This week: a murdered poet, a wild god, the silence of pine forests, squawks, trills, and yodels, and much more. Enjoy.

The book knows that, just like humans, it’s destined to be born and die alone. But it also knows (again, just like humans) that it would far prefer to be accompanied in the meantime.

The book trembles with anticipation when the poet finally places it in an envelope and heads for the post office, launching it on a journey to its reader, though that’s nothing in comparison to the feeling of being held at last, its pages caressed and maybe even folded back if one or two of the poems really hit home… 

Matthew Stewart, The book knows…

Listen, we say, and I try
but fail without knowing it,
layers of sounds untangling
in a mind chaotic with
shattered mirrors. Only later,
in the dark, I hear water,
wind, a single clear tone. One.

PF Anderson, untitled

Do you remember my plan to take January as a retreat month?

Well, that didn’t happen. But I did try and take December as a retreat month and also that didn’t happen. I was being slightly over ambitious. But I have found that being over ambitious often means you end up with something half way to what you were aiming for. I managed to set some firm boundaries around the Christmas break, and I took two weeks off. This is unheard of for me. I even made the decision not to post on substack, which made me feel sick with anxiety. I don’t think I have missed posting on substack in the very nearly three years since I began posting weekly.

I did not write. Not even my diary.

On Christmas Day afternoon, once the guests had left, I crawled under a blanket and barely emerged again for a week. I read. I dived fully into book after book, the deep, deliciousness of disappearing into another world. I did not post on social media. I mostly didn’t check my accounts at all.

The world didn’t end.

I lost subscribers, plenty of them, (waves sadly at their retreating backs) but I was willing to sacrifice that loss for pure rest and the nourishment of being a reader rather than a writer. I did not plug my books, I did not formulate social media plans, or apply for anything, or answer emails, or submit anything or plan a new-year new me. I just drifted. No To Do list, no alarm, nothing but nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, or rarely.

When I began to prepare myself to come back to work I began to check into social media and interact more. Lots of people, lots of writers, had already gone back to work and jumped on the posting treadmill and my immediate feelings were of dread, of missing out, of being left behind of being not good enough because I was still in my blanket fort with my books and not running with the pack. Interspersed with all of the new courses on offer, workshops, events, subscription plans, posts and book news was the actual news in which it seems the world is already on fire.

Truth, emerge from your well and chastise us with your whip. I can’t cope with the corruption in the world right now, the lies and the greed and hatred and fear.

Wendy Pratt, Truth emerging from her well: on creativity and accountability

When I was 19 or 20, I checked out a public library copy of James Michener’s chronicle of the Kent State tragedy. I was at an age where I was pretty sure I was going to keep studying English Lit and planning loosely on a teaching career, though I would change my mind later when I realized I didn’t have the patience and nurturing temperament that teaching (well GOOD teaching) required. For a moment, though, in the summer of 1993, things opened a little, granting some much needed optimism after the Gulf War and a sense of hope and progress. Clinton had just been elected and the world seemed to be righting itself, even though I hadn’t been all that cognizant of the Reagan/Bush eras of my childhood and teen years. […]

The Michener book formed my ideas of what I surely thought we’d never, as a country regress to. For one, the sort of violence that occurred should not happen when the world was watching far more, be it the availability of news coverage, the internet, social media. People would not be prone to propaganda and state messaging as they were when there were less news outlet to cover things and more incentive to toe the line. I was wrong, In fact, it seems almost miraculous that I could BE so wrong. 

Kristy Bowen, the decline of democracy doomscroll

I have been working on a draft of a new poem this morning, “Who Gets to Speak,” which concerns the murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota, of Renee Nicole Good, who was at the wheel of her vehicle, her wife in the passenger seat, when an ICE officer fired into the car’s windshield. Good, shot in the head, died that same day, January 7, 2026.

Since the killing, more and more mayors and governors, elected representatives, celebrities, common citizens of these (un)United States of America have come out to raise their voices in both protest and outrage.

Since the killing, more and more of our so-called executive branch leaders, including our worst president, his lying Wild West sidekick Kristi Noem of the Department of Homeland Security, the know-nothing Kash Patel of the FBI, among others, none of whom dare utter the name Renee Nicole Good, offer up fodder of the day to explain away the wholly unnecessary death of a woman a mother a wife a citizen in her Honda SUV. The truth of how the killing unfolded is not known but many in the government, at all levels, have posited their truths. Everyone has the story. No one has all the facts of the story.

Maureen Doallas, Who Gets to Speak

I care
that this is the story
we teach to our children:
because we know

what it is to be
dehumanized, we will never.
Raise a cup to freedom.
Because we know the heart
of the stranger.

Rachel Barenblat, Our story

This post may seem a little bit unbalanced, but I have to describe the good times as well as the bad this week. Let me start with the birthday celebration with my good friend poet Kelli Agodon, in which we had a lot of laughs, some cupcakes, some libations, and some good talk about poetry. I had been feeling a bit discouraged on the poetry front, and Kelli is always good at helping me see the bigger picture on that front. […]

It is impossible to keep my blog apolitical these days. And why try? Not to quote Harry Potter, but as Minerva McGonagal said in the Deathly Hallows, “And his name is Voldemort, Filius. You might as well use it, he’s going to try and kill you either way.” There’s no point in trying to be nice, to not speak up in public, because at this point, they will try and kill us either way, and they proved it this week, murdering a young mother and award-winning poet, Renee Good, in cold blood by shooting her in the face when she was no threat, then lying about it and saying she was a ‘domestic terrorist.’ This evening they were breaking into people’s houses in Minneapolis, where I have many friends, without warrants, brandishing guns in front of children. If anyone is the terrorist at this point, it is the Gestapo-like ICE agents, who seem to face no consequences, unlike our military and police force, for murder. We’ll see if the murderer is brought to justice. There is plenty of video evidence to show that the woman was no terrorist, and the ice agent videotaping his encounter and when she says “I’m not mad at you” he growls “fucking bitch” as he shoots her three times in the head, with her wife and dog in the car. A white, innocent, American citizen – not a criminal, not an “illegal immigrant” but a local, mother of three, Christian housewife. None of those privileges protects us anymore from Trump’s evil personal secret enforcers. We must act to protect our country’s freedoms, or we must leave. It feels very much like the history books, reading about Berlin and Vienna in the 1930s. I remember reading about friends sneaking Jewish Dr. Freud out, and I remember asking myself why he didn’t leave sooner – but now I see, leaving isn’t easy, and a lot of people want to stay and fight to make their country a better place – though I am feeling unsure that that is even possible at this point.

With Trump kidnapping Venezuela’s President and First Lady, installing a puppet President and taking over the country’s oil, and now threatening our NATO ally Denmark by threatening to use military force to take Greenland, well, it sure does look like Hitler’s playbook, doesn’t it? And we know from history that appeasing bullies and dictators – as people and countries did in the 30s – did not protect them. Not being willing to speak the evil’s name does not protect us.

These are serious times, and serious topics. It is easy to feel frightened and helpless and angry, all at once. I am a poet, and so, as we witness these moments, we will write poetry, maybe no one will read it, but we will write it all the same.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Wonderful Visit with a Poet Friend in the New Year, and Then, Grappling with the ICE Murder of a Poet and an Unhinged President

“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”
—Carl Sandburg

January 6^th, formerly known as the Epiphany, now known as Insurrection Day, is Carl Sandburg’s birthday. Sandburg has been one of my favorite humans for most of my life. He was a Democratic Socialist and believed in the strength of America’s diversity. In other words, he was a good moral role model—good enough for the likes of Pete Seeger to admire.

When my child, Serena, was born on that day in 1998, I used the quote on a birth announcement, despite my being a devout atheist who believes the kitchen ceiling fan is a higher power.

Their birthday this year was a great reminder of how many true friends they have, people who called and texted and posted about them, brought them thoughtful gifts and gave them thoughtful cards.

It was the most temporary of panaceas. The next evening, they were crying about this headline from the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Humane Security: “Experts Warn U.S. in Early Stages of Genocide Against Trans Americans.” The article is worth reading.

Of course, trans people are not the only Americans being targeted for “mass atrocity.” First, they came for the immigrants. And now, every day, they are coming for regular people who are terrified of a masked militia disappearing them and their neighbors.

Renee Nicole Good was murdered yesterday by an untrained ICEhole with anger issues—because who would take a job as a paid kidnapper and murderer?

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Anger Issues

Not long ago, I read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It’s one of those books you hear about so often that you think you’ve read it. (Maybe I had?) It seems brand new at the moment in the age of book banning. And that first sentence: “It was a pleasure to burn.”

From page 79 of the 50th Anniversary edition:

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality.”

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, powerless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”

*

Have you read Bradbury’s essay (included in the back of my edition) titled “Investing Dimes”? He talks about writing the book in the “typing room in the basement of the library at the University of California at Lost Angeles.” He says, “There, in neat rows, were a score or more of old Remington or Underwood typewriters which rented out a a dime a half hour. You thrust your dime in, the clock ticked madly, and you typed wildly, to finish before the half hour was out.” He goes on to talk about how writing the book changed him. “Have I changed my mind about much that it said to me, when I was a younger writer? Only if by change you mean has my love of libraries widened and deepened, to which the answer is a yes that ricochets off the stacks and dusts talcum off the librarian’s cheek.”

I cannot tell you how much I love the whole idea of putting a dime into a typewriter, forcing the writer to type madly.

Shawna Lemay, Delicious Books, Beauty Shocks

The shades have no names, so delicate, 
merged, chilled.  Darkly brooding,  
wading into my poor mind.

I’d understand if there were 
only darkness.  But that gray shines 
bright, perfect for cloud bathing.

Jill Pearlman, Bowl of Mysteries

I find myself in a position where I have met my goals. The logical next step is to work in a full collection, and this is where I’ve stumbled. For a while I’ve noticed a nag at the back of my brain that maybe I don’t love poetry enough anymore. I’ve struggled to feel motivated to take the leap into joining a poetry group, I‘ve noticed I’m reading fewer poetry books and whilst I have a lot of ideas for poetry projects, I’m reluctant to begin any of them. Planning my hopes for the year, I began to write the usual poetry related goals and noticed a flicker of that Sunday night/ Monday morning feeling. Something had shifted and 2026 feels like a time to swerve away from poetry – for a while at least.

Some poetry related things will remain. I’ve started a Facebook group for poetry prompts and feedback, a gentle space with no pressure and no competition – just love of playing with words, and I have a Poetry School course that begins next week as well as ongoing commissions for bespoke wedding poetry. Poetry will shift back to being a creative outlet rather than something that drives me and creates the feeling of desperately trying to be as good as all the poets that have numerous magnificent collections out in the world. I’m moving back towards long form writing, winnowing out ideas for short fiction and dare I, dare I say it taking tentative steps to explore ideas for a novel.

Am I just giving up on poetry? No. What I’m doing is allowing myself to be proud of what I’ve achieved and to allow myself to tread a different path and, in a world, where everything is becoming more terrible and terrifying each day, this feels like freedom.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I learned from the snow

snowmelt puddle
while it can
holding a tree

reflection by tom clausen

Brandon Kilbourne has a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago and over twenty years of experience as a research biologist at natural history museums. His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Obsidian, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

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

Well, this is my first book, so I can’t compare it to my more recent work, unless I compare it to research articles in biology and paleontology… In that vein though, I would say that Natural History, and the associated award, represent my ability to incorporate my scientific knowledge, expertise, and training into art. While the book, and my poetry more broadly, probably has something of a science influence in the fact that it’s narrative and prosy, it’s a big departure from my science writing in that it brings in human and geopolitical history in a way that my research articles simply can’t. I would say that the ability to probe the links of science and museums to colonialism and slavery—and the uncomfortable questions this entails—is something available to me solely through art. Likewise, using poetry, I can explore perspectives that you would not find in a scientific research article. Of course, the point of view of a near-extinct sea cow would not be found in a research article, but I’m also able to include the subjective experience of field biologists and paleontologists, which usually are not found in research articles but more in field notes or diaries, if anywhere. Ultimately poetry gives me a lens to reflect upon science and museums and my place in these worlds, including in the context of being a Black person in these historically (very) white spaces.

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

Good question. I think poetry appeals to me because of its compact form and the challenge of encapsulating in a relatively limited space a deeper reflection or what strikes me as a profound experience. Though some of my poems are admittedly quite long! Beyond this, I’m drawn to poetry given its room for acoustic play (e.g., alliteration, rhythm, rhyme) and the brief mis-directions of meaning or fleeting associations that are available through enjambments.

Another point of appeal is that poetry can generate wonder by renewing and reframing (human) experience, and this might easily go hand-in-hand with natural history museums, which are something of houses of wonder for the natural world. Fostering this wonder is largely a function of their exhibitions as well as their collections—of which usually less than 5% are on display in exhibitions in the larger museums. While I think much, if not all, nature/science writing is geared towards creating wonder toward and appreciation of the natural world, in some ways perhaps poetry is predisposed towards this? Another thing to consider is that science starts from a curiosity manifested as questions (which are then developed into hypotheses). Likewise, poems are often anchored in a curiosity which then begets a question. Though science is pursued with the hope of a clear answer/result, the questions raised in poetry may not have a such an answer (though it’s worth noting that scientific studies also do not always reach a definitive answer or result). Perhaps it’s also that, like science, poetry employs image, comparison, and surprise to develop its insights.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brandon Kilbourne

It may be hibernation season, but I can feel the literary world heating up again–professors building syllabi, organizational emails flying. I’m participating in some of that planning energy toward two local events in the next month: “Writing from the Underworld” at Rockbridge Regional Library branch three blocks from me (1/29, 5:30-7:00, a short reading followed by a free workshop), and, an hour’s drive away in Charlottesville, a panel discussion called “Guardians of Wonder: Writing What We Must Not Lose,” sponsored by the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont (2/6, live music starting at 6:30 pm). Thanks to an NEA grant (what a miracle to win one this year!), the garden is giving away copies of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World to the first 125 people who register to attend. Both were invitations rather than events I pitched or applied for. A nice effect of my 2025 travel seems to be that people think of me for events more often.

“Writing from the underworld”–not just mycocosms but whatever lurks below our visible lives–certainly fits my January mood. I want to be writing, and I feel intensely introspective, but it’s hard to warm myself up into language. To get started after a break, I often circle around like a dog seeking a comfortable position, chasing whatever dim sparks distract me. I had trouble even doing that this week because I’m so upset by escalating political horrors. I’d promised myself to check the news less often–surely morning and evening is enough–but then what’s happened by 5 pm so thoroughly knocks the wind out of me, maybe that’s not the right strategy. It’s almost as if contemporary media is ingeniously designed to bait and hook a person at the neurological level. Consumer, stay in your phone-cave!

At least I’m reading. I’ve spent this week with some terrific recent poetry collections I picked up at the Punch Bucket Lit Fest in Asheville in September, including Sara Moore Wagner’s daring poems about Annie Oakley in Lady Wing Shot and Han VanderHart’s spare and heartbreaking Larks.

Lesley Wheeler, At the lip of the cave

As I head back to a more regular work schedule, let me capture a few last snippets that I haven’t so far.

–As we traveled, we saw a lot of wildlife.  Of course, we often see a lot of wildlife, a lot of dead wildlife by the side of the road.  But Christmas Eve, as we drove back across the mountain from Bristol (TN) to Arden (NC), we saw a wolf.  You might ask how we knew it was a wolf and not a dog/coyote/fox.  It was a large animal, with a face that wasn’t like a fox or a coyote.  It was far from any house where a dog might have gotten out of a fenced yard.  We also saw an eagle on our trip back from Williamsburg.  At first I thought it was your average vulture, but it had white wings and a white head as it swooped up away from the road kill he had been eating. […]

–Before yesterday, I might have written about how I didn’t do much poetry writing, but Tuesday, I came up with a pretty good rough draft.  I saw the foggy weather and thought about the early December forecast for freezing fog, and came up with an interesting Epiphany poem.

–Even if I haven’t done a lot of writing, I’ve done a lot of quilting.  My spouse and I made 4 quilt tops for the local Lutheran group that creates quilts for Lutheran World Relief.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Few More Snippets from Winter Break

I think of shadows —
shadows of fixed length
people shrinking and expanding with the light
and disappearing altogether at the end of the day
to a place where the disappeared gather
you and I at opposite ends
unable to move in the darkness.
What should I call it?

What should I call the reading
of the last word of the poem
and the inability to go back to the beginning
to go anywhere
because that devastating silence that follows
is the poem.
And that is the reading.
That being rooted in the debris for as long as it takes
for the universe to stop shuddering.
What should I call it?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Nomenclature

What are we to say when we encounter the line “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk”? This was what struck the public ear when Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) published “Hurt Hawks” in his 1928 collection Cawdor and Other Poems — the memorable line, opening the second part of the poem, declaring that a fierce, alien view of the world was the deep, true way to see the human relation to nature.

It was also the line that, for some years, kept me from fuller appreciation of Jeffers. The poem is certainly widely known. Anthologies of American poetry typically choose “Hurt Hawks” as a selection from Jeffers, setting it beside “Shine, Perishing Republic” and (slightly less commonly) “Be Angry at the Sun.” But something in the poem’s most striking line always put my back up, seeming a cheap pose: tough-guy Nietzscheanism, as Nietzsche was understood in those days. “I’d sooner . . . kill a man than a hawk,” really? No sense of hesitation for the human? And that I’m-a-no-nonsense-man interpolation, “except the penalties”?

But in recent years, I’ve found myself coming back to Jeffers and the long rhythmic lines, often nine or ten stresses, that became his trademark. And that has meant facing up to “Hurt Hawks,” trying to understand the interaction of the poem’s two parts: seventeen and fifteen lines of uneven verse.

In the first part, Jeffers shows us a red-tail hawk with a shattered wing that trails the bird “like a banner in defeat.” Even were he to survive, the hawk will never again be able to fly — never again deploy the freedom of the sky and the deadly power of its talons. Death would be “salvation,” of a kind.

That picture leads the poem to a meditation on Nature and the “wild God of the world.” Like, say, Robert Frost in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” Jeffers rejects the pathetic fallacy, the ordinary human reading of human emotions into animals. But where Frost rejects all human projection, Jeffers suggests that extraordinary men — ah, Nietzsche! — or those in such extraordinary circumstances as “men that are dying” can perceive the god of nature that has been forgotten by “you communal people.” That god can sometimes be merciful to animals but “not often to the arrogant,” which in the context of the first part of the poem seems another sneer at the comfortable “communal people” so distant from the “beautiful and wild” — from the natural state to which they must return in the moments of their dying.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Hurt Hawks

In the monotheistic traditions, the created world emerged from a single, self-contained and self-sufficient, perfectly unified, divine source; and everything those traditions teach us about how to live in the world follows from the belief in that unity. What would change, I asked myself, if we started instead from the belief that the creative act itself requires the tension inherent in a preceding disunity, in the differences between two forces that need to come together for creation to occur?

As the list of all the different “manifestations of attraction” given by the Kāma Sūtra commentator shows, that tension need not be understood as sexual by definition, though it can of course be that as well. Instead, to me, it feels akin to what Audre Lorde talks about in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power:”

[T]he first [way] in which the erotic [functions for me] is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding…and lessens the threat of…difference.

Lorde, of course, was writing out of a Black lesbian feminist sensibility, not the desire to achieve mystical enlightenment. Her essay was specifically about the need for women to reclaim the erotic within themselves over and against patriarchy’s pornographic narrowing of that capacity. Nonetheless, her position has in common with the Hindu thought I quoted above the notion that there is no such thing as a relationship that does not involve the negotiation of power—that all relationships, in other words, whether between people or between humans and the divine, are in that sense political.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Power We Pretend Not To See – 2

i reject the idea that any of us are here
for some heroic reason. i think at most i was put here
by the soil to be a headstone carver. to find the skull
& perfect it. there is always a need for
more dead inside the dead. no ending is complete.
even the headstones are licked by rain. fade until
the names are whispered in the stone.

Robin Gow, nail in the coffin

This morning a light wind tickles the leaves and drops of rain, held there temporarily, fall. No bird song yet in the faintly herbed air.

Alt Text says this week’s photo is a moon in the sky, and this makes me chuckle because I wondered if this might be the suggestion. I say it is actually a photograph of a balloon flying freely in the sky back in 2014, and when I photographed it I was loving its flight and its brief moonlike quality.

I did a happy poet dance this week in celebration of the publication of My Sister Went to Live on the Moon. It was wonderful to see this poem on the Atrium site and to remember the joy of writing it. It was one of those intense writing experiences where the thoughts come tumbling out like a waterfall into a fast flowing river. The kind that has me eager to see what has been created when I can finally pause the writing. The kind that when that pause comes I feel as though I have been a conduit for the words and their journey onto the page.

My recent reflection that this might be the year I howl at full moons rather than include them in my poetry isn’t quite accurate now! I have opened the year with a moon poem and followed this up by writing another where the moon is centre stage during Kim Moore and Clare Shaw’s January Writing Hours! The one currently in the notebook is a little rough round the edges, but I reckon some tender editing and a few visits to Poetry Corner will have it seeing the light of day.

Sue Finch, THE MOON POEMS ARE WAXING LYRICAL

In November, I went to London to take part in a showcase for my publisher. It was a really lovely night, which I was extremely nervous about before I went and then when I was there I really enjoyed it. I met my publicist for the first time, hung out with my publisher and various authors under the Little/Brown imprint, including the always lovely Hollie McNish.

I’ve never taken part in a publisher’s showcase and was struck by the different requirements and expectations for poets versus novelists. Poets read one or two poems – novelists either gave a kind of speed pitch about their novel or took part in a quick fire Q & A about their work. It made me feel very relieved as a poet that I could hide behind my poetry! I was struck by how much more novelists have to rely on their personality to promote their work, and quick wits to come up with answers…

Kim Moore, A late November and December Reads Post

Everything about starting Red Hen was a risk, and I often ask myself whether the risk was worth it.

There is no complete answer to that question, but when I think about strategy for the press, I think that we wouldn’t have started Red Hen if I were not the kind of person who leaned into risk. Red Hen Press got to thirty years on a wave of risk-taking. There is a dream that goes into building a press, and then a lot of hard work and labor gets you to the first twenty-five or thirty years. But to sustain a press, you must do a lot of planning, marketing, team-building. The phrase “what got you here won’t get you there” certainly applies to us.

I can still enjoy the occasional risk: a high dive, a long swim, a cold swim, a drive with no gas, arriving in a city with no place to stay, going for a week with no food. I can experiment with degrees of risk personally, but Red Hen is going for the building blocks of sustainability. Our next thirty years are going to center on strategic thinking, planning, inviting more thought partners and fundraising partners to the table.

In the risk of starting a press, there are going to be a lot of hard parts that you aren’t ready for, and you will want to throw in the towel. You are often working largely unpaid during the time you could be writing or making biscuits. But the risk leads to moments of joyful work—finding a great author, editing a brilliant book. This is why I started the press.

The swim this morning reminded me that, in my own life, I will always have the joy of risk. When I swim out a long way, because I believe in risk, I have never kept anything for the swim back. I give it my all; I keep moving forward.

In 2026, as Red Hen Press turns thirty-two, we are entering our next level of success. Our team has a plan for sales, marketing, and publicity. Risk to strategy is a leap from the top of one building to the next, but we have been practicing our jumps for years, and for us, with the ground far below, the leap feels like flying.

Kate Gale, Leaving the Shore: On the Cold Plunge of Risk

These impediments to moving books, this idea of small press as part of the real commodities economy jostles me about.

It reinvigorates in me the idea of poetry as shared life process, not saleable goods. Is poetry 50% hustle? Sholn or share alike?

Conceive hook and impact of a poem or work to place it in “the market”, as a frame, makes a poem an interchangeable widget. This is problematic. It objectifies something tender, careful, playful, vulnerable, ephemeral. An auction block doesn’t honour the spirit of poetry. 

Saw an ad for how art is not the main act if one is to “succeed” as a gallery — it has also taken the kool-aid of capitalism. Capitalism, which is to say to siphon money from working class to the rich, to accept hierarchies as is, to be isolated, specialized, part of the amused, obedient masses. 

Poetry isn’t always sticking it to the man. It is grown within systems. Selling and buying it seems shamefaced somehow.

So many conundrums to solve. 

Pearl Pirie, Digital Chapbooks

It’s true that wintry walks offer quiet splendor (sometimes) and a chance to reflect, but mostly winter affords the chance to stay inside, curled up with a book or browsing through garden catalogs. Theoretically, it’s a good time to revise and submit my work; often, however, I don’t get to that process because winter is also a low-energy time for me. I powered through a fibromyalgia flare two days after New Year’s Eve because loved ones were visiting, but there’s a bit of fallout as a result–worth it, though; and I’m chuffed about taking poetry workshops later in the month. Meanwhile, reading books! I got a Samuel Hazo collection from my local library, I’m reading Wendell Berry and Richard McCann, and Ada Limón’s You Are Here is on my to-read pile. I’ve also felt inspired by the start-of-a-new-year blog posts Dave Bonta has curated on his Poetry Blog Digest. Many writers and books there I want to check out, and many writers and poets feeling some of the same things I’ve been feeling about the past year and what to make of the years ahead.

So to recharge, as it were, I’ll do small, refreshing things this January: take photos, doodle with watercolors, read books, tromp about in boots, meet pals for morning coffee, draft poems, play with images, as per Johan Huizinga–“To call poetry, as Paul Valery has done, a playing with words and language is no metaphor: it is the precise and literal truth…What poetic language does with images is to play with them.”

Ann E. Michael, Small, refreshing

Sanskrit poetry uses quantitative metres based on the patterned alternation of long and short syllables, similar to those of classical Latin and Ancient Greek. This particular poem is in the metre known as Śārdūlavikrīḍita, which is by far the single most common metre in the collection. In this case, the poem consists of four metrically-identical sequences of nineteen syllables each, arranged in two couplets. These are sometimes printed as two long lines, and in Sanskrit poetics each of the four metrical sequences is in fact conceived of as a ‘quarter-line’, meaning that the whole poem, though consisting of four repetitions of the same metrical sequence, is understood to be a single unit.

As the poem is in a metre which would be familiar to any experienced reader of Sanskrit lyric, I thought it was important that the style and form of the translation should be readily accessible to an Anglophone reader. For this reason, I made no attempt in this instance to reproduce or even suggest the original metre in my translation, as this would be likely to produce quite an unusual-sounding poem – the opposite of my aim. On the other hand, a free verse translation would set aside entirely the considerable formal constraints of the Sanskrit poem, which are a considerable part of its beauty, memorability and, for Sanskrit readers, its familiarity. Instead, I tried to combine ordinary English diction and word order – to create a sense of accessibility – with stanzas, end-rhyme, half-rhyme and also quite a high degree of assonance to suggest a formal structure: in the first stanza, for example, there is a concentration of words containing similar vowel sounds (first, is, this, evening, nights, I, filled, moonlight, Vindhya, hills, thick, jasmine, first time). Here is my translation of the poem:

The first man I lay with is my husband now
And this evening is just the same
As those nights when I felt filled
By moonlight, and the breeze came
Down from the Vindhya hills thick
With the scent of jasmine opening for the first time.

And I too am the same. So why
Does my heart so yearn again to lie
Behind a screen of reeds, in pleasure
So tender and so long to take
On the slope of the bank, on the rise of my waist.

In my translation each couplet has become a whole stanza, one slightly longer than the other. Within the stanzas, I have attempted to reproduce the order of thought of the Sanskrit and something of its effect. In the original, for example, the first half-line refers to the husband and the next line-and a half to the nights they spent together when courting: so in my version only the first line of the first stanza describes the speaker’s husband, and the rest of the stanza deals with the nights.

Sanskrit poetry of this type achieves particular density and concision in various ways all of which create a challenge for the translator. One of these is by assuming knowledge in the reader of the wider cultural and literary tradition to which it belongs. Sanskrit lyric is particularly rich in erotic verse, which is divided into many different types and typical scenarios: there is no real parallel for this in any Western literary tradition. Similarly, several elements of the poem assume specific cultural knowledge. There are, for instance, many different Sanskrit words for different types of jasmine, each of which has its own cultural and literary connotations. The type mentioned here, mālatī, is known for its strong scent, abundance of flowers, its use as a woman’s hair decoration, and for flowering in the evening. The Anglophone reader is very unlikely to be aware of different types of jasmine, let alone their different possible associations, so to introduce a qualifying adjective here would risk alienating the reader. On the other hand, jasmine is, I think, familiar enough even to an Anglophone reader – and its strong scent sufficiently obvious and evocative – that I was not tempted to replace it with a more familiar flower with broadly similar connotations, such as honeysuckle.

Victoria Moul, In the translator’s workshop: a poem from the “Subhāsitaratnakosha”

I am honoured and delighted to have taken part in the BBC Radio 4 programme Artworks celebrating 40 years of Poems on the Underground.

You can listen to the episode here.

With thanks to producer Mair Bosworth for inviting me to talk about my encounter with Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Words, Wide Night’ somewhere between Swiss Cottage and St John’s Wood.

Anthony Wilson, Poems on the Underground is 40!

I was happy to appear this week on David Bauman’s poetry podcast In Three Poems. I love the format which focuses on (as the name implies) three poems. One of mine chosen and read by Dave, one of mine read by me, and one I select by another poet–Tom Hennen’s “From a Country Overlooked.” We talk about birding (Dave’s an expert, I’m a hack), hiking, the silence of pine forests, and what all that has to do with poetry and my new book Temporary Shelters. You can listen to it at this link or find it on Spotify or Apple.

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

Grant Clauser, Grant Reads Tom Hennen and Talks About Birds on In Three Poems Podcast

Today I’m happy to share with you an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change, which was just published on AGNI’s blog. It’s from the first chapter of the book, “A World Bewildered,” which explores how creative writers and artists can lean into their negative capability—their capacity to be with uncertainty and contradiction without grasping after clear answers—as an approach to both our lives and our work during these bewildering and tenuous times. This particular section reminds us that the writing process is not just about expressing feelings and ideas or causing transformation in the minds and hearts of the audience, but also—if we let it—a process of self-transformation: an opportunity to change our own minds and see previously-hidden truths and connections.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, You Are Not the Choir – or, Seeing the Matrix

I wrote “Document” last spring at a cabin in the woods in southern Ohio. I call it my happy place, and at least part of every book I’ve ever published has been written there. I remember sitting in a chair by the fire, looking out the window, and noticing sunlight coming down through the leaves. (The word in Japanese is komorebi, meaning “sunlight filtering through trees.”) I’d been thinking—and writing—a lot about memory and the way the self is revised over time. These are themes that come up again and again in A Suit or a Suitcase.

I’ve been going to that cabin, or one neighboring it, for 22 years. I’ve been watching sunlight (or rain, or snow, or high winds) through those trees for 22 years. It’s a repeated experience and yet a new experience every single time. Even if the trees and the view are exactly the same, the light is not, and the season is not, and the time of day is not, and I am not. The perspective changes because the viewer changes.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “Document”

When Elizabeth Bishop sat down on her bed to put on her shoes on the 6th October 1979, she was preparing to go out for dinner and due to be picked up within the hour. She certainly wasn’t expecting to have a cerebral aneurysm and die. She was only sixty-eight.

If her death hadn’t come so early and so suddenly, I very much doubt that Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke Box, Alice Quinn’s controversial book of Bishop’s uncollected poems, drafts and fragments, would have seen the light of day. The book is entirely out of step with Bishop’s meticulous quality control: Bishop published only 101 poems and translations in her lifetime. I feel miserable that her legacy has been forced to carry this book of failed poems, private fragments and early drafts that go nowhere. Although the book was published twenty years ago, I’m writing about it now because I only read it for the first time while preparing my recent North Sea Poets class on Bishop. I’d known of its existence, but had been – wisely, it turns out – avoiding it. And I can’t believe there wasn’t more sustained outrage on her behalf.

At least there was some. At the time, Helen Vendler, in a scathing review in The New Republic, called it a book of ‘repudiated’ poems. I would argue that they aren’t poems at all. The most charitable interpretation is ‘raw material’: ideas that didn’t work or go anywhere, and were rightly abandoned. A poem isn’t a poem until it’s ready to make its own way in the world as a finished, polished piece of art; its publication represents its formal gift to the reader. Before then, it’s the – often very – private property of the poet in whose notebook it took root and grew (and indeed often died). Surely this rule especially applies to Bishop, a poet not only with a track record of award-winning books, but also famous for her astonishing rigour – someone who could wait for years to find the right word or phrase, and finally deem a poem ready for publication. Bishop is the opposite of a freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness writer; there is something even more violating and upsetting not just in seeing her process on display, but in the false claims for its ‘finishedness’ made to justify the act. Increasingly it feels to me like an act of vandalism.

Lisa Brockwell, Burn Your Notebooks

I’ve tried to understand what makes ‘angels’ and ‘rain’ seem so radio-actively evocative in their context. Of course there’s sheer surprise at the sudden entry of a Judaeo-Christian metaphor, and the incongruous fusion of the bright, sunlit idea of angels with that of rain. However, I think it’s above all a matter of sound and rhythm. The ‘a’ sound stands out phonetically because it’s much more heavily stressed than the only previous occurrence in ‘decaying’. It’s also emphasised by the way the speaking voice moves into it. It seems to me to drop on the unstressed second syllable of ‘Ocean’, at what might well have been the end of a sentence; to gather itself in the following line and stanza break; then to explode into the marvellous ‘ANGels of rain and lightning’. Meter emphasises how ‘An-gels’ divides into two syllables, making us register the n and the soft g as separate consonant sounds, so that the voice seems to hang suspended for the fraction of a second in the middle of the word. This greatly heightens its sonic force and so underlines the leaping way in which disparate ideas come together or explode out of each other in the metaphor.

Edmund Prestwich, Such dazzling genius

This poem appears in Tzara’s 1946 collection le Signe de vie (Sign of Life), but was written between 1938 and 1945. During that time, Tzara stayed in occupied France and participated in the resistance. As he was both Jewish and an active communist, his life was very much in danger, and at one point a hostile newspaper doxxed him to the gestapo. You can read more about Tzara’s war-time activity here.

Before on this blog, I’ve translated sections of Tzara’s epic poem of 1931, L’Homme approximatif—a work that itself shows an evolution into Surrealism from his earlier Dadaist style. Where that early style was absurdist and almost nihilistic, his more surrealist approach introduced something akin to sustained dreaming on the page. A very wide range of emotions, thoughts, and imagery courses through that work. Here, in the poem of 1946, his style has tempered quite a bit stylistically, as he moves from epic to something more or less lyric. Instead of lines that pile up with images and fragments, here he uses stanzas and, at times, relatively straight-ahead prosody. But as in the poem of 1931, he never uses punctuation, he deploys fragments and discontinuities—even if they make the poem awkward—and his imagery and diction are, thankfully, still volatile.

Above the style itself, what captures me in the following poem is the complexity of Tzara’s reaction to the war’s end and the Allied victory. Tzara gives us a blend of gratitude, irony, anger, dread, despair, belief, trauma, longing—a complete disorganization of values and affects, all threaded together in a single imaginative gesture. 

R.M. Haines, Four Poems of Petty War

What about this poem reached out to me? Which part of my existence felt apprehended in (or by) its being?

An elegance in the stanzaic construction. An intertextual friskiness in the speaker’s engagement of motifs and phrases hatched while marveling over the work of another. An alluring ghost-presence of images from Yeats’ poem, “The Sorrow of Love”, with its repeated conjunctions:

And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world’s tears
And all the trouble of her labouring ships,
And all the trouble of her myriad years.

Or maybe a gist of Yeats’ “Broken Dreams” — though it seems too dedicated, too intent on cherishing what has aged rather than what was empty.

I can’t remember.

The way I imagine it has nothing to do with its reality, or with Tate’s realization. And I like that in a poem. I value being being strung out on a line, trying to locate my affective response on a range between disappointment and fascination. Two friends chew over edits in their overly-meaningful poems. They go out for drinks and leave each other with words. Riddling words that want definition. Poems excel at riddling the definitive parts of language, and — in my imagination — Tate writes “Two for Charles Simic” in dialogue with the possibility of defining the sky or nothing.

Alina Stefanescu, James Tate

You come in from your early walk, tell me you saw a dead swan frozen in reeds at the edge of the iced-up river. Bird flu’s here again. I drive to our land. Black ice on the hill road. A car coming the other way skids and swerves. I pull on to the verge to avoid it. The look of panic on the driver’s face stays with me as I drive on to our track. It takes a minute or two to free two frozen locks on gates. Our smallholding’s three hundred yards up the track, which is white with snow and frost. I park the truck, haul water from the back. The woods are quiet in the freezing fog. Frosted leaves, grass. I know even now carbon is moving, tree to tree, as each one rests. Roots are exchanging nutrients. We are clearing ground for a new pig-barn. The bonfire from the dug-out debris smoulders. Smoke blends with fog.

Bob Mee, EARLY MORNING, JANUARY 8, 2026

The squawks, trills, and yodels of alarm and demand come from the bare branches when us bipedals walk about. Continuously we siphon seed into the feeders, toss the peanuts, slide cakes of suet into their holders.

We know about those deceptive, bullying jays, tantalizing us with their false blues. We can imagine every shade of red that met the hawk’s beak. We know about the House Sparrow’s vandalism and murder within bluebird boxes. We monitor. We maintain. We press roots into the soil. We raise worms. We let the grasses grow. We raise abundant flowers. Everything for you, my friends and yet the birds blow up into the sky like a bomb when we step outside. Donna retreats. The squirrels climb their cursive up the trees and jump their serifs from bough to bough, all the while trilling their loud song. The chipmunks dive into the earth like it is water.

And here we stand, hands on our hips on the patio, scanning the barren canopies where birds huddle like hooded monks on the high branches.

Sarah Lada, Come to This Place Where Only We Are Violent

My daughter and I were walking in the forest in early November. Hamilton, Ontario, just below the Niagara Escarpment. Light was filtered amber through the yellow leaves. The way it reflects bright off snow, it reflected from the leaves fallen on the forest floor. We were walking through a woods suffused by golden light, a continuous late afternoon honeying, as if walking through a leaf itself, some kind of Magic School Bus science trip.

If I believed in heaven, I said, it wouldn’t be the bright green technicolour spring of the Christian right. it wouldn’t be Webern’s boundless, directionless, infinite twelve-tone heaven. It would be this fall. The end of an age. Elves leaving. The mortal forest. The peat smell. No gaudy bursting of flower buds or impetuous birds. This lager-coloured light in a shuffling forest.

I don’t understand those who don’t like all the seasons, my daughter said.

Then we wondered about borders. Where are the borders of colours, when does red become orange, and when does grey darken into blue?

Other places, there are only two seasons. Rainy and dry. And why four? What about the metric system. Maybe there should be five.

We could invent another season, try to find its source in our memory, associations, hopes.

What would we call it? When would it be?

A before-fall, an after-spring. A season of in-between days.

Perhaps it is there already like a silent letter, inexpressible and unspoken. A subtext between father and daughter. The dry season between drops of rain.

Gary Barwin, The Metric Season: walking with my daughter in 2011

What was the question that nudged
me awake, that I know still
has no answer?

I have a memory of pork
smoked over embers, the mumbled
prayers of mambunong, rice

wine scattered on the ground
for blessing; knives slicing meat
to dress in a bowl with lime and pepper.

My tongue is always bathed
with longing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Hunger Wakes Me

rain falls without clouds. without sky. without judgment. timber
by timber the old structures are brought down. a poet of white flowers,
lying near death, discovers salt in the depths of heaven.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: a magic baby, the local megaliths, over two million lights, the way a poet blinks, and much more. Enjoy! See you in 2026.

The color of the year is charcoal, and these
are the ashes with which we paint over this
sparkling holiday, dimming the fairy lights
into a gentle distance, glow to glimmer.

PF Anderson, Sonnet

The poems are curious pinpoints set as a kind of sequence. They are minimalist, although less imagistic than narrative, offering narrative moments, albeit sans context but for themselves, and perhaps the suggesting of grouping, although more as a way to understand how to approach them, perhaps, as opposed to any kind of particular interconnection or narrative line. The pieces pinpoint, individual dots on an expansive grid, which can’t help but begin to form shapes, if even unconsciously, as any reader might go through. […] Davies’ poems are, each, individually complete in their incompleteness, fragmentary in nature, and less an exploration in density than a way of looking at narrative through a keyhole, perhaps.

rob mclennan, James Davies, it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall

Gabriel, if you like, be not afraid, to follow that shimmering orb

until you find a hurried and poetically humble stall, there a magic baby

waits to fisher stitch an empire’s myths. What if things were not

as we thought them? What if we were wrong, lost, lost in all of this?

james mcconachie, Yet Nothing You Dismay

I love these quieter days after Christmas. Today is the first day I’ve had entirely to myself since term ended, and I’m spending it by:

– finding new shelves for old bottles

– reading poetry by Morag Anderson and Maggie Milner, and choosing poems for January Writing Hours

– plotting with Kim by text and arranging our live events for paying subscribers for January, February and March

– arranging broken bits of pottery into categories which are obvious only to me

– making whisky liqueur so that the house is full of the smell I remember from Christmas Eve

– looking for the local megaliths I’ve been ignoring for years – until I discovered The Megalith Portal in Fiona Robertson’s “Stone Lands”. Then my partner bought me “The Old Stones” for Christmas, and now all of the big stones on the moors are transformed, and a new obsession is born!

I’m wishing you light, and I hope that however dark or busy your day, there’s time, however snatched, to do the things that make you happy, or comfortable, or warm.

Clare Shaw, If You Need More Light …

At the heart of Deryn Rees-Jones’ new collection Hôtel Amour (Seren), there is a sequence of twenty-four sonnets which flip for the first time into the first person – following the third person of the early section, ‘The Hotel’, and preceding the (mostly) third person of the later section, ‘The Garden’. And at the heart of this first-person sequence, there is a poem, Sonnet xii, in which the poet addresses her thoughts to her deceased husband, the memory of whom is anchoring her sense of self to her weakened and virus-riddled body. And at the heart of this sonnet, like all of them neatly bisected into seven-line stanzas, this clause straddles the whiteness of the central break:  

…and me

like a kite flown from the beach as you look up to hold me…

(Sonnet xii)

At the very heart of Hôtel Amour, then, is a ‘me’, and then a blank space, and then a metaphor, and then a ‘you’. And my reading of this collection is that it is an attempt – and a brilliant one – to fill in, or at least to give some definition to, that blank space that sits between the ‘me’ and the ‘you’ and which is therefore at the very centre, the unknowable centre, of the self. More specifically, this is the blank space between Rees-Jones and her husband, the poet Michael Murphy, who died of a brain tumour in 2009; but in taking on the project (started in 2019’s Erato – and earlier in the elegiac poems of Burying the Wren in 2012) of exploring her grief, she moves far beyond elegy, and builds a serious and profound meditation on what it means to be a human subject.

[…]

Towards the end of the period that I was reading and writing about Rees-Jones’ work, my mother-in-law passed away from pancreatic cancer. Watching and speaking to her in her final days as her body failed and witnessing the awesome spectacle of my wife taking on the full responsibility for the care of her mother at home, gave many of Rees-Jones’ words a new significance, especially those relating directly to her husband’s premature death. I returned to my essay on her work and found that I no longer thought some of the things I had thought before my mother-in-law died. New thoughts came to me, based in a fresh awareness of the bodiliness and the gravity – I might almost say the sanctity – of a human life ending. What had always seemed like a very good collection, had morphed into a profoundly serious and important one. This essay, then, is a substantially revised version of the one I originally wrote, and even now I am aware that my present reflections are also probably provisional, perhaps fleeting, but certainly contingent.

To return to the ‘me’, the blank space and the ‘you’, and the failed attempt to define the space between them through metaphor which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay; it seems to me that the world of meaning-making where this attempt takes place is the world that exists somewhere between the writer and the reader, fully belonging to neither but for which each bears responsibility, albeit of a different type.

I think about the revisions and reworkings in Rees-Jones’ work, I think about her celebration of the necessary failures in art and life, and I think about her speaker’s fragmentary voice speaking brokenly into a whiteness of blank paper. Then I think about my own revisions, my own failures.

I think about the still point of the turning world, where the dance is.

And without my fully understanding why, the people around me – both in my memory and as physical presences in my life now – suddenly seem more important.

Chris Edgoose, Revised reflections on Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones

My friend and collaborator Arnold McBay is an artist and musician. He frequently makes intriguing short films exploring very elemental objects such as clouds and branches. These often move slowly, change slowly, emerge to be only more themselves. He is always finding the surprising and mysterious quiddity of things with perfectly simple means.

Last night he sent me a short film (1 minute long) of branches moving as if they were the hands of a clock. This is exactly my kind of thing and I couldn’t resist and so asked if I could write some text and make the audio for it. So I did. I wrote a short poems and made an audio track from the sounds of breaking sticks and a typewriter (since the poem refers to the trees “writing” and the repeated sounds of the sticks breaking sounded like a typewriter.)

I was intrigued by the idea of a tree “writing” in time by growing. How a tree is a kind of writing in time. Of time.

I wrote the poem and it was ok, but line to line, a bit flat. So then I had the idea of mixing up the lines in order to create more energy between lines. I remembered how a student had showed me how she randomized lines using Excel and a sorting procedure. (You create random numbers using the RAND function in a second column and then sort the numbers from high to low, bringing the lines you’ve inserted in the first column with them and thus into random order.)

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that random was more interesting than my original order. Thank you, Mr. Cage. But part of the reason is that it breaks apart the logical chain between lines that is initially created. Sometimes I run a poem backwards for the same reason, though it maintains another kind of order. But the leaps between lines are larger and therefore have more energy. The mind leaps like a squirrel between branches in order to form the poem. Always more exciting to get the reader more involved and/or thinking like a squirrel.

Gary Barwin, Set the Alarm for Spring: why random is better

Last week Peter and I sent a new episode of Planet Poetry out into the world, featuring our interview with Niall Campbell about his excellent Bloodaxe book The Island in the Sound, plus various festive shenanigans. Yippee! We’re still going strong, even though fewer new episodes this season. We’re both enjoying the reduced pressure, to be honest!

I had a fabulous time reading at the Poets Cafe in Reading a couple of weeks ago. Hosts Vic and Katie were so welcoming, and the audience was warm and very switched-on. There was an impressive open mic. I sold a few books, both The Mayday Diaries and Yo-Yo, now well into its second edition.

I’m not writing a great deal at the moment, but I’ve been making an effort to send a few poems out. Gratitude to The Frogmore Papers which will publish a new poem of mine in the Spring. And I’m thrilled to have The Mayday Diaries as the current featured publication at Atrium. Huge thanks to editors Holly and Claire.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on new ideas for my quarterly spreadsheet which seems to have a life of its own these days. I’m frequently surprised and touched by the messages of support I get for producing it. It seems the poetry magazine landscape is a sprawling and confusing space and people are thankful for a tool that helps with both navigation and motivation to keep going.

Robin Houghton, Seasons Greetings

I wasn’t going to do a chart for the end of the year…all a bit of a busman’s holiday and the like, but the arrival this week of the wonderful new issue of Finished Creatures containing a new poem by me made me reconsider…Thanks to Jan for taking a new new poem from me…A poem written and finished in 2025 as well which is good work; looking back at my notes I can see the first scribbled notes/draft was 30th January and the final draft was sorted on 4th August. […]

The collected data would suggest that 2025 has seen an overall increase in the number of poems sent out, and certainly an increase on recent years. I’ve crunched the numbers and the number of unique submissions has gone up YoY again – which is good, I think.

But it comes down to the success rate (or does it?)

Maybe it’s working (maybe it’s Maybelline, etc), but we’ve seen a 100% increase on 2024 in successes. It looks a little different if we present this as counts, but either way the numbers are up. And I thought this had been a crap year (for many reasons).

Mat Riches, What a count…

Bless the Christmas Number One.

Thank you for the nightmare in which they
deny using white phosphorus,
deny they shot a man who was emptying a bin,
deny they shot a woman who was mending a carpet,
deny they bulldozed a tent filled with the chronically sick,
deny mass graves.

Bless the turkey and all its trimmings.

Bless the Boxing Day breakfast of buttered toast, eggs, bacon and beans.

Bless the football match we’re going to later.

Bless both teams.

Bless the abyss of the human mind.

Bob Mee, A CHRISTMAS POEM FROM TWO YEARS AGO…

From across the boulevard, crowds stream
toward the entrance to the battleship whose nine

16-inch guns, three triple-gun turrets, twenty
5-inch dual purpose guns and forty-nine 8-inch

Oerlikon auto cannons are decked out in over two
million lights. To get to the main deck, the lines

(single file) must navigate two bridges, but only
after walking through the museum converted into

a white wilderness. In one hall, an animated
tree. In another, strung on wires from

the ceiling, a polar bear treads air.

Luisa A. Igloria, Light Show

To visit (or live) in a country that is not yours by birth is an enlivening and sometimes, bewildering experience. A student came up to me at the festival and told me I had an excellent personality (!) and someone else told me I was the best poet that they’d ever heard read — it was a time out of time experience.

Now, typing this post in the quiet of my Seattle home, the cold wind beating the trees and electrical wires outside, it all seems unreal. A world where poets and poetry take center stage. A place where poets from all over the world come together? Yes, dear reader, this exists.

After the festival finished, I visited my friend, the fabulous poet and educator, Anil Oomen, who was on sabbatical, conducting research in Southern India. Anil is from Kerala, a state in the south of India with the highest literacy rate in the world. It is also famous as a home for writers, painters, filmmakers, and fabulous fish.

How did we meet? Nearly 29 years ago, Anil took a poetry class with me in Eugene, Oregon. I was a newly minted MFA graduate and he was a stay at home dad who needed to get out of the house. In that little class of seven, held after hours in Black Sun Books, Anil brought in a poem (a palindrome) about his first language, Malayalam. The language of Kerala where he was born and lived his first five years. All of a sudden, he was teaching me about this incredible language and culture. From that poem (later published in the South African journal, Carapace, that I was guest editing at the time) the idea came to me that someday Anil and I would travel together in Kerala. 29 years later, we have.

I think bringing poets together to generate new work in beautiful places might be my dream for retirement.

Susan Rich, Elizabeth Bishop Travels to India for the Kolkata International Poetry Festival

Today’s Christmas poem is by R. S. Thomas, not generally known as the most celebratory of poets and offering an appropriately chilly version of festive spirit here. One for anyone who’s feeling a bit Christmas-ed out by this point!

Blind Noel

Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
on the heart for another
snowflake to reveal a pattern.

Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow
of so vast a God I shiver, unable
to detect the child for the whiteness.

Victoria Moul, A Christmas poem, no. 2

I’m only on Chapter 4 but am finding, in the etymological tracings of the words that intersect in meaning(s) for play–game, contest, gambol, gamble, dallying, tournament, match, riddle, performance, frolic, pretending, folly, fun, sport, etc.–fruitful stuff for poetry, for thinking about poems and about how poems work as craft, as poems, and as works of art and imagination. And also, what roles poems may play in culture today, and whether that differs at all from the role poetry played in ancient times. Huizinga writes:

“In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ‘sparking’ between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.”

Language may not be necessary for play but can easily be incorporated into it, and language can become play. Or playful. I don’t know much about Wittgenstein, but I find myself thinking of his theory about words having “family resemblances” that often connect, overlap, shade meanings. So we get jokes, puns, flirting, mocking, and new “rules” for our language use that culture constantly shifts in all kinds of directions. Language is a game-changer, and poets make use of that.

Ann E. Michael, Play’s the thing

It’s a shame we can’t embed playable text into Substack, isn’t it?

Also a shame that I didn’t have time to make a new version of Ice Dive, as I’d been planning to. This version is a little buggy, the mechanics are unbalanced and many of the lines need further shaping and shuffling.

But I wanted to end the advent calendar on a ludokinetic poem and this is the only ice-themed one I have — even counting the many pieces sitting around in various states of completion in the workshop. It was originally devised so as to be playable over a Zoom call — the player merely has to shout “Stop!” when they want to come up for air, whereupon I (the person in control of the game) click once to bring them back to the surface.

For what it’s worth, it is possible to finish the game, collecting all seven pieces of the ‘something’ it is you’re collecting. I’ve only managed it once, though.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Ice Advent Calendar #10: Ice Dive

Hatfield is foggy this morning, and most of the snow has melted off. My adult kids have returned to their towns, and the holiday leftovers eaten or tossed. I’ve got some books to mail, some poems to send to the black hole of Submittable, and a few new drafts to sit with. 

I woke this morning with the remnant of a dream in which I was talking with a famous poet (I won’t say who) about how heavy poems were. Lately I’ve been working on a poem about trains.  I have my father’s old Lionel train set, which he gave me a couple years ago (I can’t say inherited, because he’s still living, but inherited feels more accurate). While I didn’t really care for toy trains when I was a kid (I had a Tyco racecar track instead), they seem important to me now because it was important to him that I or my brother take the set rather than let it go to a stranger. It’s a post-war classic train set about 75-years old, and amazingly still mostly works. I even added two new cars myself, and the old engine manages to pull them. This year it chugged a circle under my Christmas tree. 

Grant Clauser, The Weight of Poetry

I am the superior
officer who loses the paperwork
or makes up the statistics.
I am the one who ignores
your e-mails, who cannot be reached
by text or phone, the one
with a full inbox.

When the wise ones
come, as they do, full of dreams,
babbling about the stars
that lead them or messages
from gods or angels,
I open the gates. I don’t alert
the authorities up the road.
Let the kings and emperors
pay for their own intelligence.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Border Lands

This was the year that finally convinced me that humanity is devolving as a species and that we are past due for an extinction-level event, so Earth can hit the reset button. Nihilistic, perhaps, but if you’ve been watching world events – especially the U.S. descent into authoritarianism and isolation – then you know exactly what I mean. 

The deaths of David Lynch, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, and Rob Reiner hit me especially hard, since I remain an unrepentant film buff and those [four] were among my favorites. Every year, more and more of my icons pass away, which also brings my own mortality into focus. 

Maybe that’s why much of this year was dedicated to what Kate Bush refers to as “archive work.” I’ve got another box of materials almost ready for the Georgia State University Library Archive, which is the repository for my papers, manuscripts, and ephemera related to my writing life. While this will be an ongoing process until I kick the bucket (and beyond), I’m nearing the end of culling through 40 years of writing. 

During the most recent dig, I uncovered a small grouping of poems – some dating back to the 1980s – that I’m currently sorting through to see if anything is worth revising or will just go to the archive. I also found handwritten pages of another story that belongs with my long-simmering collection of tales in the fictional town of Cottonwood, GA (the first four of them are in Kiss Shot, which was published as an ebook back in 2012). Of course, this has me eager to get back to work on this collection, but at the expense of the fourth Venus novel.

Collin Kelley, A look back at 2025

Still a couple days left to read but I’m adding to best of list now,

The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson, illustrated by April White (Brick Books, 2025) which gave so many aha moments on chronic illness and concussion, and consumer culture, and pure amazement at her rendering poems from trash container text.

and from backlist titles,

But Then I Thought by Kyla Houbolt (above/ground, 2023) which impels me to buy her book too. What a crisp, alert alive mind!

Pearl Pirie, Fav Reads 2025, Addendum

[…] He knew they were important, even if
he couldn’t quite recall which one was which,
or how he’d landed in this unknown bed
this perfectly nice place that wasn’t home.
*
Another poem from my current project, an expanded volume of Torah poetry. This poem arises out of parashat Vayechi, in which Jacob — now in Egypt — blesses his grandsons and his sons.

When I imagined Yakov nearing the end of his life, I remembered visits with my father in his last months and weeks. I remember what he had forgotten and what stayed with him. I remember trying to steer away from my mother’s absence. (No reason to make him grieve her loss again.)

After my siblings and I had moved him into assisted living (with his approval; he understood, at least in flashes, that he couldn’t live alone any more) he lost track of things more quickly. That’s normal, I know.

I remember a visit when he said, “I’m not sure where this is? It’s not home, it’s just — the place where I stay now.” I can imagine Jacob, away from his familiar surroundings, maybe feeling the same way.

Rachel Barenblat, Not home

Ben Lerner describes one of his dreams involving Keith Waldrop. In this dream, Ben is an undergrad “trying to impress Keith by saying something about Olson’s ‘Projective Verse.’ When I finish my little speech Keith is quiet for a moment and then says: “It’s always seemed to me that lines of poetry are broken less by the way a poet breathes than by the way a poet blinks his eyes.”

Alina Stefanescu, Guston and allegory.

I’ve been tossing my phone aside a lot, which, in essence, is a surreal way of tossing aside an entire universe. Because I read books, I am often faced with a deluge of reels where highly-curated humans talk about the same 15-30 books. Because I write in journals, ads show up in my feed of highly-curated humans who look and act out the part of an observant human pontificating their surroundings, pen in hand. Because I go on walks, reels and reels of highly-curated humans talk at me about living an “analogue life”, off the phone. Journals, books, puzzles, watercolors, and all the things that I see when I look up from my phone are romantically and aesthetically displayed on my screen. Because I do not engage in or click anything, the algorithm has only a vague nebula to work with. I do not know how many pages of a book a person could read in the time that it takes to curate, create, and edit a reel about annotating a book. The cogs and wheels of the manufactured lifestyles and hot-takes continue. When I toss my phone aside, so do I.

Sarah Lada, American Idiot

My father would have none of it
“China elephants as holiday gifts?
Oh no, they always bring bad luck.”
And who would openly court misfortune?

When a child there were moments
I sensed elephants in the living room
the drum taut tension of things unsaid
We tiptoed around their slumbering forms.

Paul Tobin, WE TIPTOED AROUND

One of my favorite books, in spite of its flaws, is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. One of my love languages is giving gifts. I love the exchange of gifts, especially when you find something you’re certain the other person will love.

In his book, Hyde says:

1. A true gift loses its power if it is hoarded or sold. Gifts should be like a river. You should always feel like you can pass them on when you don’t need them. (I like to think that he’s a big fan of white elephant parties.)
2. Art, he says, is a spiritual act. It creates a sense that we are alive and belong to the world. I like to think that the work I do is part of that circle of creation, not just a bounce of profit; that we are in the sacred fire.
3. Market economies thrive on strangers, on isolation. Gift-giving builds communities with stories and myths, and when they are shared, they create a kind of magic. Red Hen’s supporters feel like that to me. You enter a circle, and when you contribute to our growth, you become a part of our family.
4. The cultural commons—the shared arts, literature, dance, gardens, museums, public spaces, and all else created by those of us in the creative spaces—become more and more integrated into our being the more we participate in them.
5. The more we give and expect gifts, the more we create a world where gift-giving is the norm, and we build trust that we can rely on others for support.
6. Artists are stewards of the creative spirit; we sit in the well of the collective unconscious and drink.

Hyde’s examples of artists who participated in this lifelong sharing include Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. If I were to suggest a rewrite of The Gift, which I wouldn’t, I would suggest replacing Pound with Toni Morrison. Pound, despite being a celebrated poet, went to prison for treason, hated the Jewish people, and had an utter contempt for women and people of color, neither of which he would support in publishing.

I am a fan of literary citizens. Toni Morrison is one. She built community by taking time from her own wildly important writing to mentor, teach, and sit with young writers, discussing their creative lives. Her students loved her. They said she was spellbinding in the classroom and an amazing mentor. This kind of literary citizenship is what Red Hen Press is built on—the idea that the arts can only exist and thrive in community.

Kate Gale, In Which I Step Away from My Cliff and Ride a Horse

alone in the waiting room
checking the plant
for reality

waiting by tom clausen

I know you’re supposed to size up the previous year and set goals for the next, but I feel like 2025 was somehow rougher than it could have been—the bathroom renovation was a too-long-and-too-expensive nightmare (I’m glad to have the disability-friendly bathroom, but it took a LOT of time and money and took a toll on both my health and Glenn’s)—rejection on the writing front, an increase in MS symptoms for the last six months (hence the brain MRI), and the political nightmare that is America right now—I want to be grateful and count my blessings, but for now, I just feel like shutting the door on the last few years and hoping for some more normalcy—for myself and my country—in 2026. Just wishing doesn’t make it so, of course. I know a lot of people who had a difficult holiday season—health emergencies, layoffs, losing parents and loved ones, divorces, or learning to care for parents who are getting older. I am sending good thoughts to all who are struggling right now.

If I have some positive hopes for the new year, it’s maybe a trip to Europe and a residency in spring on San Juan Island, maybe to find a good publisher for my seventh book, maybe a part-time regular job I could count on instead of scrambling for freelance stuff all the time, better health for me and my family? Less drama, more fun. Less spending, more appreciating the things I have. More time for friendship, adventure, inspiration? At my age and with so many things out of my control, I don’t do “goal setting” per se like I used to for each new year, but I do try to envision something positive—small joys, the chance to reset, a chance to embrace something new.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Stressful Christmas, Thinking about 2025, and the Year Ahead

The snow makes it all quiet. Away from the windows, away from the dinner, there is a blanket over the earth, the air is scrubbed clean, and nothing is moving. I wish it would snow for a year, and the telly breaks. Then the radio goes off, and we forget to talk, and we get a year of this crispy breathing quiet.

John Siddique, A Christmas Poem

日記買ふ白く輝く日々を買ふ　内村恭子

nikki kau shiroku kagayaku hibi o kau

            I buy a diary…
            I buy days
           shining white

                                                Kyoko Uchimura     

from Tashin (Gods), a haiku collection of Kyoko Uchimura, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo, 2025

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 26, 2025)

This week: poems in which the word ‘snow’ matters, the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental lyric, a guy running in the park, a word that feels like a sort of dignified sadness, and much more. Enjoy. And happy holidays! I hope to be back for one last edition of the digest before the New Year.

The darkness comes earlier every day, and we depend on electric light to illuminate our faces, everyone home around the table after a hours away.
My dad died the day after Christmas.
One of my children never born was due a few days before Christmas.
The last hours of daylight slip over our neighbors yard in a slanted line, a tightrope line between fear and despair.
Their nativity–even Joseph–golden, lit within.
And Santa is a neon outline on the siding, red and white, his blue eyes laughing.
Inside our home, I hang up lights that twinkle, strands to cast a glow in the empty living room in the evening.
I keep a fire burning only for its light.

Renee Emerson, The Language of Loss

Listen! Nothingness.
Look through it.
Swollen river.
Swans in mist.

Moonlit puddles, iced.
Look through, past.
Sit for a bit. Doze.

Bob Mee, POETRY AS AN UNCERTAIN COLLECTION OF NOISES

The snows have come. This means many things. Even the birds on their fly-highways can’t help but be found out. Everyone must land somewhere. In winter, the black-capped chickadee’s flight is an arcing applause that ends in the cedar tree. Their plaudits celebrate seed and suet. And with every landing avian talon a crystalline flower plummets into the white tapestry below. And below that tapestry, worm and pupae dot the deeper soil in their chambers. Everyone, including the hunkering deer, pretend to be stone.

Sarah Lada, The Valley Dwellers

Three more poems featuring snow which must be in conversation with each other and perhaps with Rossetti too: Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’, Robert Frost’s ‘Desert Places’ and Philip Larkin’s ‘The Winter Palace’. Three wintry poems by three wintry poets. Three poems in which the mind is like winter, because winter is nothingness, and so is the mind. Three poems in which each poem feels a little differently about the mind being a kind of nothingness.

Three poems, too, in which the word ‘snow’ matters, though Frost is the one who makes it work the hardest:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

Fast, snow, fast. It doesn’t snow much here in London, and when it does snow the snow rarely settles. It doesn’t snow anywhere in England as much as it once did, which is one of those facts which, when I remember it, gives me the chills.

Jeremy Wikeley, Snow on snow, snow on snow (on snow)

There is a meadow across from our subdivision which does not belong to anyone. There are no lawnmowers on this meadow where a coterie of crows conduct their general assembly each morning. There is a four-way stop sign but the stop looks ashamed and some say there is  a ghost that haunts the meadow and what the stop sign feels is akin to dread. There is a crow whom the other crows caw around and he is likely the lead crow likely his name is Frank. There are parents who will not let their children play in the meadow because it is full of weeds and buttercups and fire ant mounds. The parents want someone to own the meadow and develop it. There are many ways to say develop without meaning to but there are no ways to say develop that do not involve the destruction of something else. There is a child developing their interpersonal skills which means she learns to stop imagining the crows conversing in the meadow. The child will develop beyond freeze-tag, and when she has developed appropriately this child-part will be dead. There is a distinct tinge of ache she will feel when passing the meadow but the pain will be located in a phantom limb. There is no way to discuss the pain we feel in parts of us that don’t exist anymore. There is a meadow and crows and fire ants. There is a place waiting to die. There will be cupcakes and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. There are people who will call the cupcakes an improvement.

Alina Stefanescu, Rant.

only the empire thinks,
“there are not enough data centers.”
a warehouse full of little machines.
our bodies like lakes wrapping
around them as if we can brush
our teeth with horror. as if the salmon
will still be able to speak to us.
a dry wishing fountain full of pennies.

Robin Gow, uses for water

I know I have to rise from the small low chair
whose seat bears my grief print

Seven days of sitting with all that quickened love
sickness

Still so opened; still the quivering shell
of darkness

Jill Pearlman, City Shiva

I arrived in Paris on 10th September, 2024. When I first came here, I wasn’t sure if I were going to stay beyond the summer of this year but it has been one year and a few months that I have been here. In this time, I haven’t really left Paris except for a few days. It has not been long enough to call this hallucinatory city home but it has been long enough to not find it entirely foreign: it is a liminal city, like a person who you have known for a long time and then suddenly 

not 
at 
all. 

Saudamini Deo, Leaving Paris

Solstice: a clear day here in the Netherlands with the sun breaking through as I type this.

My holiday reading is sorted. The seven books include translations from French, Spanish and Norwegian. The latter an interesting set of haiku and haiku-like poems about the Japanese ski-jumper Noriaki Kasai.

Broken Sleep Books use the world’s largest on-demand publishers. The parcel came from France: no import duties, no VAT, no waiting while parcels linger in the customs depot. A bonus!

Fokkina McDonnell, Solstice and poetry

At the very beginning of the seventeenth century, a period in which epigrams were at their most intensely fashionable, we find many examples of Christmas epigrams. This one, on the symbolism of celebrating mass three times at Christmas, is much more succinct than our anonymous late 16th century student, but it’s structured around the same point: that Bethlehem marks the convergence of Noah’s Ark, David and Christ. The final four lines run as follows:

Nocte prior, sub luce sequens, in luce suprema
   Sub Noe, sub templo, sub cruce sacra notant
Sub Noe, sub Dauid, sub Christo sacra fuere
   Nox, aurora, dies, vmbra, figura, deus.

The first at night, the next at dawn, the last in the daylight
   They mark rites under Noah, under the temple, under the cross:
Under Noah, under David, under Christ were made sacred
   Night, dawn, day, shade, shape, god.

The very popular Epigrammata (1616) of the Dutch Jesuit poet Bernhard Bauhusius (van Bauhuysen, 1576-1619), one of the first Jesuit Latin poets to have a significant influence in England, treats the topic entirely differently. He writes in a highly emotive and imaginative mode, as if the poet were present at the manger, singing to the baby, and reminding Mary to shut the stable door.

Lectule, lectule mi, dulcissime lectule, salue;
   Lectule liliolis, lectule strate rosis.
Ah nec strate rosis, nec liliolis formosis;
   Verum & liliolis, & benè digne rosis.
[…]
Claude MARIA fores, en algida, nuda tremensque
   Prae foribus stat hyems; claude MARIA fores.

Crib, my crib, my sweetest crib, greetings;
   Crib spread with tiny lilies, spread with roses.
Ah not spread with roses, nor with beautiful tiny lilies;
   But truly worthy of tiny lilies, and well worthy of roses.
[…]
Mary, shut the doors, look how icy, naked and trembling
   Stands winter at the doors; Mary, shut the doors.

This placing of oneself at the Biblical scene derives from Jesuit meditative practice, but was quickly influential upon poets who were not themselves Jesuits or even Roman Catholics — including George Herbert, who, along with the Franco-Scot George Buchanan in the sixteenth century and the Polish Jesuit Casimir Sarbiewski, was among the most influential religious poets of the period in England.

Victoria Moul, How to write a Christmas poem in early modern England

Soaring hollow-boned and prehistoric over our infant species, birds live their lives indifferent to ours. They are not giving us signs, but we make of them omens and draw from them divinations. They furnish our best metaphors and the neural infrastructure of our dreams. They challenge our assumptions about the deepest measure of intelligence.

Because birds so beguile us, they magnetize our attention, and anything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. In every reflection, a reckoning; in every reckoning, a possibility — a glimpse of us better than ourselves.

That is what Nobel laureate Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930–March 17, 2017) conjures up in his shamanic poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” — an eternal vision for reprieve from the worst in us, written in the final years of the Cold War, the war that could have ended the world but was abated, not because we are perfect but because we are perfectible, because peace is possible, because, as Maya Angelou wrote in another eternal mirror of a poem, we are the possible.

Maria Popova, If Birds Ran the World

Through text, photographs, visual text, waveforms, erasure, utterance, polygraph charts and accumulation, [Eric] Schmaltz explores the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental lyric; exploring certainty and uncertainty, as he investigates text-forms and perceived truth, attention, poetry and poetic form. A caveat, whether descriptor or warning, by the author at the offset, offers: “This book is a document of truth’s performance under duress. // Some of what you will read is true; the rest is poetry.”

In many ways, the core of the book’s content is familiar—who am I and how did I get here—but examined through a unique blend of experimental and confessional, each side wrestling for a kind of control that might not be possible. Given the foundation for this particular mode of inquiry is the use of polygraph, it introduces a whole other layer of tension, of resistance: “I confess,” as the poem, the pages, repeat. “We’re going to focus on some background questions.” Schmaltz writes, “This part of the session ensures that you are able to speak truthfully and that you are mentally and physically fit to proceed with the polygraph test today. // Please answer the following questions truthfully.” There are occasionally ways through which certain conceptual poetry-based works can articulate human elements more deeply, more openly, than the lyric mode, something I felt as well through Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Book 1 (Coach House Books, 2015) [see my review of such here], and Schmaltz manages a dual-core through this work that counterpoints brilliantly, working from the most basic of human questions across a structure of the nature of being, the nature of expansive, articulated, inarticulate and impossible truth, composed across an expansive bandwidth.

rob mclennan, Eric Schmaltz, I Confess

Very excited to get my contributor’s copy of Laurel Review, which has my poem “Biodiversity (In the World of Fairy Tales)”—and also work by a ton of friends, Steve Fellner, Amanda Auchter, Michael Czyzniejewski, and local Allen Braden. I love when I get to read my friend’s work with mine! […]

Since tonight is the Solstice, I’ll try to remember to light a candle (even an LED one counts) and think about what I want to leave behind and what I want to happen in the new year. A friend of mine recommended a “reverse bucket list,” which involves listing accomplishments you’ve already done and crossing things off your life list that you don’t need or want (skydiving? No thank you! I’ve already parasailed, zip lined, rock climbed, rappelled down a mountain, and ropes courses galore…don’t have anything to prove about that stuff anymore). The point is that we often discount things we’ve already accomplished and feel anxious about things we want that we haven’t accomplished yet (more money! more fame! more accolades! etc.), so this is a way to feel more gratitude and less stress.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, New Poem in Laurel Review, and Holiday Coping Mechanisms

Earlier in the year, my North Sea Poets workshop looked at the masks a poets might wear and why they might wear them. There are creative reasons, like being able to make an imaginative leap or garner a new perspective by a change of position, into someone or something else. But there is also the potential for renewal – when one’s own writing has hit too comfortable a groove, when one’s gestures and turns come too easily, too mechanically, for there ever to be any tears or surprise.

Heaney still serves us as a great guide today, not only for his poems but his essays – and especially his long interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones. It is a comfort to any poet to read that, seventeen years after Death of a Naturalist, Heaney himself was sensing the limits of where his writing had taken him. Facing this staleness, he put on the mask of Sweeney, writing poems in the guise of the cursed madman of Irish myth. Doing this, something new opened up for Heaney’s poetry. Heaney himself states ‘I felt relieved of myself when I was writing them’. ‘I felt up and away, as one of the poems has it. At full tilt. Reckless and accurate and entirely Sweenified, as capable of muck-racking as of self-mockery. The poetry was in the persona’.

Helen Vendler, in The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry is sure of the positive effect on Heaney’s poetry of Heaney becoming not-Heaney for a while:

‘The outlaw role of Sweeney permits Heaney to assume the mask of an alienated warrior, of a wilful temperament (that of Miłosz, that of Cézanne) in many ways unlike his own. The assumption of a persona cannot, of course, be a permanent solution to the problematic aspects of one’s own personality and culture but in resorting to the masks of Miłosz and Cézanne, Heaney can glimpse further authentic extensions of his own imagination.’

There’s an appealing paradox in all this – for Heaney to carry on as himself, he had to spend some time being someone else. There is writer’s block, yes. But I think I feel my own symptoms as closer to this second type of stasis – where I have perhaps hit the limits of whatever first voice I had, and where the desire is to discover the ‘authentic extensions’ of my own writing. The desire to feel again that I might sit at a page and anything could happen. The memoir pieces I’ve contributed to our Substack have been the unexpected trialling of such a shift. Maybe in 2026 such experiments can bring my writing to newer, fresher ground.

Niall Campbell, What If It’s Not Writer’s Block?

I must try and remember how darkness is not to be feared or resisted, like this morning in the yoga studio when the instructor dimmed the lights and we submitted to the shadows around us as well as those within us.

child’s pose*
letting go of ourselves
to become ourselves

*Child’s Pose (Balasana) is a grounding, inward-folding pose that encourages introspection and confronting inner truths.

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Winter Solstice 2025

Thra-Koom! was an e-pamphlet published 15 years ago by Silkworms Ink.

It’s a short sequence of superhero poems — comic-book-based, since the Marvel Cinematic Universe hadn’t really made its appearance yet. For this little advent calendar, I should arguably have revived ‘Iceman’ — but I’m not sure that poem has a lot of heart or depth to it, and I’m not quite as invested in Iceman as I am in the Silver Surfer.

The Surfer, of course, appeared in this summer’s Fantastic Four: First Steps, portrayed by Juliet Garner, in a mildly controversial (though ultimately inconsequential) bit of casting. A male version, played by Doug Jones (of Pan’s Labyrinth and other monster movies) appeared in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer — Jones did a better job of brooding philosophically, aided by Laurence Fishburne’s baritone voiceover, but neither portrayal really connected with the version of the character I’ve found most affecting, which is rooted in Stan Lee and John Buscema’s run of Silver Surfer comics from 1968 to 1970. Here, the Surfer is almost wretchedly noble and introspective, frequently shown in poses of contorted anguish as he faces godly adversaries, existential crises and the self-destructive stupidity of vicious men.

“In every voice … in every human heart … a smouldering hostility!” he laments, squatting on a rooftop while Spiderman tries to pick a fight with him. The messaging is fairly crude — these are comics for children, after all — but it remains refreshing, even today, to read about a superhero who is made vulnerable, even driven to despair, by his sensitivity to man-made horror.

Why is this version of the poem called ‘Or, from the Mountain’? I suppose because I wanted to revise it into something with more of a folk flavour. What if, rather than being coated in silver, the character had an association with orichalcum, the mythical metal referred to in Ancient Greek texts (from ὄρο / óros / mountain and χαλκό / khalkós / copper)? The mountain as a source of power, rather than the space god Galactus, is also a little more grounded.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Ice Advent Calendar #9: Or, from the Mountain

O naraniag
a bulan, Un-unnoyko indengam the lover sings

in serenade to the moon. It floats, seemingly
remote, a silver coin in the atmosphere

above all the petty currency of our lives.
It’s been an age since I heard these lyrics—

Toy nasipnget a lubongko/ Inka kad silawan
Tapno diak mayyaw-awan— a prayer for some

brilliance to spill into this dark,
something to point the way onward or out.

Luisa A. Igloria, O Bright Moon

My thoughts are with Michael and team at London Grip for their recent technical disasters that mean the majority of the London Grip archive has gone. LG is a source of wonderful poems and reviews, and I feel for the folks there as the disaster was not of their making. Poets, if you’re published online make sure you take a PDF download after…

In lovely and unexpected news this week, I saw there was a new episode of Planet Poetry. That , in and of itself, is cause for celebration. And it was great to hear the interview with Niall Campbell that was the main focus off it. I mean, I say main focus, but arguably he was more of a support act to Robin reading one of my poems in the second half. I wasn’t expecting it at all, but what an honour.

Robin did an excellent job reading Riches (about 48 mins in) from Collecting the Data. It was very strange to hear someone else reading my work. It’s a new experience for me, and has made me look at the poem again in a new (and good) way. I hear the beats of the poem differently now, even if they haven’t changed. It’s know the advice is to read your poem aloud when writing, but you’re still yourself when you do it, so to hear someone else do it is really quite educational. And very moving. Thank you Robin and Peter. Listen to the ep for the poems and interview , the poem from Kay Syrad and the bloopers.

Mat Riches, Peace to all on this Cluttered Earth

During my ridiculously lucky 3-night residency in Miami last week–praise to SWWIM and the Betsy Writer’s Room!–I worked on a multipart poem I started in October. The sequence begins by conjuring a tiny land snail. A brainstorm occurred to me on the sand, because in South Beach you’re basically obligated to do some of your thinking next to the Atlantic: hey, I should end the sequence with the Great Pink Sea Snail! As a seventies kid catching the 1967 movie Dr. Dolittle on TV once in a while, I adored the giant snail, which you may remember carries some of the characters back to England from Sea Star Island. Its watertight shell, pearly-pink inside, is the size of a small house, equipped with gauzy curtains and baskets of fruity refreshments. What a ride.

And wow, what a racist, sexist, bloated, boring film. I rewatched much of it, often on fast-forward because it’s painful in every way possible. I also went down the internet rabbit-hole to learn that Rex Harrison, whom my mother loved, was loathed by many who worked with him (the rudest, most selfish person they’d ever met, they say, and worse–it’s always worse). I’m guessing the Great Pink Sea Snail swam so fast mainly to get away from him.

I have some ideas about why the snail captured my imagination. My long-ago dissertation on U.S. women poets was called The Poetics of Enclosure, after all. I’m attracted to inward-turning spaces–like the lyric poem–that also, paradoxically, make room for big ideas, aspirations, and feelings. That gorgeous shell offers protection and secrecy while also enabling movement.

Lesley Wheeler, The Great Pink Sea Snail rides on

Part of the test for the poet-mother is that the child is a distraction from writing. In Dead fly, she is faced with the dilemma of using the time when he is asleep to write or to catch up on sleep herself: ‘Do I creep/ the aching floorboards and return to bed, or enter the other dimensions where verse spills/ from head to notebook in the study?’ It is not that she has nothing to say, the ideas will spill from her head but she is exhausted and to choose sleep will leave her feeling guilty and unfulfilled. The poem ends with: ‘I pick up the baby monitor/ make my way/ along the corridor/ which groans/ and will never stop.’ This final image is rich in meaning: it embodies her sense of desperation that she will never find time to write again; it conveys the obligations of motherhood being endless; and it evokes a sense of the speaker’s exhaustion.

 In the concluding poems of the collection the speaker resolves this tension between being both mother and writer. In Second wind, Mahon writes: ‘Despite the lopsided balance of those early years/ weighted in exploring maternal conventions,/ the daily rotes pulsed along a blurry sweep/ and became my art.’ She finds a way of integrating writing with motherhood. Practically, she uses the time when her son is at school to write: ‘My hands cradle/ coffee mug as he walks to school./ Freedom loops his step/ The blank page stares.’ However, more than that, it appears that this new life as a mother becomes the poetry. ‘In isolation,// this mother’s creativity found its nook/ in a tedium punctured by guilt, self-doubt./ I’d spy the notebook and pen,/ hold words in my head/ till my hands were free.’ Motherhood becomes the inspiration, it provides the words which she would hang on to till she had the opportunity to write them down.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Cry’ by Katy Mahon

In “Fragments” Tara Singh has created a powerful sequence of poems exploring the power/status imbalances that trap victims with abusers. Singh demonstrates awareness of how form, whether free verse, duplex or using symbols to represent words indicating where victims can’t speak or where words aren’t enough, can work with a poem to convey and enhance meaning. Singh has a compassionate, interrogative eye.

Emma Lee, “Fragments” Tara Singh (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

If you’ve ever been pursued by someone who purports to love you, if you’ve been hassled, threatened by a person-thinks-they’re-god, who won’t just leave you alone, who doesn’t respect your simplest boundaries, then this poem, which is at one level praising the persistence of divine love, will send a chill to your heart, as it does now to mine. 

If you’ve ever had this said to you, “I love you so much I’ll harm myself if you don’t XYZ…,” then the whole Hound-poem thing looks more terrifying and manipulative than pinnacle of Victorian ode-writing. No wonder Francis was “sore adread”. No wonder he, in the absence of twenty-first century trauma-informed therapy, capitulated to the Hound in the end. No wonder even the care of others who rated his poetry couldn’t help him give up his opium addiction. 

I’m sorry, but English Literature O level notwithstanding, I think The Hound of Heaven a ghastly poem. I know it was written in a different era. I know it rhymes, and is an extended metaphor, and is thought to be great, particularly by those who share Thompson’s faith, but that’s not enough to redeem it for me.

I’m grateful, nevertheless, that the poem exists for this reason: Thompson and his Dangerous Dog highlight the importance of choosing the right hound to live alongside. One that’s cool, self-sufficient, has a band of kind and reliable archetypal friends. A dog who sleeps on his back atop his kennel, listens to Woodstock speaking in Bird, writes novels, and recognises, and has compassion for, human foibles. Most of all, a hound who is at peace with his own doggy, dogged nature, and doesn’t feel the need to capture and dominate others. 

So, Snoopy! I choose Snoopy as my hound for Christmas, and for life.

Liz Lefroy, I Choose A Hound For Life, Not Just For Christmas

The Sunday School pageant director embraced
the medieval ideals. Mary would have dark
hair and a pure soul. Joseph, a mousy
man who knew how to fade into the background.
Every angel must be haloed with golden
hair, and I, the greatest girl, the head
angel, standing shoulders above the others.

It could have been worse. Ugly and unruly
children had to slide into the heads and tails
of other creatures, subdued by the weight
of their costumes, while I got to lead
the processional. But I, unworldly foolish,
longed to be Mary. I cursed
my blond hair, my Slavic looks which damned
me to the realm of the angels.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Christmas Pageants, Modern and Medieval

He loved it all (the music, the tree, the tinsel, the Rankin and Bass, the hot chocolate, the gifts, etc.) So every year, I played along, my heart warming a little bit each time. I knew how much it meant to him. So I found one thing I could get excited about with him: Lights. Candles. Always with a quick flashback to that hidden menorah. The one my grandmother couldn’t openly take out to burn each candle properly. Maybe that’s why I hoard and feel so brazen about burning candles now? It’s a generational comeback, a return to roots, a “pour-one-out-for-močiute”* kind of thing?

*Lithuanian for granny, grandma

This also seems to track with my alignment with pagan solstice, the time of year I genuinely feel a shift within me. It’s not so much Christmas for me, it’s the light in spite of the darkness, the long nights, the blankets of snow that seem to insulate all earthly sound. You can hear the trees going into long slumbers. They creak. The moon, the sky, the wind are all bare, raw, crisp, and stark. I like this reality. It makes me feel small, properly insignificant—human.

And so, I am still devoted to light as a way to connect with him, even, devastatingly, in his absence this year, my first holiday without him. I light candles in my home almost every night, but most specifically, a candle upon his altar. I have been fiercely ardent in the ritual of lighting the candle. It is a way to call to him, to fixate myself in the moment of stillness, to be present when the veil between us drops. I can often sense that he appreciates the fire light as a gate through which to communicate. Earlier this summer, I played one of his poems aloud near the flame and it seemed to dance in synch with the poem. For a brief moment, the reflection in the glass of the candle holder seemed to morph into the shape of his face.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Looking for matches.

There’s something strange about opening a fat parcel of books that bear your own name. It doesn’t seem real, and when you read your own words on a tangible white page rather than a screen, it feels quite odd, and also rather wonderful.

I have been lucky enough – or I should say WE have been lucky enough – to be published by the fine Welsh publisher Briony Collins at Atomic Bohemian. It’s a collaboration between me, and the chemist and poet Stephen Paul Wren, on the subject of microplastics, those tiny fibres shed from the everyday plastic items that we take for granted.

Stephen’s viewpoint as a scientist is somewhat different from mine. I collected historical plastics like bakelite for many years, admiring the sculptural or art deco designs, and the astounding technical innovations of the early and mid 20th century.

I have sold most of the collection, including 55 bakelite or catalin wirelesses. What started out as a wonder substance has become a threat to the environment, and to human and animal health. The thing I loved has become a dirty word.

When I discovered that Stephen shared my worries about microplastics, we decided to write a book together. Some of the poems come in two parts, one written by him, the other by me. Many of them have footnotes directing the reader to the scientific papers or articles which sow the evidence behind the poem. Of course we have extrapolated from the current facts or hypotheses, and the result is often surreal and disturbing.

Lesley Curwen, Opening the author’s copies

The top 10 and the top 2 dozen of the year. Some of these were really tight calls. And a have a dozen still underway that I may finish this year. Could happen.

2025 Poetry:

Toward an Origin Story by Laurie D Graham (Model Press, 2025)
Seed Beetle by Mahaila Smith (Stelliform Press, 2025)
Hawk & Moon by Han VanderHart (Bottlecap Press, 2025)

[…]

2 dozen “Backlist” Favs

Poetry:

Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin (Brick, 2024)
To Assemble an Absence by John Levy (above/ground, 2024)
Sweet Vinegars: poems of wildflowers by Claudia Radmore (Shoreline, 2024)
Heliotropia: poems by Manahil Bandukwala (Brick, 2024)
Slowly Turning by Marco Fraticelli (Yarrow Press, 2024)
Small Arguments: poems by Souvankham Thammovongsa (M&S, 2003, 2023)
A “Working Life” by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2023)
Notes on Drowning by rob mclennan (Broken Jaw Press, 1998)
still the dead trees: haiku by Robert Piotrowski (Red Moon Press, 2017)
The Weight of Oranges: poems by Anne Michaels (M&S, 1997)

Pearl Pirie, Fav Reads 2025

I wonder if I make too much of this but the ghost of mortality clings to me this December a danse macabre in which each step, each pirouette, leads further towards an unstoppable incapacity. How many things become impossible, every day? How many are disappearing, right now?

[…]

My first post on Substack was on Christmas day, last year. It has been a spectacular adventure on this platform. A huge thank you to those who subscribed and followed and read and liked and commented and even bought my book. Am greatly encouraged to continue to write and share and learn and grow in this wonderful community. Wish you all the very best of the season. May the new year come with kindness and grace.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Countdown conversation

Once the holiday hubbub dies down and the lonelier, cold January days arrive, I have poetry workshops to look forward to. They’ll be online, which suits my schedule in winter. Last year, I enrolled in two such workshops and found they spurred me to get a good deal of writing done, so I figured I might try repeating the process. Anita Skeen is doing another series for The Friends of Roethke Foundation with readings, prompts, and discussion on “writing toward wisdom.” In Dickens’ era, I’d be considered old enough to be wise (though most of us, Dickens certainly included, know better about age inevitably bringing wisdom). But the operating word for Skeen in this case is “toward.” It will be interesting to see where she takes her workshop participants in the new year.

Ann E. Michael, Last messages

Equinox is from the Latin aequus—equal—and nox: night; solstice is from sol + sistere: sun standing still. While our linguistic relationship to equinox is one of measurement, the solstice is phenomenological. You can’t quite apprehend a day and night of equal length, though I guess you can stay awake with a couple of stopwatches if you really want. But light that comes later and later (or earlier and earlier), night that falls faster and faster (or slower and slower) is a persistent reminder that we are whirling around the sun at thirty kilometres a second, no matter how much slower (faster) it feels.

Tranströmer’s lyric lives in this moment of renewed awareness, opening with a moment of revelation that carries into observation:

One winter morning, you sense how this earth
rolls forward. Against the walls of the house
a blast of air rattles
out from hiding.

Every moment of every day, you know the earth rolls forward, but that’s not the same as sensing it, as perceiving it, which requires the body’s assistance: the ears that hear the rattle of air, the skin that feels the ice embedded in blast. So awakened, the speaker lingers in his awareness, figured as a sort of shelter:

Surrounded by motion: tranquility’s tent.

This is the first solsticey bit for me, the standing still, which here enables a new kind of sight, one that also now perceives the “secret rudder in the migrating bird flock” and hears “Out of the winter darkness / a tremolo.” It’s a lovely, subtle transition that sets us up for what’s coming, tremolo being by (my) accounts a summer word. From the Latin tremulus, meaning “trembling,” it is a word movement and of song, the willow’s thousand thousand leaves shimmering above the wind-stirred pond, the delicate flute of the wood thrush. The stanza is enjambed, a moment that recalls the enjambed opening line; like that instant in which we await the first revelation that shifts us from stillness to movement, the source of the tremolo is withheld across the break, and once again motion meets stasis.

Vanessa Stauffer, “In the Surging Prow There Is Calm” by Tomas Tranströmer (trans. Patty Crane)

the way
the light bulb rests
in the rest of the trash

smokestack sunset by tom clausen

We’re a week away from Christmas. The weekend snow is melting, though still hanging around. My kids will be coming home soon and I hope to share some winter hikes with them.

Anyway, the lovely poetry website One Art published two Xmas-themed poems of mine. One takes place in a dismal shopping mall where a pall of the season’s (year’s) malaise looms over everything except the lone mall caroler.

The other is mostly a metaphor for the hard passage of time, the burdens we carry, especially this time of year–typical holiday stuff.

You can read them both here at One Art.

Grant Clauser, Almost Christmas Poetry

I think people treat things like Chat GPT as an oracle, when really it’s more like mirror. If what it is reflecting is faulty or misinformed, it too will be faulty and misinformed. If you tell it to write poetry, it will write what it thinks poetry looks like. One of the hilarious things I kept encountering when using the image generators I tried out was that it took things far too literally. I was mostly making faux artifacts in vintage camera styles–cabinet card photos of Mothman and dollhouse dioramas of creepy Victorian houses. But the more specific I got, the more erratic the generator became. While most AI art could hardly be called art (and many artists violently balk at even that conversation)  I have seen people do some really cool things in the horror genre with it.  I still like its possibilities for creating collage elements in Canva I can’t find among stock photos or things I can actually use.  I just wish it compensated artists it scrapes from and didn’t use so much water. 

In [the television series] PLURIBUS, the collective operates not unlike an LLM. If everyone shares the same brain, no new creativity can come from it—at least not any that doesn’t already exits or Frankenstein existing things together. 

Kristy Bowen, the mirror and the oracle

וְנִשְׁכַּח כּל־הַשָּׂבָע בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם וְכִלָּה הָרָעָב אֶת־הָאָרֶץ׃
All the abundance in the land of Egypt will be forgotten. (Gen. 41:30)

Isn’t that what trauma does?
We forget we ever felt otherwise.
This grief is reality, has always
been lurking under the surface.
This is life, this emptiness.
This is all life is, or ever was.
Sink to the earth and give in.

But Yosef says no. Stick photographs
on the fridge. Preserve sungolds
for a snow-day pizza topping, apples
into applesauce for latkes.
Talk to Shekhinah in the front seat
of your car. Even in the dungeon
you are not alone.

Rachel Barenblat, Seven lean years

The other day I found myself a bit overwhelmed with my dead. It must have been the coming-on of Christmas, hanging ornaments on the tree that made me think of me and my little mom doing that together. A guy running in the park put me in mind of my brother. Some guy’s facial expression on TV made me think of Dave. I’m shopping for new skis, which made me think of Art, who would have had what I wanted and would have given me a discount. I heard myself say in my head “Oh…mygod,” just the way Emma used to say it. And I’m glad not to be once again wrangling with Kathy about not wanting her to give me a gift but her wanting to give me a gift so me trying to come up with something I wanted and then having to come up with a gift for her. Geesh, woman, give it a rest. And she did.

And I felt bereft, a word that to me feels like a sort of dignified sadness, with its measured e’s balanced on either side of the fulcrum of r, and that efficient ft cutting off any great show of grief. So I walked bereft in the gray wind. But then solstice, and the coming-on of light, bit by bit. And someone told me the stars are aligned in some way that only happens during times of great change.

And so I resolve to stay present, both with my dead and with my living. Both so surprisingly full of light. And here is a poem by Kathleen Lynch that cracks me up. And isn’t that what we want art to do, crack us up a little bit.

Marilyn McCabe, I eat the many possibilities

The fourth and final poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Samar Al Guhssain.

Mihrab, by Samar Al Guhssain, translated from the Arabic by Batool Abu Akleen.

Samar Al Guhssain is an 18-year-old poet from Gaza. This is her first publication. 

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 4: Mihrab, by Samar Al Guhssain

I’ve always been fascinated by those traditions that treat books almost like people. In the Jewish tradition, sacred books that are damaged or not used are not destroyed, but buried in a cemetery. I find this beautiful and haunting. I’ve been burying books in my garden and then exhuming them. Here is a video of one. I left it outside for a long time and then I buried it. Then dug it up.

The image makes sense to me. A book interacting with the world. With earth, with the elements. Rain. Sun. Wind. A book resisting decay. Or fulfulling its natural role of engaging with life and death. Transformation. Beginning in the earth as seed then growth to tree, toppled, made paper then a return to earth. As with ink. And whatever cycle ideas undergo. The book as a part of the infinite number of processes of change, Emergence, decay, resurgence.

I know in one way a book is a cultural object and this framing is fanciful, ecoromantic. But in another way, everything is part of the process. It may be a precious poeticization to say so, but broadly, it is true. And a book, its bookness, is always implicitly a metaphor. It’s a kind of visual poetry: not just examining the letter but a larger form. Its medium.

This book is a body. A landscape. And you can see how it has begun to merge with its environment. Leaves, maple key, dirt. Its words have disappeared into its burial. Have changed state. Changed statement.

Gary Barwin, Haunted (Buried) Books: Remains that remain.

地球儀が鞄に入り日短　常幸龍BCAD

chikyūgi ga kaban ni hairi hi mijika

            a globe
           fits in a bag
            short winter day

                                                BCAD Jōkōryu

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 20, 2025)

Many cultures do not regard January 1st as a significant date at all. The Lunar New Year is at the end of January. The Jewish New Year is in the fall. The Persian New Year is in March. The Islamic New Year is in June.

You may have your own individual new year. Personally, I consider my birthday to be a more significant date than the Gregorian New Year. (Though as I get older, both dates have come to feel equally depressing.)

Another problematic aspect of New Year’s resolutions is one I wrote about last year. I suspect this might be the true reason so many resolutions fail. That is, they are so often tied to self-recrimination. The very nature of making resolutions for change implies that we believe something in our lives needs fixing. We insist on change because we are convinced something is broken, often that we ourselves don’t measure up. Resolutions tend to begin from feelings of unworthiness.

I will start that novel…because I’ve been such a slacker.

I will commit to writing more…because my output sucked last year.

I’ll send my work out more frequently…because my CV is pathetic.

I will make more time to write …because everyone else is moving ahead while I twiddle my stubby little thumbs.

It’s only natural that our plans for self-improvement would fail in a headspace like this. (Your thumbs are beautiful and perfect, by the way.)

Truly, what is the motivation to push harder, work more, create bigger, when your mind will invariably become a bossy scold who never appreciates what you do? Nothing is ever good enough for you, your inner self is bound to rebel. And by month two, motivation tanks.

For this reason, rather than pledge oneself to some new agenda, some grand life change, I think it’s better—more gratifying, more compassionate, more motivating—to commit to something you’ve already begun. This means looking at your writing life and finding habits, practices and actions that are working right now.

It’s so easy to castigate ourselves for all the ways we haven’t met our goals or lived up to our own expectations. What about acknowledging what you’ve already achieved? Celebrating what you’ve found exciting in your process? Commending yourself for your already-habitual efforts and hard-won discipline?

And then, committing to simply keeping it going?

Becky Tuch, Q: What are your New Year’s acknowledgements and resolutions?

When you first discover kissing, it is a wonder. I thought kissing was all I would ever do. I remember kissing in cars. For hours. I remember the fog on the windows as the music played. It was the late Eighties. “Heaven is a Place on Earth?” played while I kissed a boy in my four-hundred-dollar car that I had to roll start each morning. The kissing went on and on; there was Madonna, Queen, Michael Jackson. […]

In the Year of the Horse, I may still be figuring out the next act, but it is going to include kissing, because, as my friend Ron Koertge says in his fairytale poems, kissing transforms us. The next kiss might be from my dog, Maja, or from my husband, but I will continue to lean into love. In a year like this, love, joy, and gratitude—these are what have sustained me in the belief that a kinder future is ahead.

Kate Gale, Kissing in the Year of the Horse

a small horse leans into her juniper tree. a lost whisper

recovers its body. love and silence will cut life’s thread.

i feel the splinter in my palm burrow on.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: gods of brokenness, a hollowed-out hosiery factory, end paper mood-matches, quokkas sleeping in the shade, and much more. Enjoy.

There’s something energetic about having vibraphone and parachute in the same poem. Is the opening too seemingly glib in its absurd surrealism? Or is it a good way into the more emotionally more real element of the poem? […]

I do love this failure.

Gary Barwin, ERRATA: how to know if a poem “works” or if it’s finished

Something weathered in the voice that greeted me, a bit creaky, like worn mahogany. Pin-point sharp, too. Trained by my father as a child to guess the voice of a speaker without it being announced, I plumped straight away for Margaret Atwood. She said:

This was Canada. You didn’t think you were going to be successful. You thought you were going to be dedicated. It wasn’t considered a career, it was considered a vocation, like a priest.

Margaret Atwood, Woman’s Hour, 5 November 2025

And I thought: that’s it. That’s all I need to listen to. Nothing can improve upon its wisdom. (I was wrong: the whole interview is studded with such nuggets.) Thank you, Radio 4, I take it all back. My other thought was: that is a proper poet’s answer. It’s basically the same thing a prizewinning friend of mine said to me a thousand years ago: ‘I don’t write for prizes. In the end, the process is all any of us have.’

The coffee now made and the stairs climbed, I shuffled back into my chair, took a sip, and reached for my notebook. Where had they got to, those lines about the [———-]? Could they be worked on for a moment? Could I remember again my vocation and commit to being dedicated? I gazed out of the window. This was not Canada, but Plymouth, in the rain. It turns out I could.

Anthony Wilson, This was Canada

This month is always a tricky one. Some of the best things in my life have happened in November, but also some of the worst. It always feels like an unruly month anyway, posed between the spookyness of Halloween and the festivity of Christmas.  With the end of daylight savings time,  the dark comes even earlier and stays so long.  I am never sure what to wear or which coat to bring. How warm or cold spaces will be. The other night I made sure to wear tights for the first time this year, but still found myself burrowing under my coat while we watched Frankenstein in the chilly theater. I can’t just throw on my shoes and run downstairs or to the alley to throw out trash. Leaving the apartment requires preparation. Tights. Coats. Boots. Many layers. When I stay home,  hours after 4pm are dark and strange and I never quite know what to do with myself. It’s too early to stop working but way too early to just go watch something. It feels like midnight but its only 8pm. 

Still good things can happen. In 2000, I managed to land the library job that changed the course of everything and brought me back to Chicago and settled into the place I worked for two decades after that. I came in for an interview on November 1st, was hired on Veteran’s Day, and moved over Thanksgiving weekend to the city I had left after grad school a year and a half before.  In 2005, I received a call one morning from the press that wanted to publish my very first collection of poems and floated on a cloud all day on that momentum alone.  Other Novembers are hazier. Some delightful. Some darker. Like the one in 2019 where I moved out of the studio, sad that it was no longer financially doable due to rising rents and salary stagnation, which had been supplementing my shop income for the 12 years I had the space.

Kristy Bowen, novembers

The title and first line establish the situation of the poem: a tour guide is showing us around the labyrinth; we infer pretty quickly that this particular labyrinth is the mythic home of the minotaur: the “it” that was kept here. The pathos is quickly established as well, the hard rhyme of “their own” and “soup bone” providing an ironic conceptual rhyme—one typically doesn’t require their kin to subsist on scraps—and the shorthand of “beneath the stair” for the dungeon beneath the palace shrinking the scale down to human domesticity. We need not dismiss this story as yet another expected excess of royalty: instead, Stallings encourages us to think of our own kin, our own homes.

The passive voice that opens the second stanza introduces another sort of ironizing distance in “When howls were heard.” The suffering of the imprisoned minotaur, chucked down into Daedalus’s basement funhouse, is perceivable, sure, but no one’s here to own up to it. Instead it’s presented as an agentless action, the language of academic and corporate writing, employed as abdication from accountability, a means of distorting or mutating language to obscure the active cruelty. Again the scale is reframed, and the king and queen of Crete are imagined as your average upper-middle-class couple sipping sherry after dinner and politely excusing their guests so that they might go manage the monster in the basement.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Tour of the Labyrinth” by A.E. Stallings

Laura Theis’ Introduction to Cloud Care is physically slighter than the Finlay and Kinsella books, but it has its own heft. Theis is a German poet who lives in Oxford and writes in her adopted language, English. The poems collected here offer a series of windows into a world that melds the private and public, domestic and natural spheres. For instance, the opening lines of ‘There Used to Be a House Here’ moves the reader quickly from observation of the world to a meditation on natural magic

but now it’s a tree-walled
ruin under an open sky

she has learned that
the generosity of birds is

a witchcraft beyond
pendulums or sage

But Theis is not indulging in a kind of nostalgic longing for some kind of pure nature, as she calls out in ‘Oak Coppice’, a coppice being a kind of technological intervention in natural process:

Poets have told me over and over about sitting in nature,
staying away from screens. But I am typing this on my phone.
I wish I had not looked up
the meaning of coppice.

Coppicing is, in its way, a form of imposed metamorphosis, and shapeshifting is a central concern of many of these poems, from tips on dating a were-hare, through a lover who it seems is being unfaithful with trees:

She returns home to me with leaves in her hair,
her cheeks flushed,
always satisfied, serene.

to a prose poem called ‘I Wonder How Ovid Dealt with This’ in which the work itself is the thing that shapeshifts.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading November 2025: A Broken Sleep Special

Tourists scale the tumulus and find,
at sunrise, eagles, lions, and Apollo,
gods of brokenness, unhumbled despite
centuries of disregard. Extinct.

Ann E. Michael, Magnificent

I started studying this parsha last week in preparation for writing poetry about it and teaching it this week. I had drafted a line or two, but it just wasn’t flowing. Last night I woke in the middle of the night and suddenly realized: I was going about it wrong. Instead of trying to put myself in Ya’akov’s shoes, I should put myself in Rachel’s. The combination of that spark, and this teaching, brought the poem through me.

Of course it’s anachronistic to imagine the Biblical Rachel quoting psalms, which wouldn’t be written for a few thousand years. But that’s no big deal in the garden of Torah interpretation. As the saying goes, אין מוקדם ומאוחר בתורה / ein mukdam u’m’uhar baTorah, “there’s no before and after in Torah.” In God’s time perhaps it’s all simultaneous anyway.

Rachel Barenblat, Rachel speaks

I just finished proofing some poems (a poem in the Jan/Feb issue of Poetry, two in Sugar House Review) and an essay called “The Unfenced Field and Poetry” (forthcoming in Third Coast), and winter is so in the air here in North Carolina. I’ve been binge-reading Susan Howe after reading her gorgeous new Penitential Cries (so. good.) as well as 100 Years of Solitude, and feeling surrounded by good books, if nothing else.

Han VanderHart, Poetry, Poetry for November and December

How does your most recent work compare to your previous?

Well my most recent work, IRØNCLAD, an illustrated hybrid collection, is coming out mid October with Spuyten Duyvil. I always try and approach a new work from a fresh angle, and IRØNCLAD is my first book that was not written on a typewriter or in word-processing software, but directly into the layout program, InDesign. The reasoning was to try and take advantage of the actual typography of the poem or prose piece. The book is set in the fictional world of The Iron Plier Society, who themselves are trying to make sense of their own archeological record. Fragments uncovered in the geological strata inform the book and the narrative. As you move deeper into the book, you discover, fragment by fragment, artifact by artifact, what appears to be the evolution of a civilization—yet, you can never quite be sure that what you have discovered in the damp earth faithfully represents your progenitors intentions (every interpretation comes with its own set of biases also). And, it is easy to misinterpret those too!

My previous collection, which came out with Unlikely Books in May this year, is the poetry collection Spells for the Wicked, which certainly informs IRØNCLAD. In fact, you might say that IRØNCLAD is the culmination of many years of addressing the subject of mythology and how it informs the later narrative and structure of a given society or culture.

How does it feel different?

Although they are two entirely different books, narratively, linguistically, typographically even, they do address some of the same principles in their own fashion. I consider myself a writer of books rather that a writer of individual poems or pieces of fiction. Much of my more recent work crosses the boundaries between fiction and poetry. In my earlier work, I may have been more concerned with presenting a given poetic form. These days I allow the book to inform me, rather than lying down rules in advance. Essentially though, I always try to approach each book project with a slightly different angle: be it the method for writing it (i.e. handwritten, typewriter, direct to computer), the environment I am writing in, or in some cases with a collaborator, the collaborative process itself. All of these things can significantly influence the outcome and inform the work, sometimes in surprising ways.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marc Vincenz

Now I am standing at the little window on the landing watching the weather and there the magpie is again, sitting in the sycamore, staring straight in at me. I have no fight to argue with a bird today. I’m watching the weather. After driving all the way out to the cancer hospital this week, full of nerves and strategy for sitting through five hours of treatment, they cancelled the chemo and rescheduled. The day the chemo is supposed to happen has snow and ice warnings, the Wolds might be thick with snow and I know we’ll struggle to get across, so we’ll have to cancel and move it to next week, unless my brother can get away from work and take his four by four. If it’s cancelled, my mum will be relieved because she is dreading the treatment like nothing I’ve ever seen. But it will be yet another delay, the clock ticking. Her precious days taken up with all this bullshit of waiting and driving and waiting and driving.

I work on the poetry commission. Finish it, sign it off. A job well done. I’m excited to see it in its next evolution. The simple pleasure of artists working together. The sparks of excitement over idea exchange. I make a big pot of tea, return to the desk.

Snow. But it doesn’t last long. I feel it before I see it. The room darkens around me, the sky pushing down on the trees, then that silent strangeness of snow falling. Frida and I stand at the window and watch.

Wendy Pratt, Blotmonað: Month of sacrifices

I’m happy to share the third poetry video from my book Temporary Shelters. The poem, Gunpowder Homestead, explores my fascination with the old house ruins and foundations I sometimes run into on woods hikes in my home state of Pennsylvania.

Whenever I encounter a place like this, I think about the people who lived here once 150 or more years ago–how their lives were different from mine, how the land and the world may have been different, and what happened that the place fell into ruin.

Grant Clauser, Video for Gunpowder Homestead

Well, I probably shouldn’t write a review of Christopher James’ new pamphlet, The Ice Sonnets (Dithering Chaps, 2025), given that my endorsement appears on its back cover, but I can recommend it thoroughly and suggest you get hold of a copy for yourself by visiting the Dithering Chaps webshop. To give you a flavour of this top-notch collection, here’s that aforementioned endorsement…

‘In The Ice Sonnets, Christopher James tells the story of Shackleton’s expedition via a collage effect of juxtaposing exquisitely drawn pen portraits of its participants, interweaving the characters, drawing out the group dynamics that develop in extreme conditions. These poems tell a highly specific tale with universal ramifications.’

Matthew Stewart, Christopher James’ The Ice Sonnets

In effect, it’s a sequel to The Penguin Diaries of 2017, which dealt with Robert Scott’s ill-fated attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1912.

Inevitably, The Penguin Diaries, though similar in that it is a 65-sonnet sequence, had the mood of an elegy, because the expedition ended in tragedy with Scott and his final team dying on the ice just a few miles from safety. While Scott’s story has taken on the legend of heroic British failure – they reached the Pole, only to find the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, had beaten them to it, then died on the way back – The Ice Sonnets is a celebration of survival against enormous odds.

Once again James chooses to give each member of the expedition a sonnet to themselves. Each acts like a snapshot, a pen-picture, of what made each man remarkable. After all, it was a bonkers idea. Having worked in Canada in winter, I know how horrendously cold it can get – and I was nowhere near the (North) Pole. It seems to me just plain weird that anyone would bother to freeze themselves to death, in Scott’s case, to go to the extreme point of our planet and plant a flag in it.

Exploration of the earth is not something we bother too much about, however, in 2025, because it’s been mapped, scanned, analysed, explored physically and psychologically in intense detail. Any one of us can see satellite images of the tiniest scrap of land or sea. This is obviously a vast contrast to how the ‘globe’ appeared to our ancestors. Britons were fed the idea of Empire, of ‘Darkest Africa’, of a world to be conquered and colonised. Men like Scott and Shackleton captured the imagination – and did, because they took the immense risk of travelling into the vast, frozen unknown, provide us with a greater communal knowledge of the planet on which we all live. Their achievements, as strange as they might seem to some now, remain impressive, their lives enigmatic, worthy in themselves of exploration.

What James has done here is provide, by dedicating to each individual a poem of fourteen lines, a distilled impression of who they were. In doing so, he delves into the character, teasing out detail, giving each a separate identity within the whole, and so providing a convincing insight into not only an individual life but how that person fitted into the overall ‘team’. About how we human beings work individually and collectively.

Bob Mee, THE ICE SONNETS by CHRISTOPHER JAMES

For composers, there is a certain significance in the 8th opus. And Christian Lehnert gestures towards this significance in the titling of his eighth poetry collection, Opus 8: Wickerwork.

Designating itself “a nature book,” Wickerwork is now (partly) available in Richard Sieburth’s English-language translation, and in his tantalizing prefatory essay that supplies context and enriches Lehnert’s wickers. The book is divided into seven linked chapters or movements, overseen by a unique epigraph.

And each of the seven movements is composed of seven contrapuntal poems that face one another across the page’s seam. On the left: the solo voicings of a couplet in alexandrine meter. On the right: the chorales of an octave in iambic tetrameter. Sieburth likens Lehnert’s distichs to the “phanopaeia” that Ezra Pound defined as “a casting of images on the visual imagination.”

Names

The name is an herb / a seedling and a shaft /
Risen from the sound / of wood and oil and sap.

In these poems, Lehnert uses a virgule to indicate a pause or breath within the line, thus connecting the poem’s way of being — and breathing— to a convention in German baroque verse, namely, the use of a separatrix to serve as a guide for oral reading and performance.

Alina Stefanescu, Nominations in Christian Lehnert’s poetic forms.

Frost left its edges on the deck and steps but I find a dry spot to sit, my coffee’s steam seeming to fill the gray sky. I try to still my mind’s constant conversation and just breathe in the damp cold, hear the barrage as individual songs, ignore the intrusion of should-have-cut-back-the-lavender, of next-year-I’ll-dig-up-the-lizard’s-tail. Study again the difficult present, amid the uncertainty of tomorrow, of the next hour, next minute. It takes work to be in the world like this. To be an extension of it, not a mover through it. But of course, I am both. As I am an impatient observer of my species, and inescapably, one and the same.

I admire this long poem by Barbara Tomash for its unreined wander but its careful containment too. There is no escaping itself.

Marilyn McCabe, to hide the sound of the groaning enormity

Kujō Takeko – 11 Tanka (1920-1928), by Dick Whyte:

All the blood in my body is frozen;
Only the cold sword of reason
Flashes within me.

The Forgotten Poets Newsletter, from which this tanka is taken, “is dedicated to out-of-print, obscure, and generally under-appreciated poets and poems, particularly from the late-1800s and early-1900s.” Dick Whyte, the person who curates and writes the newsletter also has “a specific interest in the intertwining histories of tanka and haiku, both in Japanese and English, and their relationship to the beginnings of free-verse.” The issue from which the above tanka comes is about Kujō Takeko, a woman whose poetry would be a “significant influence on the shintai’shi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) movements in Japan. The tanka I’ve quoted above, along with all the others in this issue of Forgotten Poets, were translated by Glenn Hughes and Yozan T. Iwasaki. (There is a slightly more detailed bio of Takeko here.)

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #50

3rd Wednesday has published my poem “Le Plus Ça Change” on their website.

I am very pleased with this small poem because it was formed by looking at two poems which were not quite working and taking the best parts of each (the images, of course) and combining them. Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to try connecting these pieces, since they were both about things French. But the brain gets into ruts of thought sometimes; the process is a great pleasure when something breaks through.

Ellen Roberts Young, Poem On Line

I’m pleased to have five poems and verse translations in the new issue of Literary Imagination (volume 27.3, pp. 299-304). Literary Imagination is the journal of the American Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers and is unusual in publishing a mixture of scholarship, essays, poems and translations accessible to writers, critics and teachers outside as well as within academia. The new editor, Paul Franz, is doing something really exciting with it — the long piece in this issue by James Tusing on Alice Monro is really superb and has already garnered a good deal of attention.

The five pieces I have in this issue are quite varied: the first is a translation of Ancient Greek prose into English verse, from Julian the Apostate (readers who read this post about Greek a while ago will recognise the extract). The second is a poem of my own linked loosely to that passage, called ‘Reading Julian the Apostate on my late father’s birthday’. The third is a verse translation of a Pāli poem from the Therīgāthā, a collection of poems written by early Buddhist nuns. (I wrote briefly about this collection here.) The fourth is a loose and experimental version of Horace, Odes 1.10. The fifth is a poem of my own called ‘Latin didactic’ that is in part about reading the Georgics.

Victoria Moul, Five poems and translations in “Literary Imagination”

If you haven’t heard the term, a beta reader is someone who reads an early draft of a book and provides feedback. They are not editors. They don’t provide line-level changes or suggestions. Instead, they answer questions and give overall impressions.

If you ask ten people for an opinion on poetry, you will get ten different answers. For that reason, I chose to keep my pool of beta readers very small, sticking to only four writers—Heidi Fiedler, Jillian Stacia, Michelle Awad, Elise Powers—and my mom and husband.

It’s a strange thing to share your work with beta readers. You’re not just putting the book out there for people to read. You’re sharing it and asking the hard questions: What’s working? What isn’t? What would you cut? Etc.

My beta readers’ reflections helped me see the book more clearly than I could on my own, and most importantly, made me feel less alone in it all. After years of working on the poems in this collection, sharing it felt incredible. I’d chosen my readers with great intention, and they treated my work with care and respect.

Allison Mei-Li, Behind the book

I’m thrilled and deeply honored that my poem “Clutch” was selected for today’s Poem-a-Day series by The Academy of American Poets, curated by the incredible Tacey M. Atsitty, author of (At) Wrist (University of Wisconsin Press, November 14, 2023).

This recognition means so much to me, and I’m grateful to Tacey for championing voices and poetry that connect us all. Make sure to check out the other poems she selected in the month of November. Each poem includes comments from the poet about the poem and an audio recording.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Clutch” selected for Poets.org Poem-a-Day series!

cloud gazing…
I thought about it
but wasn’t sure
what I’d do
with an empty mind

cloud gazing by tom clausen

I’ve been writing a lot about the Firth of Forth. I live near where the estuary opens into the North Sea, and when I look south across the Firth, it’s easy to imagine that this is a scene from thousands of years ago. In certain lights there aren’t many visible traces of human presence. What’s more difficult to picture is how the Firth looked during the Last Ice Age. Immeasurable tons of ice flowing out to sea, scraping away at the land. All vegetation, all animal and bird life, all traces of early human habitation erased. The islands and hills of today are what remain of larger geological forms eroded to stubs by glaciers.

It makes you feel small, thinking on this timescale, reflecting upon the massive impact of the ice on a landscape which you might assume is unchanging. I wanted to explore this feeling in a poem – a long poem, almost in essay form, which progresses incrementally and implacably. I was interested in how human history might be understood alongside a vaster geological history, not least because – from the point of view of an individual – the drawn-out events of human history can themselves seem like unstoppable forces.

Like an essay, my long poem ‘Glacier’ makes a lot of use of quotation. This was influenced by Marianne Moore’s marvellous poem ‘An Octopus’, about a glacier-topped mountain in North America. I like the instability created by the intrusion of other people’s words upon the poetic voice, and the frisson when terminology from other disciplines is put under pressure in a poem. Glaciers pick up all kinds of debris, from grit to huge boulders, finally depositing them far from their original context. I want the quoted phrases in my poem to be repositioned in a similar way.

Garry MacKenzie, Glacier

I know this last year has been a lot for many of us (personally, I’ve felt in some sort of crisis-mode since May 2024!) But I read the other day that the opposite of anxiety is creativity (I always thought it was calmness, as I am highly creative with my anxiety and worst-case scenarios!) But what the author shared was that we can take all those uncomfortable emotions and make something from them—write a poem, journal, paint something, or even string fairy lights in the laundry room just because. Make beauty where there wasn’t any. And I like that idea—leave the world a little better each day. Create when you can. […]

The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi — I just finished this book and I adored it! Gabrielle does something in these poems that reminds me why we read in the first place—to feeeeel (yes, with five e’s). If you’re someone who has one toe dipped in sadness, but who also walks through the world noticing the small miracles of being alive—this may be exactly the book you need right now. Its opening line is: The days I don’t want to kill myself are extraordinary. From there, the book keeps opening up into how temporary everything is, and yet somehow it keeps choosing wonder and finding joy. It’s my current favorite read—the book I keep returning to, the one that keeps returning to me.

Kelli Russell Agodon, My *Favorite Things* List

Publishing a chapbook starts with encountering a mind.

There’s a lot of poetry in the world that can take any shape or position. Authorial summary, imagist embroidery, foregrounding feelings or ironed down lessons, or poet voice’s uniform containment, unshaped lashing, formal, anarchist, anti-hierarchy, storytelling, language-y foregrounded.

Here was a mind questioning and admitting how things don’t quite reconcile. There’s the considered footstep of word choice, and risk of embedded emotions but an exploring mind as if talking to itself not performing an established script. This is a mind that can be self-deprecating. Observant, humble, vivid, self-questioning, That is an exciting brain. 

At an open mic, Tamsyn’s poem (and I don’t recall which, it being a couple years ago) stood out in glittering neon sparkle of aha. What is this alert mind here? Hm, hm, think I might need to meet this person.

Could I see more poems?

These poems reflect a world of citizens I want to live in, to make more of. These are poems I can hear and feel. Ideas and posture relative to the world that make sense to me. Ones that take risk, that can sit with thoughts not all categorically pre-filed for the reader.

So, I got the poems, which I will then sit on as a dragon’s hoard. Read, rest, reread.

I look at line length, poem width and length, consider the potential size of container. Next or simultaneously: Looking at the poems as a critic, call out what is particularly fabulous and goosebump-making. Let it sit, reconsider.

Meanwhile I consider paper types, end paper mood-matches, cover stock options. What sort of cover image would complement the poems? Brainstorm that. Look and draw and make images. That’s a fun imagining stage.

While waiting considering paper stock, reconsider fonts. Doing a few layouts. Give suggestions for edits. Dialogue. Sending a proof of concept for approval and edits.

Pearl Pirie, Process of Chapbooks: for Farr’s

A couple of years ago, Joelle Taylor took part in the contemporary poetry archive project that I was involved in at the University of East Anglia. Her creative response to the project was “dust kings. tough kids”, a “queer crown of sonnets” written in memory of murdered butch women. Here is part of her note on the sequence:

While writing I stared at a cheap plastic snow globe that imprisoned a gold angel. Occasionally, gold glitter rained down on the angel. The snow globe was given to me in the early 1990s by my girlfriend’s brother, Richard. He was the first gay man I personally knew to die of AIDS, and he left behind him a collection of snow globes for the mourners to take home with them from his funeral. As I worked, I thought about the snow globe, about the idea of the vitrine in general, about emergency, about memory, safety, love, and friendship. This Crown of 15 Sonnets is written in response to the idea of the snow globe as an archive within itself.

“dust kings. tough kids” has now been republished as part of Maryville: 1957—2007 (Bloomsbury) […]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #38: A Crop of Frost

When I first read Chaucer Cameron’s In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered (Against the Grain, 2021) I was reminded of Mexican writer and activist, Cesar A. Cruz , who said ‘Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.’ In other words literature should provoke strong reactions, jolt the reader out of his/her complacency, force them to confront uncomfortable truths. Cameron does just that by taking us into the lives of women who work in the sex industry: prostitutes, cam girls, strippers.

She shows us that this is a world in which women are treated as an expendable commodity, their value dependent on their looks. In Erotic, a poem written from the point of view of a pole-dancer, she states: ‘ But here/ tonight/ a pint glass/ does the rounds,/ half full:/ loose change/ that clanks/ against the sides/ is a sign/ I’ve lost./ Skin no longer/ tight against my frame/ fixes me/ at half price./ Doesn’t it?’  The consequence of ageing is a drop in remuneration. There’s something tragic about a woman who describes herself in monetary terms, as ‘half price.’ Her job has undermined her self-image, her self-worth. This is developed further in the symbolic description that follows: ‘My dressing/ room/ has dwindled/ to toilet size./ No door locks/ grime-smeared/ floor tiles/ cracked.’ The squalidness of the environment and its comparison to a toilet suggests the humiliation she feels and the contempt with which she believes she is held. She also feels very vulnerable. Significantly there are ‘no door locks’: she is defenceless. Her position is a precarious one, subject to the whims of her employer.  As a consequence we are told she ‘cower(s) in a corner/ until the owner comes to check.’ She goes on: ‘This time/ he shows pity,/ dresses me/ in finery./ takes me to his table’/ he likes/ the meat,/ the tuck, tuck/twist of me.’ The image ‘he likes the meat’ is shocking in its resonance with its associations of death, carnal appetite, and violence. This is a man who enjoys his life and death power over her: ‘He likes/ to see/ the light/ in my acid eyes/ go out/ just before/ they/ close.’

These notions of male power and exploitation permeate virtually every poem in this pamphlet.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘In Ideal World I’d not be Murdered’ by Chaucer Cameron

Bex Hainsworth is a poet whose work I’ve skirted the periphery of for a while, always enjoyably so. Circulaire has given me the chance to dive in and explore at greater depth, and I’m so glad I did. Hainsworth has been published in The Rialto, Poetry Wales and bath magg, among others. While her debut pamphlet, Walrussey, is described as ecopoetry, Hainsworth says of this collection, in an interview with Sam Szanto, “Circulaire is my confessional era”. Confessional feels right. The poems are corporeal, intimate; concerned with the domestic stage and the everyday dangers of being a woman.

The opening poem somehow reminded me of Colette, who, in her memoirs, gives us a poetic, personal ethnography of the domestic interior. Speaking of her grandmother’s ‘semi-detached’, Hainsworth says:

“It shook knitting needles

and ration books from its cellar,

ready for new visitations.”

(All houses are haunted by women)

A few poems in, in Arcs, she speaks of a first apartment;

“Tucked away in the hips

of a hollowed-out hosiery factory”

and

“the rosy bones of our chilly homes”

There is a repeated merging of the interior space of the home with the interior space of the child, then “almost-woman”. The poems loosely follow a narrative arc from childhood to adulthood, charting “the cycle of female experience” (another interview quote).

Victoria Spires, Tender excavations

I am poor and I owe
an incalculable debt
to the world— I have taken
more than my share of what
it has given, and still
it does not begrudge another
chance to secure my so-called
fortune. […]
And I am rich with
a surplus, always, of feeling.
There is so much, I often
don’t know what to do with it;
and other times, it saves me
from thinking I am completely
bereft, empty as a pauper’s purse.

Luisa A. Igloria, Pauper’s Purse

I came to the cafe thinking I would be able to tap into something creative and instead I found a (nother) way to self-critique. I need to try to use this as a spark (a cattle prod?) to inspire something more. Does this count as writing, this post wherein I complain about not being able to write? What would I tell my students?

I guess I’d remind them that writing is a muscle that you have to work regularly or else risk weakening. Not losing—you can always get it back—but it does get harder the longer you sit on your metaphorical butt.

I’d also tell them (and by extension, myself), not to be too hard on themselves. Life is hard enough. (Especially lately, good lord.) Be gentle. Give grace.

But also: get going.

Sheila Squillante, What Counts?

I cannot wait, I cannot wait, I cannot wait
until we can talk about all of this in the past tense
I cannot wait for these to be the old days
[…]

This week I’m sharing this poem from a wonderful event we did together this month down at STATUS FLO at The Brighton Dome Studio Theatre. This regular poetry night is incredible, with fabulous curation and hosting by Aflo Poet, one of the UK’s rising superstar poets. The evening also featured poetry and vivid story-telling from the excellent Pablo Franco. Both of these poets delivered phenomenal sets and you should check them both out. This film of my poem was kindly sent to me by Gray Taylor. The night was electric, the audience so warm, responsive, which you might hear here, thank you to everyone there. Thank you for inviting me to join you.

Salena Godden, I Cannot Wait To Breathe

Best Small Fictions 2025 is now open for pre-orders on the Alternating Current Press website here. I’m thrilled to be included for the third time & in this 10th anniversary edition! Many thanks to Jeff Harvey’s Gooseberry Pie for nominating my Microfiction “After Reading A Newspaper Clipping Of Emily Dickinson’s Obituary Online” and to judge Robert Shapard for selecting it for inclusion. Thanks to the anthology editors and readers for their hard work. Congrats to my fellow flash writers. I can’t wait to have it in my hands! Please consider pre-ordering which determines the print runs. Thanks!

In other book news, I received my signed copy of Patti Smith’s new book, Bread of Angels, and look forward to beginning reading today. Two of her previous books are among my favorites, Just Kids and M Train. I’ve read them more than once which is a testament to how much I like them. Patti’s is the first Stack I subscribed to a few years ago. I really like her low-key impromptu videos that make me feel like we are having a chat about ordinary and extraordinary things. She spoke about this book as she wrote it so I know it will be brilliant reading. I’ll let you know what I think.

Charlotte Hamrick, Book News!

I have spent some time this morning listening to Patricia Smith’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award for poetry; another poet pasted it in a Facebook post.  I went to the website where one could watch the whole ceremony (here), but instead, I’m listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Patti Smith–the more famous Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, the author of Just Kids, along with more recent books.

Back to the poet Patricia Smith, who was the only poet of all the nominees whose work I had read (go here for the full list).  I hadn’t even heard of the poets nominated until they were nominated.  Some years are like that.  But happily, I have heard of Patricia Smith; I remember a presentation she did at an AWP conference, probably as far back as the one in D.C. in 2011.  I probably wouldn’t have discovered her book Blood Dazzler on my own without hearing her talk about it at her presentation.  It showed me what poetry could do, and I’m glad she’s now gained wider recognition for her poetry.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Various Patricia Smiths and Various Strands of a Life

A book which has been on my shelves forever is A Wild Patience Has Take Me This Far by Adrienne Rich. I’ve culled my books a number of times but this one remains. However, I hadn’t taken it off the shelf for ages. Lately I’ve been saying in my head a lot, I don’t really think I have the wild patience for this. But then I laugh and do the thing anyway. You know? Anyway the book’s title is the first line of a poem titled “Integrity.” In it she speaks of her selves being both “anger and tenderness.” She speaks of how the light is both critical and critical. In another poem she says, “If you can read and understand this poem / send something back…” I’ve always loved her poem “What Kind of Times Are These.”

Shawna Lemay, I’m Giving You a Free Pass (and a side of wild patience)

Once, in Spain, I saw a two pet meerkats on a lilo floating down a bright river, chattering loudly with what might have been excitement, or perhaps more likely, fear. Sometimes, in the bright, sociable suburbs of Perth, I feel like a meerkat on a lilo.

But when I walked into The Moon Café, with its long bar crowded with bottles, its stage and its rainbow flags, I found my footing again. And to open the reading, an Acknowledgement of and Welcome to Country which made me feel, for a moment, like we all belonged to this one moment in millennia of human history, to all the ages of this dizzingly ancient land.

More of that another time. Because now, I want to talk about quokkas.

And Cath Drake. Since the Moon Café, I’ve been reading her collection “The Shaking City” published with Seren in 2020. It’s unusually thick and accomplished for a first collection – and I read it slowly in these baking hot days of wild distractions. By the time I reach the second section – a sequence of fantastical and quotidian character portraits, each equally magical – I return to the first section, and find new narratives in each of the rich, dense yet accessible poems. It’s a collection which deserves to be more widely acclaimed – but it’s the third section – “Far From Home” – which comes alive for me in 30 degree heat, facebook full of pictures of the snow falling back home, Australian Ravens wailing like babies or peacocks, or mating cats, .

The day after the Cath Drake’s reading, I was due to visit Rottnest Island or Wadjemup, the Noongar name of the island. It’s referred as ‘the place across the water where the spirits are’ – the resting place of the spirits, as well as the bodies of the Aboriginal men and boys who died in the island’s prison and forced labour camps between 1838 and 1931.

In her reading, Cath described how significant the island is for anybody raised in Perth – how quickly and drastically it has changed; how she loves it regardless. I was only on the island for five hours, and my engagement was brief, shallow, and wildly enthusiastic. I loved the speed and breeze of cycling down its tracks and deceptive hills. I loved the snorkelling; the fish like silver flames, the shy and sandy flounder. I loved the white beaches, the rough vegetation, the peeling gum trees and the old buildings; the gulls and oystercatchers. But most of all, I love the quokkas, sleeping in the shade near the shops, climbing into unattended bags, begging under benches, stealing ketchup from our table.

Clare Shaw, The Strange and Shining.

It took several days for me to settle into a travel mode, and leave behind the sorrows and concerns of my daily life. I checked my messages, looked at the Guardian once a day, kept up with Duolingo (switching from Spanish to Italian), but I stayed away from social media and any threaded conversation scrolls, posting only a couple of pictures myself and one blog post. We ate out some, at pizzerias and simple trattorias, and we also cooked. At first I was unable to draw or write much, but eventually this loosened up and I managed to keep a basic written journal and worked in my sketchbook; every day, I looked for ideas for future paintings or writing.

We had a lot of remarkable experiences, and I’ll try to share some of them here as the next weeks unfold. I’ve come back feeling like the creative discouragement and inertia of the last few months has lifted, and I feel inspired to write and do artwork over the winter. This is a relief, and I hope it lasts. But in order to do that, I realize I have to be online less, to be less focused on political news, argument, and the negativity I can do nothing about, to say “no” a little more often, and to determinedly focus my energies and time on the areas where I can actually make a difference, both in my own life and in others’. Distraction is everywhere, and it’s there for a reason — and not a benign one. Resistance, on the other hand, also takes many forms. One is to set a meaningful direction for oneself, and stick to it. That’s never easy. It’s the path with greater challenge, and greater potential serenity too.

Beth Adams, Re-entry

Look at the airline staff: all yawns, blank, demoted 
to rote smiles as they correct operating intelligence.

Job description: To Oversee the Blundering
Machine.  But as any parent knows, kids grow

competent; they turn 30, don’t need reminders
to pack and get going. The message is bright and bold:

they are replacing us. But AI ain’t flesh and blood,
the workers’ smiles tell you that in one second.

Jill Pearlman, The New Thanksgiving Travel

I was thinking about how to make this season brighter—with all the political ugliness and Trump and his horrid party boys trying to kill the arts (defunding the NEA means a lot of presses and lit mags shutting down and struggling)—and I came upon this idea. If you have a favorite press or literary magazine—we may not be able to replace a $25K grant from the government, but maybe we can give a little and if it happens from many of us, it will be enough to count. I know a lot of us are struggling with money these days—more than usual, given the layoffs and the inflation—but giving during the holidays has always been a tradition that usually comes—not from the wealthy, not from the billionaires—but from the little people, from the middle class. There are a lot of people who don’t have enough to eat. Animal shelters need donations of pet food. Even cleaning out and donating from your pantry may do more good than you know.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, How to Give a Little, Making the Holidays Brighter…Literally

I know that it’s an incredibly challenging financial time for many, as prices continue to rise and economic inequality deepens. And, there are also so many worthy causes and organizations in need (and even more so with many ends to federal funding), but if you’re able (and don’t forget to ask if your employer offers matching donations) and so inclined, I’d like to offer a couple of ways you can support the arts this season.

First, Black Ocean, where I am editor, is celebrating its first year as a nonprofit publisher and about to celebrate 20 years in publishing in 2026, and is trying to raise money to meet its annual fundraising goal to support its books and translations. Find out more here.

Also, please consider supporting Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), where your gift will enable meaningful arts education partnerships for students, teachers, and teaching artists in Chicago and West Chicago. Find out more about their programs and how to donate here. (What’s more, your gift will be matched by the Wildflower Foundation.)

Carrie Olivia Adams, A Few Reasons for Gratitude

Happy Thanksgiving! Isn’t is amazing that we have a whole holiday dedicated to gratitude? (With a side of cranberry sauce.) There’s so much I’m grateful for, but a key element is the sense of purpose I gain from my Makino Studios work. It turns out that being an artist and poet doesn’t bring in the big bucks—who knew?! But unlike hedge fund managers, I get to regularly hear from people how much my offerings touch them.

This weekend a friend told me that one of my cards was perfect for a difficult situation: her brother is in his last weeks in hospice. Another wrote that she was so moved by a poem that she sent it on to family and friends. And there are hundreds of people who make a point of giving my haiku calendar to friends, family, book club members, caregivers and coworkers every year. It’s a real gift to have that impact as an artist and poet. Your support helps my dreams take wing, so thank you all!

Annette Makino, On grateful wings

it was snowing & the sky was bare.
we both stopped. no porch light,
just the glow of white snow lighting
our faces. maybe he saw the creature
staring down at us. maybe he was looking
at something else. i could not make out
the beast’s full body. eyes. claws.
wing tips like mountains.

Robin Gow, 11/22

the view from what happens decides there’s a road. or a fly

on the wall of winter. all things to be done will be done

over. the dark in a dog set to howl.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you read each water anew.

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Harrison, Everything I have not written

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Where am I?

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

sacred shrine
worshippers raise
their selfie sticks

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

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

rice paddies blurring into the past bullet train

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

Annette Makino, Three wayfarers in Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Rich, A little story of birds and birdbrains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

james mcconachie, A Vein of Abiding Mineral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, October Reads

It started with a joke in a direct message… 

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

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

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

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

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

Nope. Now more than ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Visit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Solemn-sinister wreath-rubbish

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

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

Jill Pearlman, On Seeing Kara Walker in Mary Janes

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

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

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

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

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

4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You never see all of yourself.

Explore the places you’ve never been”

(Wolf Eye)

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

“Have you

seen the faces of flowers? …

What wallpaper did you choose for your face

before you went out?”

(Have You)

“What is the smell of mirrors?”

(Mirrors)

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

Victoria Spires, Alchemising the mundane

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

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

But look, you say, she is smiling.

And she is.

Her long hair floats out
like golden pondweed […]

Sue Finch, No Terrapin Today

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, Captain Haddock in Monte Carlo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rejections to Treasure

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

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

“Like what?” we asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, curation vs gatekeeping

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, The Power of Celebrity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon Stone, ESSAY / The Amalgamist’s Workshop

old encyclopedias:
I buy a complete set
for collaging

Bill Waters, A Collection of Moments: Library Book Sale

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, The poem within the poem

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

Bound Voices #001: A Conversation with Victoria Moul

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

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

https://sheilabender.substack.com

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

Bethany Reid, Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Blessing” by James Wright

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

I want to read those writers.

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Writing Prompts & Working Class Writers

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

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

Sarah Lada, We All Become Just Bodies

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

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

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

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Being present in grief.

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Landfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Jewish Heretics and Wild Writers

old skin. thin.

one can see through it to a future.

crows feed on the sunflower’s eye.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: how poems happen, early-autumn dreamtime, the gates of unuttered words, and much more. Enjoy.

It was almost midnight on February 18, 2023. My back was injured from repeatedly picking up our elderly dog Misha. I was lying in bed with one of the large spiral-bound notebooks I use for journaling. Feeling sore and tired, I didn’t have anything profound to say, so I just wrote about the moment: journaling about my wee life despite my stunning insignificance in the grand scheme of things. The first draft read:

spiral notebook
these random jottings in this bit
of galaxy

This felt very awkward, but it had potential. I cut “these” but it was still clunky. Next I tried:

spiral notebook
recording my small part
of the galaxy

I crossed out “small” but it still seemed too long and too obvious. I gave up for the time being.

The next day, I came back to it with fresh eyes. Changing “notebook” into “journal” covered the journaling aspect without having to detail it. And instead of hitting readers over the head with my point, the new, condensed version gave them a little something to work out. I changed “part” for “bit” because it sounded smaller.

The haiku was now so short that I thought it worked better as a one-liner, or “monoku.” In English-language haiku, this is a popular variation from the typical three lines. The poem now read:

spiral journal my bit of the galaxy

Three weeks later, I submitted it to the esteemed journal Modern Haiku, and happily, editor Paul Miller accepted it for the summer 2023 edition.

Last month, while perusing my haiku collection to find good subjects for haiga (art combined with haiku), this one spoke to me. But I’d noticed that many of my poems are in the first person. For pieces that will go into my annual calendar, I worry that too many “I” poems could seem too self-involved; I would rather include the reader. So for the haiga version, I changed “my” to “this.”

Now I wonder if my meaning is less clear in this version, but I guess that’s OK; each reader can interpret it as they wish. There are plenty of haiku that I find mysterious but interesting, as long as they aren’t completely obscure.

Annette Makino, How a haiku is hatched

In 2017, a trip to Berlin led me to the place where the Nazis began the burning of books.

I felt a sudden,  powerful physical and emotional sensation, history coming fully alive. I had studied the Weimar Republic at University but it could not convey the palpable combination of location and history which I felt as I studied  the memorial to those events.

“Ghosts gather, tug at your sleeve politely / plead that you read the Book of the Dead. / Its opening page lies at your feet. Descend / to lamentation’s rainbow. / “
Viewing the monument in Budapest to the murder of Jews was a further jolt. Out of these intense moments came two poems, Berlin 1933 and Shoes, published in my first book, At the Storms Edge, ( Palewell Press.)

My poetic voice was maturing and a re-reading of Primo Levi’s book made an even deeper impression.  I felt a deep urge to honour his life and work, to try to imagine those moments before extermination, to praise his humanity. Hence this poem, for me the most important in the book. And perhaps, subconsciously, I was provoking readers and listeners to say, “this matters, you need to know so that you can spot the warning signs here and elsewhere.”

Am I in danger of overstatement? Think how rancorously divided we were over Brexit. The murder of MP, Jo Cox.  Violent disorder about asylum-seekers in hotels. The condemning of judges in the right-wing press for upholding the law. In the words of Sir Michael Tippett, “I must know my shadow and my light.” Artists must be willing to address full on the worst of our individual and collective selves, even if only in private conversation or introspection.

After the end of the war, Theodore Adorno said,”After Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry. ” I think we must continue to write because in the face of evil silence might imply consent. We must add our voice to the chorus of protest, warning and lament.

Drop-in by Frank McMahon (Nigel Kent)

This week I was recording some poems for a thing and I was wondering what to record. I rather fancied a theme of some kind. First of all, I considered my rabbit poems and then I decided because there are likely to be more yet to come, they would be better saved for a future date. Whilst looking I enjoyed rereading my poem Watching the Joker Alone which was written in response to a call out for cinematic poems from The Broken Spine. This encouraged me to see which other poems had found their home with this particular press – and a setlist was formed.

Watching the Joker Alone is one of those poems that captures a specific moment in time, and which might not even have been written if I hadn’t read the call out from Alan Parry. On seeing the call out I had recently returned from a solo visit to the cinema so I picked up my pen to see what might evolve. I remembered the feeling I had as I walked down the stairs to the exit as the credits rolled, and the poem took form on the page.

Sue Finch, WATCHING THE JOKER ALONE

The following poem evolved in my head over a couple of days before I put pen to paper. I had been thinking about a salt mine in Poland I had visited years ago and how we humans create holes in the ground.

Salt

They found it where he said they would,
a day’s digging in the field, dirty brown crystals.
It was, he maintained, proof that some time before
there had been an ocean above our heads. […]

Paul Tobin, AN OCEAN ABOVE OUR HEADS

Here, the kind of September morning
that pauses my breath — jeweled dew
on the tall grasses and ripe corn,
the hillsides beginning to take on
their seasonal tweed, while over there —
famine, injustice, anguish. Despair
presses down like a lead blanket.
Where is hope in a year like this?

I turn to Jonah, the reluctant prophet
who found his conscience and his heart
at the bottom of the sea. […]

This year’s Elul poem had been eluding me. This has been a really hard year for the world. I couldn’t find the path in … until I started working with my Bayit hevre on a new rendering of the Book of Jonah for this year. (Coming soon.) We went deep into the context of Jonah and what it might say to us this year. And that led me to what I needed to say this year.

Rachel Barenblat, Elul poem for 2025

Beginning in March 2025, large areas of South Australian coastal waters have been devastated by a harmful algal bloom, leading to mass mortalities of uncountable numbers of fish, invertebrates and other marine life. The causes are complex but all arise from the unmitigated effects of anthropogenic climate change.

I made the video from images of fish that have been killed by the bloom and washed up on beaches along the eastern side of Gulf St Vincent. The audio was created from samples taken from videos of living fish, crabs and squid recorded at Seacliff beach, South Australia, in January – February 2025, before the bloom hit. The text is what the fish might say to us, if only they could…

Ian Gibbins, DEADEYE

Today is publication day for Temporary Shelters, so I’m happy to share a new video from the book. It was shot and produced by Bare Bones Filmmakers.

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

Grant Clauser, Another New Poetry Video

My writing desk is a slightly creaky thing I made myself. ‘Desk’ is suggestive of grandeur, whereas in fact it’s just a crude, slim table. The top is an old shutter from some who-knows-how-ancient window, the frame is made from the pitch pine side lengths from an old bed. […] From the desk I can see the curtains I draw in summer to keep out the flies while the balcony doors are open. […]

When we started this project there was a building boom in Spain and old houses in pretty villages were being gutted and turned into tourist accommodation. The beds that had been left behind when the occupants had thrown up their hands in despair at their precarious rural lives and set off to start again in Barcelona, were all of a piece. I have their dimensions committed to memory, the lateral timbers 1.8m long, 7.5cm wide, 3.5cm thick.

Everywhere I look in and around the house are these timbers, a dense pitch pine too hard to take a nail without bending it, resistant to weather and insects. They are in the window frames, the roof structure of the porch, dozens built into the eaves and soffits alone. They made up the ladder to the tree house I built with my son. When it finally fell apart I repurposed the wood, yet again, into a ramp for the henhouse. I think of the generations of my neighbours, who were conceived, born and died in these beds, whatever embodied energy that implies, but mostly I think of my young sons, who when dad arrived with a pile of them tottering on the roof of the car, would happily set-to, reducing them to their reusable components with hammers and spanners.

I suppose I’m concluding something about timelessness and transience, a feeling the high country here, with its ruins, hermitages and 1000-year-old olive trees, will not permit you to ignore. You might think the energy, the vibes built into this house would set up some kind of a psychic din, all those lives lived and lost between the timbers, but what I notice instead is silence, the long wavelength calm that drifts in from the surrounding landscape. There are bee-eaters massing every day now, in some high-altitude conference of the birds, usually some of the last migrants to leave after the summer. Yesterday, arriving back from the coast just before dawn, I saw an eagle owl, heading back to the mountains after drinking down at the river. The soft, sweet dreamtime that is early autumn is upon us all, conceived, born, slipping back into the light when we must. The timbers and the forests will endure, and when they’re finally done, they will surely keep someone warm.

james mcconachie, Sticks and Stones

After devoting several notebook pages to a description of his writing desk, Franz Kafka must have paused and walked to the window. Surely time passed. Maybe something happened. According to his notebook, the next paragraph is “wretched”:

Wretched, wretched, and yet well intended. It’s midnight after all, but considering that I’m very well rested, that can only serve as an excuse insofar as I wouldn’t have written anything at all during the day. The burning lightbulb, the quiet apartment, the darkness outside, the last waking moments entitle me to write, even if it’s the most wretched stuff. And I hastily make use of this right. This is just who I am.

Wretched, too, the feeling of wronging the subject or failing the object. Grotesque, the shame upon encountering the ill-depicted desk. Bovine, that instant when passing the hallway mirror and noting the WRONG writ large on the forehead.

Alina Stefanescu, Commissioned sights.

I’ve returned to reading Knausgård’s My Struggle, and one of the things that sticks with me the most about reading him is how easily he writes about self-loathing. It’s just plain there on the page, as simple and straightforward as any quotidian detail. A passerby is wearing a scarf as easily as he is wearing his loathing. I am, in a way, envious of that honesty. Part of me wonders if it’s gendered. As a woman, as a poet, how is it that it takes me many more words to express that kind of self-discontent? Am I building architecture to prevent a kind of bare vulnerability?

I was thinking about this a lot when going through the final edits on the proofs. To be honest (which seems extra appropriate here), I gave these proofs a level of close attention that I never had with my four books before. It’s not because I thought these poems were less finished than the others, but it’s more so because reading the poems on the page has always felt like listening to a recording or watching a video of myself. I have the same recoil. I can’t do it. I don’t. Reading them aloud for an audience is different. There’s an element of performance that I can embrace as a form of distance and protection. But in this final stage, before the poems become fully real as a book, I have trouble confronting myself there on the page, even under those words and all that dressy architecture. Do I fear that I may decide in that last moment that this book should not exist, is not good enough to exist?

But this time, with my feline friend Maya at my side on the chaise lounge, I faced those pages head-on, and they will find their way into the world this spring underneath the stunning package of this beautiful cover, which I’m excited to reveal.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Mantises, Leaf Blowers, and a Cover Reveal

One of the most commonly proved facts is that you will scour your manuscript and galleys to make sure you’ve eliminated any remaining typos, misspellings, or wayward punctuation only to discover–well–you haven’t. Your editor will also scour for these, as will the occasional friend, partner, or critique buddy. You will think you are safe, but upon opening the book weeks, month, or years later, there will be at least one that has somehow eluded all eyes til just now. 

Some may say, in fact, this is one of the blessings of printing POD, since you can always fix your mistakes and oversights, especially if you are doing the ordering. I speak from both sides of the experience, since as an editor, I read through one final time before printing and have missed some pretty embarrassing  punctuation gaffs. This is also true of my own books, either persistent errors that have eluded everyone til it’s been made public, or some jostling that led to conjoined words, extra spaces, missing periods, and other pesky flaws. All the editorial eyes in the world will not catch a word you are all collectively misspelling (in my first book, published by a traditional press, It was the city of Albuquerque, which only the odd New Mexico native seemed to notice).

Most often, I know I always need an extra set of eyes, usually another poet or editor who is trained to read for things, though a friend or partner has had to sometimes help out. For books I edit, we can usually catch most things in a few back and forths before saving the final version. When you’re on your own, though, without a formal editor these are things you need to attend to–whether that’s enlisting help, trusting your own eye (the success of which will depend on how detail oriented you are) or hiring a professional as a developmental/proofing editor, or what the cool fiction kids call a beta reader.  

One nice thing about the poetry collections of my own that I have published is that they usually have already existed in a published version, either in journals or zine projects that have themselves been proofread within an inch of their lives. Or even the print version of EXOTICA that required only minor adjustments since the zine was already published and it’s just slightly different in formatting for print. CLOVEN, however, like GRANATA, has not been published before in another version, so I am starting fresh with whatever I had as I cemented the poems in place as finished (and even that may change in the process.) This means, I am moving slowly and extra carefully with each page and each fragment. It also gives me a chance to make tiny tweaks that may make the poems just a little better rhythm- or language-wise. It’s a slower process as well, but I am hoping to wrap it up before the end of this month to be on track with my publication plan.  

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | proofing

Today I learned that Contubernales Books, the small independent publisher of primarily Greek & Latin works in translation, has published a second book of mine : Parmenides in Minneapolis. (Their first effort was last year’s Mississippi River extravaganza, Green Radius.) One day I hope these books will surface, somehow, through the still pond of our culture’s literary-critical apparatus – its hearing-aid technology, so to speak (such as it is).

For a long time – since the early 1980s, in fact – I have been mining my own vein (or cursèd dry cistern, if you will) of the “American sublime”, or the modernist epic, or simply the l-o-o-n-g poem. The 20th century, and perhaps the early 21st century, have proven fertile ground for multifarious efforts of this kind, some of them quite brilliant and even great; but my own primary model and paragon in this regard, if you want to know, has not been Ezra Pound, or H.D., or T.S. Eliot, or W.C. Williams, or Charles Olson, or… or… or the many other imposing and erudite examplars.

No, I have only had two prime instigators : Osip Mandelstam – who is not even American, nor a writer of long poems! – and Hart Crane – who is. Crane, I find, mingled the classic beautiful-and-sublime into a profound contemporary long-poem invention : The Bridge. About Crane, I stand with Harold Bloom, and the sometimes-formidable critic John Irwin.

Henry Gould, A New Book of Poetry

On Tuesday, I had the great pleasure of reading at Five Leaves bookshop in Nottingham, alongside two lovely poets whose poetry I love: Kathy Pimlott and Peter Sansom. As Kathy mentioned during her reading, she and I met because we were both participants in the Poetry Business Writing School run by Peter and Ann Sansom. I think our sets of poems complemented one another’s. I’m very grateful to Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves and Tim Fellows of Crooked Spire Press for introducing our readings. […]

I’ve been reading Peatlands (Arc Publications, 2014), written by Pedro Serrano, the Mexican poet, and translated by Anna Crowe, both of whom I was due to be reading alongside in Mytholmroyd. (They have been replaced by Kim Moore and Molly Prosser.) In his poem ‘El Arte de Fecar’ / ‘The Liminating Art’, he writes, ‘Shitting is like the art of writing: / you have to give it thought and just so long / for everything to come out good and strong.’ I can’t argue with that.

I’ve also been (re-)reading Us (Faber, 2018) by Zaffar Kunial, as it’s the chosen book for this month’s Poetry Book Club. In these days when the media are encouraging the open racism of far-right fuckwits, his poems exploring what it means to belong have taken on added importance. I’ve also re-worked my way through the poetry oeuvre of Seamus Heaney, accompanied again by Stepping Stones (Faber, 2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s seminal interviews with him. For me, Heaney remains a paragon of how a poet can negotiate the politics and events of their time.

Matthew Paul, September reading and other news

Tomorrow night, we read in Vancouver. Preparing for our flight, I poke through our bookshelves, thinking I might continue my Etel Adnan rereading, only to discover a further Dodie Bellamy title I had forgotten we owned. The TV SUTRAS (2014), frustratingly and foolishly unopened, clearly landing years before I managed to first properly read Bellamy’s work. Within a few hours, Christine and I in the Air Canada lounge, thanks to passes from her father, as I read Dodie Bellamy and watch planes ascend at angles.

Wait for me, driver. I’ll be right back.

Man getting out of cab.

COMMENTARY

Keep returning to the practice. It will always be there waiting for you. Life will also be waiting for you—no need to cling to it during practice. This is the key to focus. Leave competing demands behind.

I’m enjoying the call-and-response of these texts, reminiscent of what Canadian poet Ken Norris once worked through his own chapbook, The Commentaries (1999), a work that commented upon his own poetry collection, The Music (1995), offering it as his own variation on Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (1978). As Bellamy writes to introduce the collection, The TV SUTRAS is an “inspired” text.

I use “inspired” in the spiritual sense, meaning a text that is dictated or revealed. For example, each day between noon and 1 p.m., Aiwass, the minister of Horus, dictated The Book of the Law to Aleister Crowley in the spring of 1904. And then there’s Moses, who climbed Mount Sinai so God could dictate the Ten Commandments to him. For The Urantia Book, space aliens spoke through a sleeping man named Wilfred Kellog in Chicago, Illinois, USA. For the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith dropped a magical seer stone into his hat, then buried his face in the hat, and in the darkness a spiritual light shone, revealing a parchment.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

One day last week I saw a circular announcing a small academic conference or colloquium at Cambridge in December on the Pindaric fragments. (Here if you fancy it yourself.) Reading it was the first time in years — and certainly the first time since I withdrew from formal academia — that I genuinely wished I could go to an academic conference. I am too much an introvert and too covetous of my time to have ever been very keen on conferences, but I love thinking about Pindar and wish I knew more about the study of the fragments.

Coincidentally, on the same day that I saw this notice, the Twitter/X/whatever account @sentantiq posted a fragment not from Pindar, but from Bacchylides, Pindar’s less well-known contemporary in Greece in the 5th century BCE. The post was a single line, in both Greek and English translation:

[οὐδὲ γὰρ ῥᾷστον] ἀρρήτων ἐπέων πύλας / ἐξευρεῖν

It isn’t easy to find the gates of unuttered words.

I love this image of the gates of (or for) unuttered words, and I imagine anyone who writes regularly can sympathise with the sentiment — it is indeed not easy to find new (or even inadequate but not-new) words for things, or a new way of putting something; equally, it’s not easy to find a path into a new subject, an access point to a new topic, to say something original. And there’s something just very slightly paradoxical about the idea of “unspoken words” — they only become words, we might imagine, once they are spoken or at least utterable. (ἀρρήτος, here translated as ‘unspoken’, can also mean that cannot be spoken or not to be spoken.)

Victoria Moul, Finding the door of words: on originality

“[P]oetry makes nothing happen,” Auden says, but “it survives.” More than that, it is “A way of happening, a mouth.” Whatever poetry is, in other words, it is not inert. Following Auden’s metaphor, it “happens” in the same way that a river happens, and in the same way that the mouth of a river opens onto something larger than the itself, an ocean for example, so does the “mouth” of poetry. So does a question. You can see here the thread that is going to run through this blog.

As an example of a poem that opens onto a question that opens onto precisely the kind of reflecting on the state of the world that I think we need today, I’d like to invite you to engage with Elisa Gabbert’s close reading in The New York Times of another Auden poem, “Musée Des Beaux Arts,” which is nominally a response to Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus […]

We often ask what good poems can do in the face of the suffering inflicted, for example, by Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the famine in Sudan—not to mention the Trump administration’s attacks on migrants, women, and people who are trans and queer. (That list could, obviously, go on.) Gabbert’s essay, it seems to me, offers one answer to that question. Poems, good poems—in both the aesthetic and moral/ethical sense—offer us emotional and intellectual access to the complex interiority of what it means that we have a choice in bearing witness, or not, to suffering, much less in taking, or not, whatever action we can to end it. Gabbert’s essay is worth reading and talking about and I think it is especially worth teaching.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, What Poems Do We Need Right Now?

I’ve been thinking about my monthly Listopia posts and how much time they take to organize and write up and I’ve decided to suspend them, at least for the time being. Maybe permanently, I don’t know. I may do a similar footprint on a weekly basis but, honestly, I don’t know about that either. All I know is it’s been a tough few weeks, for many reasons, making me feel tired mentally and physically. I’ve been reassessing my online time because I’m sure it’s contributing to my fatigue. This week, I spent less time scrolling social media, a years-long bad habit. The very first day I noticed how much more present I felt in my real life, how much more time I had for other things. When I am online, I look for the type of stories I want to read right now – more positive, less dark. I like dark reads. I like crime, gothic, and noir but I feel like I need to chill for a while & be mindful of the content I’m consuming. That definitely includes news and opinion pieces.

Charlotte Hamrick, Old-School Chill

I’m retraining my brain to pay attention like it’s 1999. I miss my old brain, the one that could read for hours. The one that had lots of good ideas. The one that craved learning. We did an accidental phone-free Saturday recently, and it felt really good. In the article below, I especially appreciate author Yana Yuhai’s explanation of the neuroscience behind our compulsions to scroll (“Our attention spans haven’t disappeared, they’ve been retrained”), and her suggestions for ways to get our attention back, none of which are dogmatic or dramatic (“make focus feel like a soft return, not a hard reset”). Neuroplasticity for the win.

Rita Ott Ramstad, When the right plant in the right place isn’t

As a poet, I ask myself whose story is this to tell? I’m not among those constantly wandering in search of safety for the next few hours. Wondering then, where to next? I’m not clutching my stomach to pain of emptiness in a body wasting in the drag on it as it as it tries to pull some kind of strength from nutrients that aren’t available.  

I’m not having to close my eyes as I step over body parts that are barely distinguishable. That every breath I take is filled with a mixture of dust, of soot particles and the sulfur of explosions. The smell of death that is always an undercurrent. I know of these things but I don’t actually live then, so it’s not really my story to tell.

The story that is mine to tell is none the less painful. It is the story of a mixture of anger and sadness. It is a frustration that even as a poet I cannot seem to find the correct word to convey that sadness because sadness is not good enough. It’s more than that… it’s not even despondency, it’s overwhelming, it’s grief. It is seeing so many photos and videos that they have become a collage of images in my brain.  And as this goes on, my anger grows and it is hard to keep it under control because it is American Tax Dollars, Billions of them that has been feeding this ugly vial right-wing Zionist government that has made the decision to choose genocide on the people of Gaza. 

Michael Allyn Wells, Two Stories and a Genocide

Wishbone, war bone, water bone.

All the bones building the body of this one nation underground.

Strewn across battlefields, skulls with no tongue to recount the ways they once loved.

Etched into those bones:

disinterest, disinheritance. Fire, ice, dust, tears.

If only this were a train song, a mournful melody to make all this leaving easier.

Rich Ferguson, One Nation, Underground

My sincerest gratitude to New Verse News for publishing my duplex poem “Dear Judy” earlier this week. The events of September 10 were heartbreaking. Two people died that day. One person assassinated in the state where I lived most of my life and one in my new home state of Colorado. Two children were critically injured in the school shooting in Evergreen. I’ve been writing epistolary duplex poems to my mother, who passed unexpectedly in January 2024. Not all of the poems are related to current events but they have been a way for me to still talk to her, tell her things I need to, feel close to her. This is the first one published.

New Verse News publishes poems related to current events. They are quick to respond and generous in their promotion on social media. 

Trish Hopkinson, My duplex poem “Dear Judy” published in New Verse News, open for current event poems!

Yesterday I attended the first in a series of monthly interfaith retreats hosted by SEEL Puget Sound. SEEL stands for “Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life.” The series is based around formalized spiritual exercises designed in the mid-1500’s by St. Ignatius of Loyola, who later went on to found the Jesuit order. At the end of the retreat, we were given a book of prayers, reflections and poems called “Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits”, and I was totally shocked to find a poem in it by Gerard Manly Hopkins. In all my of my years of stumbling across his poetry, I had no idea that he was a Jesuit priest. To be fair, most of his online biographies make a concerted effort to gloss this over for some reason, and Gerard Manly Hopkins is not a poet who I ever specifically sought out to read. But when I did happen to come across his work, I always liked it and found it interesting. His beautiful poem “God’s Grandeur” in my estimation has early echos of EE Cummings:

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

I have only had this book for one day, and I am already completely enamored of it. I love that it mixes poetry and prays, and some that count as both, such as in “Soul of Christ” by St. Ignatius:

“May the shelter I seek
be the shadow of your cross.”

The problem with reading the Bible and religious literature is that it can’t merely be “consumed.” The audacity of certain lines, like this one, thunk me across the head like a two-by-four, and I have to stop reading for extended periods of time to walk around dizzily with cartoon stars over my noggin while my body and soul wrestles with the enormity of it.

Kristen McHenry, Hearts on Fire: Discovering Jesuit Poets

Sometimes I feel like just picking up my own shoe and dropping it, so anxious am I always about that “other shoe to drop”-waiting business. Let me just make happen the Next Thing, so I can stop being anxious about it. Of course, mmm, that’s not how life works. I mean, sometimes, I guess, you can blow things up with your own actions. But mostly it’s just stuff unfolding in its own odd time, its own strange way, and you standing there thinking, Wait, what? or Okay, okay, come on, already. I’m talking personally. I’m talking professionally. I’m talking nationally. Internationally. I’m talking about the shift of summer to fallish to fall to holy crap it’s cold.

How do you know when wisdom lies in waiting, and when it is time to act? And what act should be taken? And how do you take it, knowing it could be disastrous…or completely inconsequential? How do you wait, knowing you may be missing a crucial opportunity to act? I watch the criss-cross of the double-dutch jump ropes. Do I jump now? Now?

When writing a poem, the stakes are low. That’s what revision is for. In watercolor painting, the stakes are higher — many things once done cannot at all be undone. And then there’s life.

I admire this poem for how it deliberates, takes a small action, and then sits for a moment in its reverberation. It’s a small poem that feels enormous in its moment of silence afterward. It is from the most recent issue of One Art online magazine.

Marilyn McCabe, everything breaks

Yesterday I read the first line of “To Autumn”:  “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”  I asked my students if the mornings had been misty lately.  They looked startled.  I realized that they probably wouldn’t know.  They’re probably up after the sun has risen and burned off the mist.

But here at a higher altitude, it’s been very foggy/misty, and I’ve really enjoyed watching the swirls.  I’ve thought of past generations, surrounded by fog and mist and smoke, and it’s no wonder they believed in ghosts, that they described ghosts the way they did.

I’m feeling a bit haunted myself.  It’s strange to teach this poem to students who are not much older than Keats was when he wrote this perfect poem.  It’s strange to think how much older I am than my students.  When I first started teaching, I was only a few years older than my students.  Now I am decades older.

Like Keats, I’m haunted by my mortality.  Let this haunting prompt me to do my best work!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Autumn of Life

I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’ve been listening to the poetry podcast, The Poems We Made Along the Way a lot recently. It’s into series 3 now, and has had a wide variety of guests. I’d urge you to seek them all out via your podcast provider of choice, but the most recent guest was Lewis Buxton. I’ve been listening to it this week, and, as ever, found much too enjoy.

Gregory has an interview style that seems to put the poet at ease because he asks such diligent questions, often reaching back into previous interviews for sources. The questions are mostly about craft and attitudes towards writing, etc rather than about specific poems, and for fans of process it’s always a fascinating hour or so. The set pieces of the ‘Lightning round’ and What would you do to help poetry if money was no object’ sections are always illuminating, often surprising and never fail to set my own mental hares running towards imagining what I’d say if I was a guest. NB that’s not a request, Gregory—Christ no, I’d be far too dull as a guest. Even I don’t care what I have to say about poetry, so why would anyone else?

Mat Riches, Telephone call for unpredictable sands

In the prose  piece that closes the book, “Excerpt from ‘A New History of Printing’ (1933)”, [Fergal] Gaynor invents a history to satirise internet culture (using that last word in it’s very loosest sense), via an imagined printing invention that replicates the idea of paperless text:

Few in the long run were the voices of dissent. A short-lived movement in philosophy and the arts, of strong aestheticist bent, bemoaned the loss of the material pleasures of the old medium: the smells, the feel of the object, the different styles of cover. It was not made clear whether the artists in question had read the books concerned. Shrill complaints were emitted from the loose association referring to itself as ‘dedicated readers’ who, in the Darwinian jargon of the day, made claim that they were being deprived of their ‘habitats’, and that, ironically, they found themselves isolated in a world of texts. And there are many accounts from the period – the medium, despite all its owners’ precautions, still lending itself to conflagration – of the strange experience of watching a whole library, perhaps even a civilization, burn in bright seconds down to a grey nothing.

This concern for the possibility of literacy, of literature, surviving is of a piece with Gaynor’s poetic ambitions as stated in section X of ‘Runes’:

poetry
as production
line

for an age now
art
outsourced

tiny fingers
sharp reflexes
good for such work

space
grows
in the library

as if a fire burnt
as if green things

The folding of poetry into the exploitation of child labour in such activities as Victorian lace-making marks a kind of convergence of his politics and aesthetics, as if he’s discovering his own purpose for the existence of poetry. 

Billy Mills, Two from Shearsman: A Review

Very few books on Shakespeare are worth reading: Kermode, Bate, Barber, Bradley, Johnson, Hazlitt, Nuttall, Coleridge, Ann Barton. It is hard to be genuinely interesting about a genius. Rhodri Lewis’s book Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, is a new and worthwhile book about Shakespeare as a thinker. Lewis argues that Shakespeare is constantly using dramatic experiments to subvert the idea that rational philosophical systems can explain our lives.

…Shakespeare’s tragedies also try to make their audiences think. In particular, to make them think about the status of human thought as an ineradicably emotional phenomenon that is far from being the province of an unblinking and dispassionate rationality. The Shakespeare of the tragedies goes beyond the familiar claim that reason is the slave of the passions, and asks us to infer that reason as we tend to discuss it is the invention of the passions—of our desperate need to feel that we understand, or have the capacity to understand, our earthly lot. In so doing, he does not imply that the mental phenomenon represented by the word “reason” (something like “the power of intelligence through which human beings process the world”) does not exist, but that reason as generally understood is a heuristic—a fiction that the human mind has settled upon in the attempt to explain itself to itself.

Lewis’s book is short, cogent, informative, and provocative. There are also occasionally humorous moments, such as this passage about Antony, a little commentary on modern academia.

…how better expose the ethics of Ciceronian humanist peer review than to write about someone who—after bringing himself low through ostentatious displays of liberality—came to spurn both civility and civic life? The more so if this character were to make much of the need to be seen, spurning the self-deceiving complacencies of the polis in order to affirm that, in withdrawing from his fellow human beings, he had chosen the correct path?

There are still prominent Shakespeareans who ideologically, reflexively deny the fact that “Shakespeare tells us how to live” or that Shakespeare has “something to tell us”. (When I interviewed Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips, Phillips told me that Shakespeare is more “evocative than informative” and drew out some old saws about astonishing language, the effect people have on each other through their language, etc. That’s fine as far as it goes, and hardly untrue, but it’s a plain ideology rather than a critical reading of the plays. You can watch the little disagreement here if you care to.) Lewis avoids this mistake and is happy to discover and describe the beliefs at play in Shakespeare’s work, noting always that he is an experimental, dramatic thinker who opposes the humanist system of trying to rationalise life. His book is all the better for it. I also came away from this book more convinced than ever that Shakespeare is a (Jamesian) philosophical pragmatist.

Henry Oliver, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

“Have they marked you with arrows?” is a cancer survival story from being recalled to the screening unit, through surgery (though without gory details) and the dehumanisation of procedures, and hope. Through the poems, Jayne Stanton confronts the clichés and platitudes offered to sufferers and records what it takes to endure. In “After the appointment”, when the poet and her husband grab a drink in the cafeteria,

“You try to recall what you’ve just been told
and when you last saw him cry.

You both agree – the cafeteria
seems farther away than usual.”

[…]

“Have they marked you with arrows?” is a compassionate collection. Stanton’s short poems contain dense concepts and carry a bulk of unsaid emotional weight, which make them compelling. Readers aren’t told what to think or how to react. The poems show the strength foisted on a patient determined to survive. 

Emma Lee, “Have they marked you with arrows?” Jayne Stanton (Poetryspace) – book review

The middle-distance poem, which takes its name from middle-distance running, came into its own in the middle of the twentieth century, though its origins go back to the beginning of that same century, if not further. Among its number are some of the best long-ish (but not too long) modern poems in the English language, from Among School Children to The Whitsun Weddings. Critics, however, have written remarkably little about it. You won’t find the term in any literary histories or textbooks. In fact, you would be forgiven for wondering if I wasn’t just making the whole thing up to prove a point.

‘The owl of Minerva’, Hegel wrote, ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk’.1 Or, as Joni Mitchell put it, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. The middle-distance poem began its walk (or else a gentle jog) off into the long evening some time ago. Its zenith—zeniths tend to be—may also have been its passing. But every elegy is also an attempt at resurrection, and the middle-distance poem was a special kind of poem. Not the only one by any means, but one that we will miss more than we realise.

I miss it already. Whenever I pick up a new collection or a magazine, I am always on the look out for one. I am almost always disappointed.2 Almost invariably, the modern long-ish poem lacks the middle-distance poem’s energy, its sense of direction, its intensity of feeling. I don’t think this is simply a question of ‘free verse’ crowding out metre. Indeed, the middle-distance poem’s absence is all the more noticable in the more form-friendly parts of the poetry world.

But this kind of talk only gets us so far. What I want to do here is begin to sketch out in very broad, provisional brush strokes some of the genre’s distinguishing features in the hope that better informed readers will be able to flesh them out later (or at least quibble productively). In short, how do you spot one in the wild?

Jeremy Wikeley, The Middle-Distance Poem: An Elegy

The occupational hazard of going to things where other writers are also present is that they will always at some point ask you whether you are writing. Like the famously bad bus service in Plymouth, this happened twice in the space of ten minutes the other day at Kay Dunbar’s memorial at Dartington Hall. First I bumped into a poetry acquaintance, an editor who was kind enough to take a poem of mine 320 years ago. ‘Are you writing?’ she said. ‘Of course,’ I said. Everyone around us laughed. To which I said, ‘What else am I supposed to say?’ To which she said, ‘Ah, but are you writing well, or successfully?’, a distinction which was new to me, and completely shut me up. Some minutes later, another (even older) poetry friend asked me exactly the same thing. Was the universe trying to tell me something?

Later on the weekend I saw my old friend Christopher Southgate, who happened to be dispensing his vast knowledge and learning in the locality, as you do. His tea made and the small talk over, like an arrow speared on a laser beam he posed me the same question. To which I said, ‘Of course!’ I could see instantly that he wasn’t taken in (he never is, which is one reason I love him). I heard myself clearing my throat. ‘I’ve been making dates – appointments – with poems.’ I explained that the bits of scrap paper from the kitchen with two words written on them have been making their way up the stairs and into the general proximity of my notebook(s) where they wait to be transcribed and become poems. This seemed to satisfy him. ‘Making a date with a poem,’ he mused, ‘there is something in that, perhaps . . .’ I took this also as a sign of the universe giving me its approval.

Anthony Wilson, This is writing!

Every so often, I’m reminded that the work we do at the desk—quiet, private, uncertain—can find its way into larger conversations. I recently learned that my lyric memoir Ruin & Want has been included on CLMP’s Reading List for Hispanic Heritage Month 2025.

That book came from years of sorting through memory and silence, and to see it alongside so many powerful voices feels like a kind of homecoming.

I’m also grateful to share that Black Lawrence Press is running a Hispanic Heritage Month sale that includes my book, Rotura. You can find the full list here.

Indie presses like BLP have been steady companions in my writing life, and their commitment to bringing new work into the world is something I deeply admire.

José Angel Araguz, two bits of good news

Yesterday was the Writer’s Digest Virtual Poetry Conference, so I got to see my friend Mary Biddinger’s talk on prose poetry and flash fiction in the morning, then showered, dressed and did my own talk on Solarpunk poetry, which is a type of science fiction poetry that looks to a more hopeful future for ecology, equity, and humanity. Then I turned around and ran out of the house to make it to opening day of the Woodinville Pumpkin Farm at JB Family Growers. (Yes, it’s a lavender farm AND a pumpkin farm!) The sun was shining in a blue sky, although there was still a level of smoke that made me a little verklempt. It was so nice to roam around the beautiful sunflower maze, the broad pumpkin patch, and the towering corn maze. Are you feeling Fall yet?

I really overscheduled myself this September, so yes, I am still working on judging the SFPA’s poetry contest—now I’m just writing some comments to the winners. I read over 600 poems (often not on their own page, or in the same font, so that was fun!) and chose nine winners in Dwarf, Short, and Long categories. It reminded me that often judges aren’t looking to rule you out, they’re looking to rule you in. At least that’s how I do it. When you submit a poem to any contest, make sure it’s unique and that it stands out. This year, for instance, there were a lot of both Mars Rover and dragon poems, not bad subjects, but it makes it harder for me to discern the best of the lot. A French formal poem on colonialism in space? Yes, that caught my eye. I was also surprised by an overall lack of imagery—has imagery gone out of fashion again? Anyway, the contest winners will be announced soon enough.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! Solarpunk Poetry, Judging Poetry Contests, Pumpkin Patches, Adventure and Hummingbirds

It’s always an aesthetic risk to speak to the present moment, and even more so, to share one’s attempts to do so, but I feel that it’s important: all of us together trying articulate what we’re feeling, what we’re trying to understand, and refusing to accept that it’s just business as usual in the world (even if that might, tragically, be the case.) It’s important that we try to communicate and not allow ourselves to be gaslit by history as it is unfolding. This may seem obvious and even Pollyanna, but like many truisms, its true.

It maybe be a finger in the dike (does anyone use that proverb anymore?) but still significant. I hope it is the F-U finger maintaining the bulwark against all the forces which seek to flood the world with terror, dehumanization, silencing, censorship and hate.

Gary Barwin, Charlie Kirk and not being Gaslit by History

This morning I wondered if I should be more intentional about this publication, and then rejected the thought in favour of—you guessed it—pleasure. I do not mean the hedonic variety, but the eudaemonic: achieved through the pursuit of meaning, of well-being through a sense of one’s purpose. In this light, pleasure’s the wrong word. I guess I should rebrand, but being “good” at social media holds little to no value to me. Stopping whatever I’m doing to spend an hour in the middle of the day—or at the advent of a sleepless night—to tell the truth about a poem, without second-guessing it, strikes me, for a host of reasons personal and not, as priceless.

I was looking for something else in Ed Hirsch’s Stranger by Night yesterday and was reminded of “The Guild,” which I promptly emailed to someone I thought would appreciate it. It took an hour or so and a walk along the river, during which I squatted on a rock and watched a great blue heron fishing in the shallows on the other side of the little bay, for my real interest in the poem to swim up to the surface: when the bird hauled itself up into its unlikely flight, I assumed I’d spooked it, but instead it flew straight towards me to alight at the other end of the groyne —maybe fifteen feet away—and turn its stony dino gaze on me. Yes, this is a metaphor: for the way a poem sometimes looks back at you, explains you to yourself.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Guild” by Edward Hirsch

I was thinking today of this passage of Proust’s, which he gives to the character of the artist Elstir:

“There is no man,” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man–so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise–unless he has passed through all the fatuous and unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded…We do not receive wisdom, we discover it for ourselves, after a journey through a wilderness no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”

There’s some comfort in that. I would not call myself wise, but I’m definitely wiser than I was at 15 or 21. I suppose I’m still sometimes “fatuous and unwholesome” (whatever Elstir meant by that), awkward in society, and mistaken in some of my intuitions. But I have discovered myself for myself, with all the pain, sorrow, embarrassment, and joys that such discovery requires, and have developed my own point of view. In addition, I’ve learned that each person holds their own point of view. We don’t all think alike or in concert and may never fully understand one another. That makes the world contentious, yes. And interesting. […]

Naively urbane, the city
my youth inhabits lies brittle
in the pages. The past undoes
itself at last. Or I do.

Ann E. Michael, Points of view

Magnetic poetry remains a creative tool that challenges me with its tactile nature, its playfulness, its restrictions. Usually you have a set of words about a certain subject. Here I’ve used my basic set in combination with a set called ‘Trees’.

By the way. You can see that I try to use what I have available but I have no problem to ‘create’ words in case they are not included: here the words ‘small’, ‘noises’ and ‘down’.

Why do I point this out?

When you use a poetic form you work within its limitations and restrictions (which can be exhilarating and very satisfying). Never forget these were man-made. They have a reason why they came to pass and why they are well-used. But things develop, intermingle, grow, and change. Contexts evolve. If you feel the need to leave the comfort zone and it aligns with what you want to achieve please do it and don’t hesitate because somewhere there are people gatekeeping art.

Oh, they might get even angry, and act as if only they can define what is right to do and what not.

Just do your thing and let them run in their hamster’s wheel. Be happy with what you create. That in itself is already valuable. I’d say your happiness is very, very important.

Kati Mohr, This Trust

一生に打つ一億字天の川　堀田季何

isshō ni utsu ichioku ji amanogawa

            in a lifetime we type

            one hundred million letters

            the Milky Way

                                                Kika Hotta

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), February 2022 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 16, 2025)

— From May Sarton’s journal, At Seventy: “What kept me going was, I think, that writing for me is a way of understanding what is happening to me, of thinking hard things out. I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself. Perhaps it is the need to remake order out of chaos over and over again. For art is order, but it is made out of the chaos of life.”

— In the same book, Sarton quotes Catherine Clayton who talks about being in a creative drought for a year and a half. She says, “Now a drawing is slowly coming into being. To work is to feel whole. To work for long moments unselfconsciously is grand. To still all other voices and to work, just quietly work.” And isn’t that a monumental task these days, to quiet the voices, to quietly work?

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – The Secret Prerequisite

there is a small boat waiting. in the middle

of the page. where a poem begins. and goes

no further. serenity. a map of the heart completed.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, they come for us.

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

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

What will be the sound as our ship goes down?

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, How to See the Sea

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

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

Karen Macfarlane, Tay Whale

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

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

Kristy Bowen, the poet and the scientist

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

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

Overspill by Sam Illingworth

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

Fairways curve
where warnings should.

The air carries
what water cannot hold.

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

No fence keeps out
what was never invited.

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

JoAnne Growney, Mathematics and Golf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ama Bolton, The time-travelling adventures of Sam Coleridge

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

Luisa A. Igloria, After

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

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

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

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

Josephine Corcoran, Congrats to Abeer Ameer and Modron Magazine!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathleen Jamie, At the Canongate Wall

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

Katie Manning, A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends

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

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

Matthew Paul, On Longbarrow Press and James Caruth

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

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

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

Han

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

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

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

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

Maybe I need to reconnect with the thrill of it.

Maybe I need to drop all resistance to it.

*

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

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

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

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

More interesting reasons to write. Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, Been a minute

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hyejung Kook [no title]

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

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

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

Grant Clauser, New Poetry Video and Book Update

horses lie down beside me, one nuzzles my back.

dream life. july.

strawberries feed from my hands.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ali Thurm, What I’ve been reading

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

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

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

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

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

Roy Marshall, Two poems by Paul Batchelor

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

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

still burns
years later
in your mind

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

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

Early July monsoons,
the sunflowers drink deep.

Brittle October stalks,
every drop baked out.

And still it returns
as January snow.

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

Red chile ristra
cleaned of harvestmen
& their cobwebs.

Water boils
red as a
Jemez flood —

Hungry, we wait for
carne adovada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Mia Kang, All Empires Must

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

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

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Greenfinch’ by Pete Strong

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

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

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

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

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

Erica Goss, Sea and Stars: Writing the Sestina

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

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

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

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

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

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

from gas to water, rock to star.

PF Anderson, Saying Goodbye, Again

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, No sudden moves (2)

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

*

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

On 13 Days of Rain

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Women and Nature

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

But it is.

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

~~

Competition, Wet Summers

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Wet summers

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

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

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

CLAPPING

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

Sue Finch, ENTHUSIASTIC APPLAUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Mee, AN UNEXPECTED TIME FOR REFLECTION

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

Robin Gow, he/him

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

Marilyn McCabe, in a sudden strangeness

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, “Language is punishment.”

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, In which the terms are non-negotiable

In this massive, end-of-the-year edition: gold paint and bird wings, throwing words to the wind, liquid understatement, stopping by woods, a river about a river, and much more. Enjoy.

Geography is elastic but night has reversed or doubled itself and it is not yet late but soon it will be if I am not diligent diligent being the rudder the bow the shoe’s heel and sometimes it is a memory etched on a sidewalk happy new year floating from my eves as the starlings shoot out.

Rebecca Loudon, Christmas Eve

I cleared my mind for Christmas photocopying outlines of birds and brushing them with gold. Paper birds flew across the front room and others, backed with pages from a dreadful novel, flew across the stairwell. I cut birds out of linen scraps and sewed them onto a tablecloth. I went down to the pier and watched them gather late one afternoon. I read my paternal grandmother’s fortune telling book, its auguries and instructions for interpreting the behaviour of birds (ornithomancy). 

I stopped by the sloe hedge opposite mum’s yesterday evening and listened to birds, far too late I thought, it was dark, and remembered the tunnel into the hedge used by the vixen who visits mum. The dark hillocky ridge beyond, punctured by rabbits. Mist sinking into everything. 

Jackie Wills, Gold paint and bird wings

Her eyes skirt the trees,
the marshy undergrowth
for a safe settling.
She tires easily now,
seeks sheltered landings
on timeworn wings,
her flight nearing
an unfamiliar shore
that beckons
with no promises.

Sarah Russell, Bird Woman

Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. This year was different — a time of such profound pain and profound transformation that it fused reading and writing into a single, surprising act of the unconscious: I began making bird divinations to clarify the confusion of living and refill my reservoir of trust in the cohesion of the world. This daily practice left a great deal less time for other reading, especially anything new: The written word today seems more and more resigned to commodified virtue signaling and hollow self-help, so I found myself returning more and more to trusted treasures that have stood the test of time and changing moral fashions. 

Maria Popova, Favorite Books of the Year: Art, Science, Poetry, Psychology, Children’s, and More

I want to read more – but I do need to clarify in my own mind what I want to read, and why.

I want to write more – but I do need to clarify…

I want to keep posting online.

I want to keep connecting with lovely people.

I want to see more birds (real life as well as photos), photograph more birds, post more bird photos, read and write about birds (oh look, I’ve done some clarifying right there).

Sue Ibrahim, Another year…

Perhaps this particular bird is a singular bird:
its fluting tones original to its temperament

and not to any other in the larger murmuration,
though each wears the same coat lightly stippled

white, flocked with purple, green, and gold. Yet,
a song only becomes what it is when one note joins

or swerves alongside another, the mystery of never
breaking off a single feather even as it curves.

Luisa A. Igloria, Mozart’s Starling

A mixture of fear and feathers in Mary Ruefle’s “Tail Feathers” which opens so exquisitely . . . I arrived by rain. […]

Orientation for birds is accomplished by tail feathers. Usually, birds have six pairs of feathers on the tail, with each pair displaying increasing levels of asymmetry towards the outer pair, all of which are arranged in a fan shape that supports precision steering in flight. In some birds like the peacock, tail feathers have evolved into showy ornaments that are useless in flight.

Moist.
Like flames.

The tension in that implausible and totally possible image that evokes the world of school, disabling the tail feathers from accomplishing their purpose. All means of escape are ornamental in the classroom or the school corridor. The game is rotten, to mischaracterize a quote from a Concrete Blonde cover of a Leonard Cohen song. The board limits the choices that can be made. On that note, Cezanne had multiple peach-heaps that could be hiding the skull, this Still life: Assiette de pêches among them.

I always wonder what art or illustration Mary Ruefle is studying as the poem comes together. She reminds me of Samuel Beckett in this way; or else, my suspicion that an image is being assimilated into the language. 

Alina Stefanescu, Fear maps.

A comic in a blog can have a filmic quality–you scroll down through image after image, with screen light shining behind them. This week I’m delighted to show you Chris Gavaler’s comic “Rhapsomantic” based on my poem “Rhapsodomancy,” a poem from my forthcoming book Mycocosmic. (Text-only version here, in ASP Review). He and I consulted on the images sometimes, which he created after comparing my words to the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot images. There were moments I’d say yes, this is perfect, and others when an image had the wrong vibe and I’d suggest it went with a different Major Arcana card instead. I love the results.

Lesley Wheeler, Comics, newsreels, retrospectives

just cold enough
for puddles to freeze . . .
cubist moon

Bill Waters, 2 poems

The poets whose books I reviewed in 2024 addressed grief and loss, the experience of exile, infertility, and the natural world, of living in the spaces between illness and health, and the power of resilience. They wrote of how the abiding presence of Nature balances an acute awareness of climate change, how language connects family, and why the dead are never truly gone.

Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones: 2024 Book Covers and 2025 Reviews

I’m surprised by my own tears and wonder why I don’t feel this deeply when I read other, similar headlines. Though, occasionally, one will stand out and some detail in the article about strangers will hook me and deepen my understanding beyond the intellectual. Something specific that sparks a network of memories, not their specifics, but the silent knowledge inherent in memory that makes facts move from the part of the brain that understands words, to the part that comprehends lived experience.

We witness.

This is what reading is about, isn’t it? When literature can witness lived experience in a way that mirrors what we recognize to be true. When an external perspective shows us more than we can see on our own. I still find it amazing how words can bridge the gap of distance, and of time.

It’s strange to be working on two projects at once. One is nearly entirely factual, shaped with imaginative connections (The wasp memoir). While the other is nearly entirely fictional, set within a framework of a few facts (The Baroness play). Both attempting to witness the human experience.

Scientists say now that our memories don’t function like recordings, but that we recreate the memory each time we bring it to mind. Every time I get caught up in concerns about writing the truth rather than writing what is true, I think of this.

It is true that my great grandmother was a cuckoo wasp. That my grandmother left the cramped, hexagon cell in the strange hive to wander over the moor. Potter wasp, intermittent mother to my mother. Solitary down the line. I am a witness.

Ren Powell, What it Might Mean to Witness

She turns a page in the journal.
Blank. White. What’s the point?

And then, one day, a request for an interview.
A girl, student of history, inquisitive, gentle.

A canvas bag, a notebook, pens of different colours.
She has tied her lovely red hair into bunches.

Larissa invites her to sit by the window, says.
There’s nothing especially interesting about my life,

but do you know how Margaret Clitherow
was crushed to death beneath stones?

Bob Mee, TODAY I TRIED TO THINK ABOUT HOW ONE WAY OR ANOTHER SO MANY OF US ARE DISPLACED

Post-exertion malaise: it sounds like the title of a contemporary novel.

I’ve read studies that speculate PEM results from a sort of communications snafu among the many complex body systems: nerves, synapses, gut microbes, spine, brain, and probably processes science has yet to discover. What I wasn’t aware of until recently is that PEM can appear after mental or social “exertions” as well. Mental exertion such as submitting to journals; social exertion such as attending poetry readings, parties, family gatherings. It explains why I had to lie down for a nap at 5 pm every day the last few years I was working full-time, even though my job was a desk job. And why shopping has become such a tiring task for me.

Shopping, when you think about it, involves: 1) being in a public or social space; 2) attention to details; 3) frequent decision-making; 4) stress about finances, parking, and whether said decisions were the right ones; 5) unexpected stuff like long lines, a credit card that refuses to work, bad weather, and not finding what you were shopping for. Even if you shop online, some of these processes are involved. Yes, our brains are bombarded; and our brains are designed to filter and make efficient work of the bombarding, but perhaps that’s part of what goes awry with long covid and chronic fatigue. The filter may clog, so to speak. Brain fog and fatigue.

Similar micro-decisions go on when I send out poems to journals. Should this poem be sent to that publication? Do I like the other poems in this magazine, the editorial bent? Is this poem finished, and is it any good? Do they require a fee? Do I want to pay the fee? Are they okay with simultaneous submissions? Do they use Submittable, email, or some other method? Such analysis goes on constantly, as well as lots of even smaller decisions. I have to read the submissions guidelines carefully and, sometimes, re-format my work to suit. And then there’s the cover letter if required, and the bio–though I have a “boilerplate bio,” often it seems wrong for the journal; if they’ve asked for a personal touch or want me to stress place or background, I have to tweak the bio…and on and on. The task was never my favorite, but it didn’t exhaust me.

Ann E. Michael, Post-exertion malaise

I used to diarize and write my ideas down on napkins. Now that I don’t go to many places that have napkins, I bring along my book.

I’m a chronic chronicler. Every day on Facebook for a lot of years (and Flickr for many years before that), I’ve been posting a photo I took that day and writing about that day’s events.

It started as writing practice for times when I didn’t have a blog-worthy post. It’s where I dumped my shit, almost literally, like details about my colonoscopy. […]

My friend Susan, leader of writing retreats and author of several books and the Substack Writing and Roaming, advised me at lunch yesterday to get out of my own way. She saw that I was constantly throwing up roadblocks to keep from advancing to the finish line with my own projects: two unfinished novels, an unfinished children’s book about bugs (a passion project) and my finished poetry manuscript, Words with Friends.

I bought that manuscript with me, and she said “It looks finished! Why haven’t you submitted it yet?”

“Because it’s not organized. I need to put the poems in order.”

She said, “The last thing I want to read is six poems in a row about bugs” (or something similar), and I thought shit! She’s right. “Take this manuscript and throw it up in the air. Pick the pages up randomly, and that’s your order.”

Then she flipped through the manuscript, catching on a poem called “Pine.” I kept talking to her while she was reading it, and she was so intently focused on that poem. She pulled it from the stack and said, “Except make this one first.”

What has stopped me from pursuing personal writing goals and instead sent me to the basement to make lamps? Is it a fear of failure? Is it money? It’s certainly not a lack of time, now that I have nowhere to go.

I won’t call this a “resolution,” but I’ll try to spend my time more wisely.

In 2025, I will post my daily diary, along with other content, here, with a TL;DR summary on Facebook and a link to the post. And I will throw that manuscript up in the air and start sending it around.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Throwing Words to the Wind

Since it’s a big job, the remodeling of this site to contain both blog and personal website, there’s much to be done, including getting my book and zine page updated to reflect this year, which has been a whirl ever since last January when I decided to create monthly zines of art and writing work. At first, it was largely because I had had to graduate to a paid Issuu subscription, which was going to cost almost 30 bucks a month and I’d better take full advantage of that and actually use it. About midyear, I actually found a much better and much less expensive platform for hosting e-zines, so moved to that. I still enjoyed putting out monthly zines though, even with most of them being electronic with a couple exceptions. 

There’s something very rewarding about collecting and publishing poems this way, especially since my work is typically written as a series, and though I occasionally publish bits and pieces in collab zines, journals, and anthologies, they are best experienced in tandem with each other and any attendant artwork. I also like offering the bulk of my work with no impediments like expensive printing and shipping costs, especially in this economy.  I’ve been saving the printing costs for longer projects like this year’s full-length collection, RUINPORN, or the larger book projects that had specifications beyond my own printer like GRANATA and GHOST BOX (which was half created in studio, half by the professionals.)

As I was making the collage above for the webpage that lists everything, I realized that is quite a lot of work out in the world this year, which feels really good, because more often in previous years I’ve sat on things for years before releasing them, really with no benefits (at some point, they are done, so its not like they are aging like wine hidden away.) 

Kristy Bowen, bookish things

Here’s a sneak peek of the likely cover of my next book, coming out in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something good to read, I highly recommend a new anthology, The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (edited by Todd and Noah Davis and and Carolyn Mahan). it pairs descriptions, habitat and lifestyle notes on key species in the region with poems about those species. Yes, I’m included (my entry is the mayapple). Among the other poets included are David Baker, Kasey Jueds, Chase Twichell, Lee Upton, Marjorie Maddox, K.A. Hays, Michael Garrigan, Jerry Wemple, Chard deNiord, and many more.

Grant Clauser, 2024 Update and stuff

Lately, it’s been about counting. Years. Runs. Words. Work. Breaths. Days. Trees.[…]

12,000 words – the number of words my novel has been stuck on all year. I lost my writing mojo in 2024, but I’ve found it again. Standby 2025, especially February 14th.

18 – the number of years I’ve spent at Wrexham University building a project which includes the voices of those usually excluded from education, from life, from being heard. A few days before my birthday, Outside In won an Above and Beyond Award for embedding Inclusion into the everyday life of the university. A day after my birthday, the group threw me a surprise party with more gifts than I could carry, some flowers that have lasted right up to today.

Breaths – who knows how many? But lately I’ve been practising Yoga Nidra as a way of grounding myself back into my adult self after the re-emergence of childhood traumas, counting breaths in through my nose, and out through my mouth. At first, I found this almost impossible to do. Now, it’s becoming more of a habit.

24 – the number of my advent calendar, and maybe yours: a treat I bought in the dark of November. Each day in December, I’ve opened a cardboard drawer to find a gift to myself. Lavender salve to rub into my temples, geranium hand cream, frankincense oil to rejuvenate my 60 year old skins. It’s taught me something about self-care that I don’t think I knew before – how to treasure myself each day, regardless.

1 – the tree that came to mind in a therapy session recently. This tree is real and imagined, a safe place of non-judgement, acceptance, strength, solidity and power –  somewhere I can go, in my mind, to find all that I needed when a child, all that I need now to draw upon when I’m thrown back into child-learnt fears. 

And so I find I’ve numbered my days, counted myself into my sixties and up to this Christmas  Day. And what have I found? 

Love. A growing into love for myself I’ve never thought possible. A growing into receiving love from others I’ve never thought I deserved. A growing love for this world, with all its darkness, all its lights.

Liz Lefroy, I Number My Days

Asterisks and diamond drops
and the cold, so cold,
Lording-over-us blue 

and the rose chill – 
sky’s bright rim of ear, 
so cold, asking to be nibbled

this renegade that escaped,
a maraschino cherry
a cocktail on ice

so raw and beloved
the song’s song be-
longing in our mortal ear. 

Jill Pearlman, Bright Rim of Ear Lyric

Is it wildly obvious that blue is my favorite color? I’ve recently learned that it’s scientifically proven that the color blue lifts one’s mood. I’ve just ordered the book Blue Mind by Wallace Nichols to learn more. Wallace’s focus is on blue water, but since I walk the shoreline where I live nearly everyday, I think that’s probably relevant, too. All I know is that the calm and peace the color offers me is real.

No wonder my most recent book is Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) has blue in the title or that the swag bags for Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women are also, blue.

It used to embarrass me that I had such an affinity to one color above all others, but not now.

Not being embarrassed anymore is one of the greatest gifts of growing older. Creating space in the world for others to walk through is another. Almost exactly, fifteen years ago, my good friend Kelli Russell Agodon and I dreamed-up the idea for a poetry retreat for women and Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Writing Retreat for Women was born over a glass of wine, sitting by a roaring fire.

We had both taught at several conferences that featured a less than nurturing atmosphere: a small inside stairwell, an unheated room, and the list goes on. Kelli and I decided, at our writing retreat everyone would feel cared for and seen. There will be swag bags full of new books and everyone will have a one-on-one conference at no extra charge.

Over the years, we moved from Florence, Oregon, to La Connor, Washington. A number of years ago we started inviting guest faculty which have included Elizabeth Austen, Jessica Gigot, Claudia Castro Luna, Michele Bombardier, January Gill O’Neil, Rena Priest, Maggie Smith, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and Jane Wong.

This year writer-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield and poet Susan Landgraf will join me on the theme of wonderment and joy. What could be better?

Susan Rich, Another Year, Oh My: Celebrating

Sharing a name with a famous actress was innocuous enough, wasn’t it? We had little in common other than being white women. I am American; she was British. I’m a poet and writer; she was a renowned actress of the stage and screen. I was born in 1977; she was born in 1934 and had already won two Oscars by the time I was walking. Surely we wouldn’t be mistaken for one another!

But, to my astonishment and amusement, once I started publishing books and having a more public life, and especially after my poem “Good Bones” went viral in 2016, that’s exactly what happened. In 2017 Meryl Streep read my poem “Good Bones” at Lincoln Center, as part of the annual Academy of American Poets gala. I wasn’t in the audience that evening, but when I listened to the audio later, I heard her say, “I’m going to read a poem by Maggie Smith.” The crowd murmured with excitement, and she said, in her unmistakable voice, “Not that one. The American.”

I laughed. From that day forward, my social media bio has been either “Not that one” or “The other one.”

I hope Dame Maggie Smith, who was known for her wit, would have found all of this amusing as well. As her character Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, once said on Downton Abbey, “Life is a game, where the player must appear ridiculous.”

Maggie Smith, The Other One, Forever & Ever

For me, the year really got started in April with the solar eclipse, which Chris and I watched from Burlington, Vermont, in the path of totality. I still tell anyone who will listen that it changed my life. It sounds goofy AF and over-the-top, and I just don’t care. What I saw and felt was the most profound awe of my life. The magic and power were undeniable, and it became clear: that giddy feeling was what I needed more of in my life. And I needed it immediately, so I spent the year getting after it. [….]

I spent the first six months of the year dramatically revising my poetry manuscript and continuing to send it out. In the process, I crossed the 30-submission mark. And then? I pressed pause. Even though some of the responses included positive signs about the viability of the manuscript, all were ultimately rejections except two that I’m waiting on. I am writing still, just not as much as I used to. I completed Sarah Freligh‘s August Micro-a-Day challenge, gathered some free writes in my journal, attended a couple of local open mics and featured at one.

I’ll get more serious about po’biz again in the future, I’m sure, but for now I’m reassessing what I’m doing, who I’m doing it for and what I want out of it. […]

Art making has come and gone in my life over the years, but mostly, it has been gone. This year, it started calling to me again, however. I had lots of resistance and fear about it initially because I was taking myself too seriously. I’ve been working through it and trying to make it about play. I have some things I want to pursue in 2025, but for now, I’m just practicing and exploring. (You can follow me on an Instagram account dedicated to this art journey here.)

So what now? What’s up next? On the heels of this awkward ritual — the recap — there may be another one: the resolutions, the intentions, the goals for 2025. But if not, the main theme is this: I’m trying to channel the magic and wisdom from 2024 into a new model for writing and art making and being in the world.

That means returning to this idea that we can create what we need for ourselves and for our communities. Our strength lies there, not with typical measures like publications or likes or beauty standards or even elections. That’s a story for another day, but sticking to the theme I have going here, we got us.

We got us.

We make something out of nothing. Almost every day. And the worlds we make are as real as any we’ve been handed. And they’re ours. They belong to us. Imagine how powerful we are when we keep building. Imagine it like it’s already true — and suddenly it is.

Carolee Bennett, To Make a Safe Space for Myself

The final poem in our Palestine Advent series is Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin.

Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali.

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1933 in the village of Saffuriya and died in Nazareth in 2011. His So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Anthony Wilson, Palestine Advent 24: Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali

I do realize what has been lost, in our semester long focus on trees.  I love the idea of students choosing a topic and diving deep and learning a lot.  But through the years, I’m less and less convinced that happens, except for one or two students, who have probably been doing that on their own anyway.

In this time of planetary destruction, teaching students how to notice the world around them seems more important than ever.  Exposing students to the ways of being a naturalist in the world, even if they’re not going to be scientists–that seems very important to me.  Along the way we did creative approaches too, which I wrote about in this blog post, and I think those experiences helped some of them realize that they do have creative skills, that these, too, can be learned.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Success of Adopting a Tree in a Composition Class

When I was a child, my sisters and I were told (and believed) that on Christmas Eve when the clock struck midnight, for one hour all of the animals could talk to one another. This was a magical happening, and also a secret: if we were to try to stay awake and observe this convening (which I suggested on a number of occasions), the magic would be broken.

In my early childhood, we lived in a suburban house with a wide swath of woods behind, and always cohabitated with at least one cat and one or two dogs. Later, we moved to a seven-acre farm and in addition to the animals who shared our house, we also lived alongside chickens, Nubian goats, alpacas, horses and a pony, two barn cats, and a pig, not to mention all of the other wild creatures–birds, squirrels, mice and moles, raccoons, snakes and lizards, turtles and toads, deer–that shared the land. At that point, imagining the conversations that would take place on this sacred night became even more mysterious. What, given the brief gift of a shared language, would all of these creatures say to one another?

Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Christmas

i read in an old grimoire
that if we are sick we should bury all our hooves.
we should prepare for winter. we must
boil a whole tree until it is
soft as flesh.
i pickle the moon to go with it.
sweet lemon divine. i collect the hooves.

Robin Gow, healing spells

I grew up in the same New England that Robert Frost wrote about. I saw the roads. Drifts of snow covered them. New Hampshire used to get an average of 174 inches of snow a year. Now, due to climate change, just a lousy 60 inches, a third of what it was fifty years ago.

Snow or no snow, the question might be, do we take the time to look outside at all? Are we intentional about looking up from our phones? The answer is no. We don’t have time—or make time—to look at the woods.

What could possibly be happening on Instagram or TikTok that is more exciting than driving, crossing the street, or interacting with someone at our local coffee shop? It’s all too apparent that we are sucked into our devices. We are absorbed by our longing for the pixels of a digital world.

The first time I realized the phone was a competition was at a Red Hen poetry reading at Poets House. Leaves fell in New York’s late afternoon. Li Young Li was reading with Peggy Shumaker, two accomplished poets. Before the reading began, no one was looking through the Poets House library, one of the largest poetry collections in the world. They weren’t observing the beauty of the space. They were playing with their phones. I realized that the event was competing with something that could fit on their laps.

This was twelve years ago; the phone hadn’t really taken us by the throat. It has now.

Kate Gale, Stopping by Woods: On Returning to Intention

sun dying
i become
part of the darkness

Grant Hackett [no title]

In an Afterword, [Robert] van Vliet briefly explains some of Vessels’ compositional background. A few years ago, in the midst of the bleakness and isolation of the Covid pandemic, the poet was tied up in a difficult, exasperating writer’s block. Taking up a popular creative writer’s manual, which offered a method of daily exercises – applying aleatory, chance texts as writing prompts – van Vliet leaned instead upon three much-valued personal sources : the I Ching, the journals of Thoreau, and the gnostic Nag Hammadi Gospel texts.

The poet emphasizes the generative effect of chance operations, comparable to casting the I Ching oracles – and these methods clearly had a liberating influence, opening wide, exploratory dimensions, adding variety to the sequence. But if you read his explanation carefully, you find that the process involved several overlapping steps : sorting, mixing, shifting, recombining. And in fact this step-by-step approach allowed van Vliet’s own voice to emerge : quietly, subtly, unobtrusively. For me it emerges in the refined lightness, the liquid understatement, the powerful simplicity, of his images of nature. Like ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry in its foreshortened, whispering force, its emotional accuracy, his short lyrics find a place where heart, mind, and soul – feeling, thought, and truth – seem to merge in a transparency of light, wind, water, seasonal change.

The ancient source material is by no means an artificial scaffolding, a crutch. It is the avenue for an encounter : because for this kind of Transcendentalist, philosophical writing (think, Thoreau), there is no Truth but lived truth; there is no Word but felt words, embodied words – words in-relation to others, to otherness, to Another. The divine, the sacred, washes through these poems like a wind (or rain, or drought) : the fear and terror are there, as well as the longing and adoration. Moreover the free, questing, skeptical, philosophical mind is there : the only dogma, the only authority, the only truth… you must live them. You must experience them yourself. This is the encounter (in my rough approximation) that the reader will find in this volume. It is supremely paradoxical, supremely mysterious – as is our mortal life in this mysterious cosmos. The poet challenges himself – and the reader – to find life again, beyond the fraudulent twilight realm of illusions, self-delusions.

Henry Gould, A New Song : a New Walk

I’ve been thinking about connections, networks, and finding angels in strangers. These past two months have been an odd kerfluffle of dinners with family and friends, stretches of quiet, paroxysms of activity, stretches of how-can-it-be-only-4:30. My husband has invited another crop of people over for dinner, and I feel resentful. And I feel guilty for that. I don’t know these people very well, or at all. He relies on me for my conversational skills while he finishes cooking, and then also at the table. I don’t feel like pumping up that particular energy. I don’t feel like hearing myself say brightly to someone, “So…” and ask some question about their lives. I don’t care. But I ask myself, what is my preferred alternative? Another quiet dinner and then Netflix? Really? Again?

I think these people coming to my table have nothing to offer me, but how could I possibly know? And why would I cut myself off from the possibility? Don’t I believe that in community lies all hope and possibility, all potential for the human species on the planet? Don’t I believe that these interactions with friends and strangers make rich a life? What is my problem? Something inside me is unsettled and bleating mutely, and something about the prospect of these people, these particular people and their particular connection, makes me feel trapped. Which is completely ridiculous.

But I found a kind of resonance with the shrimp in this poem by Catherine Barnett, from her terrific book Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space. Alone or not alone enough, is the question of the poem.

But I think the real question of life is the “sharing a patch of sea grass” she mentions. I know from another book I’m reading right now, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, that it’s not just a couple of shrimp sharing that patch of sea grass, it’s teeming masses of bacteria and other teeny things, single celled whatsits and multicelled whosits, and fleas and waterworld insects, all awash in waves and winds frantically trying to keep everything in balance. I learned in some other article somewhere that even though we are an incredibly destructive force, we human species have also had some positive effects on the planet, and were we to disappear, those positive effects would disappear too.

I guess my point is, we’re all in this together, we shrimp and insects, we whosits and humans and winds. And although we’re never particularly alone, sometimes it feels like it, and against our will. So look, Elijah could show up for dinner at any time. Just set the table. Prepare to look at a stranger with your brainy eyes, and to say brightly, “So…”

Marilyn McCabe, then they’re gone again

There’s a delightful quickness of fantasy in early Yeats. When I was a boy, critics seemed to enjoy disparaging his ‘Celtic twilight’ poems as – I suppose – trivial and escapist. I don’t know if that’s still the case. Carrying Jeffares’ MacMillan paperback selection around with me, I loved intoning those early poems quite as much as the later ones and for the same reason – I gorged on the sheer richness and control of their music in a quite indiscriminate way. Nowadays the solemn drone of the Rose poems has lost its appeal for me. I don’t mean I now think of it as weak, or bad, or clumsy but that there’s something static and unchanging in its effect which means that it has lost its life through repetition. ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and similar poems have kept their freshness. I think this is partly because of the sparkling distinctness of their images. Each line brings a separate self-contained flowering of life as well as contributing to a developing narrative:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

The style of almost childlike simplicity is important. Aengus says things and we seem to see them with absolute clarity in a mood of wide-eyed, wondering but unquestioning acceptance. There’s no pushing of mood or meaning by the poet, and this is part of the difference from the Rose poems, and why this one seems to me so much more artistically resilient than they are. However, I think that there’s something entranced and entrancing about the feeling of the verse right from the start, before the trout transforms to a glimmering girl. What I started this piece hoping to do was to analyse how this feeling is given but that seems to be beyond me. All I can say is that the way we and the speaker are caught in the grid of these delicate iambic tetrameter lines with their abcb rhymes seems to have something to do with it, creating a sense of being in some sort of hyperreal, entranced state or space. 

Edmund Prestwich, Magic words: W B Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’

In the artist’s statement accompanying her “Poetry Recitation with Music: The Waste Land,” Beijing-based artist Wang Baoju concludes by saying that her recitation of a Chinese translation of T.S. Eliot’s famous 1922 poem performed in time to a Beijing traffic light’s beeping is “absurd.”

But if we stop at simple dictionary definitions (or stop with Google Translate), we lose some important word play. Wang uses the word 荒诞, pronounced huangdan and meaning “absurd, ridiculous, over the top,” to describe the nature of her performance. In doing so, she echoes the Chinese translation of the title of Eliot’s poem: 荒原 huangyuan.

The character 荒 huang repeats, suggesting that not only is Wang’s performance inherently absurd (or, better put, absurdist in the tradition of art that reflects real-world absurdity), but that it also does something with and to Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, that it, we might say, somehow wastes the poem, or uses the poem to waste something about poetry itself, or our time, or contemporary Beijing, that it somehow wastes the Waste Land, whatever that might mean.

What are we, as viewers, to do with this? 

Can we relate to interminable waits? 

To our time being cut up by machines, computers, algorithms, codes

Perhaps some of us might note that parts of Beijing look almost identical to parts of any other global megacity….

We might observe that traffic and people rushing about on their business in the city can, if we sit and watch for a while, seem somehow ghostlike, zombie-like, machine-like, unreal?

That we can feel unreal, too, in cityscapes shaped by the demands of commerce and technology more than by the needs of the human body, psyche, and soul? 

That maybe there’s something “dead” about this world we’ve made, with its pulsing energies and seemingly endless tearing-down and rebuilding, its material excesses, profligate consumption of resources, and flows of emissions and garbage?

That all of this is happening in a world that feels like it’s teetering on the brink of some kind of catastrophe, even as we drift through daily life as if things might go on forever just as they do now, distracted by our screens?

David Perry, Hurry Up and Wait: Wang Baoju’s Hyper-Unreal Absurdist Beijing Waste Land

Christmas himself was probably played by William Rowley, a famous comic actor who must — like Jonson himself — have been a large man, as he generally played jolly, plump parts (like Plum Porridge in Middleton’s Inner Temple Masque (1619) and the Cook in Jonson’s later masque, Neptune’s Triumph). But all the other actors were probably actually boys, drawn from the professional companies with which Jonson was associated. The contrast between their childish appearance and the adult jobs Christmas attributes to them (such as ‘Hercules the porter’) is part of the joke. The boy Cupid would certainly have been played by a child, as would his mother Venus, the only speaking female part.

Christmas has just got his show underway, and is part-way through his opening song, when he is interrupted, first by some noise outside, and then by the entrance of Venus, a ‘deaf tire-woman’ (that is, a dressmaker), who — a bit like Christmas himself — insists on coming in and, despite his protests, on staying so that she can watch her son, Cupid, who has a part in the play. Making Venus a deaf dressmaker and Cupid a local apprentice (to a bugle-maker, that is, a maker of glass beads) has obvious comic potential, and we duly discover that Venus lives on Pudding Lane (a poor neighbourhood, famous as the place where the Fire of London began later in the century); that she is the child of a fishmonger (a profession with a reputation for lechery and infidelity); that her husband was a blacksmith (an obvious reference to Vulcan); that Cupid is apprenticed to a bead-maker on Love Lane (slightly east of Pudding Lane), and so on.

The whole thing keeps nearly collapsing into chaos — more people want to come in; Venus keeps interrupting Christmas and then mishearing what she is told; Christmas’ children discover they have lost or forgotten half their props; and then Cupid begins his speech but, interrupted by his mother, loses his place and forgets his words:

CUPID: You worthy wights, king, lords, and knights,
O queen and ladies bright,
Cupid invites you to the sights
He shall present tonight.
VENUS: ’Tis a good child. – Speak out, hold up your head, Love.
CUPID: And which Cupid – and which Cupid [he keeps repeating it, unable to remember the rest]

There’s an energy to the piece, dependent to a large extent on the comedy of a performance going wrong — and never being quite sure whether all of the errors are scripted or not — which is quite a lot like a good pantomime, still a traditional part of the British Christmas.

Victoria Moul, Did Ben Jonson invent Father Christmas?

Szirtes’ career illustrates what Pasternak discusses in An Essay in Autobiography (Harvill, 1990). Though our experience of the world is necessarily subjective, there is a sufficient underlying matrix that remains “the common property of man” – the hard-wiring implicit in being human. Superimposed on this is the softer wiring derived from upbringing, environment and education, and the self is ultimately a function of these base matrices in progressive interaction with individual decision-making in the flow of experience. So the objective world is processed through the individual’s particular matrices – his/her sets of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, texturised as it were, accordingly. From this, Pasternak argues that when an individual dies he leaves behind his own unique “share of this . . . the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul”. This, of course, is where “art finds its . . . field of action and its main content . . . the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience”. Art can be defined as the expression of experience playing across the matrices of the self, saying not this is me, but this is, this was, mine.

It is the raw imagery of stasis and movement that emerges in Szirtes’ early work as being truly his and it blooms into the maturity of the late 1980s. In short lyrical pieces the point of stasis is associated with the preservative of art in the spit ball gobbed by a foreign worker in ‘Anthropomorphosis’ which is caught and “suspended” by the poem. The afternoon rearranges itself around it and even the narrator “hung there / Encapsulated in that quick pearled light”. Versions of this encapsulation abound: girls creating a silver foil tree find themselves absorbed into a Keatsian “cold pastoral”. Such freeze-frame moments anticipate Szirtes’ sustained meditations on photography but early on, images of snow and frost suggest the ambivalent status of such suspension. In ‘The Car’ a snowfall is both beautiful and sepulchral: “Fantastic Gaudi-like structures hung / Under the mudguard . . . . / Wonderful, cried the girls under the snow”. A girl who is observed sewing causes consternation (“I do not like you to be quite so still”) caught in a stasis that can “eat away a life” that can “freeze the creases of a finished garment” (‘A Girl Sewing‘).

Martyn Crucefix, George Szirtes’ King’s Gold Medal for Poetry

on a notepad
in the stonemason’s yard:
names to be carved

Matthew Paul, My year in haiku

At the opening of The Grail, the final part of the trilogy, in a poem dated 31^st October 2024, we find ourselves back in the Providence of Roger Williams and Cautantowwit, in a sense Gould’s earthly Eden. But then circumstances plunge the poem back into harsh reality, with two poems dated the 4^th and 6^th of November, bracketing the re-election of Trump, and, as it happens, Guy Fawkes’ Night:

Election day, the traitor, redivivus,
golden-orange, breathing fire, emerges
from Hecate’s diamond basement (Hades)…
wearing Empedocles’ bronze shoe, Jesus!
No one could have predicted this. Amen,
howls each mesmerized hurt soul… He’s us!
Meanwhile… Roger, Coke’s fiery lamb… sighs.
These trials of conscience burden suffering MAN!
he shouts: Only soft-hearted JONAH can restore us.
(from ‘Twisted Knot’)

I want to pause a moment to unpack at least some of the references in this stanza, which is typical of Gould’s method. By association with Hecate, keeper of the key to Hades, fire-breathing Trump becomes Satan, the ultimate traitor, and with the figure of Fawkes, who figures in Milton’s ‘In Quintum Novembris.’ (On the Fifth of November), a poem that could be viewed as an early draft of ‘Paradise Lost’. Fawkes’ basement full of gunpowder being an analogical Hades of its own. And then there’s Empedocles’ attempted deceit, a brazen (pardon the pun) attempt at self-aggrandisement.

Next we have Roger Williams, whose patron, the English jurist Sir Edward Coke, prosecuted Fawkes for treason. Williams knew Milton and tutored him in Native American languages. He also founded Providence as an oasis of ‘liberty of conscience’. As it turns out, he also wrote about Jonah as being, perhaps, soft-hearted: ‘Jonah did not compel the Ninevites to hear that message which he brought unto them.’ (I cannot source the apparent quote that closes the stanza.) And it may be just me, but Jonah brings to mind Moby-Dick. One way or another, these lines illustrate Gould’s insistence on history as a kind of process outside time, or in which all times and places co-exist and illuminate each other.

Billy Mills, Three Books by Henry Gould: A Review

Over the last few days, I’ve taken some very long walks, several naps, and I’ve read What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, trans. and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill (LiverightPubl, 2025). It is being hailed as “a landmark literary event.” The poems, presented in the original German and in English, were never intended by Arendt for publication, and they don’t strike me as being poems one memorizes or writes out in a commonplace book. They compel, however, if taken as a diary of Arendt’s life:

The thoughts come to me,
I’m no longer a stranger to them.
I grow into their dwelling
like a plowed field.

(from Part II, 1942-1961)

If you aren’t already steeped in Hannah Arendt’s work, the footnotes and the introduction of What Remains are a necessary guide. Additionally, they offer the editors’ obsession with the poetry, and a direct look into one of the greatest minds of the 20^th century.

Bethany Reid, What Remains

Edward Storer (1880-1944) was born in Alnwick, England, lived in Rome, and then returned to England to live in Weybridge, London; “In November of 1908, Storer, author already of Inclinations, much of which is in the “Imagist” manner, published his Mirrors of Illusion, the first book of “Imagist” poems, with an essay attacking poetic conventions.” (Flint, A History of Imagism, 1915)

One of the founders of the ‘School of Images’ group in 1909, alongside F.S. Flint and T.E. Hulme, both of whom were also experimenting with free-verse, inspired by French vers libre, and Japanese tanka and haiku (the influence of tanka, for instance, is particularly obvious in Storer’s short poems, as well as in the stanza forms of his longer poems). The School of Images group also included Florence Farr and a young Ezra Pound, among others.

Storer published three books of ‘new’ poetry between 1907 and 1909—Inclinations (1907), Mirrors of Illusion (1908), and The Ballad of the Mad Bird (1909)—and was a significant forerunner to the ‘new verse’ movements which would eventually take both England and America by storm in the 1910s-1920s. In the 1910s he also published an influential book of Sappho’s fragments in translation, seemingly using tanka and haiku as a model.

Storer also wrote the one of the first truly ‘modernist’ essays on poetics, included as an appendix to Inclinations (1907), but largely ignored by historians. The basic tenant of modernist theory was that each art had its own, unique essence, which differed ‘absolutely’ from one another, and that an artist’s highest calling was to identify, and nurture this essence. Up until the late-1800s narrative had always been seen as one of the foundations of Western poetry, which Storer disputed. Narrative, as an inherently ‘realist’ pursuit relied on ‘believability’, which was fundamentally at odds with the poetic, he argued. Conversely, poetry ignored its own essence the more it engaged with narrative. This led Storer to argue for an ‘imagistic’ model of poetry, in distinction to any kind of ‘realism’, grounded in ‘suggestive’ linking and combination, rather than ‘narrative’.

Storer seldom gets sufficient credit for his theory of poetics, though Pound would go on to plagiarise Storer, Flint, and Hulme’s ideas, as well as those of earlier free-verse poets like Yone Noguchi, in his essays of 1912-1915, under the name of ‘Imagisme’. This ‘new’ Imagist movement went on to include numerous extremely talented poets like Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, and Amy Lowell, and remains one of the most well know—if poorly understood—movements of the 20th Century.

Dick Whyte, Edward Storer – 7 Short Poems (1907-22)

Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony comprises around 450 poems that tend to begin with a name, a place (farm, factory, saloon, boarding house) and sometimes a time of day or the age of the named person if relevant, and that tend to end with violence – gunshots, knife wounds, mutilation in industrial accidents. Their language is court-room plain, these are the facts; courtly, I’d say, respectful; no Henry James sub-clauses; the power is accumulative. Testimony was published in the US in several volumes by New Directions and Black Sparrow Press between 1965 and 1978; it was reissued in 2015 by Black Sparrow in a single edition – subtitled The United States (1885–1915): Recitative – that also includes as an appendix the prototype volume, written in prose, first published in 1934.

I’ve known of this book without ever, until this year, getting to it. It is one of the books of the last century; it has never been published in the UK. Repeat: it has never been published in the UK.

Reznikoff (1894–1976), by all accounts, was a modest man. He was born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He sold hats for the family business. He wore out a lot of shoe leather, walking 20 miles a day on the streets of New York. In his twenties he had poems accepted by the magazine Poetry and then withdrew them; most of his work until the 1960s was self-published, and typeset and printed by himself. His poetry is included in anthologies of the Objectivists alongside that of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi (all of them immigrants to the US or the sons of immigrants). He studied law and practised very briefly but then ducked down, Bartleby-ish, and for many years earned his living by writing summaries of court records for legal reference books.

‘I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases – not a great many as law reports go – and found almost all that follows.’ This is Reznikoff’s brief prefatory note to his 1934 prose version of Testimony. Given that what comes to court is the bad stuff – murders, rape, theft, claims for negligence, property disputes and forged wills – Testimony is not a picnic in the park.

Charles Boyle, Late in the day, my book of the year

It’s nice to have so many little details all in one place when I can only remember bits and pieces read from articles and other books about Auden. A useful reference. I think Carpenter is right to stress Auden’s middle-class, Edwardian upbringing. His verse was innovative at all stages of his writing career, and he lived into the 1970s, but in his attitude to homosexuality, his longing for a settled, domestic life, and his return to the Christian fold, he showed the deep marks of home. Nevertheless Carpenter is alert to how Auden’s travels and different habitations around the world influenced his writing. The biographer pays his subject the tribute of close attention.

Jee Leong Koh, Humphrey Carpenter’s W. H. AUDEN: A BIOGRAPHY

The poem I’m writing about is “Boxers in the Key of M” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from her book Apocalyptic Swing. You can find the full text here in the archives of The New England Review.

I first met Gaby when I moved to San Francisco in 2003. Amy and I house sat for her and took care of her cat Clemente while we looked for a place to live, and then, some years later, we worked together running the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. I have always considered her both a wonderful person and an extraordinary writer and I recommend all her books unreservedly.

I’ve always found Gaby’s poems to be intimate, whether writing in the voice of a character or when the line between poet and I is more blurry, as it is in this poem. And it feels weird to write that when the poem starts with an announcement of its poem-ness, a sort of half-simile.

As in Marvelous and Macho, as in Leon’s
younger brother Michael, a name I learned
in Catholic school.

The connection of boxing to music is a natural one. Rounds are three minutes long, roughly the length of a pop song, and many legendary boxers have been described as dancing around the ring. Michael Spinks was apparently a dancer before he was a boxer, and his wife was a dance instructor. Camacho danced on Univision’s Mira Quien Baila after his boxing career ended. And while Marvelous Marvin Hagler didn’t have the same reputation for dancing as many other fighters, he still stayed on his toes and bounced.

I also like where the mention of Catholic school takes us, along with the rest of that line and the next one, “St. Michael of the mat, / of the left hook and the deafening blow.”

Brian Spears, Sometimes there’s nowhere to run

The surrendering in the above poem speaks to me. And whenever I read from my volume of Hermann Hesse poems translated by Ludwig Max Fischer I am always taken with the commentary by Fischer. He quotes Hesse, “To cut through the charades of this world, to despise it, may be the aim of the great thinkers. My only goal in life is to be able to love this world, to see it and myself and all beings with the eyes of love and admiration and reverence…”

I’m interested in his insistence on love. I like that he “saw himself as an advocate for the soul, as an activist for the spirit in everyone beyond ideologies and doctrines.” Hesse saw words as instruments for the possible, and which could lead us to joy.

How many thousands of time in a life do we need to relearn the path to joy?

Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – Winwood, Hesse, Michelangelo

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

Always. Yes. Probably the primary thing I am always thinking about is: How does poetry’s condensed nature/its condensation yield an outsized MEANING? What does it mean (for my experience of time and space) to prop those effects up in a kind of shadow box?

A couple books ago, I was obsessed with the impossibility of a coherent self and what it MEANS to control the flow of information on the page.

Right now, I’m thinking/writing about the gaze, infection, vampires, the tone of ordinary suffering, rage as a holding of the line . . .

In the work of other contemporary poets (and other types of writers) who are much bigger in their thinking than I (btw I am totally cool with being B-movie-ish, a petty tinkerer), I feel like some of the big questions of now are related to what the inside (terrorizing, terrorized) of looking and being is, how language and art $erve capital in ways within and beyond our knowing, how writing with and from sources can be an ethos that might help to de-center whiteness, how Literature can facilitate an expansion of collective knowledge . . .

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

The writer can help proliferate community and thus (quite actively or even very remotely/impressionistically) stabilize the fragile threads of solidarity between the many people needed to collaborate in service of surviving the horror of Now; 

can create literal or figurative occasions for what is also my current fave teaching strategy, “small explosive art situations”;

can narrate/express/compose/sing for the purposes of witness, observation, or mere preservation of the ephemeral–all of which can be meaningful to any single reader; 

can, because Literature is a shared experience and requires many types and modes of stewardship, be “a person for others” (I went to a Jesuit high school LOL); 

can offer a momentary or lasting un-selfing for another human, which might act as salve or as awakening;

can do what Grushenka (in Brothers Karamazov) suggests is as important as full devotion to goodness: at least once give someone an onion when they need it.

That’s what I can come up with right now. I’ll think on this again in ten years.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Olivia Cronk

From a construction point of view, the poem is a masterclass in the strong line ending, and the sounds of this…the ow sound of window, flower, over and glow vs the clipped ends of snapped, snipped, lapped, missed, and the rhymed couplets at the end, but beyond the technical details (in a book that is all sonnets) , I love it for its attentive nature, the partner noticing something that means something to their partner — I can’t always say I manage that despite my best intentions, but as I sit here at the end of a year that has very much done a number on me, it is acting as a reminder that I can and should do more to notice these little things.

Both R and me are struggling today to feel comfortable with doing nothing. She keeps wanting to do stuff (despite being knackered from organising Xmas and looking after my carcass for the last week). I am loathe to sit down having been ill for a week, feeling “better” but exhausted, so sitting still is hard, but we both need to remember we don’t “always need to be on the move”

Mat Riches, Uncareful Owner

the wild geese
are shitting on the snow
icy pond

Jim Young [no title]

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is poetry’s equivalent of Pachelbel’s Canon in D – overused to within an inch of its life. I don’t care. Both are wildly popular because they are beautiful; simple enough to speak widely; complex enough to hold and engage. “You do not have to crawl on your knees repenting” is the line I’d like to live in the coming year. And this year, more than ever before, I found my place in “the family of things”.

More often than not, I forget to say that it’s Clare writing this article – but maybe it’s obvious from the different ways Kim and I write, and the things we say. For example – I want to tell you about how, decades ago, one of my girlfriends complained about the way I spoke about my family. It’s always THE family, she said – like it’s a unit. The Family is coming. I’m spending time with The Family. Like there’s no other family! Like you don’t exist without it!

But, I was the youngest of six – a Catholic family – and we were a unit. We were cubs, we moved and lived and rested in a pile. We had our own bible, our own lore. We shared our underwear, changed once a week and washed by hand, we bathed in the same water, smelled of each other, caught lice and worms from each other, ate choddy from each other’s mouths. The Family was my horizon and furthest place; the Family was much more than world. It was my fingers, my thoughts and all my dreams. It was my arterial system and my exoskeleton; my tastebuds and my lens. What do you do when your systems all fall apart?

Clare Shaw, Family Estrangement, December, and the Family of Things

How can we get a decent night’s sleep on a mattress made from fists and crumbling civilizations?

How can we turn a blind eye when reality’s mugshot is posted on the back of our eyeballs, continually reminding us of the crimes humans commit against one another?

A bullet isn’t like a trained dog. You can’t tell it to sit and expect a positive outcome when all it knows is kill.

But something I can say to you with optimistic certainty is this: the story of us has been woven from other stories; our stories will weave with different stories to create future stories.

A hymn about a hymn, a kiss about a kiss, a river about a river, forever flowing.

Rich Ferguson, A River About a River

Overall I read about 41,000 pages. That’s about 110 pages a day on average. It’s a ballpark because some were facing pages translations, some had no page numbers so I didn’t count or made a guess. I only counted up to appendices if I didn’t read those. Assist points go to my back and sciatica and energy crashes which left me capable of doing little more than reading.

I am always adding new questions to track. This year I added a couple new columns to the spreadsheet: re-reads (28 titles) and cost of title.

• 66% were free to me: downloads, contributor copies, review copies, gifts, jury copies, library, or little free libraries
• 19% were bought at full price, from the author directly, at small press fairs, by subscription, or else came from indie bookstores
• 8% from Amazon (sorry)
• 7% came from thrift stores or used bookstores (so 50 cents to $10)

[…]

Poetry comprised 60%. Most of the rest are novels or novellas. Chapbooks rang in around 20%. The next biggest categories were memoir or essays, then history or science. […]

What work is it that I want written word to do?

To expand me. To teach me how to be a better human. To understand angles of human nature. To conceive of a supportive world. To enter play and silliness, and to enter scary experiences completely unlike my own. To live more lives and to live a life I’m better equipped to understand.

Pearl Pirie, Self-audit and Best of 2024 List

About a week ago, I panicked when I realized I had promised two different writers blurbs for their next collections by the end of December. I had already read the books and taken notes, but I hadn’t started parsing my notes and my pulled quotes to make cohesive statements. I proceeded to put aside everything else I’d been planning to work on and make sure they got completed.

Being asked to create a blurb for another writer is an honor, one that I take seriously and one that takes quite some time. (See ’s excellent recent stack about writing and asking for blurbs.) It is the same with writing book reviews, something that I have done A LOT over the past five years. (Thirty-three poetry reviews at Rhino Reviews alone, six at Tinderbox Poetry – plus others at Limp Wrist, South Florida Poetry Review, and other venues. If you add them up, it’s around 10 reviews per year for the past five years – almost one a month.)

I’m not complaining. Reviewing has made me a more careful reader of poems and a better thinker about my own poems. I have considered this practice one way of giving back to poetry, one way of giving attention and respect to what poets do. I think about providing space for poets on my reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey in the same way, and I hope that Asterales, the new journal I am launching with friend/writer Rachel Bunting next month, will be another way to showcase writers and artists with gratitude for what they create.

But all of these things take physical time and mental energy. The more time spent on blurbs, reviews, reading submissions, website work, booking, and promoting means less time on my own creative and personal pursuits, less mental energy for my own poems or freewriting, this Substack, artwork, or even pleasure reading. (Or other personal things like exercise, time with family/friends, traveling.) For this reason, and for some personal ones (including some travel plans), I have decided to make changes for the coming year.

I have decided I need to learn to say no.

Easy, right? Not so much.

Donna Vorreyer, Fa-la-la-la-Labor

Leaving aside the thornily persistent issue of whether ize or ise is the more authentic British spelling, I have to admit that U.K. poets who use American spelling really do grind my gears.

What’s more, I gather from other poets that certain U.S. poetry mags require American spelling and some U.K. mags demand British spelling. Both positions seem absurd to me. In fact, they’re only a short step away from asking poets to correct their use of an expression or a phrasal verb because the meaning is different on the other side of the pond. All these would be red lines for me, as my spelling and choice of syntax represent a key part of the roots of my poetry.

Mind you, before anyone starts getting twitchy about the potential politics of the above statement, it’s worth underlining that this is far from being a question of nationalism or Little Britain. Bearing in mind the negative effects of Brexit on every aspect of my life, I’m never going to be heading down that cul-de-sac! No, it’s more to do with how our uses of language in our poetry express our origin and identity. And we all write through both, whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not…

Matthew Stewart, Americanised (sic) spelling

For the past two years, I’ve collaborated with haiku friends on what I call the Midwinter Day Renku. I created this renku variation in response to one of my all-time favorite works of literature, Bernadette Mayer’s epic poem Midwinter Day. 

The story behind Midwinter Day is that Mayer composed the entire thing on Friday, December 22nd, 1978, the date of the winter solstice. The title refers to the fact that many older, lunar-based calendars consider the solstice the midpoint of the season rather than the beginning, which is the designation of the astronomical calendar we use today. 

Midwinter Day is a 100-ish page poem about the day in the life of a young family (Mayer, her husband, and their two children) living in Lenox, Massachusetts. Largely free verse, this poem is highly allusive, contains numerous lists, and frequently incorporates poetic devices such as rhyme. In Midwinter Day, poetry is not separate from parenthood and grocery shopping; it’s intertwined. There is no distinction between art and the rest of life; they are one and the same. 

Since first reading this poem in 2015, I wanted to create some sort of homage to it. But my attempts to truly imitate Bernadette Mayer fell flat, and didn’t feel true to the way I like to approach my own poetry. Once I went deeper into studying haiku and learned about the various forms of linked verse, I began experimenting with a linked form that I wrote solo throughout the day. But while you can certainly write a renku or other linked form alone, I found I didn’t really enjoy that. I wanted to collaborate. Midwinter Day might have been written by a sole author, and yet she is anything but alone. 

After a couple of years of noodling around ideas, I finally settled on a shorter version of the renku. I wrote the first one with my friend Claire, a poetry friend from my Austin days. Last year, I tried with a larger group: six people in three time zones emailing back and forth. Tomorrow, I will write the third-ever Midwinter Day renku with my friend Dan, who lives in another country. It’s the first international Midwinter Day renku! I’ve kept it just the two of us because juggling such disparate time zones is going to be a bit of a challenge, and I decided a smaller size would help navigate that. 

This approach to the form is still a work in progress. Not only do I keep learning more about renku, but I keep wanting to adjust the specifics of the structure itself.

Allyson Whipple, Midwinter Day Renku: First Notes on a New Form

Around this time of the year magazines ask contributors for their books of the year. Funnily enough, I am a lot less cynical about these than I used to be. But they are undeniably strange, in a way that should be familiar to anyone involved in publishing: you have to sign up to the fiction that the only books worth talking about were published in the last twelve months, when of course there’s no straight line between the year a book was published in and its relevance, let alone its quality. Many old books are painfully current. Plenty of new ones are out of date. […]

Winter Recipes from the Collective, Louise Glück (2021)

The first of Glück’s collections I’ve read, though I knew individual poems. Also her last book. So, I’m no expert and the Nobel Prize win probably speaks for itself. I will just say that the way her poems climb down the page is uncanny. And they are testimony to just how hard – in every sense – so-called free verse and so called-confessional poetry is, or ought to be. This is the beginning of “Night Thoughts”:

Long ago I was born. There’s no one alive anymore who remembers me as a baby. Was I a good baby? A bad? Except in my head that debate is now silenced forever. What constitutes a bad baby, I wondered. Colic, my mother said, which meant it cried a lot. What harm could there be in that?…

Jem Wikeley, Books of the year

[I]t’s awards season in the literary community. Social Media is awash with announcements, congratulations, and virtual high-fives, as it should be. But I’d like to give a shout-out to writers who have never had a nomination for Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Wigleaf Top 50, Best of the Net, Best American Essay, or any of the other awards that I’m not aware of.

There are lots of writers who aren’t on social media and don’t have the exposure others enjoy because, life. Writers who are writing on their lunch breaks, in rush-hour traffic, after putting the kids to bed at night, before the kids get up in the morning, on bits of napkin, on back of grocery lists and bill envelopes, on post-it notes, or maybe only in their heads for now. There are writers writing in liminal spaces as noted in Amy Barnes’ insightful craft essay in Reckon Review.

Lots of writers aren’t in academia, don’t have degrees in anything or maybe in fields like healthcare support or general business, who went to a technical community college instead of an Ivy League university. There are writers who don’t belong to writing groups or attend workshops, who believe in the stories they create in their own heads. There are writers who are published sparingly because the submitting process takes time they don’t have or cost money they can’t give. There are writers who aren’t aware, or maybe only peripherally aware, of literary awards. The first time I was nominated, back in the day, I had to Google the Pushcart Prize. I’d never heard of it.

I want to celebrate the writers whose own life stories, and their made-up ones too, beat anything written by a Booker Prize winner. Keep writing, keep living, hang in there. You are seen. You have people who are like you that read your work and think you are the bomb. Believe it.

Charlotte Hamrick, Reading & Writing a Strong Sense of Place

This year I’ve written 7 poems (none of them very good), 4 stories (2 ok), and 15 Flashes (some of them ok. Maybe 2 good). I’ve radically revamped 4 old stories – by merging 2 of them I think I’ve produced 1 printable piece.

I’ve had a dozen or so acceptances, mostly of old (sometimes very old) stuff.

Because I was long-listed in their competition, I got a story in the Leicester Writes anthology. And Full House nominated a Flash of mine for Best MicroFiction 2025.

And that’s about it. I sent 2 booklets off (one poetry, one prose) which got nowhere. This time last year I promised myself that I’d write some proper reviews. I haven’t, though I’ve read (or listened to) about 200 books. 

Tim Love, My Writing Year (2024)

I have to admit that this was a tough year for me. Is it because of my age? Is this a peri-menopause thing? A mid-life crisis? The election nearly wrung all my positive energy out of me. My last book’s sales were respectable but not great (not as good as my previous book’s), and my rejection vs acceptance rate was mediocre at best. I worked hard but felt a bit like I was butting up against a wall in the literary world. I am lucky to have wonderful writer friends but I’m missing the spark that usually drives me to write. Not sure if it’s plain disappointment or disillusionment or what, exactly. The grungy weather is bothering me a little bit more than normal, and my MS flared up worse this fall than it has in a long time—not sure of the cause, which left me unable to do much besides listen to audiobooks and watch old movies on TCM.

So, what do you do? Well, two good, very healthy friends—one died suddenly, the other experiencing a “surprise” terminal illness—have taught me a hard lesson. Maybe we should be kinder to ourselves, appreciating the days that we do have, and maybe not being so judgy about what we are accomplishing and focusing more and how much we are enjoying what we have, and experiencing things like “joy” and “awe”—things we often don’t put a priority on in our culture of productivity everywhere, all the time. While I am being scanned for tumors and tested for cancer and autoimmune problems, when I am dealing with yet another crown or root canal—I have to remember to prioritize the good days and take advantage of them. I have maybe, in the last four years, lived a too-circumscribed life, too safe? Certainly, too much damn time in doctor’s and dentist’s offices. Have I not been allowing myself enough adventure? Maybe that should be my goal for 2025—to live a more adventurous, joyful life—to maybe take a few risks in the days I have, because tomorrow is never guaranteed.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! Trumpeter Swans, Revaluating at Midlife after a Tough Year, MRIs, and Ballets

The sky is a persistence of cloud, its low mist erasing trees,
meeting fields, dampening my face, my hair; I feel like
a conduit between two states: earth and water. Perhaps
we always exist in dualities but rarely notice. Perhaps I am
beginning to understand both the beauty and decay
of my wondrous life, the gift and theft of inevitable death.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Superposition

[I]t’s less shocking than it is mesmerizing, even comforting, for me to see this evidence of my own aging, particularly as it means I get to see a little of mom every time I look in the mirror. It’s good to catch this glimpse every day because I need her—maybe actually I am inviting her, calling for her intercession with this very writing—to nudge me along on this book project which has already taken almost a year since I wrote the first unsure words.

I realized the other day that I need to look at it every day. I don’t necessarily need to write every day, but I need to keep it close to me because when I don’t, when I let weeks go by between writing sessions (because it’s painful to write about your mother’s alcoholism and recovery and death), my synapses get sleepy (a trauma response, remember?) and I lose the thread.

It took me 20 years to complete the book about my father. I do not want a reprise of that experience.

So. I hate resolutions, but let me try to keep this one.

Sheila Squillante, On eyeballs and grey hair and outlines

I made a decision at the beginning of last year to submit to publications I regarded as out of reach. Standards are higher, chances of success are lower – yet it’s a strategy that has paid off. Instead of chasing the dopamine hit of publication I’ve focused on becoming better at what I do, and really understanding what it is I want to say. I’m barely halfway to either of these things, but I am ending the year with two small collections of poetry that have a real sense of identity. Both have been longlisted in competitions I barely dared dream of entering and I am proud to have written them. Publication will come – I just need to be patient and diligent in finding the right home. I’ve had individual poems longlisted for publication in Butcher’s Dog, as well has being part of the final issues of Dreich and the fabulous Spelt Magazine. I’m growing braver in terms of style, and content as well as developing an understanding of what matters to me. […]

My morning has been spent looking at goals for next year – I’ve more work to do in terms of the nuts and bolts, but I’ve had a realisation that I need to give myself permission to focus on writing for its own sake, rather than as a potential income stream. My work as a bespoke poet and copywriter will continue, but as far as my creative writing is concerned I need to see the art as valuable for its own sake – which of course means seeing value in myself. I’m determined to connect with the poetry and writing community in a more meaningful way, rather than squirrel myself away in the safety of home. It’s hard to put myself “out there” but I can see how actively supporting others in their work offers a path to growth and nourishment for everyone involved.

I finish the year in a calmer place. I have a greater understanding of what matters to me, how I want to use my writing and where I want to be in this peculiar, terrifying world. I often bewildered and frustrated, and often filled with rage at my lack of confidence. I am proud that I keep going, and proud of how far I’ve come. As my mental health improves, I hope that the barriers I so frequently fashion will become less powerful and that I’ll be able to continue to develop my skills and build on the connections I’ve made.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I’ve learned this year

知らぬ間に冬の金魚となりにけり           遠藤容代

shiranu ma ni fuyu no kingyo to narinikeri

            without knowing how

            I become

            a winter goldfish     

                                                            Noriyo Endo 

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), February 2022 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 21, 2024)

This morning I stepped out of my little house in my little village on a day of low cloud and thick mist to head down to the river Hertford. It was the first time I’d been for a walk since before Christmas and I was ready for it. I was looking for fieldfares, which I found, along with a white egret moving through the grey like an omen, and the creak and tick of water dropping through the bare, wet branches of the beech trees. The air was full of the calls of crows, the rattle and croak made more gothic than usual by a mist that sucked the light but leant all sounds a crystallised ring. Through the village I went and out along the farm tracks, passing people from the village; dog walkers, bird watchers, who passed the time with me, telling me about what they had and hadn’t seen – owls in Parish woods, a swell of a storm on the brigg, less roe deer this year, but a fox like an burning ember in the top field and always, always the otter sightings for the luckiest, luckiest few. I have never seen the otters. Though I look or signs and sounds of them, not a single sighting. Maybe they are a village myth.

Out and along the farm track where the land opens up, where the turbine sliced steadily away at the low cloud, and down to the Hertford, straight and low in its man-made state, flowing away from the sea in its strange manner, the sound of water over pebbles bright and hard in the gloom. I stood on the bridge and looked down its length and imagined I could see all the way down to Folkton, Flixton, down past the paleolithic islands of the long blade people to the Mesolithic site of Star Carr and my lake-people ancestors. The cloud was too low today to see any of it, or the mound of Seamer Beacon, or even the lip of the valley, Folkton moor over the rise, the site of the Folkton drums only visible in my mind’s eye.

Here I am, I thought, at the edge of the lake again, paleolake Flixton, The Ghost Lake of my book, my landscape-nature memoir which defined 2024 for me, the year it was published. I have washed up at the end of 2024 satisfied, happy, rolling dazedly to a stop here with the publication of my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to The Ghost Lake.

This is like the ancient custom of beating the bounds, of returning and marking your land, the boundaries of your community by beating on the boundary stones, as if waking up the spirit of a place and attaching yourself to it. Though, obviously, without smashing small boys about. I have this in my head as I tap my gloved hand along the metal of the bridge. 

Wendy Pratt, Beating the Boundaries

After ten years of sharing poetry on WordPress, it feels like it has lost its raison d’être. Maybe I, maybe poetry, maybe the passion, maybe that ecosystem — something, some things, all things – have crashed into a wall.

Not that there aren’t still things to say. Maybe just not there. Not that there aren’t any more poems. Though I don’t really know what or where.

But it is a new year. Or it will soon be. Just like this year was new, once.

I think of Naomi Shihab Nye who wrote so evocatively in ‘Burning the old Year’:

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

And even if there are solid keepsakes, events that will crystallize into memories, some even fragrant or warm – like Kobayashi Issa says:

New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

How does one look back at a year? Never mind the sun, the silhouettes tell a different story. Different stories. The sky rips open. Moonlight bleeds like a wound all night. And the poet picks at scabs. It is their job. Sometimes it is poetry that is contrary, sometimes it is life. Sometimes, it is the poet.

It is cold and grey today and the drizzle is a fine mist. The impending year has brought me to this poem. Cold and grey and wet. Beyond this lies 2025.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, One for the road

It’s February 3, and I just went through the house, changing the calendars from January to February. We are snowed in. Last night’s rehearsal was cancelled, and perhaps tonight’s will be, too, which is really a preview performance, but, egad!–we have barely had a dress rehearsal. Anxiety balanced by yoga. I did not see any groundhogs in real life or on the news (because I wasn’t watching the news), but I did see what I thought was a large owl, hunkered down in the snow, scanning the yard for small prey. It transformed, via head movement, into a rabbit, a huge rabbit, just sitting out there in the snow, flicking its now visible ears.

Kathleen Kirk, No Groundhogs

All this desk work has meant I’ve been walking the dog later in the day and often catching only the last sliver of daylight. This is a good time of day to be walking – the air smells of earth and damp, grass and sheep, hedgerows filled with shouty sparrows preparing to roost. Sometimes the sun catches the tops of the beech trees as its setting, and the branches become rose gold in the light. The windows of the cottages are warm squares and the train, if I see it run through the village, is a gallery of empty seats, sleeping heads, newspapers, books and laptops slicing into the black. This winter we’ve been spoiled by some wonderful sunsets. I like to catch the sunset from a hill at the far end of the village, watch it slide down the valley, then turn and walk back as the dark encroaches, pulling the colour out of it all until the lane is silver, the hills charcoal, the village a brightness of lamps and warm living rooms.

The tax return this year was probably the worst I’ve had to submit in terms of complication and stress. […] Doing my accounts […] is a bit like travelling back in time, I can feel the anxiety and stress and weekend working leaching out of the numbers. It made me ill with stress, but also helped my business (my business being me, effectively) survive the pandemic. I lost work in lots of face to face areas and had to drive up business in the online areas and I’m proud to say that after seven years of being self employed and edging sideways towards making my living from creative writing with some tutoring and teaching, I earned the same in 2020/21 as I did when I left my job as a microbiologist. It was hard, hard work, but I have reached a bench mark that I set myself years ago, and that makes me happy. I’m still working out how to manage my time to give me more writing time, but it is happening. Small goals, small steps with an image of what the main goal is. I’m getting there. Sometimes I am so stuck in the stress I forget that the outside world exists. As soon as I’m out in the weather, though, it’s like I feel real, as if a papery version of me exists in my office, but the real me exists only outside in the dusk and the weather.

Wendy Pratt, Walking at Dusk

The ladder serves the myth
that elevation is a need. Because stars and gods
live in the sky. Because the higher you go, the

further it still is. You move seven squares forward,
dodging a venomous fang, not quite at the
lowest step. It has been raining for days. If

there was a sky, it has collapsed into the ground.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Paradox

It’s winter, nights are in the low teens, and the ground out here is covered with snow. I’m still hiking in the local woods most weekends. My class at Rosemont college is off to a good start–brilliant and insightful students. My monthly local workshop is still going strong after more than 10 years. We’re on zoom at the moment, but we all hope to be back in person soon, as soon as it’s safe.

The writing has been going well, and publishing hasn’t been too bad either. My book manuscript has been a finalist about 5 times so far. I’ve had new poems published by Greensboro Review, UCity Review, Cider Press Review, and some others. Later this year I’ve got poems coming out in Sand Hills Review, Kenyon Review, Louisiana Literature, and Verse Daily, with hopefully more to announce soon.

My 2020 book, Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven, received a very positive write-up in Broad City Review, which you can read here. If you’re interested in checking out the book, you can find it here.

Grant Clauser, 2022 Update

I stared into the sun.
The last thing I remember, tears

were simmering in my eyes and your name
had frozen on my tongue.

Karen Dennison, Poetry and science 9 – Leaving

I am elated to announce that Mother Mary Comes To Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology has been selected as a 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read by Georgia Center for the Book. Karen Head and I worked for seven years to find a home for this project, so this honor is a testimony to perseverance and to the brilliant poets who contributed their work. And, of course, to Madville Publishing who loved the anthology and has made the whole publication process a pleasure. 

Collin Kelley, Anthology named 2022 Book All Georgians Should Read

I’d like to say a public thank you to Presence for sending me books to review from time to time, and for having faith in my haiku. Sometimes it feels like I’m working very much on the fringes (probably no bad thing). Lockdown enabled me to follow some new routes too, but that has also led to me feeling a bit out of the loop (again, that might not be a bad thing). Nevertheless, Presence has linked me to the haiku community and I really appreciate that sense of fellowship.

Another poetic community is The Poets Directory who have invited me to read at their ‘virtual stanza’ event. So:

Join us on Sunday February 13th at 19:00 for the December Poets’ Directory Live! Virtual Stanza event via Zoom. The event is part of the Poetry Society’s network of Stanza groups and brings poetry into your home every month. With readings from the excellent Chaucer Cameron, Julie Mellor, Damien Donnelly, Rory Waterman and Pascale Petit.

I have to say I’m in awe of the poets I’ll be supporting. Anyway, I’ll be taking a deep breath and hoping for the best! The free online event takes place on Sun 13th Feb at 7.00 – further details can be found here. Hope some of you can join us.

Julie Mellor, Reviews and readings …

A nightmare crossdresses in lullabies.

A hesitation builds dirigibles of yesness.

A quiet, quarantined heart manages a highway hum.

A fleeting second impersonates forever.

Rich Ferguson, Once Upon a Moment’s Noticings

How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?

Translation of poetry is on a continuum with writing it, even if, in a sense, it’s also unwriting (taking things apart). Having “translated” only a small number of poems, with only the most rudimentary knowledge of the language of the original (Russian), I can have little to add to what real translators think and do. Even the occasion of my first involvement with translation was a bit of happenstance: In 1989, Lyn Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko paired five American poets, of whom I was one, with five Russian poets for a sort of experiment in translation. This was during Perestroika, so before the fall of the USSR, and the enthusiasm for communication across what was left of the iron curtain was high. The idea was to do it transpersonally, not just transtextually. So the ten of us met in Stockholm and Helsinki, and then Leningrad, to talk face to face and, with that dialogue as a kind of substrate, to read and translate each other’s work. “Translation,” on these terms, involved a great deal of talking, eating, drinking, smoking, reading, walking around, guessing, second guessing—being—all activities (except smoking) that figure into my own process. […]

David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

All of the above. Definitely every instance of culture I consume, plus human conversation—the sound of people talking—really anything that crosses my perceptual bow. Lately I’ve been interested in what John Rapko calls “proto-art”—what you might think of as “found” objects in nature (or culture), naïve works, things that were once thought “primitive” or were at one time thought important, now not. The attraction is the lack of finish or determined meaning—the fact that meaning can occur unintentionally or quasi-intentionally. That there can be an unadulterated, unfiltered perceptual reward in something that didn’t mean to be art. Perhaps a weird thing for someone who makes art to say.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jean Day

why are children who will never bear a child :: the lullaby that i sing

Grant Hackett [no title]

Destiny
is rhyme
and spring

nine hells
three heavens

our
remains hard
and sweet sugar.

Ernesto Priego, 3. La calavera

I have begun to think of Higher Ed as a bad boyfriend, who breaks one’s heart again and again, and apologizes profusely and each time, one thinks it might be different. Not an abusive boyfriend, in that one’s face isn’t broken and it’s not bad enough that one knows to run away. There’s potential–one wants it all to be different. But the Higher Education bad boyfriend breaks one’s heart in so many ways.

Let me hasten to say that I feel fortunate in so many ways.  Since we spent much of 2021 thinking I would lose my job, we made alternate plans.  I am so grateful to Feb. 2021 Kristin who went ahead and applied for seminary and candidacy.  I am so grateful that we have sold the house.  I am so grateful that I have a vision of an alternate future.

While I will miss many of my colleagues, I am also grateful that someone else will have the task of leading the campus through the accreditation visit in 2 months.  I was not looking forward to many of the changes that were barreling towards us.

I will return to the campus today for a final time to box up books and load up the car.  When the HR person asked if I had any questions, I thought, I have so many questions.  But the one I asked was “I have more personal stuff in my office than I can get home today in my little car.  How do you want me to handle that?”

This morning, after a night of restless sleep, I woke up with a Meat Loaf lyric in my head:  “I want you, I need you, but there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you.” Thanks Higher Ed Bad Boyfriend! Now listening to Jimmy Buffett’s “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On.” That man doesn’t get enough credit for his skillful lyrics.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Play List for Job Loss: Higher Ed Bad Boyfriend Strikes Again

On Friday, people at work, as goodbye-for-nows were exchanged and tiny celebrations hatched, kept asking me how nice it must be going to be to have my time be my own.  I laughed, of course and said I’d probably be busier than ever, which is no doubt true, but it will feel different.  Especially since, for one, I have the freedom to set my own schedules and routines in a way I have not for, well, really since ever. College was something dictated by class schedules and play rehearsals. Grad school at DePaul had a little more free time when I wasn’t in classes, but was largely a time of full-time study and some writing. Since, I’ve been working full-time in addition to fitting all my more creative pursuits around it (and there was that crazy 4 year span where I was also getting my MFA.) My outside pursuits happened largely in the in-betweens and in odd hours either early or late in the day. My course was entirely dictated by work schedules, which is what will change. 

Over the weeks since I decided to leave, I’ve been thinking about how I want to structure my day, now that I am free to choose when and where to focus efforts.  There will be the freelance stuff…maybe 3 hours a day. The press/shop which will now get 4 hours daily which will be so much more generous than the previous 1-2 and weekends. (which means more on-schedule dgp releases, more time to clear the inbox, better marketing,  faster order turnaround, and new shop offerings.)  Daily writing, time my own writing and art projects, maybe 1-2 hours rather than hits and misses all week or manic sprints to finish on deadlines.  I’ll have the discretion of nights, when I can either do more work if I want or chill as needed.  Same with weekends (this is one thing I am looking forward to..a little more work/life balance…because I have never had it.)  I’ll also be working maybe 8-9 hours daily and not 11-12 so that will be great.  Also, no commuting, but much more ample time for walks. 

Kristy Bowen, of work and time

The present is still raucous

as vaudeville, or extravagant with drama:
clumsy actors stepping into wet cement,

falling on their knees; raising their eyes
to a tarpaulin sky as a calliope whistles

a carnival song, not quite drowning
the sounds of funerals and thunder.

Luisa A. Igloria, Soundtracks

I’m wrangling with a poem right now that was sparked by an interesting tidbit of science research. This is often how poems begin for me. I spun that out a bit and then tried to bring it back home, to me, to my life, and then spun it out again to include a “you.” I liked the movement of it. (Sidebar: I got a sciency poem rejected recently because it was too personal. I thought that was funny. I’m nothing if not a science experiment myself.) But in the end it felt sentimental, that is, there was a superficial emotionality to it that was unearned.

Was it in how the poem landed? Was it a question of language? Was it some problem inherent to the poem’s…what…journey or something, its heart or something?

A friend took a squint at it, rearranged it some, took out a line, made some suggestions. That helped smooth the sentimental edge but the poem still didn’t quite…what? It didn’t do whatever it is I want a poem to do: Transcend its details or ask an unanswerable question that needed to be asked or flip my thinking on its head or suddenly rearrange the world in a new way or…well…any of those magical things a poem can do.

It’s funny, isn’t it, what a poem can do, and how a poem can fail to do “It,” that poemy thing. Such a small figure, a poem, and how vast it can be. And how confounding.

Marilyn McCabe, Cruisin’ with a six; or, Anatomy of a Revision

If I pick up a new poetry book, I want to find images, language, meaning, that provokes me into sensing or knowing something I didn’t sense or know before I began. This is a fairly basic and generalised summary, yes, but it’s a fair test. I don’t mind a lot being asked of me – in fact, it can be thrilling to find yourself immersed in poetry or writing that challenges you on several levels. I’m happy reading experimental writing where you sense the poet isn’t even sure where the poem is going, or where some images connect easily and others are hard to pin down, or is doing something that at times is just plain mad. (See previous reviews of the work of Peter Finch and Michael Kriesel.) Part of the fun of reading poetry is having to work at it. I want to sense that a writer is really trying to work at their craft – and not just in a technical sense. More often than not I find the restraints of ‘form’ tiresome.

It’s also plain that not everyone can produce something extraordinary, even once in their lives – and even the best writers can and do release stuff that is sub-standard, that is published because of who they are, not how good it is. That happens in all areas of publishing: look at Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait album, for example, when as I understand it he had fallen out with his record company and just bashed something out that he knew very well was a long way short of what he could do. People still ran out to buy it. Me included. So, to a certain extent, if you want to go on reading poems, you have to allow for some forgiveness and tolerance.

However, I think the problem I found was that all six of the books I read felt similar. It felt as if they were all coming out of some kind of collective mindset, that ‘this is what poetry is and this is the way to write it’ as if they were a part of some kind of club where everyone knew what the limits and boundaries were and created collections that sat safely within them. It felt as if they had all read the same ‘How To Write Poetry’ manuals.

Bob Mee, I BOUGHT SIX POETRY BOOKS. NONE OF THEM INTERESTED ME.

I first met Dana Gioia at the West Chester Poetry Conference somewhere between 2008 and 2012. I was wearing a name tag that included where I lived at the time, Frederick, Maryland, a small city north of Washington, D.C., most famous for being the resting place of Francis Scott Key.

Immediately after we shook hands, Gioia launched into reciting “Barbara Frietchie” by John Greenleaf Whittier. It was a delightful connection to have made! I knew that Gioia had been head of the National Endowment for the Arts and had founded (with Michael Peich) the poetry conference I was attending. What I didn’t know was how his precise recitation in that slow baritone could at once captivate and soothe.

In high school when I first decided that the rest of my life would be this lifelong journey with writing, I cherished the book Letters to a Young Poet, given to me by my sophomore English teacher as a graduation present. I’ve carried that book with me everywhere I’ve lived and worked — from the east coast of U.S. to the upper Midwest to Shanghai, China and most recently here to Hong Kong. This is part of the reason I share Dana Gioia’s six-part series below. In the same vein as Letters to a Young Poet, Gioa’s new YouTube video series is a good place to start if you’re embarking on a writing life or simply beating yourself up for not writing as much as you would like. Unlike Letter to a young Poet, Gioia’s series provides practical wisdom on engaging (or reengaging) with a writing life given the busy demands of working full time.

Scot Slaby, If you want to help anyone start their writing journey, show them this

One of the best things about sharing creativity online is when other creative folks make something beautiful and new, arising out of / inspired by / in conversation with something that I created.

Like this right here, created by two longtime blogfriends:

The Gifts from Allan Hollander on Vimeo.

The audio recording is by Allan Hollander, and the animation is by Alison Kent.

The poem was originally published in my first book-length collection of poetry, 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia, 2011). If you don’t have a copy, I hope you’ll consider picking one up wherever fine books are sold. 

Rachel Barenblat, The Gifts – video

Some years back my old high school friend Hilary McDaniels Douglas invited me to write some music for her aerial dance company Project in Motion, based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She requested that I set a poem by Rilke and of course I couldn’t resist. I also included a poem whih appeared in my book Moon Baboon Canoe that I’d written and that felt appropriate. The overall theme of the piece was to be about water. 

Last night I began exploring a video clip of moving letters. (Full disclosure: I stole it off the Internet.) I transformed it: I layered it, expanded and contracted it, changed the colours and the movement and generally played around with it. It was riverine. It reminded me of the flowing letters in Justin Stephenson’s spectucular film about bpNichol, The Complete Works. 

I loved how the letters moved and replaced a poem that I’d stuck over top with an audiotrack of a funky distorted saxophone-based track that I’d made with a video of my hands moving. I realized that I’d need a much more flowing audio track and remembered the Rilke track that I’d made for Hilary. It was all about flowing, movement, and in my poem, it mentions hands. The whole thing worked so well together. I began transforming the video to be all about the Rilke track. I’m really thrilled with how it turned out. From a series of associations and accidents, this lovely thing that I stumbled on. [video link]

Gary Barwin, On Fishes: a video setting of a poem by RIlke and another guy

My uncles worked the Ship Canal
tugmen, exempt from The Call Up
free to drink each St Monday dry.
My mother was at war with them
the hostilities endless.
I could never fathom the reason
and she was not the kind to ask
even when I was grown and she frail
with aching hands of knotted oak.

Paul Tobin, DRINK ST MONDAY DRY

This morning I learned that 65 species of animals laugh. A few years ago I wrote Are You An Anthropocentrist? with examples of our fellow creatures making tools, doing math, demonstrating altruism, and so much more. Pretty sure laughter is just the iceberg edge of what we don’t yet recognize…

Laura Grace Weldon, Where I’m Finding Delight This Week

it’s about opening your mind
unbotting the furnace
raising the sluice gates
watching the leaves rush
down to the sea’s page
too fast to stop
too fast to review
emptying the lake
that never empties
screaming the silence
of devil may care
the never ending cataract
of clenched teeth in rictus

Jim Young, flow ~ now what’s to know

For those poets who aren’t on Instagram yet, or do not feel confident using it, I have to say, I was so grateful for this Instagram book review yesterday – and unlike some reviews, this generated sales – at least as well as I can measure on Amazon sales rank – right away! What a shock!

Thank you to TheBookshelfCafeNews for the shoutout and poets, go get on Instagram and let’s start talking about poetry books there. I am still getting used to the medium (sometimes I forget hashtags, and I’m still not confident in my ability to post “stories”) but think it is definitely worth being on there. There’s less of the negative vibe that can sometimes get overwhelming on Twitter, plus as many pictures of baby animals or cool art as you want to include in your feed. Yes, it’s still owned by evil overlord Facebook (or Meta) – but seems slightly less evil? Maybe this is because I only follow poets, Ina Garten, and a lot of red panda, fox, and zooborns accounts. Anyway, I encourage you all to give it a try. You can follow me there at @webbish6 – I mostly post pics of birds and flowers, the occasional selfie and poem – a lot like the blog, without all the words. Also, if you have helpful tips for others (and me) who are writers on Instagram, please leave them in the comments!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy February, Inching Towards Spring, Hoping for a Better Month, A Nice Review on Instagram (and Thoughts on Instagram for Poets)

The world iced, every inch glistening in the sun.

Zigzag tracks of our house cat that has walked away.

Across the bay, a tanker moves at a glacier’s pace.  

V is talking — the garage door pasted shut,

my eye straying to those lights, frozen droplets

in the branches — champagne.  

If I didn’t have myself, where would I be? 

A moment deep and wide for drinking.

Jill Pearlman, driveway Olympics

I’ve been reading proofs for Poetry’s Possible Worlds, so this is a busy and stressful moment. I’m always mildly panicky at this stage, wondering what errors I’ve overlooked, but it’s about time to type up my list of necessary fixes and send it back to the designer. It makes me think of my mother’s advice on housework: just keep the counters and other eye-level spaces clean, nobody looks at the floor. What would the floor be, the bibliography? Sigh. Some reviewers, especially any scholars who may read the book, will TOTALLY call you out on a dirty floor.

Proofing this particular book makes me think of my mother in other ways. It’s about reading poetry during a time of crisis, especially focusing on my father’s implosion. I only realized late in the game that it’s also very much about my mother, and not only because she was the one who discovered his string of affairs and called quits on the marriage. She was the person who gave me piles of books as well as the habit of reading for pleasure, consolation, education, and imagining future and alternate lives. Poetry was always in the mix, too, often long poems like Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. I read Chaucer in the Penguin translation as a middle-schooler, not knowing I should be intimidated. They were just stories.

Lesley Wheeler, Pretending the house is clean

When winter is over,
then we will grieve.

Wait for the rains of spring,
the buds on the tree branches.

James Lee Jobe, hold it all in for now

My friend Jon Appleton died on Sunday evening at the age of 83.

Yesterday afternoon, a brilliant blue day, we drove to Mont St-Bruno and took a long walk around the Lac Seigneurial; it was the right thing to do. I may write more about this eventually, but for now, I’ll let Tomas Tranströmer speak for me. Jon loved Sweden and poetry, and although he also spent a lot of time in warm places, such as California, Hawaii, Tonga, southern France, I always think of him in the north: Vermont, Sweden, Moscow. One of my most vivid memories of him is from a visit to us in Montreal some years ago, when there was an absolutely huge blizzard, one of the heaviest and stormiest I can remember. Being Vermonters at heart, none of us wanted to stay in, so we bundled up and decided to go out and see if we could find a restaurant that was still open. I can still see Jon, wearing his Russian fur hat, cavorting in the snow-filled street and laughing with delight: “This is aMAZing!”

He was a person who lived life as fully as possible, and who for many of his students and friends was — as this poem says – “a half-open door leading to a room for everyone.” Like Tranströmer, Jon suffered a stroke toward the end of his life. It affected his speech, which he gradually recovered, but he wasn’t able to continue composing music. During our last visit to him, he showed us the art studio in his retirement complex, where he said he was enjoying doing some painting. And even in the last two weeks he was writing with great pleasure about a new recording being done by Yoshiko Kline of some of his piano works, and working with an editor on the final draft of his autobiography. The creative spark never went out, and the best way I can remember and honor him, and what he gave me, is to try to do the same.

Beth Adams, The Consolation of Snow

I didn’t know that my cousin’s favorite food was pierogis. My aunt Darlene is making a batch of them to take to the dinner after the graveside service. “She won’t get to eat any, but it’s the last time I can make them for her, so I’m doing it.” I remember my aunt Violet’s cabbage rolls (they are one of my specialties). But if I ever had pierogis, I don’t remember. So, I told my aunt I’d make them, too. She told me how she makes them — in great detail —  and then said, “You can find a recipe on-line.”

I thought of that poem by Grace Paley, “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative,” about making a pie instead of writing a poem.

Bethany Reid, Pierogis

I have definitely entered a new phase of life. Where people I love, from 25 to 70 are grappling with mortality. And there are people, too, whom I do not love, but featured in a few revenge fantasies. I’m seeing how poorly written my fantasies are, how unrelated they are to real emotions. Thin storylines with hollow characters.

The wonderful – literally wonder-filled – thing about this is that I see how unfinished I am. It’s like I have opened the door to a new world. Moved from black and white to color, from a sunset projected onto flat walls, through the doorway to the “real world” which is too big to take in, and too immediate to ignore.

I want to hold someone’s hand, get my feet wet, and listen.

I read the chat messages in a quiet moment. I pay attention to the few songbirds that have overwintered near the lake. I almost wrote, “lonely songbirds”. I figure if I can learn to stop projecting, I can better see the world as it is: its brooding, its illness, death, and its love.

Ren Powell, Existential Helplessness

One last line opens,
the old monk said,
and one last line closes.
It works either way.

Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (126)

How invisible
we are. In the winter fog,
last year’s candlelight.

The sun reigns elsewhere.
Warm skins, bare feet, all small sins
that don’t leave shadows.

Magda Kapa, Moons and Stars Apart

It is dark out. The darkest I’ve ever seen. We are blindfolded and behind the wheel of a car. The fastest, most deadly car I’ve ever seen. We rush towards time, time rushes towards us. Sometimes I wonder who will be the first to relent in this metaphysical game of chicken. It is dark out. The darkest I’ve ever seen. Godspeed is the speed at which a light heart makes its own light as it travels faster than the speed of light.

Rich Ferguson, The Speed of Light

lanterns 
when the candle dies
night lives

Jim Young [no title]

There is a thread of blood
in the water, in the
fire, in the light. It is

time for light to tip
over and spill red
along the edges

of dawn, shivering
as if we are stepping
through a mirage into

water, or into Spring,
or into waking, or
into day. It is time.

P.F. Anderson, Time For Light

Midday the clouds morph from one grey-white
shape to another, shadows strong, drawn from tall
pines onto the unpaved road. What hours lie ahead
we never know. No Terce or Compline ring here,
no call to prayer but antiphon train horn
& the disturbed ducks.

Ann E. Michael, Praise

O manual, laboring handbook,
gladden the work of our hands.
We wait for peace,
but terror comes instead.
What factory fashioned the
slashing shrapnel?

Emanate
manual light, new elevation,
elicit handmade candles,
bread, bowls,
chairs,
decoys.
Carpenter, potter, baker,
emit manual glory.

Anne Higgins, The  “O Antiphons”

Near silence under the valley oaks, in California’s great valley. The only sound is the wind blowing up the delta, along the Sacramento River. It begins in the Gulf of Alaska, this wind, and spins in a vast circle that takes it far out into the northern Pacific Ocean and then back again, so that when it crosses the California coast it is actually traveling northeast. The wind then comes in through the Golden Gate, blows across the San Francisco Bay and up the wide, deep Sacramento River. As the wind reaches the park by my home it is toned down, a nice breeze, and the oak trees, naked for winter, wiggle and dance just a bit with the pine trees that are always green. Looking up, I see branches backed by the steel gray sky. Looking down I see a pine cone by my feet. Weather, from Alaska to me.

James Lee Jobe, ‘Near silence under the valley oaks’

The heap of rice glistened in the lazy slant of winter light,
her fingers flicked the stones, husked grains.

In the courtyard, the sparrows washed by the song
lapped against the wall marked with flecks of betel juice.

Uma Gowrishankar, The Terrace Concert

Darling, tonight the whole horizon
closed like a lid. The traffic sighs on
rainy tarmac, men flit like flies on

jets of wind, the river fractures,
and a streetlight manufactures
a wealth of frazzled broken textures.

So beautiful: the petrol station’s
amber flatness, the quotations
of lit shopfronts, the impatience

of running clouds. The winter races
into darkness, interlaces
bodies in its breathing spaces.

George Szirtes, Prayer for my Daughter

I sit in the quiet.
I leaf through
your cookbooks.

I remember
how you loved
the beauty shop’s bustle.

When night falls
I sing my way
through the door.

Rachel Barenblat, On the shortest day

I’ve been reading Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit, to give me, yes, hope in the dark. It was first published back in 2004, so this is a third edition, published by Haymarket Books in 2016, with an updated Foreword and Afterword to give new context to hopeful thinking that continues even now. Even now.

I picked it up at the ongoing library book sale, meaning I am supporting my library and its non-profit foundation, and started reading it December 1, the beginning of Advent. This cover is perfect, bright white like stars on a dark night. When I set it down, I set it down beside a Christmas card of white lights on a snowy tree in a dark night, with “Silent Night” printed beside the image, a card from my next-door neighbor. The book is part of my holiday decorating now. Along with ebony heads from Africa and a black mask from Mexico, and a silver bird.

What’s so wonderful, comforting, and inspiring about this book is its embrace of uncertainty and its recorded knowledge of how small, steady acts of quiet resistance or concerted protest moved people to continue to act and change things. Small acts led to big changes, and that is ongoing, and I am participating in this in my own small, steady, local ways.

Kathleen Kirk, Hope in the Dark

Sometimes I wish I were more of a “holiday person,” someone who takes delight in the rituals and traditions of the season and gets excited about decorations and gifts and parties and seasonal music. I don’t know if something broke in me long ago, or if I am just naturally like this, but holidays have always been fairly meaningless to me. I’ve never cooked or hosted a Thanksgiving dinner, I’ve never held a Christmas party, and I don’t bake anything. I don’t send out holiday cards to my volunteers at work, and I could barely muster the will to see that a single, shabby Christmas tree got put up in the lobby of the hospital this year. I hate the strained conversations about what you, me or anyone else is doing for the holidays, and then afterwards, the strained conversations about what you, me or anyone else did for the holidays. I don’t know why I have so much Christmas dysthymia. Christmas never did anything to me personally. It has just always evoked in me a vague  sense of melancholy and loneliness. This is all being magnified for me this year by the fact that this will be my first Christmas without my dad, and I won’t be able to give him a can of Almond Roca or a gift certificate to Cabela’s. He loved both of those things. […]

My biggest mistake was in thinking that I had more time. You never have more time. Even though I’m not a big fan of Christmas, it is a time of coming together with people who matter in your life. Make it count. Heal what you can, if you can. Appreciate them. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that you have forever. You don’t.

Kristen McHenry, Christmas Dysthymia

I need to go to the grocery store in town this morning and I am fearing it with deep and abiding stomach clutching dread Christmas shoppers tend to be pushy and aggressive I only need to get broccoli and avocados and fruit and cheese for my Christmas dinner which over the years has become mostly a day of grazing a quiche a pumpkin pie some guacamole and chips I figure one giant meal a year that I am expected to cook is enough for me now that my life is so much smaller and so much larger ( my son asked what’s for Christmas breakfast waffles? and I burned a hole into him with my blazing eyebulbs)

I want to run a hot bath but I hear the breathing of more than one adult child I don’t know who is here I might have to tippy toe into the kitchen to make coffee and get my oatmeal going before we can all be our most beautiful selves one day into winter and I’m already longing for summer I will always be a summer girl

Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report

On good days I am at my desk before the sun shows up.  I watch the increasing light on my back yard tree and bushes.  Here’s what I see:

Signals on stone, light
through gaps between branches as
sun clears the mountain,
friendly wave of a morning
walker not breaking his stride.

What else do I do to honor the solstice?  I close out my summer/fall writing folder and start one for winter/spring.

Ellen Roberts Young, A Tanka for the Solstice

So I’ve cracked open the collection tonight, stepping into the cold Scottish rain again of my poems, the hard gray stone and cups of tea. The images I draw together for the cover. Wool and sand, loch and Glasgow streets. Touching the words I’ve written again. It’s like going home.

I’m looking forward to seeing this chapbook, but there’s a sense of regret to finish it, to close the book on things I’ve been working on for almost two decades. Also to not be publishing the whole collection, though these are my favourite poems from it. And the poems I’m not publishing are more difficult to face just now, stepping back into the muddied waters of my old relationship which I’m happy not to ford just now.

I’m moving slowly back into the words, to find my way through them again. 

Gerry Stewart, Going Home

I also make sandwiches for our church’s soup and sandwich run for homeless people and people in need. This is a soup run organised by all the churches in Trowbridge who work together on a rota to provide hot soup and sandwiches. Even if you’re not religious, it’s worth checking out what churches are doing in your community where you live and offering support and/or donations if you can. We donate food for our local foodbank through our church, for example. St Nicholas of Tolentino in Bristol is particularly active in the community and does amazing work but is in need of more support.

So the point of this long letter is to say where I am in person and to tell you what’s helping me get through what has been a sad time. But I am a writer (and a poet to boot!) so I am extremely used to disappointments and I am absolutely not going to feel defeated or pessimistic about anything.

Josephine Corcoran, Where I am

As 2019 closes, I managed to submit new poems to two journals. I’ve crafted about 20 new poems this year, mainly while I was in Los Angeles and London. These poems are about my mother’s death, and having distance from Atlanta certainly helped with clarity and perspective. While those poems won’t be part of my LA/San Francisco-inspired collection, they will, hopefully, begin to appear in lit mags soon.

Karen Head and I have been reading submissions for the Mother Mary Comes to Me anthology due out from Madville Publishing late next year. Submissions are open through Jan. 1, so there’s still time to submit your pop culture, Virgin Mary-inspired poems for consideration.

I travelled widely in 2019, both for poetry readings from Midnight in a Perfect World and for pleasure. LA and London were magical — especially since I got to see so many friends in the process. It was a treat to read with Dustin Lance Black at Polari (thank you, Paul Burston!) and to spend nearly two weeks writing every night with my dear friend Agnes Meadows. Sometimes you have to make your own residency.

Collin Kelley, Looking back at 2019 and ahead to 2020

When I printed them all out this afternoon, I found close to 80 pieces written this year, across  5 different series–nothing to scoff at to be sure, and certainly more than I was tallying in my head. This also did not include the last batch of zodiac poems I can never keep track of, so probably approaching 100 more likely. Poems about changelings and body image, about serial killers and mass extinctions. With so much in flux this past year, and the niggling feeling I am doing so much, but only a little bit well, I am happy to see something solid and good to show for it, especially since my visual exploits have been more stagnant outside of cover designs.  I’ve never been much for numbers for the sake of numbers, but I’m aware that the higher number of things you write in a year, the better for the actual quality–like running laps or situps–even the less inspiring ones make you stronger.

Kristy Bowen, art and productivity in 2019

I’m sorry to admit that in 2019 I’ve spent £95 on individual poem competition entries and £84 on pamphlet competitions. This was all possible because of the ‘How to submit to poetry magazines’ booklet that I wrote and published end of last year – I told myself I’d use the profit from that on poetry fees and magazine subscriptions this year. But most of it’s gone now, and with competition winnings at zero pounds I just have to think of those entry fees as donations. […]

I’ve decided that in 2020 I won’t be entering any competitions. None where you pay an entry fee, anyway. I generally spend around £75 a year on magazine subscriptions, and I’ll carry on doing this as they are the lifeblood of the poetry world. You always have something in your hand to show for a subscription, and many magazines are real works of art. I’m going to send more poems to magazines. I also want to give more time to writing generally, without trying to whip up ‘competition poems’. Maybe I can pull together a full collection. Or just write more poems on the themes I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I’m leaving it open and not putting pressure on myself. But no comps for at least a year is my goal.

I know that some poets don’t enter comps at all, often because they find the idea of a ‘poetry competition’ completely at odds with the creativity of writing. I’m not sure that’s me. But I do think comps have an addictive quality (“I’ll just enter one more competition and this could be the Big One!”), and breaking the habit (for me at least) requires a complete break. Let’s see if I can stick to it.

Robin Houghton, My 2019 submissions: successes & fails | poetry blog

You can see this year I wrote in a variety of journals, each one a little different. I filled a journal about every two-and-a-half months, which is a lot of writing. I’m happy about that, satisfied with how much writing I did this year. And I’m excited to see what next year brings.

Courtney LeBlanc, Journaling

My happy news–honored above by a photo of Ursula ecstatic about catnip–is receiving a Katherine Bakeless Nason Scholarship to Breadloaf Environmental Writers Conference this June. This is also the season I gear up for book publicity, and I’m SO glad to have ONE set of dates in stone now, as I query bookstores and reading series and the like. I’m thinking I’ll roadtrip to Vermont and book a few dates at mid-points along the journey, since both the poetry collection and the novel will be out by then. I’m also applying for additional conferences, residencies, etc., which is a ton of work. I’m really grateful that of the dozen or more applications I’ve already put out there, one came through. In the spirit of making visible my shadow c.v.: I’ve also received a cartload of rejections and non-answers (if you can imagine those ghostly silences filling up a cart, anyway). That’s just the way it goes, but it’s good to have one nice shiny “yes” to light up these long dark nights.

Lesley Wheeler, Not with a whimper but a bang!

When drawing up a list of candidates for Rogue Strands’ annual list of the best U.K. poetry blogs, it soon became clear that there was no dodging the fact that 2019 was far from being a vintage year. Too many veterans, who might have faltered in the past but then returned to the fold, have finally succumbed and fallen by the wayside, while few newcomers have stepped up to the plate.

It’s worth pausing to indulge in a spot of speculation as to the reasons why. Drawing on personal experience, I have to admit that writing a blog can become a grind. That can lead you to pause, then the pause becomes a long hiatus, then a silence, and then it’s extremely tough to get back in the saddle.

And as for that feeling of the blog becoming a grind, one major issue is the feeling that you’re writing into a vacuum, especially if few comments are posted to the blog. […]

I love poetry blogging because it provides the writer and reader with a unique combination of immediacy and longevity that lies far beyond the reach of social media. For instance, if I were to take a top ten of popular posts from Rogue Strands last month, two or three would be over five years old. That’s down to the power of search engines, which continue to attract new readers to old posts, often making surprising, new connections.

In other words, I very much continue to see a strong future for poetry blogs, though they have to adapt and evolve to the changing world around them. I still waste several hours a week browsing them, and I recommend you do so too! Despite this year’s relative decline, they still offer a special blend of news, views and thought-provoking perspectives on contemporary verse.

Matthew Stewart, The Best U.K. Poetry Blogs of 2019

I’ve recently been watching the Netflix series Magic For Humans. Most of the show revolves around the magician Justin Willman stopping people in the street to perform tricks for them. They’re usually in-close tricks—coins, cards, etc rather than disappearing elephants (yet)—the audience, both in person and over television, is captivated and bewildered. And that’s where the connection to poetry comes in for me.

Willman’s magic, in part, relies on his ability to draw the audience into his world. He makes them feel welcome, safe. In short, though they may be skeptical, they trust him. His demeanor, his forthrightness, his easy smile, break through people’s built-in skeptic barrier. The audience opens up to the experience, whatever will happen. Yes, by default everyone knows it’s a trick, a series of gestures, mechanics and slight of hand to convince the viewer of the veracity of what they’re experiencing. It’s that trust that solidifies the experience, that makes it work for the viewer, even when they’re being manipulated.

For me, that’s a lot of what I look for in poetry, or what makes the poetry I like work for me.

Grant Clauser, Poetry (Magic) for Humans

We only have the days we have, and I want to spend as many of them filled with things that give me joy – poetry, spending time with friends, spending time in nature, and trying to appreciate the little things—a new song or book to love, the way the light reflects off a streetlight, or even a cat hiding in a box of presents—along the way. I laughed tonight watching Eddie Murphy on SNL and enjoyed Lizzo singing with so much joie de vivre. I sat by the fireplace and drank herbal tea and looked through pictures of the last year. We can live in fear of the unexpected tragedies and misfortunes that await us, but we can also expect unexpected beauty, humor, and happiness.  May your days have more light than darkness!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Solstice, Feeling a Little Under the Weather on the Darkest Day of the Year, Imagining 2020, and Manuscript Redux

In everything
we repeat

we repeat
everything.

That is the
poet’s duty,

to keep the wheel
in motion,

the mind moving
wind on water,

making one wave,
another.

Tom Montag, IN EVERYTHING