and then ‘a part of you on the rocks / a part of you in bog cotton / a part of you snagged on wire / a part of you unravelling’ and I felt something in me shift, a small but deeply profound intake of breath, somewhere between the words oh and wow. I can only describe it as an embodied moment. We (I, everyone) overuse the word visceral now, don’t we, but that’s where I felt it, in my good old Roman viscera. I knew I had to find more.

A quick spot of googling later and that’s what happened, a whole page of you at the Scottish Poetry Library no less, in a navy sweater (I have one too!) in front of the obligatory bookshelf, not looking at the camera (I’m with you on that), with a full biog at the foot of which an injunction to ‘Read the poems’. Which I did. Drank them, more like, gulping, swallowed them whole, not even touching the sides. At which point I started again.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: You are not alone, by Thomas A. Clark

What is it that separates us,
and what keeps us together?
In the garden, I rake
the leaves from the fruit trees.

I write,
but my mouth has many tongues—
in the city, all the windows open
in the morning.

Kati Mohr, Of Course, The Tissues In the Backpack Are Always Deep Down At the Bottom, Below Anything Else

I envy, to a degree, all those poets who just build up to a critical mass of uncompiled poems, work out an order for them, call that a collection, then start the process all over again. I can’t do that — it feels aimless. I think in book, as much as I think in poem. I like a book to have a thesis, and to know what it is as I’m writing it, even if — as in this case — it’s not something I could ever summarise neatly.

As for ‘Lightning Conductor’, I like that it isn’t about anything much, that it’s a little bit lazy. Check out that comma splice — I’m always telling my students to take those out. The whole thing’s just a bad pun, a newspaper cartoon. It doesn’t even want to commit to the sex or humanity of its principal character — etymologically, ‘mannequinesque’ means ‘man-like-ish’. I imagine it being spoken by someone who means to convince the listener that much of what seems like power is mere theatrical affectation. All that build-up — all that careful ceremony — just for the briefest of illuminations.

I also imagine the speaker gesturing intently at some shape on top of a building. Probably not a figure at all — probably just a chimney or plumbing stack. They want the listener to do all the work of imagining a person who is imagining themselves to be a wizard. Nothing at all has happened, is happening, beyond what occurs in the mind’s eye — even the city and the dark-blooded glass are illusions cast upon an empty page.

Jon Stone, POEM / Lightning Conductor

I wrote this on a wet October day, looking out onto the stony beach at Borth, its Bronze Age forest part-covered by the sweep of a dull metallic tide. As I wrote, early poems crowded into my mind, shouting for attention – and I saw them in my own hand, written in biro on A4 stapled together – my first collections. As a child, writing poetry was gathering shells, shards, bright pebbles. The universe offered small and lovely objects and I picked them up and kept them, and sometimes, I showed them to other people who thought they were pretty. A pocketful of pebbles and kind words were enough.

That changed as I grew. By my teenage years, bigger and darker things came in on the tide. […]

By the time I was detained in psychiatric hospital in my third year of uni, I’d stopped writing poetry. I was too far from the world, and from myself: I had no drive or hope of being understood. The journal I kept in those years is too dark to read, though I still keep it.

I started to write poetry again in a writing group for survivors of sexual abuse facilitated by the author and teacher Mandy Coe. Mandy is a life-force, bright and loud: we were driftwood, and she carried us. She took us to our first performance poetry night – Dead Good Poets Society; we wrote in the Walker Gallery; we cut up our poems and threw in them the air like David Bowie; we performed our poetry in the Everyman and our friends came. I read a poem about my time on the wards: “small wonder that some screamed or swore/ or crept into lonely corners/ and quietly gave up hope”.

I had a story I needed to tell, and I could not tell it over dinner, or in idle chat. But I could tell it in poetry.

Clare Shaw, Poetry and Wellbeing: part 1

[M]y next book has transformed. If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll remember I undertook extensive revision and redrafting to help the book find its story and tell it effectively. After this work was complete I approached Olivia Tuck, who I worked with on my second book Dust to see if she still offered her “poem whisperer” service. Olivia’s insight and suggestions mean my book has really grown into itself . It’s currently out at publishers and up for judgement in various competitions. I’m really proud of the book it has become and that I’m at the point where I feel it is “right.” This sense of completion means I have space for other projects. My first focus is on creating poems for a competition that couldn’t be more up my street if it tried. I’m so thrilled to have a clear focus and to be working on something that I feel so inspired by. I’m also investigating the possibility of working on a project inspired by the action group This Ends Now who highlight the failures of the press to report violence against women without shifting blame, or diluting reality. I’m not quite sure on the form this will take, but I’ll have more news after my meeting with their CEO on Tuesday. I feel like I’ve found my writer’s groove again.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Poetry news from Kathryn Anna

A strange week. The structure of the week falling down when my mum’s chemo was cancelled at the last minute. I would have liked to have been one of those people who saw this as an opportunity to have an extra day to write, but we are back to the incessant gnawing of not knowing what’s happening with my mum’s care, and I can’t write when my brain is fizzy with anxiety.

I haven’t done any creative writing of any kind since I sent the chunk of my novel to my agent to see what they think. Within two days of sending it I realised there were darlings still to kill. I could lose three thousand words of what I think might be writer-scaffolding: the story that I’m telling to myself before it becomes the story, and it would work better. But I’ve decided to wait and see what my agent’s initial reaction is before I scythe a massive chunk off it. I’m actually quite glad to have a week or so away from it.

I’ve used this week to consider what I want to do with substack, and to update it accordingly. I’ve used a lot of feedback from some in person events to shape how I think about what I present here. I’m not sure I mentioned in my last diary post that I was on a bit of a workshop running marathon, piling through a load of pre planned appearances and workshops facilitation which I’d set up before we found out that my mum’s cancer had spread and her care needs would be increased. So far I’m still managing the workload, around mum’s increased needs, possibly because there is an end in sight. A previous version of myself wanted to see if I could reduce my workload, if not take a complete break, in December, and I have left that whole month clear of workshops and mentoring, with just creative stuff and this substack to write.

I’m looking forward to embracing December as a writer, but the truth is that I’ve had a bit of an epiphany while I’ve been out of the cocoon of my writing room and actually speaking to real life people, and that epiphany is that this element of my work, alongside writing on substack, not only nourishes me as a person, but also as a writer. I’m so quick to grumble because so much of non writing work takes me away from actual writing. What I am becoming more aware of are the benefits of non-book-writing on my own writing practice, stuff that bleeds into my long term writing.

Wendy Pratt, Notes from My Writing Diary – Part Two

Over the summer I followed along as his collection of raw photos grew and he started winnowing them down into a smaller, curated selection. Recurring motifs started to emerge: People standing in the sun, big trees with broken limbs, detritus strewn in the park. People embracing trees or plants. People closing their eyes and turning their faces to the sky.

As JP’s photo collection took shape, I started scribbling notes for poems. Some were a direct response to his photo or the theme of the Sun’s rotation. Haiku and tanka seemed particularly suitable to the theme of transience, so I wrote a handful of each of those. Since he’d shared unedited photos with me, I decided to do the same with my drafts, and shared photos of my notebook pages.

As JP entered the final weeks of his residency, he began preparing the gallery show that would be its culmination. This prompted me to edit and finalize my collection of poems, which I shared with him.

It was then that JP surprised me for a second time by asking if I would do a Listener Poet session for him. Of course I was delighted by this request: as a newly certified Listener Poet, I’m eager to share this practice with others. So we spent half an hour one morning talking about his approach to photography, and in particular one portrait session he’d done recently in Berlin. After that, I spent a couple of days letting my notes steep, and then I drafted a poem for him, “Portrait of the Photographer.” (see below)

JP’s show went well. The gallery space looked beautiful, and even though I couldn’t visit Berlin to attend, he shared a video walkthrough of the space. And that’s when he gave me a third surprise: At the end of his video, he zoomed in on a handout that the gallery curators had included as part of the show, including a few of my tanka and haiku.

Dylan Tweney, Collaboration and photography

Albert is taken from my second pamphlet, Case Notes, which is based on my own experiences, both in hospital practice and as a family doctor.

Albert was the first really sick patient I looked after as a newly qualified doctor. Youthful inexperience gave me complete faith that medicine would make him better, despite his age and frailty. […]

The consultant was old-school, with a pin-striped suit and an aura of importance. Despite Albert having been in the services and used to obeying orders, both he and the kindly consultant taught me the need to respect patient autonomy.

My first pamphlet, Patient Watching, features a sequence of poems in the form of a heroic crown, in the voice of a single-handed GP in the Black Country featured in John Berger’s book A Fortunate Man. Berger’s book includes wonderful photographs of his encounters with patients, which I used as a prompt to tell stories from my own patient experiences.

I use the same device in Case Notes, writing in the voices of doctors who cared for actors and artists from the past, including Frida Kahlo, Sarah Bernhardt, Andy Warhol and Wilfred Owen. The added advantage is not having to protect patient confidentiality.

Drop-in by Judith Wozniak (Nigel Kent)

My poetry writing goes in cycles.  The cycle I like best is the one where I have a glimmer of an idea for a poem, a glimmer that takes shape throughout the day as I think about it, and by the time I sit down at my writing desk, I’ve got a shape of a poem to work with–and yet, there’s still a delightful surprise or two.

Of course it’s the cycle I like best.  Who wouldn’t like this part?  It’s where I feel like I’m doing what I’ve been put on earth to do.  It’s the part of the cycle where I feel like I’ve come across some secret portal, available to all but undertaken by few, where I glimpse the secrets of creation (which I mean in all sorts of senses of that word).

Usually my writing process is more like this:  I have a line or two, I see what I can do with them, I come up with a bit more but not a complete poem, I put it aside to think about it later, and I rarely return.  It might be for a happy reason:  the fragment leads to a more solid idea.  It’s more usual that I put it aside and then a week or two goes by, and I don’t have any additional ideas, and life gets hectic.

Lately I’ve been stuck in the cycle I like least:  no ideas, no glimmers, no lines that fizzle out and go nowhere.  I feel like it’s been months since I wrote a line, although that’s not true.

Yesterday, much to my delight, I came up with two poems.  In the morning, I had a flash of an idea about gingerbread houses being evidence of a woman working out her trauma.  I decided to go big:  make the speaker the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story.  It’s not done yet, but here is how the poem starts right now:

I deal with loss by baking.
My gingerbread structures tell
you all you need to know
about the trauma that still lives
deep inside me.

In the afternoon, I had the idea to have the gingerbread house speak.  The gingerbread house says that its not its fault that it bewitches small children. From there, the poem devolves a bit.   I had been listening to coverage of the book published by a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein, and the stories are harrowing, and those stories were in my mind as I wrote.  I need to do some work on getting the symbolism squared away.  The gingerbread house is not Epstein–that would be the witch.  Or maybe I want to back away and go in a different direction.

Or maybe not.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Two Rough Drafts Composed of Gingerbread

’Tis the season of mists and fellow mutefulness, apparently, and there being no one else available to write the substack this week (the other NSPs are all currently on the road or under the cosh) I thought I’d scribble something about fluff, or at least fluff under pressure. Lint, possibly. The poem below was a commission for Radio 4’s The Verb about three years back. The Verb has been on my mind this week. Late last year, in the course of a conversation with Ian MacMillan about the poetry of train stations, I had foolishly volunteered that no poem could possibly be written about Leuchars. For reasons both topographic and personal, I have long found it the least poetic station in the UK. Obviously, the poem was commissioned on the spot.

Leuchars is the closest station to the University of St Andrews, where I taught for a couple of happy decades, and with which I am still gently affiliated. But the station itself just reminds me of all the hours I spent freezing on a bench outside a locked waiting room in pitch-dark December, trying to mark exam scripts in the teeth of a North Sea gale, while yet another fighter jet from the airbase tore up the sky twenty feet above my head and the board told me yet another train had failed to make it out of Aberdeen. The Leuchars poem may or may not be any good – you can and will judge for yourselves, if you happen to be near a wireless next week – but as a rambling meditation on war, teaching, cutlery, dementia and death, I don’t think it can count as genuine fluff.

Unlike the poem below. It’s really a piece of occasional verse, the occasion being the BBC’s centennial: a few of us were charged with coming up with some kind of poetic tribute to the Reithian project, in whatever form we fancied. Writing poems for BBC radio is done for love, and often just for the love of Ian MacMillan. As a casual contributor, one is rewarded, more or less, only for the amount of airtime one destroys. A sonnet that took you three months will pay you roughly the same as someone else will get for breaking wind across the same minute. Lacking the normal incentives, BBC commissions can therefore sometimes be … deprioritised by more financially urgent work, which is a way of saying that I totally forgot to do this one. The dedicatee here is the poet Denise Riley, for two reasons: a) Denise reminded me that the poem was due in 48 hours, and b) she actually likes this sort of thing, or claims to, and indeed is very good at it herself. (There may still be a few who persist in thinking of Denise solely as some kind of doyenne of the UK avant-garde, but I suspect most of you know she’s many other things besides, and besides was never quite that thing in the first place.) By way of competitive encouragement, she sent me a fine poem on the now-lost rite of the 5pm Saturday footie results, specifically on the cadences of the sportscaster – his ‘RP weighty, self-assured and calm, / avuncular with its velvety inflections’ as its rise or fall foreshadowed the fate of the club. One could be certain Stenhousemuir had nilled again, well before the nil was confirmed.

All of which is to say … This poem was written in a tearing rush. As my NSP colleagues know, I suffer from Pascal syndrome. I often lack the time to make things shorter. I wrote the poem in a form I know I can deliver fairly quickly; this is where a certain motor-skill relationship to the old 4×4 can come in handy, and the rhymes left to dictate much of the poem. The poem had to find its way to its own conclusion, as none had been planned. It takes a while to yak its way there, but I kind of enjoyed the passivity. As Erroll Garner once said after an overlong piano solo, ‘I’m sorry – I just wanted to find out what happened in the end.’

Don Paterson, North Sea Line Caught, #2: ‘Kissing on the Radio’

Tomorrow I’m recording a tutorial on Horror Poetry for Writer’s Digest and the 30th I’m talking to a class at University of New Orleans about publicity and poetry. Doing the tutorial was an opportunity for me to do more in-depth thinking about what makes a horror poem a horror poem—does Sylvia Plath count? Louise Gluck? Am I a horror poet?

But real life threw in a real scare in the middle of spooky season—my father went into the hospital last night with a serious illness, so we’ve been texting and talking to mom and dad back in Ohio. Hopefully he’s in recovery by Halloween.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Poetry Friends and Readings, Horror Poetry, Halloween/Samhain and Some Real Life Scares

In the year following the death of my mother, I wrote a single poem a day for a longer, sustained span of time than ever before. It was the first time I’d ever successfully completed NAPOWRIMO, but then I just kept going for months. […] Part of it was a way to feel more focused, more present in the world. Part of it was a renewed sense of mortality. Soon, I had an entire book about mothers and mothering, some with very gothic undertones, that became my collection FEED. When my father passed nearly exactly 5 years later, I went through a similar spurt of new poems built around memory and grief that formed segments of RUINPORN. These series and poems were much less about working things out (my relationship with my father being very much less complicated than that with my mother–at least from the standpoint of making art within my grief. ) They jived well with other themes in the overall book and formed the backbone of a collection that also explored societal grief and the loneliness of the internet. […]

[G]rief is always a kind of haunting–not supernatural, but just as real as any emotion. The sense of unreality. For months, my mother was in my dreams, not knowing she was dead. Sometimes, I knew this and had to tell her. Sometimes, it knocked the wind out of me to be discovering it for the first time. I would wake up startled and sweating and sadder than I’d gone to bed. It waned after a few months, but would still occasionally happen. I chalked it up to the fact that I was not there when she passed, nor did I want to see her body before cremation. I later thought maybe doing so would have stopped the dreams. When my dad died, it was more sudden, a few weeks of decline vs. several months of hospitalization/care center. But I was there for his last breath in the hospital bed. We sat with the body for awhile after he was gone. My brain decided this was enough, and when he appears in my dreams on occasion, that shock and realization doesn’t come into play. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about how horror as a genre gives us permission to explore the darker corners of human experience. And grief? It sometimes lives in those corners. Even if you can’t see it, you know it’s there. When you’re grieving, people often want you to be “okay” as quickly as possible. They want the neat narrative arc: sadness, acceptance, moving on. But grief isn’t neat. It’s messy and recursive and sometimes it looks like a creature that shape-shifts every time you think you’ve got it figured out. One day it’s a whisper, the next it’s got claws.

Horror poetry lets you name that monster. It gives you the vocabulary for experiences that polite conversation won’t touch. You can write about death not as a gentle sleep but as the violent rupture it actually feels like. You can describe the emptiness as a void that actually swallows things, because that’s what it feels like when grief takes your appetite, your sleep, your ability to remember what life felt like before it existed. There’s something deeply validating about using dark imagery to describe dark feelings. It’s honest in a way that all the usual euphemisms never are.

Gothic literature has always understood that grief and horror are close cousins. Think about all those Victorian poems dripping with mourning imagery—the crumbling estates, the ghosts, the women in white wandering the moors. They weren’t being melodramatic (okay, maybe a little). They were trying to externalize an internal experience that defied ordinary description. When Poe wrote “The Raven,” he wasn’t just crafting a spooky poem. He was writing about the way grief makes you interrogate the universe, demanding answers you know won’t come. That bird repeating “Nevermore” is the truth grief forces you to swallow: they’re not coming back. No matter how many times you ask.

Kristy Bowen, horror and grief

I remember that strange month, sad month, odd month. I remember listening to these tapes and hearing my boot heels clicking on the pavement, then being surprised by voices, how many kind people called out and spoke to me as I walked around my London: Hello Salena, they said, Alright, mate! Sometimes they called my name like this, Hello Salena, passing someone crossing a busy street, Hello, as you bump into someone in a pub. Hello Godden they’d say on these tapes – not knowing I was observing my life in audio, not knowing my pockets were stuffed full, spare batteries, blank tapes, a notebook and pen.

I was a little scientific and analytic about it. But I was also quite smashed a lot of the time, so I would make mistakes, flip a cassette tape over and record over the same side twice or forget to change the batteries and lose some crucial evidence, events and late hours. It was pot luck what actually got recorded and saved and what was lost forever. I know I was behaving unnaturally, performing, sometimes thinking I was being clever, knowing I was on tape, telling people they were on tape and us all performing to the tape. Telling folk it was a wild experiment. And people would change the way they spoke to me. Or react as though I was a journalist interviewing them. All the time I wondered: How much of life is a performance? What is real? Authentic? True? Why do we change when we know there is a recording of our idea of self ?

Each morning I would wake up and make tea or pour a beer and smoke fags and record myself listening to the recordings from the day before and type poems and write diaries about the audio content: how it made me feel, what or who was I hearing. Writing and processing the images and emotions and soundscapes I’d captured. These morning poetry sessions and recordings became a loop of the days before-before-before and the typing-typing-typing and the sound of writing-writing-writing. A mirror looping into a mirror looping into a mirror. I remember I wrote about the sound of October and the autumn leaves and my adventures in Soho and all the people I’d bumped into and chatted and drank with the day before. I wrote about performance, how we perform when we don’t need to. What is real and what is unreal. What is expected? If nobody is looking, are we more ourselves to ourselves?

In pubs and bars (for I was mad and young and out drinking every night) I would tell people, I am recording my life on earth, it’s a poetry experiment and notice them begin to either shout and perform for me and the tape, or go quiet and change when they knew, I knew, they knew they were being recorded.

I forgot about it until now. I’m not going to open the box, not this year. Maybe in another ten years’ time. I know the box is down in the basement, but no, not now, I won’t open it now, it is enough to know it is there, sealed and dusty, it is good to know it is down there. I am gazing out of my window at the orange leafy October light and remembering it and that era.

I recall one tape: I’m with my mum in an M&S changing room as she is making me get fitted for a new bra. We are laughing. It is a moment of intimacy and love. And on another tape I’m with Oli, we’re drinking absinthe up high on the edge of the Hastings cliffs and singing death wishes into the abyss. I want to jump into the stormy sea. I record a taste of loss. Now we are here, and in this October, and the leaves

          still

            fall.

Salena Godden, October Tape Experiment

On Friday, I was one of six readers at an Off the Shelf Festival event in the University of Sheffield Drama Studio’s theatre, as a celebration of forty years of my and every other UK poet’s favourite poetry journal, The North. Hosted by the co-editor (and co-director of the Poetry Business), Peter Sansom, it consisted of a delightful 20-minute reading by the Sheffield Poet Laureate, Beth Davies, whose pamphlet The Pretence of Understanding won the New Poets’ Prize 2022, and then short readings – by Peter, Alan Payne, James (Jim) Caruth, Kate Rutter and me – each of three poems which had appeared in The North. I read Stephen Payne’s superb villanelle, ‘Dai’, Victoria Gatehouse’s brilliant, and brilliantly-titled, ‘Reservoir Gods’, and my own ‘The Prang’. It was another very memorable event, and a fitting tribute to Ann and Peter Sansom’s work over the years to cement The North as a hugely important pillar of the poetry scene in the UK and beyond.

And then yesterday, I went to my third poetry event in as many days. I have to say that by this point I was feeling as though I was permanently living in a bubble of poetry.

Matthew Paul, On the last while

Are you ignoring my message or are we
in the middle of some strange
literary cliffhanger?

I’m pitching real readers, real reviews,
real visibility, and you’re giving me
the silent treatment like I’m asking you
for your Netflix password.

Luisa A. Igloria, A Marketing Bot Reaches Out in Vain (a partially found poem)

Delivered by the postal service earlier the week, a book as mesmerizing as the leaves the leaves falling from the trees along our street this week—- yellow for an instant and then smitten by asphalt — Earthly, a collection of Jean Follain’s poems translated by Andrew Seguin.

Camille Corot’s lithograph, The Gust of Wind (1871), sits lightly on the cover, gesturing towards Canisy, the small village in Normandy where the poet in question was born and fed bread. In the translator’s introduction, Seguin paints a portrait of his subject: this writer named Jean Follain who saw the agricultural lifeways of small towns gutted by the new economy of killing, the human looking for words in the wasteland following World War II, an event sponsored by governments who caused the mass death of young men and starved village economies of the labor required for their continuance. […]

What happens in Follain’s poems?

Things are touched. Things touch back. Subjects pause like objects in a dark painting. Children “dressed in black rags” scamper through ruins.” A man’s smile “vibrates” alongside the spike of wheat in his scythe. Snails sleep as the bread burns. “The protagonist of dreams” savors wine flavored by “myrtle and cypress” as alcohol fuels arguments in the pub. Doors creak through “cold rooms.” The “rustle” of poplars near rivers rouses the blood. A novelist studies the wandering vapors. A glass blushes like a continental sunset. The “already yellow” of lindens in July crosses paths with violins who are napping in their velvet-lined coffins.

In “Landscape of Rural Hardship”:

A small garden of chives
trembles beneath the stars.

The hardship is expressed in trembling of tiny chives.

Follain opens his “Eclogue” with a man in a “shattered house” who “plays at the game of existing” as the wind groans through the orchard. With no transition, Follain abandons the man for “the lightning-struck oak” where a bird perches on a limb, singing, unafraid, slowly morphing into a haunting image:

an old man has placed his hand
where a young heart
vowed obedience.

Gestures consecrate the movements in Follain’s poems.

Alina Stefanescu, Jean Follain.

It’s a largish distance between [Carl] Phillips’ poems of careful observation to the ‘Post Dada’ world of Tomaž Šalamun as translated by Brian Henry, with its determined undermining of polite expectation:

Folk Song

Every true poet is a monster.
He destroys the voice and the people.
His singing builds the technology that destroys
the earth so that the worms don’t eat us.
A drunkard sells his coat.
A scoundrel sells his mother.
Only a poet sells his soul
to separate it from the body that he loves.

This extends from the rejection of conventional narrative:

Stories that have a first scene, a second
scene, a first border, a second border, surrender like
a lump of meat.

To the wish to go naked through the desert, even if it means abandoning one’s child:

No, I said, we’ll both go.
What will happen with Ana, Maruška said.
We’ll leave her in the car and give her
cookie. Cookie was at that time
still a drink for Ana.

But it would be a mistake to read these poems as simply a kind of teenage desire to shock, there’s a serious, almost political, impulse underlying them, a desire to pare life back to some kind of simplicity. One poem ends with the line ‘A person explodes from too much luxury.’ Šalamun has no wish to share that fate.

Billy Mills, Recent reading October 2025: Part 2

It is a pleasure and a privilege to share three poems from Wendy Klein’s new pamphlet Having Her Cake, published by Grey Hen Press. The pamphlet is dedicated to Barbara Cox (1943 – 2019). Several poems give us vivid details about their lifelong friendship. However, the focus is Barbara’s ‘physician assisted’ death. The opening poem starts: Barbara never knows what time it is in Britain. California calling ends: the kindly California law / on assisted dying / I tell her I’m coming.

Fokkina McDonnell, Having Her Cake

I’m intrigued by this full-length debut by Vancouver poet Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a poetry collection that “invites the reader to take a freight elevator ride into the guts of heavy industry,” and featuring back cover blurbs by Canadian poets Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, two of the originators of the 1970s Canadian “work poetry” ethos (amid those Kootenay School of Writing origins) that also included early work by poets Phil Hall and Erín Moure [see my longer note on some threads on “work poetry” as part of my recent review of Philadelphia poet Gina Myers’ Works & Days]. Shah’s lyrics provide a fascinating patter, one that utilizes the subject matter of labour across scenes of industrial sites and restaurant workers, composing what appear at first glance as first-person descriptive narratives, but one capable of nuanced twists and turns of sound and meaning. “dendrobranchiata,” begins the poem “prawn,” “you throw your roe out / like you remove a cava cage / spill the wine, let life flow / into its briny flute [.]” There’s almost a way her lyric is closer to the language model of poets such as ryan fitzpatrick or Peter Culley than Wayman or Braid, existing somewhere between those two points, offering labour as her building blocks but language as her poem’s propulsion. “here,” begins her poem “fear and probability,” “a woman’s soft body / is found only / in cubicle fabric nests // but I am a huntress / sparkles under steel toes / shuffling between petrochemical rainbows / into open bays / under heavy-lift ulnae / along the riverfront [.]” She offers her perspectives through and around labour, and around gender, a conversation less prevalent than it should be, even despite the high percentages of women working across various industries for decades. The language flourishes, provides flourish. While labour exists as her surrounding subject, much as Gina Myers, Shah sets her poems at the moment of actual, concrete and physical work, writing, as the short poem “ulnaris/radialis” begins: “egret, backhoe— / hand origami’s / carpal puppetry / prepares her for / the work of days / of women; [.]”

rob mclennan, Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress

Through “Darling Blue”, Sarah James has created two complementary threads. One is the doomed (fictional) affair of a woman with a married man that watches her move from the delusion of love to acceptance that she too was complicit in romanticising something tawdry. The wife is outside the frame: it’s not known if she knows of the affair or if the husband is a serial cheat. But there is a strong sense of self-discovery on the speaker’s part. The affair has enabled her to try out a role and learn what love is not. The ekphrastic poems add to the commentary: the speaker’s reaction to Crane’s “Neptune’s Horses” moves from awe at their power to identification where she takes back control after she realises that she was fooling herself. It’s a collection that rewards re-reading, a slow walk through a gallery, taking time to sit with each piece and choose to focus on the whole or a fragment, ask why a particular shade of blue was chosen or marvel at how the brushstrokes direct the light and the viewer’s eye, guiding it to see what the artist wants to reveal.

Emma Lee, “Darling Blue” Sarah James (Indigo Dreams Publishing) – book review

Last week I wrote about a poem that turned out to be a kind of private joke. This produced varied responses — several readers felt annoyed to have been “shut out” in this way, by a literary reference and concealed translation they could not reasonably have been expected to recognise. To them it felt high-handed. But others wrote to say that they didn’t mind this kind of thing — that they quite liked the feeling of “overhearing” something like a private joke, or in-crowd reference, intimate to the poet.

Perhaps this difference in response has something to do with how we think about the balance of power between the author and the reader in determining the meaning of a poem. But sometimes difficulty or obscurity can act as a kind of licence — it occurred to me afterwards that it might in fact have been Longley’s own puzzlement over the obscure names in that passage in Ovid that drew him to translate it in the first place.

There’s a good example of the way obscurity can be a spur to creativity, and even a kind of titillation, in a little Latin poem — little more than a squib — which apparently circulated pretty widely in England for a good couple of centuries. We can start around the middle of its history. In one Cambridge manuscript of the early seventeenth century, a single double-page spread records a series of mock-epitaphs — including poems on Sir Francis Bacon (d. 1626), Sir Christopher Hatton (d. 1591) and a certain Gresham (probably Sir Thomas Gresham, d. 1579, but possibly an earlier one — we’ve met this family in death before). Christopher Hatton’s enormous tomb in St Paul’s towered over the altar and obscured other monuments, which seems to be the point of one of the epigrams, appearing in this case in both Latin and English:

Epitaphs. of S^r Fra: Wal: & S^r Ph: Sid:

Nullus Francisco tumulus nullusque Philipo,
Christoforo mons est, ac tumulus cumulus.

Philipe and Fra[ncis] haue noe Tombe,
for Christopher hath all the roome.

Sir Francis Walsingham died in 1590, just a few years after Sir Philip Sidney, his son-in-law, in 1586. They were both, like Hatton, buried in (old) St Paul’s, though apparently without much in the way of a monument. The manuscript itself dates from the 1620s, so this epigram had already been going around for a while when it was written down. It can’t date from before Hatton’s death, but the jingly Latin (nullus, tumulus, nullus, tumulus, cumulus) is very unclassical in style and could easily have been written any time between the fifteenth and eighteenth century.

Victoria Moul, The evergreen obscenity

a chatbot tells me:
mother has a Proto-Indo-European root word
that sounds almost the same
so does love
though its Sanskrit cognate — lobha —
can translate to greed
one of the six enemies of the mind.

the brain watches itself process the threads
its recursive algorithm
offers a carousel of images:
picture of a woman #*méh₂tēr
picture of a night sky #thebenignfaceofchaos
picture of a rocking horse #metaphorforsomethingstilled
picture of an unidentifiable object #cellmemoryfromadifferentstateofmatter
wheels skid on ice #noimagefound

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The square root of family

Introduction to Cloud Care – Laura Theis

maybe i’ll call gillian anderson – Rhian Elizabeth

I bought these collections from Broken Sleep Books a few months ago, during a phase when writing at least one review a week seemed like a task I had more than enough energy for (seriously, what was I thinking?!). But even though this review is not incredibly timely, I have been reading and re-reading them the whole while, and they have remained grouped together in my mind, despite their apparent differences in style.

In fact, I think they have more in common than first appears. Both have gorgeous covers (typical of Broken Sleep), with striking, glossy images against a deep blue background. Both are from poets with many accolades and awards to their name. Both are tender and vulnerable, but while maybe i’ll call gillian anderson half-hides its vulnerability within a spiny lobster shell, Introduction to Cloud Care lets its layers of softness and ethereality cloak a deeper toughness and resilience.

Both collections also deal in humour and more than a little dash of the surreal, providing moments of levity that underscore the more serious ones. […]

If I could draw another thread between Elizabeth’s and Theis’ work, it’s a sense of how we continue to be haunted by our past selves, but also a desire for reinvention. As Elizabeth tells us, in the most pleasing of things, “memory is a contemptuous old bitch”.

Victoria Spires, Memory, magic, and the art of reinvention

If you’re anything like me, the news of the congressional testimony by major publishers that, among a sample size of 58,000 books published in 2020, 50% sell fewer than 12 copies, utterly shocked you. According to this data, the average publishing run sells six units (six individual books). This isn’t quite true, but such views offer a window into the cynical state of affairs in contemporary publishing circles.

The dissolution of Small Press Distribution in 2024 was likewise an earthquake in an already unstable literary ecosystem. It was during this tumultuous period that my literary organization, Sybil, set out to transition from an online-only press to an organization with the capability to execute print projects. What came next was something few might have predicted, and which we certainly hadn’t prepared for: success, on our own terms.

The most recent testament to this success came after we published a chapbook of poetry by Megan Williams, entitled Window Person. While our organization was (and, at least in a public-facing capacity, remains) not quite open for full-length submissions, we solicited a collection of her writing, making note of the prominence of the pages we had previously published featuring her work. These had become some of the most visited on the entire site. Over a period of 2-3 weeks, we exchanged emails and editorial feedback, she added poems to the collection, and the entire project was “stress-tested,” (that is, the formalistic qualities of certain poems were questioned, ensuring intentionality). The end result is a powerful chapbook, which combines the ethos of confessional poetry with a sharp satirical edge, and contains references which place it in a literary tradition that is explicitly aligned with our goals as a publisher.

The pre-order for the collection (which was as many as we initially planned on producing) sold out in nearly two hours. After expanding our print run, the collection sold out again after only ten hours. For the moment, only digital copies are available! What more could a lit mag ask for?! How is it that, in the midst of all of this unsettling news and anxiety, we found publishing success? This is the question that I will attempt to answer here.

Despite the click-bait-y title of this article, there is no ‘secret’ to publishing success (sorry!). If there is, the average working writer (like myself) may not want to hear it: work with someone with an established platform, and brand recognition, and create an authentic collaboration for a well-drafted, meaningful project. This was the case here. Sybil’s success in this context is in large part due to the popularity of the author we published. We seek to promote work we sincerely believe in, impacting every decision at every point in the publishing process, but, like any press, we also want our work to succeed, to be read, to matter. This was our aspiration going into this collaborative publishing project, and will be our approach moving forward, as we might expect of any organization we worked with as writers.

It is as essential for small presses to find their ‘niche’ as it is for authors, and for many literary organizations, success entails operating within your network, in a complex dance of circumstance, trust, shared values, and goodwill.

D.M. Rice, On Literary Citizenship and the Secret to Small Press Publishing Success

Zeugma, an ancient city in what is now Türkiye’s Gaziantep Province, is near where we began our tour of a 2000-km section of the Silk Road trade route. The city’s name comes from the ancient Greek word for “bridge,” (it means to join or yoke together); the city was located on the Euphrates, where there was likely a floating bridge, like a barge or pontoon bridge, that enabled people, largely traders, to cross. Most of the ancient city is now left to underwater archeologists to examine, alas, since it lies beneath the new Biricek Dam. […]

Our tour guide was excited when I told him that the word zeugma is used in poetry terminology. It’s a figure of speech in which words or images in a phrase are connected, often for humorous or ironic effect, as in a sentence such as: He lost his heart and his wallet at the stage door cafe. The word “lost” joins both heart and wallet. It acts as the bridge. It’s an intriguing little literary device that’s seldom the first thing I notice in a poem, but when I do identify it, I appreciate it. I like knowing the etymology, and I like knowing that I’ve been where the city was.

Ann E. Michael, Zeugma

I understood my own words, but no one else’s.
With all of us yelling and waving our hands
construction ground to a halt. Who even cared?
We left the work site like plaintive baby birds
with our new call, can anyone understand me?
why do I feel so alone?

Rachel Barenblat, Understand

I was listening to Robert McFarlane read from his new book, Is a River Alive? and he was saying that considering humans are mostly made of water, if we sit down, we’re a pond, and if we run, we’re a river.

I’m thinking of place like that. If a place changes, that place is a still the same place. Like a river, that place is fluid. And so one’s home is fluid.

In this way, all of us humans are not diasporic, we’re metamorph-poric. Our place, our home is change. It’s not to take rights from people who have a relationship with a particular place, but to think about that place as flow. If as Heraclitus said, you can never step into the same river twice, these days you can never belong to the same place because place inherently changes. The world is always already changing.

Once the sky was filled with birds. The sky is no longer filled with birds. Our place is birdless and heating up. So we have to think of this kind of change as a working paradigm for the world. And we have to consider how to think about that.

Gary Barwin, Sex with a river; a forest instead of a saxophone: change as a constant, music like the woods

I remember reading about bowler superstitions: Lucky shoes, towels, and socks  or prayers and chants. We just saw “Baby Boom” – executive Diane Keaton saddled with unexpected baby  altering her corporate ambitions – and since Diane has been  good in everything forever, I chose her. On every approach, perfecting my four-step, under my breath – Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton – and the ball lightens, rolls straight, connects dead center on the headpin, then it’s strike after strike all night. Four decades flown, and I don’t bowl often, but Diane is still the mantra. And when she dies, I find myself in the supermarket aisle, doctor’s office, subway, watching hellish newscasts  – Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton. A charm against the inconceivable,  the bowling gods giving and taking away,  another cursed split in a year full of gutters.

Collin Kelley, Bowling with Diane Keaton

This week while tuning in to POETs Day live with Kate Jenkinson (Fridays at 12:30 via LinkedIn) I found myself drawn to the Venn diagram image in the Poetry In Business Logo. It resonated with my recent thinking around how two of my favourite things (poetry and coaching) intersect. Whilst wondering about this I had also been toying with the thought that people might find it strange that my social media presence often flits between poetry and coaching. My answer to myself was that I am a poet and a coach, and sometimes I am a coach and a poet, and sometimes I am only one of these, and sometimes I am neither, but even when I am neither I still carry their vibrations. And that was my way of saying that like the honeysuckle that grows through the hydrangea in the front garden I see them as entwined. So rather than thinking about separating them as two binary elements my answer seemed instead to focus on dialling up and dialling down (thank you for extending my thinking about this, Kelley). Even with this realisation, the Venn diagram was still drawing me back to its intersection and giving me the hint that there might be something to consider about this part of it. I enjoyed a little wonder about what exists there, and here’s what I found in my intersection of poetry and coaching: Setting something down, trying something out, viewing it from different angles, hearing what it sounds like out loud, seeing what it sounds like out loud, time and space to think, time and space to reflect, moving a thought forward, adjusting it, leaning in to emotions as they resonate in real time, trying on different lenses, wondering what it’s telling you, playing with it, considering different endings, recognising your own threads and patterns, deciding which ones to continue to weave.

Sue Finch, POET, COACH. COACH, POET.

it begins with a november rose. shadows stirring a bowl

of milky blood. wholeness and wild honey die slowly.

remembrance, our permanent home.

Grant Hackett [no title]

yeast of my day
on the way to the bread shop
the sun rises

Jim Young [no title]

This week: singing bones, messages in bottles, the wind phone, the dark mist of America, and much more. Enjoy.

There was a nest and then there was chirping and then Netanyahu was born from a little blue egg. His beak like an open pocket, a broken fortune cookie opened to the sky and his parents fed him. He had no feathers and then his feathers grew and soon he flapped his uncertain wings and then he was ready. He fell from the nest onto a nearby branch and within ten minutes he had invaded. What could he do? This is the way of the world.

Feathers fell from the sky the colour of ash. The sky filled with smoke the colour of ash. Children, aid workers, women, the old, medics, men, libraries, hospitals, underground tunnels, journalists and schools. What could he do? This is the way of the world.

Gary Barwin, Netanyahu was born from a little blue egg.

At one of our local used book stores, I found a copy of William Gass’ 1976 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Gass writes in a style one might term prolix; but if you are like me and sometimes appreciate lists, wordplay, allusions, lengthy sentences, and fine distinctions in your sentences–as well as humor–while exploring the limits and the stretches of words and language, this book-length essay on the word/concept/color/iconography/sexual innuendo/moody attitude and conflicting meanings of the word blue might appeal. I’ve been feeling a bit on the blue side lately, hence my attraction to the book (though I do like Gass as a writer, as long as I don’t have to read too much of him at one time). And guess [what]? It cheered me! […]

Granted, my feeling blue has a different tone from other uses of the word: blue postcards, sexual meanings of blue–I’m reminded of the movie “I Am Curious (Blue)” which was considered racy and given an X rating when I was a kid, though the blue in that title referred to the Swedish flag, apparently. My blue is the blue of songs like “Baby’s in Black” or Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album. Or just that classic music form, the blues.

Ann E Michael, Blue

A few years ago, a mass emergence saw clouds of butterflies travelling up the Thames. Many stopped off at the National Theatre roof gardens which opened in 2018. I was amazed to find out that painted ladies are some of the most well-travelled creatures in the world, capable of migrating across multiple continents over several generations. These fragile-seeming insects are incredibly resilient, even adapting to our warming climate by following the changing seasons. […]

Their lives are a constant journey
thousands of miles over their generations, compassing

continents, strong-flying, paper-thin wings catching aair currents
undeterred while we who see ourselves as astride

the globe, no longer know who we are
or how to find our way in the world

Ruth Lexton, Small wonder

I’ve been thinking about the question “What do you want” in conjunction with Marcus Aurelius’s lines about how we have it within our power every moment to be reverently content. And when I boil it down, when I really think about how my daily life happens to be, then mainly, I can say every day: I am reverently content. I can die tomorrow knowing that I’ve written most of the books I want to write. I’ve taken some beautiful photographs. Most importantly, my daughter is beautiful and my husband is beautiful and they are both making beautiful things. I get to help people at the library many times a week. Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever not precarious. And I want more. More. More tries at all of the above. And still I can be reverently content. I can call myself beloved.

Shawna Lemay, Blessings and Praise and What Do You Want From Life?

Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief & Birdsong
MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS

One of the things that has kept me extremely busy this month is co-organising the Manchester Writing School Summer Festival, alongside some of my colleagues at the Writing School. This year the festival took place over four days – two of which were online and two in person. All of the sessions were taught in-house by our team of amazing writers at Manchester Metropolitan University.

One of the events was an in-conversation event with Professor Michael Symmons Roberts and I was lucky enough to get the job of hosting this. As the book has not long been published, I did a speed read over the weekend before hosting the event, and since then have re-read it at a much more leisurely pace!

Michael sets out to explore his lifelong fascination with Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” and this is one of the threads that runs through the book. He delves into the mythology that’s told about the premiere of this piece – that it was first performed in a prisoner of war camp in 1941 to other prisoners, and the real story behind the myth. This is just one thread though – and woven within what you might call this musicological writing are other threads – there is a thread here about grief as the writer comes to terms with the death of his parents, a thread about place, and about how poems are written, a thread about doubt and faith. All of these threads are woven together in what I would call a beautiful braided lyric essay – except there is another facet to this. Each chapter uses as its title the name of a movement from “Quartet for the End of Time” – in lyric essay terms, this could be called a hermit crab lyric essay – so perhaps what this book is, is a cross between the two.

We talked a little bit about artists who create what they create despite what is going on around them and cautiously wondered whether Messiaen was one of those – despite the mythology of Quartet for the End of Time being so closely associated with the prisoner of war camp, a lot of the music was composed elsewhere. We hear the piece through the spectre of war, but perhaps he would have written the same piece if he was in Paris, though that of course is something we won’t ever know.

We also talked about artists who are affected creatively by social, political and personal events. Michael talked a little bit about the book he’d set out to write compared to the book he ended up with, and how Covid and lockdown and the death of his parents changed not just what he was writing, but how he was writing. I wonder now if the fragmentary nature of the lyric essay, and the shell of the hermit crab felt like a kind of protection when dealing with this material.

It is a wonderful book and I would highly recommend if you’re interested in how to combine poetry and prose, global and personal history, biography and autobiography.

Kim Moore, May/June Reading

I fell out of love with writing about two years ago. I began to despise my work, dislike the circus of trying to be heard, and feel I’d lost the sound of my own voice. I also lost my work as a copywriter including being ghosted by my most enduring client (why has this become a thing) which was really disheartening and odd. My dad’s death meant I experienced another shift in my familial role, and take on responsibility for my mum. I began to collapse under the weight of myself.

I’ve spent the last couple of months making my garden, nurturing seeds, experiment with yet another way to grow tomatoes, growing aubergines and slight obscene courgettes and finally feeling as though I can achieve something. It has been the first thing I think of when I wake and a place of calm when the outside world is overwhelming. A privilege that is out of reach for so many. My planner lay empty for the first time in many years – I took time out without really realising it and now I’m ready to respond to the desire to write and share. Courage has returned. […]

I’ve also noticed ideas for poems beginning to re-emerge. I have so many ideas for new books I’m not sure where to go next – my goal for next week is to try and pin one down. We’ll see. I may spend my time with the roses instead.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Where I’ve been and where I’m going

[Michael] Vince’s syntax and metre don’t call attention to themselves but it’s through their subtle and continuous work that we come to share his vision. Throughout the book, most poems are written in short lines and long sentences. The poet uses this combination to achieve a double effect. The continuity of the sentences makes us feel the interrelatedness of the poems’ details and creates suspense as to what will come next. At the same time, by breaking the flow with line endings Vince frames individual details and emphasises words in a way that makes them shine out distinctly, not becoming subsumed within the larger movement. Complementing each other, these effects of suspense as to what will come and framing when it does give each detail a sense of emphasis.  ‘Lamb’, for example, begins

In an island village, high up,
half abandoned, where goats perch
among ruined houses, we walk
along a winding street, watched by
suspicious cats, greeted by
the occasional dog acquainted
with tourists. On a doorstep
a young woman sits with her pet
seated beside her, a lamb
with a lead and collar.

How much more circumstantial could writing be? But a striking part of the total effect is how unlocalized the experience is. We never learn who’s walking with the poet or which island they’re on, let alone which village they’re in. And so without losing their particularity the scenes and qualities Vince describes take on archetypal resonance and evocativeness, whether they be physical things like mountain, sea and sky, bread, animals or people; abstract but specifically named concepts like generosity, which is beautifully and playfully dramatized in the poem of that name; or still more abstract ideas tacitly suggested by the arc of the poem as a whole, as ‘Lamb’ suggests the ambiguity of our relation to the animal world by reminding us that the eating of lamb is a ritual of the Greek Easter.

Edmund Prestwich, Legwork by Michael Vince

夏野原ジュラ紀の骨が歌ってる　西池冬扇

natsu-nohara juraki no hone ga utatteru

            summer field

            the Jurassic bones

            singing

                                                Tōsen Nishiike

from Gendai Haiku, #718, June 2025 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

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

There are many portals into “the world of over-mind consciousness” and we must each find our own. Echoing Whitman’s insistence that “no one can acquire for another… grow for another” and Nietzsche’s admonition that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” H.D. writes:

My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.

But the world of the great creative artists is never dead.

All it takes to recreate the old stale world, she insists, are just a few creative kindreds who entwine their vision:

Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.

Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.

Couple H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision with Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing and Iris Murdoch — whose over-mind was deeply kindred to H.D.’s — on how to see more clearly and love more purely, then revisit Lewis Thomas’s magnificent living metaphor for unselfing drawn from the enchanted symbiosis of a jellyfish and a sea slug.

Maria Popova, Vision of the Womb and Vision of the Brain: H.D. on the Two Kinds of Seeing and the Key to Over-mind Consciousness

This, too, is the labor of poetry: to describe what feels incommunicable, and to imagine a world in which hope and vision are communicated. We of the 21st century are fluent in the art of the take-down but often afraid to express what we value or dream. “Perhaps” is my favorite country, the terrain of my fidelities, and the space from which I extend this invitation made possible by the brilliant Maya Popa — [Click through to view Zoom invitation]

In the darker moments of the 20th century, writers congregated around a notion conveyed in correspondence, lectures, and poetry—namely, the Flaschenpost, or “message in bottle,” described by Paul Celan via Osip Mandelstam, who imagined the poet as “the shipwrecked sailor who throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment,” leaving the poem as a “testament of the deceased” that would find “its secret addressee.” This workshop will explore poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Pasternak, and Rilke. Poets will be invited to develop their own Flaschenpost.

Alina Stefanescu, 10 tickets.

That little girl who scribbled nonsense in notebooks would be so surprised at the writer I am now and it makes my chest ache. For her, it was a just a tool to spend her days in a dreamlike state. And maybe it still is for me as an adult. And yet, when I am struggling, it helps me feel less adrift. Less apocalyptic (even if I am writing about the apocalypse.) I also think about how long it’s been getting even here, how much I invested in rather unimportant and frivolous endeavors. Struggling with the feeling that writing, especially poetry, seems to be foolish and self-indulgent in a world that presents new and very real horrors every day. Though, admittedly, even the jaded 14 year old who wrote poems in her dairy would be gobsmacked that it became a way of life and existing in the world she never would have imagined.

Kristy Bowen, poetry and past selves

Last week Henry Oliver posted Arnold Bennett’s 10-step plan for learning to appreciate poetry, which starts with reading Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Poetry in General’ twice, then some of the Bible, then Hazlitt again, and only then some Wordsworth. Much as I like Hazlitt (not to mention Wordsworth and Isaiah), this seems utterly insane to me. If you want to learn to read poetry, start with verse written for beginners, and most burnished by use. Luckily, we already have a whole vast library of poems of just this kind, in nursery rhymes, ballads and poems for children. You could do a lot worse than revisiting, to begin with, Robert Louis Stevenson or ‘À la claire fontaine’ [by Robert Desnos].

Victoria Moul, Edwin Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Desnos

The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) offers delightful and broad-ranging connections between mathematics and the arts.  An article that I discovered recently considers ways to use poetry in mathematics classes.  Found in the July 2023 issue, “Teaching Mathematics with Poetry: Some Activities,”  by Alexis E. Langellier (an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Moraine Valley Community College and a graduate teaching assistant at graduate student in Mathematical Sciences at Northern Illinois University).  Working toward a degree in Computer Science, Langellier has this intent:  My goal is to get more women in STEM.

Langellier introduces her article with these words:

During the summer of 2021, I experimented with a new way of getting children excited about mathematics: math poetry. ”Math” can be a trigger word for some children and many adults. I wanted to find a way to make learning math fun — without the students knowing they’re doing math. In this paper I describe some activities I used with students ranging from grades K-12 to the college level and share several poem examples, from students in grades two through eight.

JoAnne Growney, Teaching Math with Poetry — Some Activities

comet viewing
as light as a feather
my thoughts of you

Jim Young [no title]

I’m writing to you as a person without words. Or, rather, as a person without the right words—the ones that might somehow say the thing. Maybe, like me, you don’t know how to wrap your head around the world right now, let alone find the language. Maybe, like me, you feel more than a little scrambled.

“The world is fifty percent terrible” feels like a very conservative estimate today. With so much cruelty and greed on display, I can hardly believe we’re still checking email, going grocery shopping, and watering our plants—business as usual. And yet, as soon as I’m ready to scream into a pillow, my son gives me a hug out of nowhere, or I look up in awe at the clouds, or I read a message from someone I love.

How not to feel scrambled? There is so much to marvel at and be grateful for, and so much to grieve and rage against. I keep coming back to Rilke’s “beauty and terror.” It’s not beauty or terror, it’s and. We get both, and I don’t know what to do except acknowledge both—call them out, loud and clear, when I see them.

I have seen plenty of terrible this week. So have you. I have seen cruelty and greed beyond comprehension. I have also seen and felt love, gratitude, generosity—and I hope you have, too. We need the beauty if we’re going to keep fighting the terror, and we have to keep fighting. What choice do we have?

I don’t have the right words, but I’ve been turning to poems to find them. That’s where I always turn. I’ve been reading this W.S. Merwin poem daily, a kind of secular prayer. Maybe you could use it, too.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

It is July 2^nd, and I’m thinking only about my dad. And, of course, the death of democracy. Maybe there’s no room at this time for more grief.

Over (My Dead Body)

Where will they find the body?
They hardly knew the mind.
Beach motel, a scenic overlook,
fluffy rubble of a fallen sky?
Or god forbid a hospital,
eyebrows gone and metastatic
rage stifled by the drip drip drip.
Will I be clutching pills or pearls
of wisdom, photographs, a gun,
my chest, batman mask pulled down
B carved in my chest?
Will they find me slumped
across this poem, cobwebs
from my fingertips to pen
smell of long-extinguished
fire, sound of curtains flapping

Leslie Fuquinay MIller, Dead to Me

My friend of about eight years, artist Philippa Sutherland, died last month. She’d been ill for some time and I’d been visiting her weekly for a year. We weren’t close friends, and Philippa had many friends from different places, particularly Ireland where she lived for many years, but we found lots to talk about, books, films, art, and music, just some of Philippa’s interests. She was fiercely bright and well-informed, right until the end. […]

When I was working on my poetry collection What Are You After? (Nine Arches Press, 2018) I met with Philippa to discuss a possible cover. In the end, after discussions with my editor Jane, we decided on an image by a different artist (my friend Mary Petrovska) but Philippa gifted me her painting and it’s been on my sitting room wall ever since. Philippa especially loved it when I told her my daughter, a teenager at the time, really liked the painting. Philippa was always interested to hear about my two children. She’d been an art tutor for many years and always cared about young people. She never seemed old and was one of those consistently young at heart and in spirit people.

Josephine Corcoran, Philippa Sutherland

It’s a year ago today that my brother died. If grief is love with nowhere to go, the wind phone can be a place for those feelings to land, even momentarily.

The initiative was started in Japan by garden designer Itaru Sasaki in Otsuchi Prefecture in 2010. Sasaki said: ‘Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind.’ Hence the name Kaze no denwa’ – phone of the wind. The disconnected old-style rotary telephone allowed him to deal with grief after his cousin’s death of cancer.

Sasaki: ‘When your heart is filled with grief or some kind of burden, you aren’t in tune with your senses. You’re closed off like curtains have been pulled around you. After you empty your heart a little bit, you might be able to hear some birds singing again.’

The following year close to 20,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami. In Tokohu 10% of the population died. Sasaki allowed local people to use the wind phone. Over 30,000 people have made the journey to this telephone since, and wind phones have been set up in other countries. The wind phone also provided inspiration for films and novels.

Amy Dawson (USA) lost her daughter Emily to terminal illness in 2020. She learned about wind phones and now devotes much of her time to maintaining a listing of wind phones worldwide, providing advice and resources. The current total is just over 400. Not all calls are to a deceased. People make calls about other losses. Go to her website for more information.

Fokkina McDonnell, Wind phone

It might be fair to say that animals do not realize that they must die. They know that they can and as the process begins, they know that they will. The ill cat seeks solitude under the bed. An elephant matriarch trumpets to the rest of the herd possibly to indicate that one of their own is dying. It is because of death and other circumstances that a group of elephants is called a memory. Death makes room for more life. Death promotes evolution. Because of death, this buzzing, feathered handful of life graces my morning.

So long ago (9,205,128 of my lifetimes ago), during the Carboniferous period, an abundance of plants and trees arose in a warm, tropical climate. However, there were not enough decomposers to break down the vast amount of vegetation—specifically the lignin (what gives plants their woodiness and structure). This led to a huge abundance of vegetation that would not rot. The wood piled up and up, was buried, and with heat and pressure became coal. This period prompted the evolution of white rot, the problem-solving fungi we see today. When I look down at a fallen mulberry from the mulberry tree, I thank white rot. When I look up at the mulberry tree’s wide-spreading crown, I thank white rot. When I walk over to my gardens full of lettuce, green beans, and tomato plants, I thank white rot. When I look at the border of woods near my home, I thank white rot. When I look at the wooded ridge on the other side of the highway in the distance, I thank white rot. When I walk along the river that is simply a channel of water following the easiest path, I thank white rot. When commuting on the highway to go to work and looking down at the hills and ridges and horizons, I thank the white rot that breaks down and renders vegetive life into ghost.

Sarah Lada, Everything is Ghosts

From Quebec poet Pearl Pirie comes the chapbook we astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), a title the acknowledgements suggest “could be considered a sequel to Sex in Sevens (above/ground, Sept. 2016).” With a poetics that includes collage-movement and haiku, this small collection again works Pirie’s own familiar forms while expanding her nuance, her repertoire, of poetic assemblage, collision, sketch-notes and density. “inside the exquisite loss of everything / except where skin knows sweat,” begins the poem “vacation day,” “time and all else will be someone else’s problem, / here is birdsong and wave crash, // eyelash and breath, lips as if warmed silk / and a hiking up onto one elbow.” Her phrases almost read accumulatively, with the slight disconnect between each one, allowing the poem to exist in the collision between descriptive phrases. What amuses, as well, is Pirie’s further inclusion into the ongoing “Sex at 31” series [see my own notes on the origins of the project here, and my participation in same], her “sex at fifty,” a two-page poem that opens with “perhaps I have seen my last / set of menstrual cramps. // I never needed to collect / the whole bleeding set.” and ends with the couplet: “eight minutes until a / teleconferencing call.”

rob mclennan, Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two : Pearl Pirie, Sacha Archer + STUMPT 7 + issue eight)

As the editor, Grevel Lindop, says in his Introduction to Collusive Strangers: New Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2024), the literary world has not taken enough notice of the remarkable oeuvre of Jeremy Reed. Many of his recent collections have appeared without much, if any, critical notice, so it’s to be hoped that this substantial new selection, from 1979 -2016, will bring this misfit-poet’s work back to more general attention. The problem is that the protean Reed fits no pigeonhole, plus the fact that he’s been astonishingly prolific. Intensity of perception and a phenomenal dynamism of language and creativity are his hallmarks, and he matches the best in nature poetry (Clare and Hughes), the decadent, urban flaneur (Baudelaire), then writes as Symbolist and Surrealist (Gascoyne), pursues sci-fi, focuses on pop and fashion, next becomes a portraitist and moving elegist. Even given these 300 pages, Reed – a sometime Peter Pan now into his 70’s – continues to be elusive. Compared to the prolific poet/novelist John Burnside, the difference is clear: we all knew what the brilliant, much-missed John was up to. With Reed, we are endlessly being caught by surprise.

Martyn Crucefix, Jeremy Reed’s ‘Collusive Strangers: new selected poems’ (1979-2016) reviewed

Last weekend, I went to Ledbury, Herefordshire for the annual poetry festival that’s been running there since the Nineties. It’s hard to think of an English town with more poets literally written into it. Not only do they have John Masefield High School, named after the long-running Poet Laureate (1930—1967) who was born in Ledbury in 1878; they also have the Barrett Browning Institute, built to honour the town’s most famous Victorian poet, and now known as The Poetry House; plus every other street name seems to commemorate a poet connected with the area, from The Langland (Piers Plowman begins in the nearby Malvern Hills) to Auden Crescent and Frost Close.

I did a double take, though, when I saw the Day Lewis Pharmacy, just down the road from the Poetry House — surely not the family business of Cecil Day-Lewis (1904—1972), who succeeded Masefield as Laureate? I began to feel as though I had slipped into the kind of dream I have after reading too many anthologies before bed.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #34: Midnight Snacks Filled with Passion

Let’s say a god led me here by the hand.
Or a goodness did. Or a goodbye.
At the end of a road that is not a road,
there is a fork. Both paths lead here.
Where you stand so close that the
distance between us can never be
bridged. Where do gods go, once
they are gone? Where do we?

The crow bites into its
lunch. Looks around,
caws loudly.
Claiming. Warning.
Its beak is wide open, stained.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Of a hungry crow but no god

Later in the same poem, the speaker seems to be recuperating:

“I’m reading a book about thirteen geisha who boarded a steamer to America to attend the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, as part of the Japanese exhibit. One of them wore a blue kimono, carried a purse that contained a bar of soap, a muslin cloth, an incense bag full of chrysanthemum seeds, a reminder of her home. On the third day, she found a dead mackerel on the deck. She planted a seed in the gill of the fish and put it in a ceramic vase. A week later, a bud grew out of its mouth, the green stalk had reached its tail, overwhelming the rot with tender fragrance. They called her the girl who skewered the fish with a flower.”

The foreignness of the geisha’s situation leads her to do an apparently odd thing of placing a seed in a dead fish. The smell must have overwhelmed the soap and remnants of scent on the incense bag. Until the flower grows from the rotting fish. At least being known for doing something strange seems to have humanised her. She starts the stanza as an exhibit and becomes a girl.

Emma Lee, “Chronicle of Drifting” Yuki Tanaka (Copper Canyon Press) – book review

As a fairly frequent reviewer, I know how much thought and effort goes into attempting to produce a fair summary and consideration of a poetry publication. The reviewer has to be mindful that poetry books and pamphlets, whatever their quality may be, are, of course, the result of at least several years of writing, revising and constant striving for improvement – and debuts have a lifetime behind them.

For me, though, it’s marginally more nerve-wracking to be the reviewee than the reviewer. Twice in the last fortnight, I’ve been fortunate to read reviews of my new collection, and I’m very grateful to the editors of The High Window and The Friday Poem – David Cooke and Hilary Menos, respectively – for commissioning and publishing them. I say fortunate because some poetry collections receive no reviews at all, and others garner them belatedly, as I experienced: my first collection was out in the world for over a year before its first review appeared.

I’m even more grateful to Rowena Somerville and Jane Routh for taking the time and trouble to read my poems closely and attentively and then to write about them and how they cohere.

Rowena Somerville’s review can be read here.

Jane Routh’s review, plus a poem from the book, ‘Old Man of the Woods’, can be read here.

Matthew Paul, Reviews of The Last Corinthians

I read recently an author needs to have seven books published in order to make a living just as a writer. I don’t know how well those facts stand up. It was an insta reel I saw while procrastination-doom-scrolling through my own personal anxiety, tapping into a more generalised world-on-fire anxiety. Right now seven books (and I’m assuming poetry is not counted in this scenario) seems an impossible feat.

All this anxiety is sucking the joy from my writer life. How to pull myself back from worrying so much about the thing that I want to enjoy?

I return to the little book, and a new mantra to see me through July, to the self imposed deadline date, and beyond.

The word for amateur comes from the latin ‘amare’ meaning ‘to love’.

I don’t know where this quote came from. A strange quote for someone who wants to make a living as a writer. But what I want to do is uncouple myself from the awful ‘second album’ feeling of trying to make this new writing project perfect, and return to the unrestrained joy of following my brain down its burrows of interest. I think that’s what you have to do, as a writer. You have to be the professional, whilst holding onto the amateur, the love of the thing. In order to reach a point where I earn enough to not be worrying all the time about income, (is there such a place?) I need to be able to write well, and to be able to write well, I have to allow myself the time and energy to be free and joyful and in love with my project, without worrying whether it’s going to be published or not.

Wendy Pratt, July Mantra: The word ‘amateur’ comes from the latin ‘to love’.

I’ve always experienced acute issues with concentration and distractibility. I did very well at school up until the age of 11, when studying became essential to success, then I crashed and burned, scraping a handful of mediocre Highers, (enough in those pre-Free-Tuition-for-Scottish Students-Fiasco days to gain a University place) then dropping out after two years. I’d engage in what I termed tangential study – in the Literature section of the Library, intent on genning up on Pope or Milton or – God love him – the muddier Wordsworth, I’d veer off to one side, drawn by a brightly coloured spine, and find myself two hours later lost in Battiste Good’s Winter Count from Technicians of the Sacred or Bouttell’s Heraldry, Ancient and Modern. Sitting with a set text in front of me, and an exam looming, I’d be so overcome with anxiety I couldn’t take in any of the words. I didn’t consider it an issue – it was just my relationship with the world and the word. It’s no coincidence that most of my ars poetica poems are about butterflies. […]

In 2024, getting ready for a ten-day visit to Italy, I made a decision to take just one thin volume with me. I was going to try Slow Reading – spending significant time with each poem, living with the words rather than speeding through them; savouring the text, using the last line as an excuse to return to the beginning and read again. The book I chose was Nick Laird’s Up Late. I’d bought a copy when it won the Forward for Best Single Poem, and though I loved that poem, I found myself struggling with others. Many of them ran over into two pages – some three, even four, and long, determined lines – such a lot of words. A poem has to prove itself imperiously to me if I’m going to stick with it into page two. I coped with ‘Up Late’ itself because it’s composed of a sequence of brief, linked sadnesses, like Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’. I can handle that, where there’s a breather between sections. Just as I can handle the visual pandemonium of an art exhibition so long as I can go and sit in a quiet dark corner every now and again.

Don’t get me wrong – I could sense how good those poems were, how accomplished and confident, but my attention would drift as I read them, or leap towards the end, as if the poem was deeper than I’d expected. The poem which sold me on this book for slow reading, though, was the heftier bulk of ‘Attention’, which I came across first in The New Yorker. ‘Attention’ is an astonishing, long-limbed, gravitational descent from detached observation into rage and grief. He uses words in there as if they had no price attached to them. It is written in memory of Laird’s friend Martino Sclavi, the Italian film director who died of glioblastoma in 2020. The cancer ate away at the very part of his brain which processed the written word, so he couldn’t read. His memoir ‘The Finch in my Brain’ begins: ‘I have written this book without ever reading a sentence of it. Words do appear on the screen as I am typing away, but upon trying to read them, something funky happens.’ He would edit by listening as the computer read back his lines. A marble with a turquoise wave in it rattles downhill through the poem. I imagine the bird-like lesion in Sclavi’s brain, the sadness and anger held in the poem itself and my attention too, somehow or other, continuously held in the marble of the poem. I had no interest in pulling things apart to find out how it worked; I simply wanted to experience the emotional effect the poem was having on me again and again. So I spent a good portion of that holiday simply reading that one poem – how that marble rolled downhill, again and again.

John Glenday, Now Read On

Sometimes you lie dry.
Exposed furrows offer your mud
for footprints,
|mosquitoes create whirlpools in the air.

When you are full
your burble and flow
are in the folds of my brain
filtering my thoughts.

I lean over your bridge
for shadow photos.

You are dark. You are sparkling.
You are an almost mirror,
a depth, an ebb,
an onward.

Sue Finch, ENTERING MY BLACK AND WHITE PHASE

Here in Philadelphia, Independence Day is a huge deal. There have been fireworks going off every night this week. Last night, July 4th, the display was extraordinary and continued until nearly midnight. After watching the main show over the city’s art museum, we were trailed home by bluish smoke that filled the streets. There were police everywhere to protect the huge concert area, and their cars’ blinking lights were nearly blinding, mentally supplanting the bright dazzle we’d just witnessed up above.

I’m relating this partly to share a bit of my holiday experience with you all. (It was super fun! I am super exhausted!) But also, I think there is a metaphor here when we consider those lit mags and presses that do not serve writers’ best interests.

That is, such entities may look exciting. They offer something that dazzles. They promise to light up the dark expanse within us, that infinite sky where our dreams reside.

Once you start engaging with them, however, what they give you is far from awe-inspiring. They deliver smoke that makes your eyes tear. Blinking lights in no way matching the true thing. Crowds. Garbage. Cheap flashing toys. Bewilderment and exhaustion.

These scammy predatorial entities, we might say, are like the Fourth of July of the lit mag world. Only without the beer, music, family, friends and fireworks—just noise, chaos, litter and environmental damage.

Let’s not fall prey to these false lights, my friends!

Sadly, there is so much to say on this topic that I’m dividing this discussion into two parts. This weekend, the first part will focus on the letters that some lit mags send to submitters and people on their mailing list. Next weekend we will look at signs to look for on the magazines’ and presses’ websites.

Becky Tuch, Q: How do we spot scammy lit mags & presses (part 1)?

Coming into July of 2025, most of us in America are afraid. Sixteen million poor people just lost health insurance while the top 1% got a trillion-dollar tax cut. Unthinkable excess. Our country needs compassion, a just society for all of us who live here, available health care, food, shelter, jobs. Many don’t feel they can make a difference. But we in the 21st Century are the children of loss, and we must be willing to acknowledge the tragedy, rewrite the myth, become the heroes of our country.

Nelson Mandela and Gandhi changed history. Neither of them were rich or powerful. But they carried their country forward toward justice. They brought a commitment to reconciliation, peace, and human rights.

Every day, I ask myself, if I have the rest of my life to make a difference, what can I do? I am not here to breathe and pay the rent; I’m here to leave the world a better place. In 2025, I carry stories forward into the dark mist of America. We become the stories we tell ourselves.

Kate Gale, Of Loss and Light: Redefining the Myth of America

I’m not feeling the red-white-and-blue this year, so I hereby give you an image of the very pink Barbie pagoda mushroom–Podoserpula miranda–from New Caledonia, image drawn from The Global Fungal Red List. You’re welcome.

I found stories about its discovery when I was reminding myself of the names of mushroom morphologies for a novel I’ve been lightly revising. An interested agent told me to make the book weirder–a fun task that involved plenty of fungi. I finished this pass through the ms a couple of days ago, though, which dumped me back in the real world. The imminence of the Fourth of July somehow makes it all more awful: the big baneful bill stripping food assistance and health care from people who are barely getting by as the rich further enrich themselves. Unjust and violent deportations. Our funding of Netanyahu’s bombing and starvation of children. Obviously the list goes on. This country is harming the world and our own people in so many ways–as if the damage won’t rebound, as if all our fates aren’t connected. Not that there isn’t hope. I’m happy about Mamdani’s win. I appreciated the list in Rachel Barenblat’s blog post about where to send money to help mitigate the damage. But like so many, I’m frightened and overwhelmed, and I won’t be watching the fireworks.

One of my resources for calm is reading poems from the zillion books I purchased during the last several months at various festivals, conferences, and indie bookstores (I think supporting these efforts and authors is a good way to direct money, too). I’d never spent a lot of time with Marie Howe’s work, for instance, but her New and Selected, winner of the Pulitzer, is in fact a great pick for that prize. Sometimes I don’t enjoy the books that win the big accolades–which is okay, our tastes are allowed to differ–and in general I prefer individual collections over compendiums, but this one is worth a few days’ perusal. This review by Kevin O’Connor characterizes it well: “Howe offers poems both elegantly high-minded and unnervingly explicit and direct. Howe’s evolving style in her fifth collection reflects a willingness to question at each new beginning what poetry can be—to ask fundamental existential questions and to take seriously the essential mysteries.” I felt most moved by the poems from her 1997 book What the Living Do, but there are powerful poems throughout.

Lesley Wheeler, Instead of patriotism, fungus

So easy it was. A steady chipping away at one person one vote, a manipulation of the narrative through an entertainment channel well versed in hyperbole, a willingness on the part of many many people to turn general grievance into general hate, and then a death grip on each branch. Throw in a good dose of greed. Throw in the fact that it is not absolute power that corrupts absolutely but just a little bit. Put some in a uniform. Some weapons. The general decline of empathy. The rise of a sense of less-than, a vague idea of revenge. Of taking back. Of taking.

All this talk of polls, lawsuits, midterms, four years — people are thinking the tools of democracy will save democracy. But that’s like asking a burning house to shelter you from the flames. Like asking the deluge to hold on for a minute so you can make a cup of tea from the flood. So. Now what? Will I lay my body down in front of the oncoming tanks? I know myself to be cowardly. But if not me, who?

Here is a poem by Anna Akhmatova from 1914.

Marilyn McCabe, Not a soul you can tell has a notion

i come upon a house without any windows.
there are salespeople swarming it. some of them
have gone wild & decided to step inside. they lay
on day beds & let the wind blow through like a flute.
soon the police will come. they are
traveling salespeople too. they peddle silence
in exchange for guts. i get away. i plug my ears.
open my suitcase recklessly
& watch the birds fly into the tangerine dusk sky.

Robin Gow, hope insurance

It is the kind of morning where I feel like I’m running behind.  I was awake for several hours in the middle of the night, so I didn’t wake up quite as early as I usually do.  I have to be at work at 8 for a morning huddle each day, so there’s not much flexibility as to when I leave.  I can take my breakfast with me.  

But it’s the kind of morning where I need to choose between a walk and deeper levels of writing.  And since today is a day of more meetings and sitting, I need to walk early.  Plus there are black raspberries to pick!  I haven’t visited the hillside patch, which I call my secret garden, since Saturday.

In terms of current events, it’s a good day to walk instead of write.  I don’t want to think about budget bills or Alligator Alcatraz or all the ways our research universities are being gutted.  I am grateful to those who can fight day in and day out, especially to the ones who still have some power to make change (who are those people?  judges perhaps).

I understand that there’s a time for picking black raspberries and a time for working to save the country.  We’d likely all be better off if we took a morning walk to remind ourselves what we are saving. 

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing or Walking? Black Raspberries Await!

         In the garden, everything seems poised 

to ripen; but that means there is still 
         also waiting. If you walk around a tree 

whose foliage is so thick all its lower arms 
         are bending, you just might find 

a hidden opening. And yes there is war, there has 
         always been war; it is impossible to turn 

away. Yet amid the unpruned rosemary, new shoots 
         of pine and even elm.

Luisa A. Igloria, Short List of Transient Luminous Events

I always believed the woods were made up of alder and birch, grown for coppicing, felt familiar with their skinny, light-seeking trunks, the bounces left behind by squirrels in their high branches, the insistent knocks of woodpeckers. 

Perhaps I have somehow missed running through them in early July, or if I did was more concerned with avoiding tree roots and the ankle-twisting hardened ruts of mud because I have never before witnessed this … 

… what looks like, for the briefest of moments, thousands of hairy caterpillars draped over brambles, holly bushes, ferns, before they quickly reveal themselves to be the long yellow catkins from a mature sweet chestnut tree.

Running serves me well, my body and mind rebalancing with every stride, each deep breath, but this morning’s slow stroll is a gift from a friend searching for flowers and leaves she can press into eternity.

Castanea sativa, literally ‘brown chestnut’. The deception of the ordinary. The wondrousness of it all.

Lynne Rees, Prose poem ~ Slow

This week: clay-pits, a beautiful dumpster, the Hole of Sorrows, a tablespoon of cream, and much more. Enjoy.

I don’t know how any of us go on with our ordinary lives lately. I am among those privileged enough to have my days largely unchanged, so far, despite—among other tragedies—a climate pushed past the tipping point, despite the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, despite all three branches of government stomping directly into authoritarianism. I’m aware my puny efforts to protest, write letters, support good causes, even drive around with a handmade protest sign on my car aren’t enough. I simply hope it’s a teensy contribution toward the transformative 3.5 percent rule invoked by Erica Chenoweth, author of Why Civil Resistance Works. After researching hundreds of social/political change movements over the last century, Dr. Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics depend on many factors, her data shows it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. But what are the chances it can happen here, I grumbled to myself.

And then I drove past a dumpster. A beautiful dumpster.

It was a deep purple, a purple most often seen in delphiniums, pansies, hydrangeas, and irises. The sort of purple that would look good as a velvet dress or painted across a domed ceiling scattered with gleaming constellations. My mind gladly rested on that color purple for the rest of the drive.

Laura Grace Weldon, A Glorious Shade of Purple

These 6 poetry chapbooks were written over a span of exactly one year : May 11, 2024 to May 10, 2025. They represent some kind of quasi-pre-Socratic sagacity-foolishness of mine, on behalf of a civil society. I am perhaps now JUST BEGINNING (hopefully) to write about our actual or ideal “polis”.

Henry Gould, One Year in Poetry

Ventriloquism
a boxing match
of beings and voices 

sharpened by a whiff of the abyss

The self.  
How very small.  
The poem, how other. 

Jill Pearlman, MEMO TO SELF

The editors observe that many poems in this issue are ‘in conversation’ with other works of art, film and literature. Mine is a response to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) and the 1971 film of the same title directed by Luchino Visconti. It draws on Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) and was also inspired by the documentary on the life of Björn Andrésen, “the most beautiful boy in the world”, who played the part of Tadzio in Visconti’s film.

In their notes, the London Grip editors comment that they have deliberately ordered the poems in the issue so that “each poem is related to its neighbours by theme or narrative thread or at least some keyword.” I love the connections that emerge — the poem before mine is “Thomas Mann” by Norton Hodges and the one after links thematically. You can find the full issue here.

Ruth Lexton, He’s Looking At You, Kid

This post is coming to you at the tail end of a month of in person events where I have been promoting the paperback version of my nature-landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake, and my latest poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk. In between the in person events I’ve been mentoring poets and non fiction writers, running write-alongs (the next one is today!) and trying, and failing, to cram in work on the new writing project.

It’s been a very #authorlife month. Next week I can turn my face back to working on the funding bid for Spelt Magazine‘s digital platform and working on a new structure for Notes from the Margin, which I’ll tell you about in another post. I may even (shocked gasp) get time to WRITE.

Wendy Pratt, How to Get Published

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed through an entire interview before, but the My Bad Poetry podcast made it happen. Thanks to Aaron and Dave for the hilarious conversation about my old poems!

Katie Manning, My Bad Poetry Podcast

It’s my pleasure to introduce our May guest poet Jane McKie. We met many years ago on a writing workshop and are still part of an email group. You can find her biography at the end of this post. Cinnamon Press recently published her new poems and I’ve chosen some poems from Mine: vivid, clear embodied images with marvellous economy.

Mine

On nights when the wind drops, I hear it crooning softly,
not like a real bomb. A toothless, barnacled silhouette, wittering
to itself when the tide is low. My friends and I sometimes get close,
daring each other to nudge its rust. But what happens when
the music cuts out? Tonight, the mine’s a mute companion:
whiff of brine, cryptic fist. As my eyelids close, that’s when it—

Fokkina McDonnell, Mine

i dream of hundreds of broken windows
and of she who believes
there is no stone in my heart

Grant Hackett [no title]

[A] deluge of rain—I mean, it rained all day long, steadily, wonderfully, wow, it didn’t stop at all, all day long! Which means virga, because the next day it looked like it was raining everywhere in the distance but not right where I was, yet somehow, I felt like I was walking through mist but the mist didn’t register on the windshield so was I actually feeling mist? Which means that virga might have been happening—when rain falls but evaporates before it hits the ground. Which means that virga is a form of gaslighting. Which means that virga is here but not here. Which means that virga is so relatable, here but not here. Mysterious but explainable. Which means that I am constantly learning new things, making new connections. Which means that when I do write, I write piss-poor poetry. And that means that I have not much else to share with anyone but this piss-poor poetry and a handful of weeds.

Sarah Lada, Virga

This morning I wondered how grad studies might have changed.  Would we still spend the same amount of time on Wordsworth and Coleridge?  Is Frankenstein seen as more important, the gateway to much that is modern?  And more sobering, to think about how removed I am from literary scholarship, that I’m probably asking the wrong questions.

I am looking forward to teaching these works again. I will probably not spend much time on the last 40 years, particularly as Norton enlarged the scope to include all sorts of countries that used to be colonies, which makes the topic unmanageable.  We will do a deep dive into post World War II lit and end by thinking about whether or not these topics (fear of nuclear annihilation, seeing an increasing concentration on human rights for more groups, who will rule the world now) are still relevant.  

For decades now, when I got to make my own textbook choices, I’ve gone with no book.  This year, as I’ve been reading Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer:  Pep Talks and Practical Advice for the Creative Life, I decided to use it in my English 100 and 101 classes.  I’m not sure exactly how yet.  For those first year writing classes, I still plan to do a lot with trees and observing nature.  But some of the chapters in the book will make a great contribution to the class and to their experiences as first year college students–at least, that’s my hope.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Placing Book Orders for College Classes in an Age of AI

“You know,” she said, “I’m finally in a place where every shooting doesn’t hit me the way they used to.” We talked about how different schools had been when we started teaching, before locked perimeters, security badges, security officers, hallway cameras, shooter drills, and “run, hide, fight.” We talked about what it did to us to be constantly on lookout for danger. We didn’t consciously feel it all the time; our conscious minds had so many other things to attend to. But we knew it was always there, just under the surface, in the way we came to respond immediately to anything out of the ordinary: a lone adult we didn’t recognize in the hall, a loud and unusual noise, unplanned fire alarms, a certain kind of agitated student. We’d suddenly be scanning, on high alert, running through possibilities in our heads, locating exits. We’d each had close enough encounters with physical danger at work that threats were never hypothetical or abstract for us. Our work environment had become dystopian long before the pandemic, and Uvalde helped me see that.

There’s more I might say. I have so many thoughts about what it’s doing to all of us (of course, some of us more than others) to live in a heightened state of threat and fear now, in so many different settings, from so many different sources. But that would take me down a deep and dark rabbit hole, and all I really want to do in today’s post is share a link to that essay and provide some context for it.

Here it is: “On the Morning of a Massacre of American Schoolchildren,” which is in the latest issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.

I hope the words there say all the things I might say here, but in a better way. It is about a lesson in a high school English class, and about a school shooting, but it is really about more than either of those things. At least, I hope it is. Maybe read it as if it were a poem, if you click through. (Also, there’s an audio recording of it, if you’ve ever wondered what my voice sounds like.) And maybe read the poem that the essay hinges on, Jim Daniels’s “American Cheese.” It’s a good one. That we happened to be reading that poem on that day will always make me feel that there are forces at work in the universe beyond my ken.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Maybe read it as if it were a poem

i want to become a piece of the sky.
if i gave a cloud all my water, would
i still be able to think? to write poems?
i have learned to shrink my list of necessities.
i used to need lungs. i used to need
a tablespoon of cream.

Robin Gow, plane full of geese

My upcoming collection, The Artist’s House, is a series of poems engaging with art and artists in other forms. Ekphrastic poetry, it’s called. Each poem gives a nod to another poet, painter, musician, composer, or writer. The manuscript is leaning on me to include images. That will turn it into a more expensive book, but will increase the visual aspect in an appropriate way. I find that the most appealing ekphrastic poems are publishing online, where the image to which the poem speaks can be shared in full color at no cost.

At first I was thinking of this as a traditional print book, easy enough to publish those on Amazon, but then I remembered how many of my poet friends don’t buy poetry books. Sad, but true. And I discovered that my program that creates interior formatting for fiction doesn’t work well for a poetry collection. But thanks, Google, I found downloadable poetry book templates, some inexpensive ones on Etsy, some free from poets online.

But an illustrated poetry book? I only have one in my collection. Snow Effects by Lynne Kight, was published by Small Poetry Press in 2000. It’s this wonderful poet’s response to a traveling art exhibit called Impressionists in Winter. I saw it at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, and so did Lynne. Her ekphrastic collection responds to many specific paintings, and poet David Alpaugh’s Small Poetry Press performed a miracle in putting a reproduction (with permissions) facing each poem.

Could I find a publisher to bring out such a full-color illustrated book of poems? Not a chance!

The solution: I’ll have to self-publish this kind of poetry book. That means I have to promote it. But what poet isn’t faced with that responsibility?

Other options come to mind: to publish online with full-color images, and even to make short videos of the kind that are popular on Instagram and TikTok. A poem I’d read aloud over moving visuals. Or maybe I can do all three forms of self-publishing! I do like challenges, especially the slightly impossible ones.

Rachel Dacus, Self-Publishing a Poetry Book

Self-publishing has freed the market to allow pretty much any of us to put our work out for public consumption. Some of the old guard don’t like it, of course, believing it leads to a lowering of standards. A pompous, self-satisfied view, obviously, but one that has had a disproportionate influence for too long.

They would argue that being accepted by a ‘traditional’ publisher is both an accomplishment and a sign that a piece of writing is of a high enough quality to be admired by someone qualified to judge.

If only this were true… unfortunately for that argument, most traditional publishers are in it for the money. They have to be. They have wages to pay, a business that needs to turn a profit. Therefore, they look for what is marketable, which does not always reflect the quality of the product. If you’re on TV, if you’ve got a ‘name’ of some kind or other, then you’ll get your novel or children’s story published, however flimsy a piece of writing it might be. If you’re a duchess or a duke, that helps too.

In my view it’s this eagerness to publish pretty much anything by famous people, just as much as the availability of self-publishing, that constitutes a danger to ‘literary standards’.

And on the positive side, I can’t see what’s wrong with having choice. In the past, self-publishing was hampered by bookshops, who concentrated almost entirely on what was offered by distribution companies linked to publishers. A few would have a ‘local author’ section – sometimes jumbled up in a box by the door – and most would charge percentages of the sale price that left the self-published or those published by small presses, who were inevitably dealing in short print runs, facing a deficit on every sale. And most would apply a ‘sale or return’ policy which meant the small or self publisher would have to live near enough to fetch back what didn’t sell, often within a very short timespan, or pay the postage.

Now bookshops face competition from online companies – obviously Amazon springs to mind – who will produce a book for you as well as market it. Sure, the costs will be advantageous to them, but they will get your book out there.

Bob Mee, TWO BOOKS BY AN OLD FRIEND: A CHARMED LIFE AND HELL IN PARADISE

When people first hear that I work in book publishing, the assumption is always that I’m an editor, as though that’s the only job that exists in the book world: the one that decides what is and isn’t published. And well, yes, in part of my life, I am that gatekeeper for Black Ocean, but in the part of my life that pays the bills, I am someone other—the one whose job it is to talk about books: the publicist. And, talk about books, I do. A LOT. […]

We talk a lot about the atomization of the media when it comes to politics these days, but the same is true of book media and culture media as well. There are significantly more books being published each year than ever before (the number only increasing year to year), and the outlets and space for reviews have not remotely grown to match. At the same time, with the dispersion of media and our attention into more specialized and niche outlets, we’ve lost the power of a common or shared curator of taste. We all have different go-tos for recommendations and criticism, and that diversity is as helpful as it is harmful sometimes. I’ve watched a lot of good books not get the reviews they deserved. And, whether it’s books or music or movies, I know there is good stuff out there I am missing because I don’t have the time to cull through all of the voices in their many formats and platforms offering opinions. The reality is that book reviews are harder and harder to come by, and it takes more of them to have an impact on moving books. It is undoubtedly harder to be a publicist today than it was more than two decades ago when I started working in book marketing.

This makes me even more grateful for the publications and book review editors that have remained committed to covering and engaging with serious literature and nonfiction. And, I want to extend a big thank you to all of you who have taken on the often thankless (and not well compensated) task of reviewer and critic. We need you! And, I need to talk about books with you!

Carrie Olivia Adams, Let’s Talk About Books

Twenty numbered parts. Twenty first lines: She taught me how to sleep –

A Dickinsonian cascade of variations on a theme.

Instructions for falling asleep: “string  / the stars hung overhead,” “listen for the sea,” “name the gemstones  / in the sky behind my lids,”  “memorize a poem of breath / each molecule of air a wing / upon my tongue.”

Descriptions of a “she” who is part mother; part ghost; part earth, our home hung spinning in space: “her sweater pressed against / my cheek, the blanket satin / frayed by dreams.”

Kleinberg is also an artist (see her blog featuring her word art, chocolate is a verb). Each line is compressed, every word weighed and weighted, and the effect overall – hypnotic.

Bethany Reid, Sleeping Lessons, a chapbook by J. I. Kleinberg

I was told to read Vanessa [Lampert]’s work by Christopher Horton a while back..Maybe 18 months ago. I obliged and bought the collection mentioned above [Say It With Me, Seren, 2023] about a year ago, and it’s languished on my TBR pile until a couple of weeks ago. I figured that as we are reading together soon (17th June, The Devereux, London. Supporting Matthew Paul, also featuring Ian Parks) I should get myself up to speed. I was instantly grabbed from page one…ok, page seven because that’s when the poems start, although I did subsequently go back and get grabbed by the quotation from Richard Thompson at the start.

I raced through reading the collection relatively quickly..Turning the corners over as per usual to mark up poems to come back to, and the book is now mostly turned over.

Mat Riches, Stuck on a call

Penguin Modern Poets isn’t a new idea. There was a series in the 1990s (I have a few of these), but the original series ran between 1962 and 1979, publishing 27 slim volumes in all. Recently I’ve been rereading the sixth of this original series, published in 1964, reprinted several times up until 1970, which I bought second hand at some point for a princely £2. A lot of the names in the original series are now obscure or forgotten, and this volume contains poems by Jack Clemo, Edward Lucie-Smith and George MacBeth. I’d guess that if readers have any knowledge of any of these, it’s most likely to be George MacBeth. Edward Lucie-Smith, rather sportingly, is apparently still alive at 92, though he is known rather as an art critic than a poet, and has no page on the Poetry Foundation website. (This reminded me of a piece I wrote last year, in which quite a number of the poets picked out in The Forward Book of Poetry 2000 had gone on to focus on different kinds of writing.)

But it was Jack Clemo that prompted me to buy the volume. I came across his work via C. H. Sisson and Donald Davie, who both wrote about his poetry back in the 70s and 80s. Shamefully, Clemo has no page on the Poetry Foundation […] though there has been a small revival of interest in his work recently — Enitharmon published a new Selected Poems, edited by Luke Thompson,in 2015. Unfortunately I don’t own that, so can’t comment on the selection.

Clemo — born in 1916 — was significantly older than the other two, though like them he was still quite early in his poetic career in the 1960s. The son of a clay pit worker in Cornwall, he became deaf as a very young man and blind while still in early adulthood. His poetry is full of the landscape of the clay pits, which he combines with a devout Calvinist faith to very memorable effect. Here’s the beginning of ‘Christ in the Clay-Pit’:

Why should I find Him here
And not in a church, nor yet
Where Nature heaves a breast like Olivet
Against the stars? I peer
Upon His footsteps in this quarried mud;
I see His blood
In rusty stains on pit-props, waggon-frames
Bristling with nails, not leaves. There were no leaves
Upon His chosen Tree,
No parasitic flowering over shames
Of Eden’s primal infidelity.

(‘Olivet’ is an alternative name for the Mount of Olives.) The poem ‘Sufficiency’ pursues a similar theme. It begins like this:

Yes, I might well grow tired
Of slighting flowers all day long.
Of making my song
Of the mud in the kiln, of the wired
Poles on the clay-dump; but where
Should I find my personal pulse of prayer
If I turned from the broken, scarred
And unkept land, the hard
Contours of dogma, colourless hills?
Is there a flower that thrills
Like frayed rope? Is there grass
That cools like gravel, and are there streams
Which murmur as clay-silt does that Christ redeems?

Clemo returns again and again to an association between the bleak and broken industrial landscape of the clay-pits and the humiliation and suffering of the incarnation and crucifixion. I find this guiding metaphor very powerful and also quite unusual; I would be interested to know if any readers can think of other poets making any similar link to the industrial or post-industrial landscape? Blake, with his juxtaposition of the ‘dark, Satanic mills’ and the new Jerusalem is the obvious example, but his point is quite different — for Blake, mass industry is Satanic, a force working against the salvation of the people. Whereas Clemo sees in the realities of labour and its effect on the land an image of the incarnation.

Victoria Moul, Calvin in Cornwall: revisiting Jack Clemo’s early poetry

When I think about myth, I occasionally flash back to those first poems I wrote over two decades ago in my grad school apartment, many with similar origins in myth and literature. At the time and maybe even a little in hindsight, it seemed like good subject matter. They always say write what you know, but in your mid-20s, especially when you’ve spent the past two decades in the classroom, the stories are where you find your inspo good or bad. The first two poems I ever had accepted and published in a non-school journal?  One about Paradise Lost and the other about Salem witches. The first chapbook I put together? Rooted in personal details but imagined though things like myth, fairytales, history and lit. It’s surfaced in other projects beyond the Persephone one. In books about other things than myth–like “no girls were harmed in the making of this poem” in MAJOR CHARACTERS IN MINOR FILMS and “beneath” in THE FEVER ALMANAC. TAURUS is basically a modern re-imagining of the minotaur myth, but set in the midwest.  (The only thing I may get more mileage from is fairytales, urban folklore, and horror films…lol…) I felt the pull of it especially enticing when I was writing a lot of lessons on Greek art, myth, and literature the first year I was freelance writing for the online lessons, since that was how I spent my days amid research and refreshers on things I’d only studies in lit or theater history classes prior.

I think, or at least I hope, I can use myths more adeptly than those clumsy early poems. Maybe it’s a question of lived experience making them more grounded, however fantastical they are.

Kristy Bowen, cloven, or revisiting the Greeks

Nin, Colette, Casanova, captured something. Reveal what you wish. It’s your story. Tell the story they want to hear. Story of desire. Story of passion.

I am starting my diary. I am the greatest lover of the twenty-first century.

Men who sleep with me never recover. Nor do women. They are all of them mad.

I am Aphrodite of the modern world. Music precedes me. Stories follow me. Give me fourteen years at the Chateau Dux. My name will be synonymous with pleasure.

Kate Gale, Venice, Who Will Tell Your Story?

The Plan B default for me usually entails spending “down time” reading, writing, or housekeeping, though visiting the library and meeting friends for coffee fall under Plan B, too. Today, since I feel lousy and have a spate of brain fog, reading has been the choice. I still have a few books on the bedside pile that I haven’t gotten to–mostly poetry collections I bought at AWP at the end of March. But also there is Ocean Vuong‘s heartbreaking and beautiful novel-that-reads-like-memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, that I finally got around to reading, and a back issue of Rattle Poetry a friend gave me–one that was largely devoted to haiku and related forms–that featured a fascinating interview with Richard Gilbert (thank you, Lesley S!). On the poetry-only book list, I read January Gill O’Neil’s Glitter Road, Julie Kane’s Naked Ladies, and Ross Gay’s first collection, Against Which. All quite useful to me in times when I feel bleak and physically frail–there’s humor, sorrow, and bravery in all of these writers’ poems. Though I’m too foggy-headed to write mini-reviews at the moment, I encourage my readers to check these poets out.

Perhaps my next post will be about the lovely time my friend and I had in northern New Mexico, visiting my daughter and Santa Fe, including my opportunity to see Bandelier National Monument again and ponder its environments and history. A trip like that takes some time for me to “digest.” But it was wondrous. And so is a day at home to recuperate in my favorite way: reading.

Ann E. Michael, Plan B (reading)

Composed during the Covid-19 pandemic, Which Walks presents itself as a book on walking and being, and being present within an unprecedented global event. “reaching back / to owned devices,” the opening walk offers, “feel free, imaginary, / and tactile as the shudder // of daily acquisition, / domestic, time-bound, // vexed by practitioners, / whose practice // like ours, / a consummation, // is thrown up and out / as the poison // presence of each entrance / of nonlife into life [.]”

It has been interesting across the past few years to see the variety, volume and intimacy of literary responses to the Covid-era, a flood of eventual titles we all knew was coming, including British writer Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin Books, 2020), Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], Barcelona-based American poet Edward Smallfield’s a journal of the plague year (above/ground press, 2021), Toronto poet Nick Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], Tacoma, Washington poet Rick Barot’s chapbook During the Pandemic (Charlottesville VA: Albion Books, 2020) [see my review of such here] and American/Canadian writer Lisa Fishman’s One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025) [see my review of such here], not to mention my own pandemic-suite of essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2022). Each title, in their own individual ways, working amid and between the two poles of anxiety and calm, navigating the treacherous and uncertain waters of a once-in-a-century global pandemic.

rob mclennan, Laura Moriarty, Which Walks

It would be difficult not to like Pam Thompson’s poetry, because it has immediacy, depth and variety. Her Sub/urban Legends won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet prize in 2023 and has recently been (rather belatedly) published. At only £5 (plus p&p) it’s a genuine bargain and is available to buy here. It’s Pam’s first publication since her excellent second collection, Strange Fashion, published by Pindrop Press in 2017. […]

Pam is influenced, inter alia, by the New York school of poetry, a loose amalgam of poets associated in the 1950s and ’60s, chief among them Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. Pam has discussed her particular liking for, and the influence of, Schuyler in an intriguing 2023 podcast with Chris Jones, here. The deceptively offhand diction of the New York poets, their acute but apparently nonchalant awareness of what’s going on around them, their precision, urban sensibility and painterliness can all, I think, be discerned in Pam’s poems. And as she says in the podcast about the New York poets’ poems, hers are almost always ‘peopled’.

Sub/urban Legends doesn’t feel like a themed pamphlet, because it isn’t one. Its 24 poems are varied in tone, subject-matter and form, and each of them is worth spending time with.

Matthew Paul, On Pam Thompson’s ‘Edvard Munch in Haverfordwest’

“Bloom and Grow” feels like tending a plant in the plant owner’s absence. The poems are tended and cared for, but the writer is happy to let readers watch, figure out if that curved bud is a leaf or flower, if the stem is getting longer or thicker and to know when to deadhead the flowers. Donnelly writes from personal experience and concerns of family connections in a subtle, familiar language, showing that the lives of ordinary people are worth documenting and remembering.

Emma Lee, “Bloom and Grow” Peter J Donnelly (Alien Buddha Press) – book review

One of the strong and consistent promoters of connections between mathematics and the arts is Sarah Hart and she recently gave the 2025 Einstein Public Lecture at Clemson University (sponsored by AMS, the American Mathematical Society) entitled “A Mathematical Journey Through Literature.”  

Hart is the author of Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature (Flatiron Books, 2023) — NYTimes review here;  purchase info here.  Her presentation, summarized here in an AMS article entitled “The Axiom of a Sonnet,” explored ways that the guidelines for a sonnet — or other poetic structure — are similar to the guidelines for a mathematical structure such as a group or a ring.  A thought-provoking quote from her presentation:

“We talk about mathematics as being the language of the universe, a vital tool for science . . .”  She also noted that mathematics also provides the rhythm of music, symmetries in art, poetry rhyme schemes, and symbolism in literature.  She further noted, “Literature itself has an inherent structure much like geometry.”    (Read more here .)

A variety of poetic stanzas are scattered throughout Hart’s wide-ranging exploration of math-poetry connections — including attention to Martin Gardner and the Oulipo.

JoAnne Growney, An AMS Presentation by Sarah Hart

Now that I had my ‘captive’ poets, I wanted to seize the opportunity to go beyond the poems themselves. My poets all had additional skills and knowledge as, for example, editors, translators, competition judges, lecturers and slambassadors. Therefore, at the end of each chapter, having first discussed the development of their poem, I asked each poet for their advice on aspects such as putting together a collection, applying to competitions and examining the difference between writing for the page and for performance.

The Process of Poetry seemed to be quite well received, including being put onto a number of universities reading lists and that of The Poetry School. I therefore thought that it might be good to write a sequel. Having dual nationality, I turned towards Australia. John Kinsella and Judith Beveridge were joined by Mark Tredinnick, Sara Salah, Gavin Yuan Gao, Sarah Holland Batt, Judith Nanagala Crispin, Anthony Lawrence, Bella Li, Audrey Molloy and Jaya Savige.

In doing so, I discovered two fascinating differences. Firstly, in content, secondly, in form. Whereas in the UK version the poetry was often quite personal in nature, in the Australian sequel, The Making of a Poem, major preoccupations were clearly environmental concerns, the protection of native flora and fauna, for example, as impacted by bushfires and smugglers, and the amazing search for aboriginal ancestors.

In the UK, I was inundated with sonnets, in Australia free verse and experimental verse prevailed. Words such as anti-establishment and ‘a resistance to formal poetry’ appeared in our conversations. Having said this, ultimately the sequel contains forms such as an Abecedarian and an ideogram.

For me, the most fascinating aspect was that poets had distinct outlooks and creative processes. The fact that these were sometimes conflicting, in my opinion, only adds to the book. I hope that, if you read it, you too will celebrate the differences.

Drop-in by Rosanna McGlone (Nigel Kent)

I have a buzz after the last Haiku Canada Conference with no energy crash. That’s odd. Grocery shopping can give me an energy crash and days of trough. I did things differently, blew off talks, the day starting and ending for me when I got there or left. Not a strain to absorb everything. Chatting with folks or not. Where is this lack of pressure coming from? Who knows. 

The core of life, of writing, of events, is about people, affections, connections, curiosity about people not “Networking” and “Learning”. Reflecting on the weekend there are all kinds of salient patterns, inner and outer. […]

It doesn’t matter what I am not. What I am not is also infinite. I love the idea of being a generalist, a know it all, a curious renaissance man or polymath, drilling down immersively also appeals.  

I’ve kept one foot in familiar, compensated. I was the peacemaker, negotiator, translator, who was bridging worlds. I don’t need to be a runner, messenger on the bridge. I don’t need to shield people, make myself available as a piggy bank for other people’s secrets. I don’t need to use up my slack for people who are thrashing. I don’t need to affirm everyone and sooth and mute myself to not make waves. That may seem radical and selfish. That may seem to bear no relation to how I seem. I have spent a lot of time trying to justify my existence by helping and pleasing others, trying to be found acceptable by people who would use anyone convenient. 

I don’t have a lot of life left even in best case scenario. Maybe a third if I’m lucky. 

Being drawn by glimmers, by quiet yesses instead of being hampered and hammered by crowd of hectoring internalized voices condemning is a new idea. What if I could say, shush you, and be led by what lights me up. 

Pearl Pirie, Events: It all works

What do you want that is beyond a word?
Beyond any word? Beyond want?

Take a plant primed to flower.
Not wanting rain.
Just holding the possibility of the flower.
Not waiting. Just being under the sky.
The sky knows this. And the plant.
And the water that isn’t rain yet.
And time that isn’t the time to flower yet.
And the flower that isn’t a flower, yet.

The sum of all that potential is not want.
Is not a word. It existed before words.
Words constrain it.
Language craves it so it can survive.
Silence tries to spell it without alphabets.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Wanting

Daily one sits at one’s desk; or doesn’t. One wakes and scans the retreating subconscious, rich with dreams, for the glimpse of an idea. One tastes words, mines memory, goes about earnestly noticing things: but it all turns to ash. A line, a half poem, an idea – all flounder. This goes on for months. You try too hard, fail. The months become a year, and all the while we have Capitalist expectation of production, Calvinist horror of idle hands. You feel anxious and guilty. If you’re not working you must perforce be on holiday. But then there’s the suspicion that, for writers, even when we are ‘working’ we are actually on holiday anyway. ‘You’re hale life’s a holiday!’ said my mother, once, bitterly.

I don’t believe in so-called writer’s block with all its suggestions of drains and fatbergs. Whatever is going on, Dyno-Rod will not help. I do believe that if you’re beating your head off a wall to no avail, chances are it’s the wrong wall. As someone said, and I wish I could recall who, it was a woman and a poet – she said something like ‘if you’re suffering writer’s block it’s because you’re lying to yourself.’ Lying is a strong word, but yes, could be you’re trying to write the wrong thing. And why would one do that? Often because we try to mine an already exhausted seam. We return ever hopeful to a cupboard which now lies bare.

Not ‘block’, then, but fallow. All these metaphors. There are good ones: the bare cupboard, the fallow field, the well which must replenish drop by drop, the battery which must recharge. All understandable. But living through it feels like a waste of life.

Kathleen Jamie, On Not Writing

Marty [Silano] was a dear friend of mine. I met her in 2001 at Seattle’s Poets for Peace reading. Since her death, I’ve found myself unable to write poems—even though I can hear her in my mind telling me, You need to write that poem! It was a phrase we often said to each other, whenever one of us shared something like, “The castle on the top of the cliffs looked like a discarded chess piece,” “Our neighbors want to trim our hedge during nesting season!” or “I’m at the airport and O’Hare autocorrected to o hate!”

The first day at this retreat, poet Grace Wells brought us to a sacred Irish land to write—Poulnabrone Dolmen, sometimes translated as the “Hole of Sorrows” (Poll na mBrón). I sat on limestone, listening to a cuckoo calling from the distance (yes, they have cuckoos here), in an ancient landscape full of stories and birdsong. I thought of Marty—of how brief our lives are, the temporariness of this all, how much she loved the natural world. For the first time since her death, I began to write. The draft was rough, clumsy, I would even say—not good—but it was a draft and I had words on the page. I ended the poem with: The cuckoo continues / counting moments. I am empty / of everything I once held.

That night, Marty came to me in a dream. She was laughing and dancing and said, “I only need a thimble of wine now.” She added, “Write me into your poems.” It felt as if the place had opened me, the dream too. I woke up and wrote a draft of a poem that I continue to work on. Since then, I’ve been writing again. . .

So that’s where I am—writing, thinking of home and Marty and the beauty around me. Marty’s absence from this world has been so deeply felt by many. It’s hard to make sense of a world that so often takes the best souls too soon—but here we are. She was endlessly generous—with her love, her praise, her joy, her fierce care for the environment, and the way she continually lifted other poets, myself included. She will be missed.

Also, if you don’t know Marty or if you do and want to hear her voice again, you can listen to this wonderful interview by where they talk about meditation, Marty’s creative process, her teachers, as well as her thoughts on poetry, ALS, napping and more, for Jess’s podcast.

Kelli Russell Agodon, With Love from Ireland 🇮🇪 & Remembering Marty

Grief has been the perished rubber of a flat tyre, the wrinkled end of a deflating balloon, a dull heaviness to the body, a horizontal. Songs on my playlists have been welcoming me back when I have pulled myself out of my need for silence. Finding colour and light mixing in has given me things to lean in to, something to prop myself up against, a gentle re-plumping.

Reading ‘Hopscotch’ at The Gloucester Poetry Society’s Crafty Crows open mic felt good because I was taking part in things again. And although I shared it on my YouTube channel back in 2022 I had never read it to a live audience so I wanted to give it an airing of its own. Afterwards I discovered that the theme for National Poetry Day this coming October will be ‘Play’. That gives me a prime opportunity to read it again which is good because I like reading it out loud. This news also sent me to my poetry folder to see what other poems I have that will fit this theme and which drafts I can polish in readiness. I look forward to exploring the theme in detail and predict that poets will be sharing some cracking poems on that day.

Sue Finch, RAINBOWS AND CHICKPEAS

About 7 years ago I was working on my first full manuscript. I think the title at the time was “Cartography Lesson.” It was the collection of all of the best poems I had written at the time. And I’m an eclectic writer with eclectic interest so the poems had wide ranges of styles and subject matter. There were poems about my parents next to poems about swans, and poems about swans next to poems about sex. What held the collection together was basically that all the poems were the best pieces I had at the time. That’s all.

At one point I got word that the book was a finalist for a prize from Moon City Press. You’d think I would be excited about that, but as soon as I saw it listed, I actually had a very surprising reaction. My stomach clenched and I heard a voice say, “Oh my god, I hope I don’t win!” […]

Fortunately, I didn’t win. The poet Jeannine Hall Gailey won for her book Field Guide to the End of the World. And I was relieved.

I’m serious here. I’m not just having sour grapes about the fact that I didn’t win. I really, sincerely hoped that I wouldn’t. Because, even though I believed in the individual poems in the book, I did not believe in the book as a whole. What was I thinking, having those sex poems in the same book as the poems about my parents???

Ew.

I had put that book together not because it was ready, but because I was impatient and wanted a book out. Over the next few years I took the book apart. I divided the poems into different categories, poems about my family, poems about nature, poems about being young in the city, poems about romance and sex.

Turns out I didn’t have one book. I had the start of 3 different books.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Why I’m So Glad My Manuscript Didn’t Win This Poetry Prize

The book is well and truly launched. A month or so ago at Free Verse, the poetry book fair in London, I was helping out Jeremy Page on the Frogmore Press table while at the same time handing out promotional postcards – a bit cheeky, but Jeremy was OK with it. It was a shame not to have the actual book to sell but hey ho.

Free Verse was fun. The publisher tables were so closely packed we were virtually on each other’s laps. We were sandwiched between Caroline Davies of  Green Bottle Press and Liz Kendall of The Edge of the Woods. The nature of the event means you do a lot of waving and not-quite-conversations with people, nevertheless it’s very nice to see old acquaintances and meet new ones. I crossed paths briefly with Claire Booker, Paul Stephenson, Julia Bird, Caroline Clark, Tammy Yoseloff, Isabelle Baafi (after interviewing her recently for the podcast) and Kate Noakes…and met for the first time a number of small publishers including Kym Deyn of The Braag and Carmen et Error and Julie Hogg of Blueprint Press. I liked the fact that magazines were represented alongside book publishers.

A few people came up to me and said how much they enjoyed Planet Poetry, including one of our regular supporters Richard Chadburn, who promptly got his local bookshop to order my book! It’s always gratifying to know we have listeners, and fans even – tee hee.

So The Mayday Diaries – yep, we had a lovely launch event in Lewes with both poet and non-poet friends and family. I say ‘we’, because I had alongside me my ol’ poet pal Peter Kenny and also my mentor and Telltale Press Associate Editor Catherine Smith, who emceed. Peter read some poems, including those in his recent pamphlet Snow (Hedgehog Press). Snow is a collaboration with artist Palo Almond, who came to the launch with two of her paintings and spoke about how the pamphlet illustrations came about, which really added something special to the evening.

Robin Houghton, Free Verse, book launch & readings

It’s hard to put your finger on what makes a good workshop. Of course, it’s something to do with structure and pacing, something to do with writing exercises which include you, and excite you, and challenge you…. I’m thinking of Carola Luther’s skilful crafting, how much planning and intelligence in her teaching – how she holds her workshops gently, perceptively, so that they engage everybody. I’m thinking of humour, and charisma, and Jackie Kay, and the workshop I attended in Lancaster where I wrote the title poem of my first collection, and it came out almost finished. It can be something to do with presence, and fame: I’m thinking of Carol Ann Duffy at Moniack Mhor, her hand on my shoulder, how I hung off every word, how she read “Stafford Afternoons” to us and the whole week, the expense, the trials of sharing a room with a stranger, the 8 hour drive in a leaking car that wouldn’t get me home, was worth it. […]

In tonight’s workshop, we read Rachel Mann’s “Eleanor as Julian as Margery”, and we considered the ways in which pressure can make us beautiful. The pressure in a writing workshop – the task, the limited time, the need for concentration, the weight of expectation, the silence – is a beautiful thing as well. It can act like poetic form, providing the boundaries which hold and enable our creativity. It’s a place of contradiction: as a participant, you are both supported and challenged, liberated and contained, pushed further and further into your own interior as a result of being amongst others. Beyond the murderous levels of irritation I feel at someone repeatedly clicking their pen, there’s also a level of acceptance and unity which is astonishing in its taken-for-grantedness. Strangers from disparate backgrounds sit alongside each other as they consider and explore deeply personal aspects of themselves and their worlds; they may share stories they have never shared before, in ways they have never considered. Incredible.

Clare Shaw, Making Our Own Light

I am surrounded by objects who wait for me to move them. Sometimes, these objects must be tidied. Sometimes, washed. I pick them up with my hands and place them elsewhere. Put certain ones in the sink, others in the recycling bin, another on a shelf. Often, I gather up several that belong in the same location and make a small pile on the couch or the hearth where they wait again, coalescing, temporarily, into a new collective shape.

If I ever begin to feel depressed by my constant maintenance of objects around me, I remind myself that when one cares for something—even middling care suffices so long as one can sustain it—that thing becomes a sort of pet, and then it is able to give as well as to receive love. […]

Surrounded by objects as so many of us are, should we not have more nuanced language to describe the universe of things, as the Inuit are said to have their many words for snow? I ask the internet about this cliché and find that it is at least partially true, depending on how different linguists count words in agglutinative languages, wherein affixes (such as prefixes and suffixes) are added to a root word to form a wide variety of nuanced vocabulary. Examples of the Inuits’ basic words for snow and ice include:

qanik: snow falling
aputi: snow on the ground
pukak: crystalline snow on the ground
aniu: snow used to make water
siku: ice in general
nilak: freshwater ice, for drinking
qinu: slushy ice by the sea

And so, clumsily, I venture the start of an object lexicon:

earthing: object formed naturally on Earth (such as a mineral or fallen leaf)
starthing: object in space
handthing: object made with care
machinething: mass-produced object
screenthing: object one looks through to elsewhere
fragmenthing: an object more beautiful now that it is broken
meaningthing: object bestowed with significance through care or memory
plaything: object temporarily electrified by a child’s ardor

These words are inadequate, and immediately I want to replace them with other words, other categories. They have an earthy, AngloSaxon ring to them that I like, however. Noun upon noun, like two feet stomping a circle around a fire.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, The Everlasting Universe of Things

I am still feeling a bit at odds and ends—am I doing the right things? Am I doing too much—or too little? What should my priorities be right now (health vs. fun vs. work, etc.) Is this normal at my age? I’ve signed up for way too many things next month (judging a poetry contest, taking a class, doing a tutorial, plus an essay or two will be due, plus all normal things including another dental crown.) Needless to say, I have anxiety about all of this. I have been trying to reconnect with some old friends—the loss of one friend makes you realize how important that is. Here’s another kind of frightening thought—do I even want to do poetry anymore, or should I be trying something else? I have a lot of friends (poets) who’ve moved into essays, memoirs, even standup comedy. It certainly would be nice to be paid one in a while and have people actually read what you write. I don’t know what’s next. I’m open and hoping for guidance.

While the world is burning, the poet acts a little lost. She goes to the forest, where several giant trees have toppled—the forest seems more bare, though the river runs even louder than ever. The gardens have fewer plants and fewer birds. Maybe she doesn’t recognize the places she thought she knew. She worries about losing people, not just places. She doesn’t see a clear path ahead the way she used to. That can be unsettling. She worries that she used to be the hero of the story, and now she’s just the one taking notes.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poetry Readings in Woodinville, Suddenly Summer Weather, Goslings and Goldfinch, Searching

The wind was a ghost
I learned also went to bed, waking

early just as fruit bats returned
to their roosts on the cliffs.

Held in this interval, I felt almost
endless and untranslatable; but also,

small as a pebble in the throat
of a universe threaded with seams.

Luisa A. Igloria, Perigee, Apogee

This week: feathered messages, spring monsters, animal bodies, emerging seeds, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s all Humpty Dumpty now,
the promises of riches
floating in a golden sky,
soaring carrion eaters
eyeing the brick walls stained red,
the red spreading as the walls
fall, and fall, and keep falling.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 44: Not to Prophesize Falsely #NaPoWriMo

In 2022, when I started Dead Mall Press, I was emerging from a pretty demoralizing period […]. I had tuned out of poetry for a while and focused on music, but eventually I realized this resignation was something I had to push back against, or it would just stop my own artistic impulse. But it wasn’t enough just to write anymore: I felt a need to materially enact some of my ideas about publishing and to learn from doing—from physically making. And in a vague sort of way, I believed that there was something vital about the materiality of published objects—and I wanted to understand it.

While the entire experience has been on a very small scale, so far it has taught me an enormous amount—some of which I am not even fully conscious of. Things happen around and through these books, connections form, time unfolds—among people, in dialogue, through echoes and unknown attention. Each book is a material thing, and yet it involves psychic intensities that exceed its materiality almost excessively. And making this happen, circulating this experience, becomes an adventure—a cultural one. And I started to recognize others—other poets as well as other micro-press/DIY operations, of which there are so many—who share a desire to keep this cultural adventure alive even in its ephemerality. And this also means making sure it stands against professionalism, institutions, and capital.

As such, I think the right way to look at it, for both writer and publisher, is that both sides are peers in collaboration: they are coming together to create books of poetry, but also to give material life to a culture of oppositional imagination.

RM Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 2)

Yes, I’m going to take the challenge this April, and write (or noodle around on) a poem every day. That includes haikus, a single couplet, and rehabbing ancient drafts that weren’t working.

I’m working on a new poetry collection tentatively titled Feathered Messages highlighting – you guess it – the importance of birds in our midst and the way they affect us. Did you know, for example, that hearing birdsong regulates your pulse and breathing to calm you?

Rachel Dacus, April abundance & poetry month!

Sometimes a line comes singing into my head. What a gift. “The light has always been going down” began this way with the opening line “What. The quiet work of words.” appearing on the way back from dropping my kids off at school. Other time it is an image that triggers a poem, something I saw. Other times, it is the space I make for the writing of the poem that triggers the poem: sitting down on the couch with my dog, sitting down with my student in a sterile, grey study room on a tired, Friday afternoon, and a poem blooms out.

Han VanderHart, Everything I Know About Writing Poetry (with Jane Kenyon)

Making something from scratch — whether it’s a chocolate cake, a poem or a plant you grow from seed — stands in opposition to those whose modus operandi is destruction and chaos, and heals our wounded spirits. This is where we have to start: with ourselves. The efforts to create, and to appreciate created things, bolster our recognition that destruction and its desired effect— paralysis — don’t have to prevail. Even in the worst situations, no one can take away our ability to look for the beauty and complexity of our world, and make something from it, even if it’s just words or a melody or the idea of a drawing that we hold in our head during a time of suffering or fear. I hope a lot of you are participating in demonstrations today. And I hope tonight, or tomorrow, you’ll write some words or play some music, read a good book, walk in a park or natural area or garden, or make a good meal. Let me know how it’s going with you. Sending love.

Beth Adams, One Brushstroke at a Time

In order to keep loving, we’ll

have to keep living for those
deprived, no longer alive, taken

too soon. Pollen dusts the porch,
and new maps of the world appear

before our eyes.

Luisa A. Igloria, Some Things to Love Today

It’s April (woohoo) and I’m bunged up with a head cold and my birch allergy, so I’m hiding indoors though the weather isn’t too cold. Spring always gets started without me when it finally comes along as there is just so many birch trees here. Time for writing, watching rugby and indoor chores. Not too bad a way to spend the weekend. 

April is also time for the write-a-poem-a-day challenge from NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo. I’ve been posting my attempts on my various social media channels and have managed to keep up the first six days. I don’t always manage a full poem, but usually have a start I can play with over the next month or so. I use various sites for inspiration, including the official site listed above, Wendy Pratt’s Substack prompts, Todd Dillard’s thought-provoking prompts (he has the last few years’ threads on Twitter, I think, but I won’t link to there) and my Substack feed in general. I’m enjoying the break in my day to come up with some lines or just play with words. 

Gerry Stewart, Poetry Snippets for GloPoWriMo

April really is panning out to be the cruellest month in politics. We still have poetry. No one can take that away from us. I hope you’re still managing to write poetry. We need it; poetry is important (and even mysterious). And maybe it’s equally absurd to not write it now as to write it. May your life become poetry this month in the name of all those whose lives have been lost, whose lives have become harder than they needed to become, who are living with grief, who are afraid and anxious, who are living with unimaginable difficulties.

This past week I became frantic because I couldn’t find my copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Small potatoes, I know, but somehow these days a small thing can take on a lot of whatever else is troubling us. So I’m not using the word frantic lightly. I took apart a couple of shelves on my book case. And quite wonderfully, to me, I found a different book that I’d given up on finding — I ended up believing that I’d loaned it out or given it away by accident. (Meditations ended up being on a top shelf where I’d placed it for easy access, naturally). The book I’d given up for lost is View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska’s Selected.

Shawna Lemay, April is Poetry Month: 2025

Gigging Monster leaps about the house singing, ‘Spring is here! Spring is here! Stop writing! You wrote loads all winter, it’s my turn, it is my time to dance in the spring sunshine! You better have written something half-decent, because it is me that has to do all the leg work and stand on stage and tour it all summer!’

Writing Monster bursts into tears, upset with all the noise. She runs upstairs and throws herself on the bed and weeps about her need for solitude. She pours on the guilt about unfinished stories, she wails, ‘but I like writing, writing is a happy place . . .’ Writing Monster is so needy. She demands all of my time and patience. So much re-living and gazing into the long dark night.

Salena Godden, Monsters In Spring

I should have made more time for parties, lunches, dinners, and other events, but I was usually burned out after about four hours. My energy levels aren’t what they used to be! (More on that later.)

I did get to have a coffee and a bite to eat with Lesley Wheeler, whose new book Mycocosmic just dropped from Tupelo Press. This trip to AWP was a last minute decision on my part—I had decided not to go a long time ago—but I felt that with having to be out of the house anyway (with the ongoing disability renovation) and having felt a bit down since the beginning of the year (and Trump’s re-presidency) it would prove encouraging, and it did. Even getting a bit of a break from Seattle’s cold and dreary spring (everything bloomed after we left!) was nice. If AWP is a bit physically and mentally exhausting—and it is—it also reaffirms you as a writer—a writer some people have actually read—and part of a community—whose books you actually read.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, AWP Part 2: Meeting with Editors and Fellow Writers, My Moon City AWP Reading on YouTube, and Down Days

I think I started sharing Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for Pesach on this blog in 2007, though the haggadah existed long before that. […]

There’s new material here, including prayer-poems by me and by my fellow Bayit Liturgical Arts Working Group hevre Trisha Arlin, R. David Markus, R. Sonja Keren Pilz, and David Zaslow. And poems written by people I don’t personally know, like Amnon Ribak and Linda Pastan. And I added a favorite piece from Marcia Falk’s gorgeous Night of Beginnings haggadah, and some wisdom from the new A Quest for Our Times haggadah.

Some pieces appear both in long form and in shorter form. Some pieces appear in several forms (there are six different versions of the Four Children; which one speaks to you this year?) 

Most importantly to me: there’s more attention to what freedom asks of us. When I started working on this haggadah for my own use 25 or 30 years ago, I was really focused on the inner journey of liberation. And… in today’s world I am keenly aware that freedom comes with obligations to each other and to those who are not free. So there’s more of that in here too.

Rachel Barenblat, New edition of the VR Haggadah!

I started blogging in 2006. I started and wrote in five blogs between then and 2009, deleting three. I’m not sorry I deleted them because I changed with every iteration of writing and it was time to move on and not look back. The fourth was a New Orleans centered group blog that’s archived but still online. I still have my last blog, Zouxzoux, which is primarily a poetry blog, and I started writing in it again this year after pretty much abandoning it. I’ve been writing poems fairly often in a series I named “Something Small, Every Day (or so).” I’m writing for myself, like I used to, with no thoughts of submitting. I don’t care if I think it’s good or bad or if anyone thinks it’s good or bad, I’m just doing it. I’ve grown tired of the submissions game. Not saying I won’t ever submit again but it hasn’t interested me this year. (I do have one sub in waiting and a flash being published in Bending Genres this month – thanks BG!)

In looking at my archives, I see I participated in NaPoWriMo from 2011 – 2022, skipping the past 2 years. I’m participating this year in combination with “Something Small, Every Day.” I haven’t decided whether to post here, too, but probably not. I’m hoping to get back into the vibrant WordPress poetry community I used to be part of before I abandoned writing poetry.

All of this to say, please visit my poetry blog here, if you’re into poetry and care to. If you’re doing NaPoWriMo, drop a link and I’ll follow and support you as best I can.

Let’s have fun, for us.

Charlotte Hamrick, NaPoWriMo & Something Small Every Day

We’re not even a week into National Poetry Month, and how strange it’s been already, in small and cataclysmic ways. I spent the second half of March giving readings from Mycocosmic (and recording one super-fun podcast with Jason Gray), talking about mycelium and grief and awe and the role fungi play in helping trees communicate. Foragers turned up in most of the live audiences, as well as people who have been experienced in the Jimi Hendrix sense and want to talk about it. It’s as if mycelium connects poets to readers as well as conifers to hardwoods. Fungi also offer substantial hope beyond the mystical vibes: they help landscapes recover from wildfire and pollution, and psilocybin supports some people as they heal from trauma, for starters. Mycelium continues to feel like a role model and a blueprint. It’s done my heart good to hear people’s weird mushroom stories and field questions like one from an AWP guy in a witch’s hat.

Yet it’s not like fungi are altruists. They’re masters, instead, of ingeniously intertwined fungal-plant-animal-bacteria economies. In fact, each one of us apparent individuals is a polity, a microbiome housing many interests. Most of the DNA in our bodies is not human. What a trip! It can all fall out of balance so easily, in which case fungi might sicken and kill us (then help bacteria digest our remains, yikes). I’m working through these ideas and metaphors in a world that’s been out of balance for a long time, with a few powerful entities now hastening the damage along, the better to feed on chaos. Might there be a better equilibrium on the other side? Possibly, but even if so, too much suffering precedes it.

So, yes, between reading tour highs and the lows of being a United Statesian during fascism, I’m feeling emotional whiplash over here.

Lesley Wheeler, Role model, mycelium

I’m jumping octaves again
Startling the pigeons in front of the cathedral

Trolling the lake’s edge
Sending swans huffing into the reeds
(Once I caught them eating the ducklings and they’ve never forgiven me)

The catfish suck at the high notes
Percussive smacks of mistake

No, I sing, no, I sing, no

Ren Powell, Jackhammer Song

Latin sapphics were hugely popular in England in the latter half of the sixteenth century. This corresponds in part to a wider European fashion, but not entirely so. I think their particular popularity in England in this period was — funnily enough — partly just because the word Elizabetha, the Latin for ‘Elizabeth’, fitted so temptingly neatly into the adonean. I chose Edward Cornwallis’ page because of its handy combination of the metrical diagram and this ‘Elizabetha’-adonean at the end of the third stanza. But you see it over and over again: to such an extent that I think we can reasonably talk about the ‘Elizabethan sapphic’. If you have any Latin, you may also have noticed that Cornwallis, like most English authors of the period, is using sapphics for a grandly panegyric political ode, praising Queen Elizabeth I for her beauty, virtue and might — with her in charge, he says, the English have nothing to fear from Philip (of Spain), the chilly Scot or the ferocious French. This use of sapphics is typical of the period in England, though it’s not at all what we associate with the metre in Sappho, and even Horace in general tended to use alcaics (rather than sapphics) for his grander and more public odes. A metre can ‘mean’ quite different things at different times.

Victoria Moul, The embroidered earth: sapphics in the spring

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Collected Poems (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’ Likewise, in their adjudication, the 2014 Büchner Prize jury highlighted the way ‘Becker’s writing is interwoven with the times, with what is observed and what is remembered, what is personal and what is historical.’ […]

Though relatively brief, this poem is just one sentence, woven together with the conjunction ‘wie’ (translated here both as ‘how’ and ‘the way’). The weave is dense and as I’ve suggested it’s not really possible to tell whether what is observed – the children, the oil spill, the tree stump (resembling a body) – are contemporaneous or from different eras. My translation keeps these possibilities open: borders here are felt to be temporal, as well as geographical. The German word ‘Avantgarde’ has artistic as well as political implications, but my choice of ‘vanguard’ also brings out the militaristic connotations which are reinforced by the ‘spitzen, grünen Lanzen’ (‘sharp, green spears’) which are then swiftly transformed into a bunch of sprouting snowdrops. These flowers of Spring are interestingly referred to as a ‘Konvention’ and I retained the English equivalent, intending to suggest both a performance (something conventional, perhaps not genuine), as well as a political gathering or agreement (like the Convention on Human Rights). The ambiguity felt very relevant (and once again topical).

The final vivid, visual images – a TV screen observed through a window, a script on the screen, a woman talking, but she is inaudible to the observer – sum up Becker’s concerns about the media, political and historical change, borders real and imagined, exclusion, and the need to ask questions of those in power. Issues as real today as when the poem was written in the early 1990s.

Martyn Crucefix, Three Poems by Jürgen Becker

Before his landscapes scorched by war and history, paintings of straw
and glue, your golden hair, Margarethe, before ‘Death Fugue’, I was back at
school, deep winter. In the yard blew a few stray crisp packets; seagulls
pecked at crumbs. The annex and fence had the look of an abandoned
camp, in Polish hinterlands. Through a cloakroom window I peered,
looking for a ghost of myself, then at a ghost of myself, as the sun
poked out from a cloud and the contours of bulimia gazed back, in
sepia tones.

Fokkina McDonnell, Archive

dad’s war
in a mock-leather box
that telegram
home tomorrow
love george

Jim Young [no title]

Since I was brought up with sewing as an everyday occupation I’m surprised to find relatively little writing about sewing, although as my research continues one of the most satisfying finds was an interview with the poet Rita Dove for the Stitch Please podcast. 

The interviewer is wonderfully enthusiastic and starts with an anecdote about meeting Dove in a fabric shop. 

Dove, of course, as an older woman, was brought up with sewing. She talks about sewing being a “sensation of inventiveness”,  remembers the dresses her mother made out of coat linings and making a velvet cape for Venice carnival with a matching waistcoat for her husband. 

I could talk about fabrics, learn about them, their quirks and difficulties all day. In fact, as I write this, I’m missing that. 

Jackie Wills, Rita Dove, Rosa Parks, sewing and poems

my brother was a monk I was a musician
now we gumption
through the trees our horse hooves
clop clopping our brains fucked
with news we wriggle
in this New American Church

put our heads
together tether the breath breathe in
breathe in breathe in
pick up a hymnal

Rebecca Loudon, April 1, 2025

I have a modest goal this month of sharing a poem a day from the pile of books beside my desk. Some of these I read in August during the Sealey Challenge. Others — well, it’s about damn time. I may not read a book a day, and I’m not pushing myself to do the usual blog reviews (though some may ensue), just this: one book, one poem.

Today it is Bones in the Shallows: poems from Mission Creek by Seattle poet Tito Titus. I reviewed his I can still smile like Errol Flynn (Empty Bowl Press, 2015) a few years back.

Tito Titus’s Mission Creek is located near Cashmere, Washington, and runs into the Wenatchee River. (Forgive me if I have any of this wrong.) As the title, Bones in the Shallows, suggests, the creek disappears every summer, drained by drought, by natural disasters, by greed. And in this slim book the creek, its creatures, and the people whose lives are lived on its banks are lovingly chronicled. Nature can heal us, Titus all but says, but only if we don’t destroy it first.

Bethany Reid, National Poetry Month: poetry book #1

“Tempo” is a measured, upbeat collection, with more than a dash of earnestness. Like Mary Oliver’s “There is only one question:/ how to love this world,” Coppola asks readers how to simply be and focus on the moment, savouring the present and asking for readers to coexist and respect the natural world. It’s a world that includes storms and floods as well as sunlight dappling through green leaves.

Emma Lee, “Tempo” Lucia Coppola (Kelsay Books) – book review

The Gods of Winter by Dana Gioia
This is an older poetry collection by Gioia, who has written much. I was interested to read this after learning it was written after he lost a son to SIDS at 3 months old. His collection is infused with this loss, but not overwhelmed by it (like my work in progress, to be honest!). I admire his ability to write formal poems, and this collection shows his range. […]

I have a poem in a special project – Poems for Life with Let Go the Goat
My doctor encouraged to abort my daughter Kit when she was diagnosed with her heart condition in utero, and, though we only had six months with her outside the womb, I will never regret choosing life.

Renee Emerson, Have you seen the White Whale?

My book is finally out! I am both anxious and excited—it seems that every time I publish a book, I immediately think of changes I’d like to make. And when the book arrives with its shiny new cover, I am overwhelmed by a sense of nausea and doubt. At least now, I know that’s just part of my process. And I know I’m not the only one. I have heard stories of poets like Clark Coolidge who would edit his books on the shelves of bookshops.

Nin Andrews, Son of a Bird!

I’m not getting squared somehow in the manuscripts underway. I drop a plumb bob and there’s a slant. Is it overwriting? Is there an omission I need to see? How far down do I need to rebuild?

I hold poems at a distance. I can’t get intimate with my poems. Is it a performance anxiety that I see the words through others eyes before my own? I’m too destination/objective minded instead of process-minded. Editing before speech. Could be. Or.

To get out of a rut you need to jolt your schema, get a new influence, new experience or realization. […]

There’s still movement from VerseFest with Phil Hall and Eileen Myles, workshops and listening to their readings.

They are letting things in. Speaking out for the rightness of the extraneousness.

Poetry is not only an act of narrowing down, curating control & shutting out, but seeing, being, allowing in.

Pearl Pirie, Reopenings vs Closure

Poems eat us. Alive or dead, doesn’t matter to them.
Poems swallow the great nowheres of the world.
Poems deceive you, persuade you, tell you imagined truths.
Poems rage, ignore, do what they want.
Poems have no conscience, no guilt, no shame.
Poems bring your darkness into light and when your time in light is done
Poems take you back to darkness.
Poems know how to defend themselves.

Bob Mee, POEMS AND A SELF-PORTRAIT FOR A 72ND BIRTHDAY

Somehow, we have crested into April and National Poetry Month. With work obligations, wedding plans, and the downfall of democracy doomscroll (the DODD I’m now calling it), I am doing nothing in particular beyond my usual to celebrate this month (though that usual is usually a lot anyway.) I am finishing up a short series I’ve been working on and getting ready to start something new. Today, I paged through the stack of books on my shelves that somehow have my name on their spines and marveled, once again, how I have managed to have so many words in me, much less get them out on the page and into book form. This is especially true of COLLAPSOLOGIES and RUINPORN, both of which are a bit longer than other books and feel like companion books ins some way (and not just because of the titles are complimentary.) And even more amazing that I have two other manuscripts in their final stages of development. 

Outside of writing, I have many spinning thoughts on things I’ve seen and absorbed recently that are here then gone before I can commit them to the page more in-depth. One was the series of David Lynch screenings we’ve been enjoying at Alamo that most recently gave me a chance to see Mulholland Drive, my favorite Lynch hands down, on the big screen. Lynch is all dreamscape and little connective logic, which I feel is so much what I’ve been trying to capture in writing but always somehow fall short. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/3/2025

Happy National Poetry Month, everybody!

Working in collaboration with Pennington Public Library in New Jersey, my wife and I installed 10 of my poem signs at a place called Sked Street Park for the delight of visitors and passers-by. They will be on display all month. […]

high noon . . . / climbing the sky / a little spider

Bill Waters, National Poetry Month @ Sked Street Park

When and how were you introduced to haiku & Japanese poetry forms?

Since the early 2000’s, I have attended regular open mic events in our city. At these open mics, I was introduced to haiku and senryu by Irene Goals, who has become a dear friend. Her haiku journey started at age 16 and she was well-versed in what the writing of haiku and other forms entailed. I had a hard time grasping the fundamentals for several years, but thankfully she never gave up on me. She saw I was serious about learning the way and mentored me. It was Irene who introduced me to the work of Roberta Beary as well as others. I think it’s fair to say Roberta Beary is my creative standard for haibun. After reading one of her haibun in Rattle, I was hooked. I continue to expand my attempts in Japanese poetic forms. Currently, I am working to improve my grasp of tanka.

What do you enjoy the most about haiku?

I used to think people who say, “Well, my process is…” were a bit pretentious. But when I realised that I, too, actually have a process with writing haiku, I had to shut my own self up. My process of writing haiku is the centering of my thoughts, slowing my breathing, opening my senses, taking the time to see things around me with a deeper awareness and observation, letting myself feel the world in that moment, and feel my place in the world—all of this preparation is a big part of what I like about haiku. The opening of mind and memory, surprising myself with the words that come to me, and the deep appreciation for my surroundings: all of this is a gift to me from haiku.

Jacob D. Salzer, Vera Constantineau

Ah-LEE-nah. Is it wonderful to hear my name pronounced correctly, wherein “correctly” is defined as the way it is pronounced in my native (and very minor) language? Does the thrill of hearing myself pronounced in my first language relate to the power to be one simple thing, one Alina Stefanescu, one constant and stable self? And is there—beneath that thrilling presumption, perhaps— a refusal to be known as one of you, as among you, in your presence, in your language —known as spoken and held in your mouth?

As a reader, it is not your job to acknowledge me, to affirm me, or even to perceive me correctly. I believe that such expectations set us up to fail in beholding one another. It is too much to ask of any human. I keep thinking of Beckett’s Godot and the firmament, and the constant question that the two old friends, waiting, ask one another. The endless repetition: Who am I to you? Who will we be to one another? 

To be read is one way of knowing. To be pronounced is another. To be remembered, well, to be remembered as both a blessing, and a curse in any language.

Alina Stefanescu, What’s in a name?

The first full-length collection by American poet Imani Elizabeth Jackson, following the chapbooks Context for arboreal exchanges (Belladonna*, 2023) and saltsitting (g l o s s, 2020) as well as the co-authored (as mouthfeel) Consider the tongue with S*an D. Henry-Smith (Paper Machine, 2019), is FLAG (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024), a striking collection of prose lyric that writes on boundaries, borders and history, elements that read a bit more charged during the current geopolitical climate. “Sometimes there are no words or / the words simply are not the right / ones.” she writes, as part of the opening section. “Or sometimes the words don’t / match, or they jumble. It’s okay, it’s / alright, it’s all flow. Flow, flow, flow.”

Set in six sections—“Untitled,” “Land mouth,” “The Black Bettys,” “One wild blue day,” “Flag” and “Slow coups”—each section rides an unfolding, an unfurling, of accumulations set as individual prose blocks, allowing the music of these lyric narratives a kind of propulsion. As she offers as part of the first section: “It bears repeating that Toni Morrison / said all water has a perfect memory / and is forever trying to get back / to where it was. Writers are like / that: remembering where we were, / what valley we ran through, what / the banks were like, the light that / was there and the route back to / our original place.” She writes of history, slavery and arrival, and the ongoing impacts of that history, little of which has been properly acknowledged by the descendants of the perpetrators. “Certain facts stand.” Or, further on: “Some of us can be traced by how we / arrived—which way up or down. Some / of us don’t remember. Simply can’t.”

Moving from American border space through “Louisiana and Mississippi,” south to Guyana and the “Meeting of Waters in Brazil,” Jackson’s text is lively, powerful and performative; bearing an incredible weight with a music and craft that provides such a quality of light. I would suspect such a collection equally comfortable on the stage as it is on the page, and an adaptation for the theatre wouldn’t be impossible to imagine. Composed through an array of short narrative bursts that string and sing together to form something greater, Jackson’s FLAG articulates a conversation around borders and depictions, notions of country and self-description, and how often that narrative contradicts, and so often at the expense of the very populace they claim to protect. FLAG weaves a variety of histories, music and story, providing an incredible collage-effect of fierce intensity. This is a remarkable book.

rob mclennan, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, FLAG

The past week gave me riches galore; though I am somewhat poorer in the pocket for it, my cup runneth over in about every other way. It’s true that often, lately, I’ve felt that I am living in “interesting times” that are all too much and too awful to contemplate for long. Then again, I could have been alive (possibly quite briefly!) during Boccaccio’s time and weathering the bubonic plague. Thanks to The Decameron, readers later in history have been able to get a picture of what people were thinking about and imagining–or trying to escape–when things were truly terrible all around. And while I’m not pollyanna-ish about the present, I do feel grateful that I live during an era when travel to distant places is possible and rather speedy, that books are readily available, and that some of the wealthy people of the not-too-distant past decided that philanthropy included funding libraries, gardens, and museums for the average citizen to visit and enjoy. Current billionaires, please take note!

What the week entailed was a trip to Los Angeles to visit my eldest child and, while there, to spend a morning at the AWP conference book fair. Riches indeed! I “packed light” to be sure I had space in my carry-on for poetry books, which thankfully tend to be slim paperback volumes. I bought almost 20 books, I confess. So I came home weighted with literary riches, and while at the convention managed to connect (however briefly) with numerous poet colleagues. A shout-out here to Lesley Wheeler, whose book I had to purchase online because Mycocosmic had sold out! Congratulations, and I cannot wait to read it.

Ann E. Michael, Riches

One of the things that I love about my job, even now I work full time in a university is that no day is the same. Sometimes I get asked what a poet does, most often by my dad, who is still outraged about the time I answered his question by saying “I took a full stop out of a poem and put it in again”. I said this to annoy him, it’s quite rare that I get a day to obsess about a full stop (or not) but inspired by Clare’s recent posts about working with small children, I thought I’d start a new series of posts called ‘What do poets do all day’ where I will attempt to pull back the veil on what this poet, at least does, on a particular day.

Today my husband and daughter have gone off on a camping trip for a few days, so I have the house to myself, which is very rare. I have the last week of university teaching next week and this term has been so intense and full on that I couldn’t cope with the thought of camping and then rushing back for my teaching, so I have stayed at home.

This morning I got a lift with them out to Luddenden and ran back along the ‘clearway’ a path that runs mostly alongside the train track and means I can avoid the geese on the canal who are going into full on psycho mode, and also avoid the traffic on the main road through the valley. I got back to Hebden, got the bus up the hill (I’m a runner not a masochist!) and then showered, made myself some lunch and then Clare Shaw appeared to do some writing.

Clare announced they were working on the last part of their next collection and I decided I would have a look at my manuscript as well, after a long break from it to start some edits that have been niggling at my mind for a while.

So my editing job today was to sort out “Damaged Cento” which avid readers of this blog will know was published relatively recently in The Stinging Fly, edited by the brilliant poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin.

Kim Moore, What do poets do all day?

One poet who always feels like a rockstar to me is Todd Dillard. I had to leave Twitter when it got x’d, and he’s one of the reasons I miss it, because that’s how I always found out when he had published a new poem. So, I went to his website to see what he’d been up to and was delighted to find him in Waxwing. His poem “No Rush” really hit me hard, especially, especially, especially the ending. I am tempted to include the last few lines here, but the whole thing fits so beautifully together I didn’t want to break it apart. The poem reminded me why I love his work: Dillard has this incredible ability to pull readers in completely, in a way that feels both vulnerable and universal at the same time.

There is something about Waxwing that makes poetry feel like an open-armed invitation. Chill Subs categorizes it as “top-tiered stuff. Not Paris Review but ok.” Its website is clean and professional-looking, and easy to navigate. I first discovered the journal when I was obsessed with another rockstar writer, Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights. He published Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude in Waxwing, a poem that has everything in it, including some of the sexiest lines of poetry I have ever read. It is a long poem (which he even acknowledges toward the end) that brims with joy and generosity, even thanking the reader for sticking with him:

“…you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend.
I know I can be long-winded sometimes.”

You know what I love about sexy poetry? It jolts me awake, snapping me back into the present. It reminds me that I have an animal body. I’m not just a grown-up person with responsibilities, covering myself every morning for work, layering on clothes like dropping down the blackout curtains. A bra to hide my nipples. An undershirt to smooth over the softness of my belly. To keep my pants up, a belt. Then off to work, where I make lists, try not to stress about layoffs, schedule appointments, attempt to budget, and eat something responsible when what I really want is a Pop-Tart.

As much as I love print magazines for pulling me away from screens, sometimes I appreciate the immediacy of finding a sexy poem online. It looks so innocuous…just words on a screen. Of course, words are safe at work. It’s just a poem, right? Except my grip tightens around my phone as I take in the lines. But maybe people will think I am just reading some terrifying news article about the state of the world. Right? Except I’m also blushing.

Becky Tuch, Who Reads Lit Mags? We Do! Spotlight on Little Engines, Waxwing, Blush, Adroit Journal, Citron Review, Epiphany

A garden has lots of failures; seeds that don’t germinate, plants that succumb to frost over winter, vegetables that grow in a way that is most definitely not edible. There is never a year where something doesn’t work out as I hoped. Yet somehow, I accept this transience and uncertainty. When failure occurs, I apologise to the plant I’ve let down (I know, I know) clear it away and move on. I don’t feel personally affronted; I don’t feel that I never want to garden again, and I don’t feel that everyone else knows what they’re doing and I’ll never reach gardening nirvana. Sure, experts exist and show their skills at fancy flower shows but I honestly don’t care. All I’m worried about is my patch of colour and joy, and how to solve the puzzle of keeping geraniums alive over winter. […]

The answer to being content with my writing lies in my garden. It lies in learning to nurture my words with the same care and tenderness I give to an emerging courgette seed (I genuinely cheer when I see them). It lies in accepting failure with a cool understanding that sometimes things just don’t work, that I’ve chosen the wrong place for the plant and I’ll learn for next time. Above all it lies subverting the need for external validation and learning to enjoy the words for the way they delight me, the way they feel on my tongue, the thrill of raising my eyes to sky, seeking the right word and plucking it down to be part of the page.

As the year unfolds, as April continues its journey to the heat and celebration that summer can bring, my goal is to keep my heart light, to keep my mind trained on what brings me joy and to fall back in love with writing. Which I will, if I learn to write with the same perspective I have when I garden.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, On hope and falling back in love with writing

Today is the heavy teaching day, yet my heart is light.  We finish Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” today.  I had thought about canceling it, because it is long.  But we had space in the syllabus, and I didn’t feel like devising a new plan.  I am so glad I went ahead with it.  I had forgotten how delightful it is to teach.

I taught the first part last week, and it made me so happy to hear students still discussing it on the way out of class; as two students tried to determine if the poem was really talking about bestiality,  I thought, I am so happy not to be teaching in high school.  I don’t have to worry about angry parents coming back to demand that I be fired for teaching their students about this poem.

As the semester winds down, particularly in April, I sometimes feel a bit of despair about all that I am not doing, the poems I’m not writing, the journals that will be closing down their reading periods for the year without a single submission from me, the books of poems I’m not reading, the events I didn’t organize to celebrate National Poetry Month.  It’s good to remember all the ways I am celebrating National Poetry Month, by bringing poetry into my classrooms, by reading poetry to students and sparking interest.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Celebrating National Poetry Month with “Goblin Market”

Glowing white below a greyish sky: magnolia buds. Large, spindle-shaped, and vertical. In the week they open, the pink on their petals counts all the more as it almost always rains, and the splendour is less splendid and quickly over; the petals soaked wet. The pedestrians walking past duck under their umbrellas or into their hoods or into their thoughts.

Then all the green, in a shower.

Kati Mohr, Aye.

Consider:
How the night confesses with twinkling stars even as it swallows the flowers.
How the empty quarter of the page cradles your eyes at the end of a sorrowful poem.
How the animal released back into the wild turns once: saying something, saying nothing, perhaps grateful, perhaps disbelieving, perhaps remonstrating, before running away as fast as its legs will carry it.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, But there is the fog

All over the northern hemisphere, it seems, spring has sprung, bringing a new crop of words to the poetry blogs this week: takatalvi, the quadrille, dindsenchas, reclamă, A.S.M.R., and more. Enjoy!

Spring has come early to Finland. The snow is melted and the city is full of dust from the grit they use on the roads. Finns and those non-Finns who have been here for a while are suspicious, knowing it’s too early to get our hopes up. That takatalvi is always a possibility, the Finnish return to winter. Takatalvi means a return to winter: a sudden dump of snow or the temps dropping to twenty below zero just when the weather seems to turn towards spring. True spring when you can actually pack your shovels, snow boots and gloves away is always late here, well into April usually.

I should be writing about the light returning as my poems are usually seasonal, but I’m still writing my strange, half-love poems. I’m ignoring a lot of ‘shoulds’ which is a slight worry, but also very liberating. Nothing vital is being ignored with my kids and my job and whatever else they put me in charge of. I am carving out very specific times where I just don’t, unless I want to. And that feels good.

I’m writing again thankfully. Of all the things that slipped away this winter that worried me. I have a pile of unread books I know I will get back to, the dust bunnies will wait, but there was a definite sense of lack in being unable to find a way into writing. So I’m thankful for the rush of hormones or whatever is driving these weird poems. 

Gerry Stewart, The Shoulds of Spring

I can feel myself gearing up for April now. I’ve not written any new poems for about six months or so now, although I’ve been steadily reading and filling myself up with poetry. I’m now at the state where I’d quite like to sit down and write. It’s like a full feeling, perhaps how a glass that is almost to the brim with water would feel, if a glass could have feelings. Or it’s like teetering on the edge of a very long drop that you know once you go, you will be falling for a long time and it will be fine, but you are putting off going.

I’m hovering on that edge now. Or I’m holding myself perfectly still, so I don’t spill over the edges of myself.

Kim Moore, Writing in and through motherhood

How will a poet sit on the edge
of his soul and peer into guilt
and shame and ugliness?

What will proximity do
to language? Can verbs
overcome weakness of spirit?

Or will every attempt
at truth end as another
poem about the moon?

***

Quadrille: The quadrille is a 44-word poem with no rules about meter or rhyme.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, 44 words are plenty

I find that writing creatively comes in waves and winter tends to be a fallow time. If I’m not writing poetry, then I like to be reading it: going back to old favourites and finding new inspiration. It has been a real delight lately to encounter new poetry on Substack as well as dipping into the wealth of literary magazines online. But there is nothing quite the same as immersing oneself in a poetry collection. It is in the gathered poems of a collection that the voice, tone and style of the poet — what makes their writing theirs — truly flourishes. It’s the reading equivalent of listening to an album all the way through rather than highlights on a Spotify playlist. You can listen to “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac on its own but the brilliance of the track is best heard as part of Rumours.

Virginia Woolf’s essay on reading looks at ways to read different genres and for poetry she posits “one must be in a rash, extreme, a generous state of mind…” Poems may be brief, but often their very brevity requires of the reader more focus, more concentration of intellect, more power of imagination. As Woolf suggests, there is an “exaltation and intensity” to reading poetry because more than any other written form we are required to bring our own interpretation to the page. In a collection, we must do this time and time again, considering not only the meanings of one poem but the possible connections across a range of poems. This is why, I think, that reading a collection of poetry requires returning many times — and therein also lies the reward. […]

I love reading fiction and I consume narrative of some kind on a daily basis. But I have to admit, it’s not like that with reading poetry. I can’t just pick up a collection any time and get stuck in. Even individual poems that I come across on Substack or elsewhere, if I really want to take them in, I have to read them and then come back to them. Even though they may be shorter, it takes longer because this type of reading is not purely about consumption. It’s slow reading, an art in itself and one that is making a comeback in our fast-paced times.

Ruth Lexton, “a generous state of mind”: diving into poetry

At winter solstice, nature’s new year,
the one plants honor, I become
Queen of the Night, with pages,
blank or inscribed, for courtiers
who urge me to exile the to-do list,
intention’s nagging inversion.
I visit the day only to restock
my supply of wine and chocolate.

My rule ends at the equinox,
when Queen Persephone returns
from below, living green takes over,
I become servant, day-worker,
watering, feeding, trimming plants,
attendant to the majesty of growth.

Ellen Roberts Young, A Poem for the Change of Seasons

Maurice Scully’s deep understanding of Irish poetry informs his own practice as a writer. Unlike the English pastoral tradition, which, as I have argued elsewhere, is essentially a poetry of empire, of the land as owned object, this tradition is one of the land as living world. From the 8^th century haiku-like lyrics of intense perception to the onomastics of the Metrical Dindshenchas, medieval Irish nature poetry concerned itself with the stubborn actuality of things and of the odd relationship between those things and the words used to name them. These lines from Scully’s 5 Freedoms of Movement (Etruscan Books, 2002, originally Galloping Dog 1987) illustrate the point I am trying to make:

persistent undersound of a river. hardness.
table facing a square window inset in a deep white wall.
the four places. & more. the head of a narrow angular stairs.
sometimes an animal passes. brown white black.
a fly sometimes in the sunlight.
sometimes a man.

When Scully writes like this, the most fruitful comparison available is with the earliest Irish lyrics. The sheer concreteness of the writing mirrors the desire to present what is with minimal interference from the vanity of the writing ego. The world is not presented as a stage set for the acting out of some human drama but as a complex system of which the human domain is just one part. Or, to quote again

a large brain & a long childhood
leaves branches water (where was I?)
with all the ornate figurations in meta- this & that
(branches) climbing while the truth dwindling in proportion
to the glare of the accentuated frill will. well.
many mouths moving. no wonder nobody with any sense.

Wary of theory, this is a poetry of learning to live with and in the world, not of explaining and improving on it.

Billy Mills, Sustainable Poetry

birds breeze over
happy            wander
between root and tendril

spirited song thickly moist
green             and fresh
seeding a sanctuary

for a long sweet spring

Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): Spring Soak

I’m currently working with the novelist and poet Anna Chilvers to curate “The Book of Bogs”, which will be published by Little Toller and Blue Moose Books this September. It’s an incredible book, with poetry, short stories and more from 30 incredible writers, including Alys Fowler, Pascale Petit, Robert McFarlane, David Morley, Patti Smith – and of course, Kim Moore.

Kim has already treated you to a snippet of the short story she has written for the book, along with a description of the process which gave rise to it. In her article “Where do ideas come from anyway?” Kim writes about finding the idea for her story in an old notebook. In writing my lyric essay for the anthology, the biggest challenge was narrowing the ideas down … because I’m writing about my love for Walshaw Moor, and for moss, and peatland – and like Seamus Heaney’s bog, that love feels bottomless; it has no horizons.

On Sunday, Anna Chilvers and I will be running “Bog Bodies: A Creative Encounter” online from 10-30-12.30. We’re probably all familiar with the ancient bodies found in the bog in state of stunning preservation due to the chemical qualities of peat. But there are other bodies in the bogs and on the moors, just as fascinating. In this Sunday’s workshop we’ll focus on tardigrades (otherwise known as moss pigs or water bears) and the billions of tiny, other-worldly creatures of the bog; alongside Lindow and Tollund Man.

Clare Shaw, Land: a Love Story

I haven’t been writing many haiku lately, but I had a lovely time making this artist’s book last week in a workshop run by Sam Jackman who kindly provided all the hand printed paper for the covers as well as guiding us all through the process.

Admittedly, I did try and fit in every technique she showed us, and there are a few things I’d do differently next time, but I could see it would be an excellent way of presenting haiku and I’m hoping to combine the two disciplines when I get time. Could be a nice project for the summer holidays. Counting down already and it’s not even Easter yet!

Julie Mellor, A book without words

If my body were a basket,
I’d like it willow please —
flexible, ultra-strong
and weeping
comes for free.
[…]

M.E. is a wildly fluctuating condition (for me at least). Some weeks I almost forget it. Others I cannot get out of bed, cannot read. Most weeks are somewhere in the middle. 

Kathryn Anna Marshall, If my body were a basket

More than a decade ago I wrote a book explicitly about the apocalypse. Or maybe it was a book about different kinds of apocalypses instead of any specific one. There were vague dangers, nuclear bombs, underground houses, and zombie attacks for sure, all the stuff of dramatic end-times scenarios. Really, I was just watching a little bit too much Supernatural and the central series “apocalypse theory: a reader” just sort of formed out of it. I enjoyed reading these poems during a slew of readings in the summer of 2013. A couple years later, the book was done and was scooped up by a press who had published my work before. The next couple years had a lot going on, including finishing SEX & VIOLENCE and it finding a home at BLP, the loss of my mother, lots of work-related drama and happenings. By the time the press shut down, which I wasn’t sure was what was happening because I was frankly afraid to ask, so much was going down. In 2018 and 2019, I was barely hanging on to my mental health by a string, and then in 2020, there was covid. By then SEX & VIOLENCE was in the world and I just decided to issue an electronic version of that older book and move on (and actually, it was easy since most design work had already been done on the interior.)  It’s worth a read and fun little bit of imagined endings. What I didn’t know was that I would keep writing about it. 

In early 2018, during a sprint of daily writings I wrote a steampunk-ish series called ordinary planet, in which climate change and massive floods produced a futuristic alternative planet world very unkind to women, whose choice was domesticity or pretending to be mystics fortune tellers (inspired by the famous Fox Sisters, of course). In 2019, when I was gifted some time and reading gig at the Field Museum, I wrote extinction event,  a series about extinction as a gathering, like a gala, that no one wanted invitations for. The poems that arose during covid could also be considered in a similar vein. Bloom, the most autobiographical series of our time under lockdowns, but later the strangeness of existing in that world just reemerging,  with the plague letters. Similarly, when I wrote unreal city, inspired by Eliot’s The Wasteland,  in late 2021/early 2022, the end times felt like they, themselves, were ending. These series were scattered across different book projects–AUTOMAGIC (ordinary planet), COLLAPSOLOGIES (bloom and the plague letters), ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MONSTER ( extinction event.) Each book, with the exception of COLLAPSOLOGIES, which also has an apocalyptic feel overall, with its own subject matter and thematic concerns. 

I did not set out for RUINPORN to be so bleak, but it happened. the Eliot-inspired series kicked it off, in a time where it felt like we were all white knuckling our way through life. Or maybe it was just me, with job stresses followed by job changes (good ones, but scary at first). With more loss after my dad passed in 2022. I literally intended that to be my last book with that apocalyptic feel. I was ready to move on, to be kinder in my view of the world and its future, but the events of the last 5 months or so have me reconsidering. I am not sure what to make of the world in poems, but it’s showing up in a strange way in the new, more sci-fi poems I’ve been writing to go with a set of collages I actually finished in 2023 but wanted to revisit. 

Kristy Bowen, unhappy endings

あさつてはないかも知れず雲雀の巣　矢島渚男

asatte wa nai kamo shirezu hibari no su

            there may be

            no day after tomorrow

            a skylark’s nest

                                                Nagisao Yajima

from Haiku, a monthly haiku magazine, November 2022 Issue, Kabushiki Kaisha Kadokawa, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 22, 2025)

isolate – From the Latin, insulare, to make into an island

I – sol – ate
I am solo
since the positive Covid test
have made myself an island
plotted my time
as a map of solitude
coordinated myself to a pattern of rest

Liz Lefroy, I Isolate

On Sunday 15 March I learned the British government was considering a compulsory quarantine. The next day I emailed the owner of the campsite asking if I could arrive early. He replied immediately. I booked a flight, transferred money, packed, agonised over which poetry books to take to my ‘desert island’ near The Hague. I flew to Schiphol on the Wednesday. The local buses already had the area near the driver closed off with white-red plastic.

Here are two poems about that first lockdown: […]

Six months of safety in a static caravan,
waking to birdsong each morning,
shielded from the sun by the golden elm.
I walked my daily rounds on the grass lanes.

Forsythia, tulips, narcissi, rhododendron,
pyracantha, salvia, rock rose, asters:
the seasons’ steady markers. From a distance
I waved to neighbours finally arriving.

Fokkina McDonnell, Saved by bankruptcy

Just back from a walk along the beach at Pevensey, part of the newly-established ‘England Coastal Path’. Sunny days at this time of year are so precious, aren’t they?

Now I’m about to get down to some work, mostly to do with the forthcoming book (ahem! did I mention that before?) which is now put to bed and being printed as I write. One of the last jobs was to decide on the cover image, which I’m very pleased with, and will talk about that in a future post. The Lewes launch is arranged – I’m sharing the gig with Peter Kenny who’ll be reading from his not-one-but-two pamphlets that came out in 2024. The original plan was to have the launch event on the official launch date, which is of course May 1st. But for various reasons it’s a week later. Close enough! Being a modest type (well, let’s just say I find it cringeworthy to do too much self-promo) I’ve engaged some help with promotion… more on that in a future post too, no doubt. Meanwhile I’ve made a Mayday Diaries landing page. And one of my wonderful blurbers, Rory Waterman, recently gave the book a glowing endorsement on Bluesky. Gulp!

Robin Houghton, New book stuff, and other Spring shenanigans

In January I traveled to Book Tree in Kirkland to attend a celebration for the launch of the Western Washington Poetry Network. It’s been around for at least a year or two, but this was the official “big deal” launch. Representatives from almost every writing group and open mike from Vancouver, Washington, to Bellingham to Duvall were there. There were cookies and wine. It was raucous good fun.

I was asked to speak about our poetry group—the only showing (so far) from Mukilteo—and, in part because I’m not sure we want new members, I talked instead about this blog. I told them how many poetry books I read in 2024, and how many book reviews. I invited people to take a look. I promised to promote WWPN.

And, as a result, I was handed several books by local poets. Like I needed more poetry books! (Of course I did.)

Bethany Reid, Western Washington Poetry Network

Look at me!
I am an idiot, I am farce, I am a smoker or “Furniste”
Look at me!
I am ugly, my face lacks expression, I am short.
I am like all of you! (1)

(1) I wanted to advertise myself a little.

In Romanian, an advertisement is called “reclamă”— and there is always a bit of excitement for me when translating Tzara’s Dada years, when his French was still hypercoagulated with Romanian verbs and idioms.

reclame

1. inflection of reclamă (“advertisement”):
   1. nominative/accusative indefinite plural
   2. genitive indefinite singular

reclame

1. third-person singular/plural subjunctive of reclama (“to report”)

Obviously, Tristan Tzara (and Dada) was deeply invested in revealing the dishonesty of newspapers and media, where what got reported was often a scandal that distracted the miserable veterans or citizens of industrial capitalism from the numbing boredom of their factory-driven lives. And so perhaps the “report” that tangles with the “advertisement” amuses me, even as it sashays through my imagination, straight into the unfinished parts of Benjamin’s Arcades, where I look for traces of Tzara’s footsteps in the Zurich-Berlin-Paris pipeline of the early 20th century.

Alina Stefanescu, Tzara boots.

I’ve written before about my impatience with the default ‘surrealism-lite’ of a lot of contemporary poetry in English — especially the kind that gets published in big poetry magazines — but overall I am persuaded here. I find the poem very American, slightly irritating and rather successful. The final couplet in particular is both aurally delicious — marlstone and mud-rich; air / everywhere — and genuinely funny. Wit is quite uncommon in poetry of this kind so I really appreciated that.

The poem also has a sense of history. [Natalie] Shapero is obviously aware, and assumes that we too are aware, of the very ancient link between the appearance of a comet and social upheaval — most often they are taken to portend war and plague, though sometimes change of other kinds. The comet seen in the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC is widely reported in ancient sources, and included by Shakespeare too — as Calpurnia says to Caesar on the morning of his death, ‘When beggars die, there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes’ (II.ii).

Victoria Moul, How to watch the war: three poetic comets

In the first weeks of this year, I participated in a virtual poetry workshop with Anita Skeen. It was so useful to me that I signed up for another workshop, this one on writing the prose poem, with mixed-media artist and poet Lorette Luzajic. She is the editor of an online prose-poetry lit journal, The Mackinaw.

In this workshop, I’m returning to a form I learned early in my writing practice. My friend and mentor David Dunn may have introduced me to prose poems, I cannot recall anymore; but I do know he was writing them in 1980 and that some of the poems in our collaborative chapbook The Swan King are either prose poems or on the verge of being prose poems. Prose poetry was then considered a “new” form and was (& in some quarters, remains) controversial among poets and critics. It sounds self-conflicting: if it is prose, how can it be poetry?

In the decades since I was very new to poetry, reading everything I could find of contemporary work and experimenting all over the place, the prose poem has been much written-about in literary forums and academia and is–mostly–on pretty sturdy footing as a “form” of poetry. I never completely stopped writing prose poems, and a few appear in most of my books. I’ve been writing so many sad lyrical-narrative poems since 2018, however, that I haven’t spent much time really playing with poetry, and play is a huge part of creative thinking. So Lorette Luzajic’s workshop, which gives us a chance to experiment and play, appealed to me.

The workshop has got me thinking about versions and expansions of the form, turned up some exciting new poets to read, and offered amusing prompts that have moved me into ekphrastic, surrealistic, dream-based, and pop-culture themed poems. I have found some surprises in my own work, which is always a reviving feeling.

Ann E. Michael, Prose/poetry

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

I wrote my first book (Rhombus and Oval) in Buenos Aires, under the influence of a certain poetic mixture of narrative, non-fiction and fantastical literature. It is a very Latin American book that happens to be written in English. It “changed my life” in the sense that my identity was already that of a writer, specifically a poet, because I’d published things in magazines, and was an editor and translator of books, and above all, was an obsessive reader (which can make you believe you are the writer of everything you read). But now I had a book to my name. I’m very fond of it but not overly attached. Many people I knew in Argentina thought about the “work” more than specific books, and I think that I always have, too. A book reflects a certain moment in time, and if you keep writing books, you will have a work. There’s no need to become anguished over creating a great monumental worldchanging text as some people do, thus blocking themselves from creating. Probably most masterpieces are created by accident, in the sense of emerging from intentional artistic decisions at a moment that could not have been anticipated.

I’ve never cared too much about genre divisions, and love writing that moves freely between poetry and essay, incorporating visual elements and music. I’m now making songs with poetic lyrics, experimenting with conceptual art, playing with rhythm . . . My most recent book Taal is explicitly musical. “Taal” refers to the rhythmic cycle in Indian music. But it also refers to Gabriela Mistral’s book Tala, which plays on the Spanish meaning of the word talar, to cut down a tree, and furthermore is a nod to the Chilean poet’s interest in India.

The difference between the first book and now? I’m an older person, with more experiences, happy and otherwise. And I’m in Chile, and don’t think of leaving—I consider myself to be a Chilean-Indian diaspora-noneoftheabove poet, in deep engagement with local sounds, speech patterns, folkloric traditions and history.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jessica Sequeira (rob mclennan)

The collection tells a story. It opens a portal. It began as a painting in acrylic I did 10 years ago: [click through to view] As time went on, I wrote the poems included in this volume. […]

Each poem is a brief reminiscence, isolated in time and creator of nostalgia. Senses subtly overwhelm experiences. There is an intense longing, a wave over the sands. Then all is wiped out. The first poem of the collection, before we met is a visual impression of first love. The second poem, discarded objects of a love affair deals with the acceptance of the loss of love. What is left behind is a canvass of objects that add to the memory of what might have been. the tango dancer recalls the memory of hope, abruptly cut in the last poem, drip petals. One is left with a deep feeling of longing about something that does not exist any longer, one surfs on the mane of memory.

A drop-in by M.C. Gardner (Nigel Kent)

who taught us
to want to keep each other
both like birds & like bulbs?
hold me not in the mouth
but in the woodwork. i want to be
shaped by your hands. breathe only
when you cut the heart, an eye
in the middle of the wood
for us to look at each other through.

Robin Gow, lovespoon

John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best instrument we have invented for our suffering, he would become a poet. “I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone,” he would write about his father in a poem, not realizing he was writing about himself.

Berryman tried to medicate his deepening depression with alcohol and religion, but writing remained his most effective salve. He wrote like the rest of us draw breath — lungfuls of language and feeling to keep himself alive: ten poetry collections, numerous essays, thousands of letters, and a long biography of his favorite writer.

Maria Popova, How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on Defeating the Three Demons of Creative Work

The collection “Exit Strategy” explores how a surviving partner might navigate an afterlife, one that has to adjust to a major loss, while trying to make sense of that loss and respond to bereavement. The poems are a thoughtful, crafted response. Different forms suggest differing approaches, some are a slab of words on the page, others expansive, using the page’s white space to suggest hesitancy and exploration. This is new territory. Artworks seem to suggest a map, but the wanderer has to decide on a route, interpret the symbols and explore what they might mean in this new landscape no one can prepare for.

Emma Lee, “Exit Strategy” Patrick Wright (Broken Sleep Books) – book review

Epitaph
—: After Joseph Rocco :—
by Dick Whyte

for your multifaceted
role in death
make your peace
giant—
the earth has teeth
sharper
than any dead bug

Dick Whyte, Joseph Rocco – 4 Very Short Poems (1929-1930)

My aunt who took antidepressants, forgot them on a business trip, and had a seizure while driving and killed a stranger. She began drinking. My aunt, who is dead now.

My aunt who married a man who murdered her child. She lives. And I don’t know how she has the strength. And I will never know, because we are solitary wasps, all of us. If there are no threats between us, there are threats surrounding us. Internalized.

We each chew the stationary that desperate letters were written on. Spit out the mass to seal the entrance to each little cell.

Yes, there are prison stories I haven’t told you.

I had an uncle who married a witch. Then he disappeared. Like his father who disappeared. But that is another story.

What I am circling here is that there are all kinds of deaths. And renewals. Sometimes I believe we are fated to repeat history because that is what humans do. It doesn’t matter who raises you or how closely your DNA is related, your story will be eerily similar to someone else’s hidden story. Because that is a fact of nature: the recirculation, the renaissance of what came before. And whether that is the glory or the shame, is a matter of perspective. Whether the lapwings come two and two again, or whether they’ll find a safer place this year, it is a form of the imperfect repetition.

I believe in blowing up our lives now and then. I believe in writing more than one story.

Ren Powell, A Routine Blow-Up

I enjoyed Jeanette Burton’s beautifully produced pamphlet, Ostriches, subtitled ‘Ten Poems about My Dad’, published by Candlestick Press and available here. Burton carefully, and wittily, writes affectionate portraits of her father without tipping into dull sentimentality. At their best, her poems – ‘such as the flamboyantly titled ‘Poem in which my dad’s ear is haunted by the ghost of Tutankhamun’ and ‘Poem in which I recount the finding of my dad’s love letter to my mum in the style of a Ronnie Corbett monologue’ – speed along with a giddy mixture of whimsical silliness, acute observation and pride. It might be tempting to suggest that some of her more stream-of-consciousness poems could do with some vigorous pruning, but I reckon that would deaden the sheer exuberant flow of her poetry. 

Matthew Paul, March reading

I remember reading June Jordan for the first time in high school but not for any high school class. I found her in an anthology of women poets, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women Edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. It was 1973.

To be honest, her direct, short-lined, approach to poetry and it seemed, to life, alarmed me. And thrilled me. She wrote about what mattered: Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa. She wrote from her lived experience as an African American woman in the United States “though never solely as or for” (Adrienne Rich). She wrote of police brutality and racial profiling. She wrote (and published) poems for her friends Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker.

She wrote about joy! She once described her poetry as “voice prints of language” and stated:

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream or bumper sticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.”

Who was this woman? I had not read anything like this before. Now, decades later, Jordan still stands out as a poet (and activist, children’s book writer, librettist, political journalism, memoirist, musical playwright, speech writer…and the list goes on).

I have no sweet story of meeting her or of a connection between us except for one very particular one (just for me). I realized it only when Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem lead me back to the bookshelf: June Jordan and I share the same birthday, although I was born several decades later. This moment I’m struggling to write the kind of political poetry I wrote when I was still a human rights worker in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Gaza. June Jordan is the poet I need right now.

“Poem About My Rights” feels as if it was written in 2025, everything she mentions still true today. Listen to this poem in her on voice right here.

Susan Rich, Perhaps the Poet We Need Right Now

I have, finally, completed a draft of the manuscript of poems that emerged from a daily writing practice I sustained from New Year’s eve 2019 until the first week of 2021. It’s taken me four years to sort through, hone, and revise the material, and I am very happy with the result. Some of the poems have been published. “Sunset,” for example, appeared in the lovely journal humana obscura; “The People of Gaza Keep Dying,” appeared on New Verse News, and “On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address…” was published in Michael Broder’s Second Coming series—on, ironically enough, February 4, 2025. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications like Poets of Queens 2, The Scene, and the literary journal published by the International Human Rights Arts Movement.

During the initial stage of this project, I set myself only one constraint: that while I did not care how little I wrote on any given day, I would not write beyond the limit of that day’s page in the Lechtturm1917 page-a-day planner I’d bought. Once I was ready to start sorting, honing, and revising, though, I increased those constraints to three:

• I would work on the poems only in the order of their composition;
• If it turned out that the way to make a particular day’s writing work as a poem was to combine it with material from another day’s output, I would only take that other material from something else I’d written in the same month; and,
• In terms of content, while I would allow myself to go as far back into the past as I wanted/needed, I would not introduce anything into a poem that happened after the original day, or if that were not possible, the original month of composition. I made two exceptions to this last constraint, “The People in Gaza Keep Dying” and “In That Moment of Change.”

I wrote the poem that became “The People in Gaza Keep Dying” in January 2020 in response to the experience of reviewing Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies, by Steven Sher. Sher’s book is a deeply racist, proudly anti-Palestinian, Orthodox Jewish justification of the Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel and to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish nation state. Particularly disturbing is a poem called “Bombing Gaza” that, in light of the devastation Israel has wrought there since October 2023, could be called prophetic.

Before October 2023, I wasn’t sure how exactly I wanted to focus the poem. Once Israel began to bring Sher’s “Bombing Gaza” to life, however, it felt irresponsible not to connect the poem explicitly to current events. I decided to give the poem a title that would do this work instead of changing the text of the poem itself.

The detail I added to “In That Moment Of Change” is its dedication to the memory of my friend Veronica McGinley, who was murdered by her husband in April 2021. At that time, the poem had still not fully taken shape. It fills me with a deep, deep sadness that she will never read it, which is why I am dedicating this book to her.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #38

Naivëte, like a broken clock, gets it right twice daily. 
Jews and Muslims are cousins, are family, I hear 
in Morocco, from the taxi driver, the be-scarved woman 

guarding a blue synagogue. Even though they should be 
cranky, be-swearing food and drink; even as it’s Ramadan, 
and the driver in baseball cap careens in his springy red taxi.
God gives us strength.  Of Jews they smile, they glow.

Jill Pearlman, The Shared Overlap of Skullcaps

I am currently assisting with editing the next Sidhe Press anthology. The theme for this one is Grief and the submissions have come from a wide range of angles. All poems carry the poet’s unique view, but here there is something specifically tender about the words that are set down for us to read. Taking that first read of someone’s writing is a privilege and a joy, and editing always has me eager to see the poems that are sent in for consideration.  Having said that there is a need to take things slowly and give each poem its own space in time.

There is a wonderful tingle when certain lines from a poem continue to echo in my head after reading, and I love that feeling of resonance. There are also always poems that are very good in their own right but don’t fit the arc of the anthology as it forms. These have to be let go, but I know they will find their actual home somewhere else. I had heard this from editors before and having experienced it myself I can see more clearly now what they were referring to. Parts have to fit the whole so that the poems weave themselves into the whole journey of the book and make that arc. Some poems talk to each other along the way.

Sue Finch, A POCKETFUL OF TYRE VALVE COVER THINGS

Wikipedia describes ASMR as a neologism for a perceptual phenomenon characterized as a distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli. The nature and classification of the ASMR phenomenon is controversial, with strong anecdotal evidence to support the phenomenon but little or no scientific explanation or verified data. It has become a recent internet phenomenon. Online discussion groups such as the Society of Sensationalists formed in 2008 on Yahoo! and The Unnamed Feeling blog created in 2010 by Andrew MacMuiris aim to provide a community for learning more about the sensation by sharing ideas and personal experiences. Some earlier names for ASMR in these discussion groups included attention induced head orgasm, attention induced euphoria, and attention induced observant euphoria.

It’s interesting that these titles draw attention to the ‘paying of attention’ and, inevitably perhaps, my own thoughts about it revolve around poetry and its effects: the familiar defamiliarised, the frisson of the uncanny, Emily Dickinson talking about poems taking the top of your head off. ASMR seems linked to a particular quality of attention-giving which yields a rippling of pleasure, close to the erotic, but not the same as that. It is powerful yet undramatic; it is most common in quiet moments of observation. It seems to come when there are no goal-directed intentions in the attention-giving. It is also in a neutral sense ‘bestial’, an animal shiver, like hackles rising, but not out of anger. It’s surely something reaching far back into our ancient past, linking body and mind, yielding pleasure, rooted in a mode of being pre-dating language and conceptualisation. That interests me a great deal. Poetry is language deployed to circumvent the limits of language; these days I take that as a given. Yves Bonnefoy says: “poetry was not made to mean, but to restore words to their full intensity, their integral capacity to designate fundamental things in our relationships with ourselves and others, here and now, amid those chances that one should never, as Mallarmé did, dream of abolishing” (2012 PN Review interview with Chris Miller. Even if just considered as metaphor, perhaps ASMR is what poetry taps into, invokes, rehearses, re-discovers.

Martyn Crucefix, Back in the A.S.M.R.

But the mystics are right too.
When we’re fully here, God
is in this place.

When I’m paying
continuous partial attention
to three different news apps

or biting back responses
to someone wrong on Facebook
I’m not really here.

But last night my son
danced with his double bass
and the headlines all fell away.

Rachel Barenblat, Here

— I’d honestly not heard of Etel Adnan before reading a post last year on my favourite poetry blog by Devin Kelley titled Ordinary Plots. Who knows what rock I live under :) I ended up underlining half of The Spring Flowers Own which begins:

“The morning after
my death
we will sit in cafes
but I will not
be there
I will not be”

— “flowers do not grow on rifles” she says. And, “flowers triumph / over the human race / their tragedies are / short-lived.” And:

“It is not because spring
is too beautiful
that we’ll not write what
happens in the dark.”

— I was feeling rather worn out this morning and came upon a reel on Instagram by Sheniz and it gave me a real feeling of uplift — this reminder of the importance of colour.

— “Enemies are energizing but that fuel is short-lasting.” C.D. Wright said that. Flowers are also energizing. Planning your garden is energizing. This year, I plan on putting in extra dahlias and hollyhocks so I can give more away. Already imagining the random acts of flowers that I’ll be able to do.

Shawna Lemay, Beauty Notes: On Flowers, Mostly

When I was in first grade, I used to have
recurring dreams in which I hovered a few inches
above a sheet which turned into a quiet billowing

sea. I don’t have them anymore, only the images
fixed in memory. But I recognize the attitude:
listening for a hush that isn’t complete

silence— filled instead with insinuations
of sound and movement. Isn’t this too
a kind of reading, and the rippling a kind

of poetry? Yes, I think these are some forms
that help us. Or spirits, if that’s how you want
to name them. Dreams, for sure. But there’s

got to be something in you which knew it wanted
to turn its face in that direction, which wanted
to follow. How else could we have gotten here?

Luisa A. Igloria, Dreamwriting

In all the stuff on this blog, I’m thinking about poetry. Even when writing about Nirvana, I was thinking about poems and popularity and the way that obscurity can be an advantage. I was thinking about an underground for poetry, and how the idea of “indie” given to us by the 90s really cross-pollinated with literary culture and “indie publishing.” Because the hollowing out of the term “indie” and its contradictions matters for poetry too. Just as “indie” has long since become a mere algorithm and a fashion in the music world, many “indie” presses and bookstores prove to be highly de-pendent on corporate and state partnerships. A big difference, though, is that poetry has nowhere near the commercial appeal of music: a poet can’t “sell out” in the same way, because nobody is really buying.

And that is part of the problem. In this cordoned off, non-commercial little world of poetry and its “community” and the “independence” it so values, everything gets rationalized and excused, and you can get very deluded about your position. You can end up thinking all poetry is on the same side, inherently against the status quo, and sanctified by its being “non-profit.” This is often aligned with the view that poetry and its culture is somehow spiritual and immaterial, “a noble calling,” and that the political economics of it all is just a troublesome afterthought. I’ve called this view “literary exceptionalism,” and the problem isn’t just that it leads to an insular culture of boring poetry, bad politics, and exploitation; it’s also that it makes it hard to have any real sense of one’s position as an artist—and as such, “independence” ceases to be a material fact. It becomes “indie” as mere vibes, style, aesthetics.

And these are two things I’m always rattling on about: 1) literary exceptionalism is bogus and has no material analysis, and 2) independent literary culture—a counterculture for literature—is defined by how it relates to material factors. My idea of independent literary culture is one whose grounding principles draw a material line, not merely an aesthetic one, against the bullshit constituting establishment literary culture. To achieve this, one has to see the forces shaping the field of poetry and how these fit into the larger political-economic picture—and also how one fits into these, or against these, oneself. And for poets, in addition to broad factors like class itself, the unique conditioning forces include the state, the neoliberalized university (with its culture of professionalism and scarcity), and sources of centralized wealth (as given directly by entities like Amazon and as funneled through foundations and non-profits). Literary entities aligned with these things constitute, in varying degrees, the establishment forces—or at least those who have ceased to actively oppose the establishment.

In the last 35 years or so, there has been a massive blurring between this establishment—with its resources and infrastructure—and the ideology of “indie” within poetry. Everything has been disoriented. Where once it was absolutely clear where the establishment centers were and who was on their side in poetry—”Official Verse Culture” was institutionally and aesthetically distinct from the various schools of oppositional poetics, and the latter mostly lacked the resources of the former—now virtually every way of writing poetry has some foothold in the establishment.

R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK (no.1)

Goodbye tombstones. Goodbye minus signs.

Goodbye to the summer storm that became a winter of unsolvable arithmetic.

Hello wings. Hello honeycombs.

Hello murmurs emerging from the underground full-throated as a high school battle of the bands.

It’s early morning. I’m too sleepy to remember much that happened before this moment.

I’m too awake to release us from any promises of a dream.

Rich Ferguson, Hello, Goodbye

This season’s live session was all about growth. Growing your writing, pruning your writing to help it grow, identifying places where growth was being impeded. The session was lively: it’s good to give space, and be in a space, in which writers feel safe enough to express their fears, and one of the topics that came up, a topic that almost always comes up, is the fear of being left behind.

As we worked through exercises aimed at identifying what we wanted to write about rather than what we felt we should be writing about. One of the recurring blocks I see writers struggling with is feelings around the pressure to conform, keep up, replicate ‘successful’ writing and writers, all of which end up being a block to authenticity. The talk turned towards feelings of being irrelevant. The feeling of not really being listened to, not really being counted, not being classed as an emerging writer, because all the awards, all the attention, all the references to emergence in the writing community is aimed towards younger writers.

So much of what is happening, particularly in poetry, seems very non traditional in terms of style. But this is how literature evolves. Poetry is not a static art form, it is an evolving art form. Boundaries are always being pushed. I say this a lot, but it’s worth staying again – good writing never goes out of fashion, and authenticity is the path to good writing. Replicating a writing style because you have seen that style win competitions will lead to dissatisfaction because eventually that writing, that writer, won’t progress, they won’t grow.

Wendy Pratt, Growth Session: Older Writers Emerge Too

Let us be skunk cabbage, robed in red with our sisters.
Let us be spring peepers singing multiplicities.
Let us be river rocks guiding the bright breasts of fish and fowl.
Let us be symphony, whirlwind, and egg tooth
piercing the membrane, quietly cracking speckled shells.

Sarah Lada, Awe, A-W-E

Woke up feeling dread, like an important task was left undone, or some big issue was going to have to be faced. The smoke from the neighbor’s chimney writhed like a live thing, a fish desperate to escape the line, twisting, straining first in one direction, then the opposite. Temps have dropped, in the way of spring here, first one thing then another. I am a puddle of self-pity one minute, glorying in snowdrops the next. We’re weeks past the spring forward but still in transition. The new the new. The news the news. Yesterday I went to a store I rarely visit, and sat staring at the back of Dave’s apartment building. Later Bob said, I can’t believe Dave is just gone. Yes, I said. I know. But turns out he was talking about another Dave. Another type of gone. So many things seem unbelievable. So many things I thought would be different are not what I thought. I have wanted many things and sometimes it passed, the wanting, sometimes not. Sometimes I got what I wanted. Sometimes I got something else not looked for. And sometimes that resolved the unmet want. Sometimes it didn’t. Tulip and iris greens are shoving up, and the swamp is bruised with burgeoning skunk cabbage. We may get some snow. I wonder if I shouldn’t have bothered to get up today at all. But I did. I did.

Marilyn McCabe, Time to clean because I’m sick of keeping things

Worked on this version of Pablo Neruda’s wonderful poem this morning.

Ode to a Suit

Morning, and you lie
on a chair, waiting
for my airs, my graces,
my tenderness,
my hope, my body
to inhabit yours,
I step off the boat
of sleep, leave it
rocking behind me,
fill your sleeves,
set foot
in your empty legs,
the embrace
of your unwavering faith,
go into the street,
into poetry […]

Roy Marshall, Ode to a Suit