This week: a sequestered egg, phrenology’s adhesiveness, the rustle of blood, dancing chickens, and much more. Enjoy.

This morning the air brings the rustle of rain soon and the vague scent of vanilla biscuits.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookshelf. Indeed it is, and that person is me and the book that I have temporarily removed from its space on the shelf in Waterstones is Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. And the fact it is written by me, and it is there makes my heart dance a little happy dance.

In my ponderings this week I thought about blue moons, and I found out that maybe the blue moon at the end of May meant there have been forty-two blue moons since I was born. And whether there have or there haven’t this ‘fact’ along with the realisation that I hadn’t got a blue moon poem in amongst my moon poems inspired me to get writing. I donned my ‘Poetry in Business’ t-shirt and started to draft.

Sue Finch, FORTY-TWO BLUE MOONS

this heat, dear god. this room. a tranquillised diplomacy. refrain is bottlenecked inside the throat. i float, infused, transfigured; so pink and smooth: sequestered egg. i dream, such dreams! my cloudy raptures overrun. i must wake up. to wane of nations, whine of wealth, wax of sun; the clean and reachy flight of birds, white birds. those deadly vestal things are women in accomplished dresses, sweeping up and down. not i. an egg does not aspire to flight.

Fran Lock, LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE

All week I’ve had a book with a broken spine cracked open in my study. (Which could be how it came apart in the first place). It’s a well-loved book, as so many of mine are, and becoming more beloved all the time. This is Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski.

I’ve been doodling in the mornings, with and without words. What can I say, it’s the therapy I can afford and there are worse methods to get one’s s-h-i-t together. One of the phrases that comes up is one of my favourite lines from AZ:

“It’s not time we lack, but concentration.”

Shawna Lemay, …that summer was just about over

As a full-time writer, I sometimes work a 16-hour day, and still there are tasks not completed, and still there is no time to write poetry. I hardly ever have weekends off; I do most of my creative writing and editing on holiday, or late at night when I should be asleep. How do you let your words run wild if you’re earning less than the minimum wage, or if you have to get a first in your creative writing MA to justify the course fees and the time away from other priorities? How do you let go when you don’t understand the poem that everyone loves, or you have to write a poem-a-day, or what you most urgently want to say might lead to sweeping judgements in the poetry world, might even get you cancelled? When everyone is arguing, and you’ve been rejected again, and no-one will publish the book you’ve been working on for years, when you take your precious poem to a workshop and everyone finds something they want you to change, how then do you write freely and truly from your own heart?

And perhaps just as crucially, what can we do as a community, as readers, as friends and writers and peers, and teachers and mentors, competition judges, event organisers, publishers and editors, to support the wildness in each other? How can we shape the environment in which we create poetry, to encourage and sustain its wild heart?

Clare Shaw, Return to the Wild

Are you a poet with a chapbook or full-length collection that came out in 2025 or 2026, or is coming out in 2027? I created a spreadsheet to help poets with new books find each other for readings, events, collaborations, regional connections, and general book-launch camaraderie in this circus of book promo. Email me at kelli (at) agodon (dot) com and I’ll send you the link so you can add your book and info, to find other poets with books coming into the world around the same time. […]

Poetry Book Recommendation: The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvorocessi. I know, I won’t stop talking about this book. This is the first poem of the book—you can decide if you’d like more of this voice. I honestly can’t get enough of Gaby’s poems and rereading it again.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Terry Gross Wants to Interview Me! and Other Things AI Made Up

Two things. Firstly, the ‘Guide to Getting your Poetry Published’ is out in the world (literally: orders from Canada, Singapore, Sweden, France, India …) so that’s one big project finished. And thank you to Thomas Ovans for his review of the book on London Grip.

Secondly, I’m now setting myself a ‘poem a day’ challenge to get some work in the bag. OK, it hasn’t been every day exactly, but I’ve made a good start, and I’m back on it once I’ve written this post. Writing went out the window for a few days while our little choir the Lewes Singers were in Winchester singing the weekend services. Turned out the cathedral was the only cool place in town, in fact I got really cold a couple of times while it was over 30 degrees outside! I also met up with a friend for a visit to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. Although I’ve been there before, it’s still a lovely place to revisit, very atmospheric and quite moving to be reminded of Jane’s short and somewhat unlucky life. […]

A couple of weeks ago Peter Kenny and I launched a new episode of Planet Poetry, this time featuring poet and children’s author Mara Bergman. It’s already proving to be a popular episode. Our next interviewee will be Will Harris, in the last new episode of this season. But there will be at least one, maybe two archive interviews released over the summer. Scaling back the number of new shows this season while keeping the poddy going has suited both Peter and myself, in that we’ve both had the time and energy to work on other projects.

Robin Houghton, Quick round-up of poetry & other happenings

Last month, I revived our monthly poetry thread for subscribers, and I could not be more glad that I did.

What I witnessed this month was a reminder of the care, decency, and thoughtfulness at the heart of poetic practice. I watched strangers comment generously on one another’s poems, sharing how and why they were moved. I saw vulnerability and candor that wasn’t performed, just human.

I also read some really, really good poems I would not have encountered otherwise.

One of the pleasures of putting together this selection was the range of subjects, registers, and approaches. I found poems in strict forms, poems inventing their own forms, and poems unfolding in lively streams of consciousness. There were poems about grief and loss, of course, but also many rooted in appreciation and pleasure.

I’ve tried to reflect some of that range in my curation—and, as usual, I’ve tried to link the poems up by echoes in their motifs. My selection is idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive, but please know how much I enjoyed reading your work even if I didn’t include your poem. And please know there’s always next month.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

I wasn’t actually going to post this week, but

1. I have to say a huge thanks to Tim at Crooked Spire for a great evening last Sunday and the last event for the Fig Tree 2025 Anthology.

2. And I have to say a hugerer thank you to the wonderful Katie Griffiths for inviting me to read at the Riverhouse Barn (Michelle Penn and Tom Sastry coming up soon – go, go!!) on Thursday just gone. It was a wonderful evening of readings from Alwyn Marriage and the 4 open mic folks..And Katie’s own poem at the start (I think it was called Arrival) was glorious and very moving.

A huge thanks to Katie’s partner, Cris, for the lift to and from the station…and to everyone that came. Part of the evening was an interview ons stage. I’ll not lie, I was more nervous about this than any other part of the night, but I was out at ease and it was lovely to hear Katie say she enjoyed these blogs and my work. She’s certainly given me lots to think about in terms of using some of the gubbins I post here in poems. I gave myself something to think about by saying I should stop writing these and use the time on poems instead…We’ll see.

I look forward to Katie’s new collection, Mindset Mindrise due out this year, and commend The Attitudes (her previous collection to you now).

Finally, more gigs where you’re gifted a mug afterwards please.

Mat Riches, It meant allotment to me

Well, I was supposed to spend the last week on the San Juan Island at a writing residency. The first day was glorious – beautiful warm sunshine, seal heads bobbing in the water, and my first ever real-life encounter with baby foxes! The second day was cold and rainy, but I got a lot of reading and some writing done. The third day, sadly, I woke up with my jaw swollen from a tooth infection (root canal next week!) with fever and it was determined that I should probably get home so I could rest, get antibiotics and move up my root canal. […]

Here is the rising of the Blue Micromoon of May, which is slightly smaller AND a rare second full moon of the month. Apparently, all weird moons are signs of health doom for me, so I should really pay more attention to them (see many blog posts where weird supermoons coincide with unexpected trips to the hospital.) Should have paid attention to that horoscope!

Anyway, one thing I did get to do during the residency besides writing a new fox poem was look over my manuscript, and you know what? I had the strong feeling that, at this point, I could make it different, but I could not make it better. I definitely had the feeling it was time to send that manuscript out and start on a new project at last.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rough Week with Blue Minimoon, Baby Foxes, Tooth and Rib Drama, and Summer Approaches

It’s beginning to flood, my foot
on the brakes falling straight to the floorboard
as water rises, the car floating slowly
amidst a cache of litter, planks,
a garbage can, and a blue tricycle.
Out of control, I let the waffling
steering wheel go, lean back with a Hail Mary
on my lips and think about wading
to the nearest bar for a screw-it-all beverage.

Charlotte Hamrick, May Listopia 2026

Of course time has dimmed my memories, and no doubt shifted them as well. What I remember is a blogging community, people whom I met only online, who helped and encouraged me. 

Some of you are still here. I wasn’t, for a few years. I see the vacancies in the resurrected blog, the months of silence. No doubt I was silent elsewhere, too; silent on the blogs of my WWW friends. 

Now, I miss it. All of it. The community, the fresh excitement of meeting someone new, someone interesting, a new way of making language, new thinking, new art. New eyes. 

We built something. Now I discover that I was not the only one to fade. I learn that blogrolls are obsolete, that writers no longer exchange links and comments and follows that lead, eventually, to more of the same. 

I learn that nostalgia is a kind of grief. 

the buddha in the window well
wet with spring rain
remembers snow, its white shawl

Sharon Brogan, W.W.W. Nostalgia

I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary and thinking myself worthless; but I didn’t recognize that about myself. So why Homer’s story of a fatherless boy setting out to discover whether he actually has a heritage (and whether it is ever coming home to save him) would move me, was mysterious to me. But move me it did.

I did know some things. I was reading the classics for the first time, and they were legible! So there was a heritage, it was a real thing, and I was up to receiving it! That, at least, I understood at the time.

But another thing that happened to me, I did not realize. It happened sotto voce. I was reading poetry for the first time. It was my great good fortune that I was given the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: I was reading a master of English iambic pentameter. My ear was wholly untrained then. I was only vaguely aware that it was poetry, at first. I knew that that ragged right margin was supposed to signal something special, some elevation or sonority or affectation, but I didn’t really know what it was. So I just read it as though it were prose, galloping along, puzzling out the meaning. It was exceptionally clear language, very easy to grasp at first sight, but I was very young and very uneducated, and reading it at all was an athletic achievement. I was proud of it, and rightly so. So many foreign names, alien customs, weird locutions, puzzling repetitions! I marched through it, like Sherman’s troops through Georgia.

And something was happening besides the story. I was absorbing the fundamental rhythm of English poetry. I was learning it in probably the best, if not the most efficient way: just by reading it, line after line. When I read Shakespeare for the first time, later that year, I had a leg up: I already understood implicitly how this thing worked, how it steered, how you breathed when you read it. Poetry will eventually teach you how to read itself, if you give it time, and grant it authority.

Dale Favier, On First Looking into Fitzgerald’s Homer

In the ninth month of his forty-first year, readying the third edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sat down to compose what we, ahistorical in our lexicon, might consider his coming out. Titled “Calamus” after Acorus calamus — a tall wetland flowering plant native to his birthplace, Long Island, the sand-duned end of America, also known as sweet flag for its strong erect leaves and solid cylindrical spadix — this would always remain his most overtly erotic lyric sequence, the one in which he included his elegy for his New Orleans heartbreak. The sequence is often referred to as Whitman’s “homoerotic” epic — a definition narrowed not only to sexuality alone but to a sexuality that exists solely as an antipode of the heteronormative paradigm. Such a reading flattens the substance to the surface, for the “Calamus” poems are Whitman’s love poems—his only overt love poems. Among them is a short meta-poem vibrating with the vulnerability of writing these verses at all:

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

But while Whitman boldly celebrated his intimate sympathies in verse, he remained restive about them and sought to fathom himself through what he, along with his generation, thought to be science. Again and again, Whitman returned to phrenology’s amativeness and adhesiveness, charging his poetry of contrasts with this battery of words, locating his own coordinates in relation to them, making sense of the world, making sense of himself in relation to the world and of the world’s totality in relation to its multitudes. Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth. In the “Calamus” poems, he dares imagine in the public plane what felt so intolerable on the personal — not only the total acceptance of his nature, but its consecration of an entire species of love:

For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other! There shall from me be a new friendship —
It shall be called after my name.

How much more poetic it would be to call ourselves Whitmanic or Waltean rather than homosexual or bisexual or queer or any other term etymologically rooted not in the lush wetlands of nature but in the strangeness, the otherness of the counternatural, describing us not by what we are but by what we are not.

Maria Popova, How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love

Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). […]

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’  Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.

It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann). […]

Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.

Martyn Crucefix, Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker

Longing in Dream Logic is not confined to romantic or interpersonal scenarios; it also takes the form of grief, where desire is directed toward the impossible recovery of the dead. In several poems centred on the speaker’s grandparents, memory becomes both a consoling and destabilising force. Echo Wood is especially effective in this regard. The poem revisits shared habits and private rituals—guessing the wood of a banister, smoking roll-ups—not as anecdotal detail alone but as traces through which intimacy is preserved after loss. Since her grandfather’s death, the speaker explains that ‘she likes to haunt’ the places associated with him because ‘it feels as if a part of you is still there, a bit of your soul left behind.’ The language of haunting is crucial here. It registers grief as a condition in which the boundaries between presence and absence become porous, and in which the mourner herself assumes a spectral relation to the world. Bosman intensifies this instability through the refrain ‘Perhaps- perhaps’, a phrase that suspends the poem between disbelief and yearning. Logic gives way to wish, but the wish is structured by grief’s need to imagine continuation. In this sense, the collection’s dream logic is nowhere more affecting than in its treatment of bereavement, where emotional truth depends not on factual certainty but on the persistence of attachment.

These recurring concerns—unrealised possibility, anxiety, failed agency, and grief—give Dream Logic a notable conceptual coherence. Bosman’s references to Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, and Sylvia Plath help to situate that coherence within a wider poetic lineage, though the collection does not merely imitate its forebears. One might locate Bosman between Dickinson’s inward metaphysical attentiveness, Plath’s psychological intensity, and Brontë’s emotional extremity, yet her work remains distinct in tone and method. Where those predecessors often move toward crisis, revelation, or visionary confrontation, Bosman is more interested in quieter forms of disturbance: hesitation rather than rupture, lingering attachment rather than rebellion, emotional afterlife rather than dramatic catharsis. Her landscapes, accordingly, are less sites of sublime struggle than repositories of memory and projection. What emerges from the collection is an understated but persuasive poetics of frustration, in which the mind returns compulsively to what it has lost, feared, or failed to realise. As a debut, Dream Logic demonstrates not only technical control but a sustained interest in the forms through which interior life becomes thinkable and speakable.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Dream Logic’ by Satya Bosman

As with other Italian imports, such as olives and spaghetti, I sometimes feel have an endless appetite for sonnets. So another anthology is always welcome, and this week I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon’s Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets (Faber, 2025). It’s an enjoyable buffet of small plates; one discovery I was glad to make was “The Shepherd Boy” by John Clare, which, like many sonnets, seems to tell a story about its own playful ability to imagine riches in a confined space (the book’s title comes from Wordsworth: “‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”) […]

As with most poetic miscellanies, closer inspection reveals some scantiness in the table of contents. For a writer whose own inventively pararhymed sonnets have been so influential on contemporary poetry, Muldoon is surprisingly uninterested in the range of modern experiment with the possibilities of the fourteen-liner out there, and surprisingly keen on nineteenth-century poets with only a minor claim to significance in sonnet history. Robert Browning, for example, was not a notable sonnet writer — unlike his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — yet not only does he get in with a sort-of-sonnet comprising two seven-line stanzas, but also features in two other tributes: Swinburne’s “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” and Landor’s “To Robert Browning”. For this week’s post, then, I thought I’d pick seven sonnets passed over by Muldoon, which would be in my own imaginary anthology.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #43: A Swirling Chain

If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision, that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes.

Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you might say, and well you might — though some of you might recall the poet and critic Daniel Galef’s piece on Lee-Hamilton’s chilling “Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford,” which ran here a year ago last March. But largely, except to scholars of the Victorian era and those who remember him as the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity.

Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” His interest as a poet inclined to the historical dramatic monologue, as in the imagined address of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the mistress of her husband, Henry II, whom Eleanor loves, as Daniel Galef has written, “the way the viper loves the dove.” In these dramatic monologues, Lee-Hamilton manages to channel not only the Victorian monologue-master, Robert Browning, but also the sonnet mastery of that poet’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

A master of the sonnet in his own right, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the illusory sound of the sea in a shell.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sea-Shell Murmurs

The latest full-length poetry collection since her remarkable Griffin Prize-winning poetry title, Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s, Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), a book-length suite of deft, single-stanza prose poems. Her fourth published poetry collection, Dismantling is set in two untitled sections, the second of which is a suite of twenty-six numbered poems, each titled “cento.” “The shades above the city have already been drawn,” begins the first numbered “cento,” “the pockets of wind emptied. The room is quiet now, everything falling at the same rate of speed.” There’s a part of me still frustrated at how her work so quietly floats just under the radar, having only been introduced to her work at all through her third collection, and missing completely her first two—The Startled Heart (Oolichan Books, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (London ON: Brick Books, 2010)—although one might say what keeps her just under the radar is exactly the strength of her quietly powerful lyric. “All history is revisionist.” begins the poem “revisions,” “Dig down and there’s so and so with his version of events. A little further and you can hear the song of the last speckled cormorant and before that the ancestors of Przewalski’s horses no bigger than foxes. What’s the point of one more poem?” As part of her contribution to “short takes on the prose poem” over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in 2022, she wrote: “I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely.”

Composed across firm and precise lines, set with such a delicate touch, Joseph’s poems are masterfully written, perfectly held together, even through an ongoing conversation around how easily things fall apart. This is a collection of form and attention, carefully layered and precise. As the poem “the hour before dawn” begins: “How many silences penetrate other silences? The monk with his vows. A violin at rest in its black case. Two of Adelaide Crapsey’s three: the falling snow, the mouth of one just dead. Not the dying or the death itself but the wide-open O of the moment. The breath gone from the lungs yet still in the room.”

rob mclennan, Eve Joseph, Dismantling

Entire years of your life will blur together, or be forgotten. Eventually, some effort to rescue what is left becomes necessary, and some reckoning with its meaning becomes possible. The poems in The Discarded Life [by Adam Kirsch] are such an effort.

One of the poems’ pleasures is how well they evoke a time and place. We are in Southern California, in the early 1980’s. (I grew up there in the same decade.) The Muppets, Atari games, and Sesame Street all make appearances, against the almost-imperceptible gradations of climate that that place calls “seasons”:

The most of winter that we ever knew
Was a gray, cloudy tincture of the air[.]

For those who did not live through it, the technology of the time will seem insanely primitive, as far from us as the turn of the 20th century was to them. The absence of the internet is only the tip of the iceberg. Kirsch remembers the limited graphics of one video game, which were

All that the bulky monochrome display
Could generate from five-inch floppy disks
You had to keep inserting and withdrawing,
Like turning hand cranks on an early Ford.

While Americans worried about nuclear war, Southern Californians prepared for other disasters. I myself remember the regular drills, but not whether they were for earthquakes, wildfires, or a meltdown at the local nuclear power plant. Kirsch describes a fire coming to his summer camp:

…red smoke drifted close enough to make
Our eyes burn like the chaparral around us,

and I don’t think I’ve heard the word “chaparral” since I moved away.

Brad Skow, Book Review: The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
First, the positive – I loved the second half of this book, where Clark tied in Plath’s life to what she was writing at the time. It gave some insight into her writing process and what inspired specific poems, and analyzed the artistry of her work. I also was impressed with Plath’s ambition and work ethic – I feel like a champion when I wake up at 4:45 to get a bit of writing done in my morning routine, but Plath wrote from 4 – 8am, as a single mother with very young children. She puts me to shame!

The negative…I did the audiobook for this – it was 45 hours long. I like Sylvia Plath as much as the next person – perhaps more – but I did not care about what she ate at girl scout camp or what grades she made in elementary school. I would have preferred a 300 page condensed version of this, focusing more on her career, development as a poet, and her poetics. I thought too Clark could have gone a bit more into the mental health aspect – I think she is kind of trying to make the reader think that Plath’s depression was hereditary and inevitable – but more could have been explored there.

But my main complaint is Clark’s kid-glove handling of the monstrous Ted Hughes. I think Hughes, whether indirectly or not, murdered Plath. Actual quotes from Ted Hughes:
“I murdered her.”
”It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius”
(at her funeral) “It was either her or me.”
(also at her funeral) “You all hated her too, right?”

Not to mention that he wrote Plath to tell her it would be better for him if she committed suicide. And don’t get me started on how he mishandled her work after her death – destroying her novel-in-progress and current journals, rearranging and editing her manuscript to take out the parts that made him look bad, letting his sister who hated Sylvia write her biography, letting his mistress handle her work…

Yet, Clark tries to subtly manipulate the reader of this biography to think of him as a Byronic hero – comparing him to Heathcliff and Rochester, commenting on his stormy good looks and country ways, his powerful poetic “talent” and how much he suffered after Plath’s death. Oh please! I like a biography that sticks a bit more closely to the facts of what this guy actually did, rather than trying to paint it in a gothic romance light.

Plath was no Innocent – the first half of the book slogged along as she dated so and so and cheated with blah blah blah and got drunk here and etc etc etc – she was not much of a prim 1950s lady. But choosing Hughes as a husband set her on an unstoppable slide to self-destruction. I don’t think he remotely deserves the wrist-slap of being called a “Rochester.”

I think there is room for another Plath biography to be written – one that is a little less soft on Hughes, a bit more focused on Sylvia’s career as a poet, and 1/3rd the length of this one.

Renee Emerson, A Mushroom of Doom, a Marriage of Doom, and a Face of Doom

“Impossible Paradise” is a selected poems taking from Chen Yuhong’s collections “Half-Light” (2022), “Trance” (2016), “In Between” (2011), “Bewitched” (2007), “A River Flows Deep in Your Veins” (2002), “In Truth the Ocean” (1999) in English translation. She has been influenced by poets such as Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy whom she has translated in Chinese. However, this is the first time Chen’s own poems have been translated into English. The selections are gathered by collection in reverse order, with the most recent poems first. She relishes in the everyday and natural experiences. […]

In “Inkstone” written, ‘on seeing a Duan inkstone from the Qian Long period, Qing dynasty’, the stone is “ineloquent”,

“yet from it soundlessly
flow mountain waters, birds,
insects, flowers, fish, people”

[…]

Chen’s poetry is quietly compelling and concerned with connections between people and between people and the natural world. It’s an empathetic, measured plea for compassion and understanding. The poem’s rhythms feel prayer-like, pointing to a space for mindfulness and focus. This collection and English translations are long overdue.

Emma Lee, “Impossible Paradise” Chen Yuhong translated by George O’Connell and Diana Shi (Carcanet) – book review

Normally at the top of these posts, you’ll see details of the publications under review: title, author/editor, etc. However, for If/Then, I list Chris Turnbull as ‘instigator’ and I do so for good reason. The genesis behind this most unusual publication was a visual poem by Turnbull which she sent to Linda Russo asking her to write something in response to it and then send her poem on to another writer to repeat the process. The result is a kind of chain art text, or 21st-century renga for longer poems. The final list of contributors is: Chris Turnbull, Linda Russo, Sandra Guerreiro, Anna Reckin, Camilla Nelson, Matti Spence, Sarah Cave, Luke Thompson, Suzanna V. Evans, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Andre Bagoo, and Richard Georges.

Of course, the chain art experience is not that unusual, but what makes this one stand out is the physical structure of the object, which Turnbull describes as an ox-plough or boustrephedon, sheets of print bound in a complex folder card binding, not unlike accordion pleats, but reversible in multiple directions. Printed pages are bound into the folds using a loop of strong thread, one or two folded sheets per fold, and the first ‘return fold has a bonus of two square postcards with short extracts from a couple of the poems inset into slots in their backing card cover. The images at the link above are a perfect instance of a picture being worth a thousand words.

The poems set up conversations between them in a variety of ways. Some are straightforward links, as in the closing lines of Linda Russo’s ‘With Our Many Small Faces Turned To The Sun’:

burying the words, finally

o how long it takes

under onto

reconfigured to provide the opening for Sandra Guerreiro’s untitled response:

“o how long it takes

       under onto” entering the field

The next fold begins with Camilla Nelson’s ‘from Run’, a celebration of birds, her:

black bird                         black bird
ch-                      ch-                             ch-
meutgghhhh

looking back to Anna Reckin’s preceding ‘Now that’:

blackbirds shyer this year, but still there, darting
in and out of the ivy on the wall

Later in Nelson’s poem we read:

ch-                         ch-
click                     of cows                     moving
up                         chalk                         downs
and me in the dip
gathering sun

Then Matti Spence’s ‘Walk And’ opens:

Hear the chalk-
downs drone not white
but a proposal of something
near to that deflection

This is followed by Sarah Cave’s ‘Walk & Pray, Pilgrim’:

hear      the       chalk       rabbits
beneath       the          mountain
&    thru    the mountain    &    pray
&     ray     to     the     mountain

(Rabbits also appear in Spence’s poem.) The fold ends with Luke Thompson’s ‘Chalk Rabbit’.

The fifth fold then opens with Suzanna V. Evans’ ‘and sings’:

Sea-sieved melodies, whale melodies, fall like particles of chalk, marine
snow, down to the black spines of sea urchins, to the ear-shaped shells of
abalones.

There are other threads in these ecologically aware poems that I could have picked up on, but the chalk Downs of South East England have personal resonances for me, so I went with that one.

Billy Mills, Three Pamphlets and a Boustrephedon

Last week I was in London for a couple of days to do various things, but mostly to spend some time in the British Library. One of the items on my to-do list for the BL was to photograph in their entirety the two manuscript notebooks containing most of Payne Fisher’s earliest recorded poetry. I’ve known about these manuscripts for a decade or so, and I already had fairly detailed notes on them, but no full images and therefore no complete transcriptions.

Fisher, a fascinating figure about whom I hope to write a book in due course, went on to be Cromwell’s poet. I’ve written about him several times, both in scholarly articles and chapters and also here on substack:

Fisher came to the attention of Cromwell as a Latin poet, and it is as a Latin poet that he had great success in the 1650s (and diminishing success thereafter). His breakthrough hit was a remarkable Latin poem in the Claudianic style about the siege of York and the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. It is an excellent and unforgettable poem in large part because it is both genuinely a celebration of Cromwell’s unstoppable military might and a lament for the suffering of the defeated royalists and the besieged inhabitants of the city. (In this sense, though not really in many others, it is a bit like Lucan’s Civil War.)

Fisher had in fact fought at the battle of Marston Moor himself, on the losing royalist side, and the earliest versions of the poem — which exist in both Latin and English — are straightforwardly royalist. Here is a fragment of the early English version of the poem that would eventually become Marston Moor, describing the city of York:

That Matron-Citty prostituted now
To the leud embracement of hir Ravishers
Hung downe hir aged Head disfigur’d round
With Batteries both of Foes, and hir owne Feares.

When we think of ‘war poetry’ today we tend not to think of poetry celebrating the victors, but rather the verse that laments the suffering of the participants — as in the trench warfare of the First World War — or, as here, of innocent civilians. Conversely, if we think of the poetry associated with the English civil war, we think probably of the ‘cavalier’ poets, celebrating honour and chivalry mostly in a rather abstract if beautiful kind of way, as in Lovelace’s poem, ‘To Lucasta, on going to the wars’:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.

Fisher and Lovelace were almost exact contemporaries, and in fact Fisher met and became friends with Lovelace during the 1640s, when they were both serving in the army. But Fisher’s version of war poetry is entirely unlike Lovelace’s — and indeed it’s not much like anything else I can think of from this decade. The style is perhaps best described as ‘documentary’, and indeed several of the poems do seem to have their origins, at least, in material written during a campaign.

Victoria Moul, Realistic war poetry from the 1640s

[Margaret] Tait was Orcadian; though once she qualified as a doctor she travelled widely. In her mid-thirties, after serving through WWII in the Royal Army Medical Corps, she turned to filmmaking. “I think I gradually came over to feeling that it was necessary to do something more than just simply bringing people back to bodily health”. Between 1951 and 1998 she made over 30 films of various lengths, all of which have this sustained focus and attention to detail which I imagine she gave to her patients. Tait also published her own poems in three slight, beautiful hardbacks, the shape and size of a Ladybird book, in 1959 and 1960. Her logo is a cardiograph line, the double beat of the heart.

In her films and her poetry Tait was, says Ali Smith, instinctively Modernist (Smith links her to the Beats and Whitman, and to Hugh MacDiarmid, a friend and the subject of one of her films – check it out on YouTube). Interviewed on Channel 4, Tait quoted Lorca: “an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest … [The artist] enters what may well be called the universe of each thing … [he/she] takes all materials in the same scale”. The camera was an impartial witness, she believed: it showed all things in great and equal detail, it could present context and perspective as well as great intimacy. Using collage and disjunction, following associations of ideas and sounds and her own train of thought to move from one shot to the next, without hierarchy. This allowed her to create what she felt was “a pure form of poetry”. “In poetry something else happens … Presence, let’s say, soul or spirit, an empathy with whatever it is that’s dwelt upon, feeling for it – to the point of identification”. In The Big Sheep, for example, this dwelling is in accumulated, over-familiar layers. Images ‘rhyme’, and are nested together through repetition and cross-linking; she revisits and revises places, shapes, textures and faces constantly, in subtly interconnected moments. But these are not private exercises. She is constantly aware of us, the audience, peering over her shoulder. Look at this, she says. And this. Now look here.

“Poems, like all human fabrications from straw huts to theology, are made to our measure and by our measure, and are not above or beyond us,” said Charles Simic in ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’. “Language and paint are not metaphysical and forms are not spectral. Patterning is a universal human act”. It is in this that I understand her move from “simply bringing people back to bodily health” to looking more deeply at how we live, at how we knit our experience together. In her film poetry, she looks to present simply this, “in a way that only the motion picture camera has a language for”. Documentary filmmaking was, in her view, ultimately unsuccessful because of the way it isolates its subject from its surroundings in order to study it. “I think that film is essentially a poetic medium,” Tait said, “and although it can be put to all sorts of other – creditable and discreditable – uses, these are secondary”. Her film-poems have been described as anti-narrative. They end by simply ending.

Lesley Harrison, Sometimes it’s the Wordiness of Words That Gets in the Way

“Fardistantly past due, we throughganged the outpumpers, the alden gatherers saved from longforetimes.“

A couple of years ago, I made a video that used a very early version of MidJourney AI to create some background elements that I did not have my own material for. At the time, MidJourney seemed like an exciting new way to create original material. However, it is now clear that these AI engines illegally use original work and consume massive amounts of power. Therefore, I have completely remade the video using all my own footage. Even so, the images look somewhat unworldly, which is part of my intention. The text is in a kind of future-archaic dialect that I invented.

Ian Gibbins, The Bilgestruck reimagined

i find myself craving primordial. to chart
a path across species. wake up in the twilight dawn
of a thick-shelled egg. the sun, like a father’s eye
burning through the walls of any house.
we wake with hollow bones.

Robin Gow, 5/31

Whenever I watch sensei doing an arrangement, I am struck by her care, not only toward the flowers but her attention to the active empty space that is part of the floral field. When I took lessons in Dutch Still Life flower arrangement, I was surprised by the way the floral field is completely filled, in much the same way that an oil canvas is primed and fully painted. You never glimpse the canvas underneath an oil painting in the same way you see and appreciate the white spaces in a Chinese landscape painting.

Because, of course, the empty space is doing crucial work. In Japanese this is called 余白の美 the “beauty of the white space.” As an expression of “ma,” it is an emptiness that is active and generative. […]

I also often find myself now thinking about plants as sentient beings— each, as some Buddhist philosophers might say, on their own path toward salvation and enlightenment. Michael Pollan, in his new book on consciousness, begins his journey with a long meditation on exactly this possibility when he describes the poppies in his Berkeley garden appearing to return his gaze one afternoon, and rather than dismissing the experience, he followed his feeling into the emerging science of plant intelligence.

Researchers have shown that plants are able to read their environment and solve problems. They appear able to learn, form memories, send signals to other plants, change their behavior in response, and even cooperate with plants they recognize as kin. Pollan stops short of claiming they have reflective selfhood, but he takes their inner life seriously. And so do I.

Leanne Ogasawara, Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚

you gave me your hand lens
by a mossy tree
and I looked up close
my eyelashes crushed by its metal rim
my nose touching tree bark
smelling its tiny life
made large.

On bark cliff faces,
dripping dark where the sun can’t enter,
unfathomable life hides
itself from view

Anna Chilvers, Confessions of a Moss Widow

It delights me that Scientific American includes science-related poetry — and when my monthly issue arrives I turn first to the monthly poem.  Here are the opening stanzas of  ‘The Algorithm’ by California poet Barbara Quick from the May, 2022  issue.

Optimization under uncertainty
is a field of study in which my grown son
will earn his Ph.D. The math, in his case,
concerns the production of wind energy.

He reads his papers aloud on the phone to me
as a way to optimize their clarity,
so that even a layperson, such as myself,
can understand what he’s saying,
in between each beautifully made
equation and graph.

Quick’s complete poem is available at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Science in Meter and Verse (from Sci. Amer.)

I’ve been thinking about the wind, its partnership with seeds, with pollen, its agency with water, how it casts it beyond its own reach, and sand, rising as clouds from the desert to whirl and settle to crevices in odd places, and weather, wind its worldwide vehicle. And wind’s havoc, flattened forests, but from which new growth births, and us, our dust bowls, how wind carries even our own species with it, tangling itself in our hair, lining our faces with its force. But it occurs to me also that we are as wind ourselves, the same force of movement, destruction, new plantings. We also drive ourselves mad with our constant blowing. What can we learn from being like the wind? Could we be more humble? But the very trees themselves bow down. But though we can “harness the wind” for our energy generators, we have not yet learned to stop it. There’s that. This week the wind blew light rain pattering against the window. And here’s a charming poem by German poet Jan Wagner that translator David Kaplinger has rendered “portrait of the rain.” I guess I’ll have to start studying German, so taken have I become with some of the German poetry I’ve been dipping into.

Marilyn McCabe, particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world

I’ve been thinking about throwaway remarks in poetry recently. Those little bits of speech which don’t really seem necessary but nevertheless lodge themselves into the felt memory of reading the poem with great force.

One such moment is the detail that Jaan Kaplinski supplies the reader in these lines, from his poem ‘This morning was cold’:

I came from a meeting – a discussion of
the teaching of classical languages –
and I was sitting by the river with a friend
who wanted to tell me his troubles.

The lines could make perfect sense without the reader learning about the ‘discussion of/ the teaching of classical languages’. There are many Jaan Kaplinski poems which include similar declarative statements without any self-interruption. ‘I came from a meeting/ and I was sitting by the river with a friend/ who wanted to tell me his troubles’ is fine. But it’s the bit in the middle I love, the bit you could argue that we don’t need. When I first encountered the poem some twenty years ago, I thought its inclusion was slightly knowing, a little on the nose, self-regarding, even. All this time later, I return to the poem to check that the poem’s speaker has remembered to include this unnecessary yet vital detail that so perfectly captures the urgent liminality of needing to switch between two very different worlds, from theoretical pedagogy to listening to the ‘troubles’ of a friend on a ‘freezing’ riverbank. The poem makes another, similar turn into the world of domesticity, towards its end: ‘I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.’ This is also worth meditating on. But he had me at ‘meeting’.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: A discussion of the teaching of classical languages, by Jaan Kaplinski

I was editing some poems today and thought about one of the strategies that I use a lot when revising any writing. Cutting out the parts that are less interesting. Trimming filler. Pruning around important or more arresting images so that they stand out and aren’t cluttered up by other material. What would the musical equivalent of that be? I wondered.

I modifed the backing tracks from my piece Nothing Makes Poetry Happen (which I posted yesterday) and improvised an alto saxophone solo on top. I was trying to sound like Julius Hemphill on Dogon A.D. an album that I adore.

I took the poetry editing approach and cut out lots of filler. I noted that played too much, trying to capture the feeling of excitement and energy in the tracks. I didn’t leave much space. (Oh you ADHD!) So I edited out unnecessary parts. I found places where the “images” (musical ideas) would be better without the clutter around them. I didn’t reorder the solo, though sometimes I have done that. Except for adding on a single note at the end which came from the beginning in order to end with something more summative and cadential and a formal callback to the beginning.

With writing as with music, it’s easy to think that the flow of a draft is integral and inseparable to the essence of the work. But it isn’t. Or, in fact, one can craft a flow that better expresses or highlights the core material. And the modified flow often is a better manifestation or expression of the flow one was aiming for in the first place.

Gary Barwin, Editing music as if it were writing

Frances Brawne (later Frances Brawne Lindon) is cast as the girl next door in the Keats story. She literally became the girl next door when her family moved into rooms on one side of Wentworth Place (now Keats House) in Hampstead, London in April 1819. Fanny and Johnny had met the previous November in 1818 and Keats appears to have been initially quite critical and dismissive of her. She, however, showed him enormous kindness, gave him emotional support when his brother died of tuberculosis that December and it’s easy to reduce her simply to being the poet’s muse as the two became close during Keats’ most productive period in 1819. Fanny was “a voluminous reader” and “books were her favourite topic of conversation.” She was also, “an eager politician” and is described as being “fiery in discussion.” She was vey much Keats’ equal. On 18 October 1819, Keats proposed to Fanny Brawne and she accepted. Keats had given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry and a marriage would not be consented to by Fanny’s family. They kept their engagement a secret.

When Keats began coughing blood in February 1820 Fanny was still living next door. His infectious illness meant that meeting in person became problematic and instead they exchanged frequent notes and letters despite being only a few yards apart. Fanny would pass his window returning from her walks. All of this provided condition for an intense yet frustrating affair. We will never know if their relationship was consummated physically. The romance intensified when Keats left for Italy, on health grounds, in September. He never returned. He died in Rome in February 1821 with Fanny still believing he would be back by spring. She was thrown into a profound period of mourning that lasted six years when she learned of his death, cutting her hair short, wearing black and the ring Keats had given her before he left.

When she eventually married, twelve years after his death, she retained all of the poet’s letters and keepsakes and her archive provides much colour to the Keats story. It offers little further insight into her own. The letters she wrote to Keats are lost. The last ones she sent to Rome were never even opened and buried with the poet in accordance to his wishes. When the Keats letters were sold into a collection and published after Fanny’s death there was controversy. Fanny didn’t quite fit the Victorian narrative that had been established, she was too ordinary, even considered by critics as unworthy to be cast alongside such a distinguished figure as the poet. […]

Frances Brawne Lindon is number ninety two on the top one hundred list at Brompton Cemetery and I go in search of her. I find her in the brambles and the ivy behind a metal, workman’s fence. She retains a degree of separation, cut off, removed as she was with her poet. Perhaps they have some works in mind here. Perhaps they’ll clear a path to Fanny, give her a little more status, restore her to a greater and more deserving glory. She doesn’t need her lines cut back anymore. They’ve been lost already. I stand respectfully, eagerly behind the metal barrier as if I’m waiting for a rockstar or a member of the royal family, which, of course, I am.

Jan Noble, Nº66 Finding Fanny

In Prayer (I), George Herbert creates a sonnet out of a series of metaphors for prayer. No explanation is given. The images emerge, disorientingly.

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

I especially like the line The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, as I think it expresses a common feeling of reading poetry—a half-way feeling between experience and understanding. The soul can only be paraphrased. There are no words that fully express the human soul. The heart in prayer is on a journey to God, it cannot be said to have arrived. Poetry is the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage. It is a common cliché that life is a journey—but it is a cliché because it is true, it has been said for as long as there has been commentary on human life.

As Thoreau said, being a traveller is the history of every one of us.

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us.

Poetry is about that traveling. Whether in literal journeys in which we learn to see strangely, as in Bishop, or about spiritual journeys, as in Herbert, travels in our heads and souls, poetry captures the sense of being unsure about the world, but knowing that something is understood. Before we can begin to talk about the specific understanding, we have to be able to enter the dream, and to begin to see the poem as it wishes to be seen. We must read like travelers, coming into a new place, looking for what they can see.

Henry Oliver, Something understood. How to read poetry.

This time, wedding travel took us to the high mountain country near Boone, NC–spectacular scenery, very rainy weather, fog rolling in, winding dirt/mud roads.

I am sitting in a tiny cabin in near dark, and I’m always surprised at how hard it is for me to work on the computer lit only by the light of the computer.  I’m fine reading online stuff with no other light, but writing a blog post feels hard.  Or maybe it’s the tiredness that makes it hard, the existing outside of my normal routines. 

Let me record a line that came to me this morning, which may find its way into a poem at some point:  “I am the bartender without a corkscrew.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Second Spring Wedding

When I began writing this, I saw the bats flitting about in the air but now it’s so dark that I can’t see them. When I look up from my word document (white words on dark “paper”), I see pale, parallel symbols across the sky.

It looks like a trace fossil.

Sarah Lada, Trace

This past weekend I was most fortunate to have been interviewed, via Zoom, by four Chilean university students of English and creative writing. They are taking Hernán Pereira’s course at Arturo Prat University, Iquique, Chile. In 2014, Hernán collaborated with Dr. Karen Jogan of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania on a poetry and place project that resulted in the book So Far..So Close/Portada y Contraportada: Contemporary Writers of Tarapacá & Pennsylvania. Pamela Daza took the photos for the book; I posted a bit about it here. Thanks to social media, which I don’t often thank, I’ve kept in touch with Hernán, who is full of interesting ideas for teaching young people to enjoy poetry and to learn English.

Now, I’m retired, and I was pleased to hear from Hernán that he’s assigned his students books by English-speaking poets to read and research, and then interview, said writers (with whom he is acquainted). Would I be willing to be interviewed? Why, of course!

The result of most interviews is that I learn a great deal about my work by having other people ask me questions about it. I usually learn a bit about the interviewer(s) in the process. In this case, I was happy that the students had come up with some good and unexpected questions that really made me pause and ponder. I was also impressed with what excellent English skills they have, and how polite and earnest they are. One of the questions was what makes me motivated to write a poem. Not inspired (the usual question), but motivated–a slightly different verb and a telling one.

I answered along the lines of how seeing an image, experiencing an event, learning new information (ie observation), or reading a text with which I might disagree or wonder about leads me to a line of questioning/reflection, and that whole process motivates me to write. I have to say my answer was, in real time, rather vague, and that I was speaking with people for whom English is a second language. But a student named Maximillio said, “So, would you say then your motivation is responsive?” Wow, yes! Which clarifies a lot for me. I’m not a forward-momentum sort of writer who bulls into powerful expression, much as I admire such writers and sometimes wish I were more like them. I’m the ponderer, the one who imagines being an other and tries to figure out that perspective, the somewhat distant observer who nevertheless wants to bring the feelings and experiences home to whoever my reader may be.

That was a splendid experience for me. So nice to speak with people under 25 years old again. I miss that. Meanwhile, reading a 1998 edition of Lorca’s Poet in New York (in translation of course, though I am getting slightly better at reading the Spanish). And drafting new work in my head while watering the garden.

Ann E. Michael, Interviews

How to explain to someone else
when your basic condition is knowing you barely
have words for things in this universe? I try to strip
the shelves of my excesses. Why did I need more
than one pen, one bottle of ink?

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

People who believe in community lean into community. We are doing everything we can to lean in. I have been working seven days a week since becoming Publisher and CEO in January 2024. I haven’t been paid for three months. I’m going to keep working, but if it were up to me, I admit, I can’t carry this press into the future alone.

Sugar is poured unevenly in the publishing business. Presses without endowments and large operating reserves often go overlooked. I wonder where the sugar was poured for the Literary Arts Fund. I wonder if there was ever actually a chance for Red Hen Press, or if we only imagined there was.

Meanwhile, Tobi has powers and is hatching a plan, one that includes rebuilding our board. Our staff continues to march ahead. Our work goes on, but we need more support to be sustainable, to survive into the next year. Tobi is our community whisperer, the one who speaks in the clearing in the woods, and they help us believe that if the community wants Red Hen, it will happen.

The night we found out about the Literary Arts Fund, we had tickets to a play called Exotica, where performers dressed up like animals and performed aerial stunts. There were two dancing chickens (you really can’t make this up) who got all of us on our feet to conga through the adjoining restaurant. Maybe it was our new board member and Tobi, getting everyone up and dancing, to remind us that we are all in it together.

At some point, they had a “slut contest” to see who would dance on the bar and strip. The twenty-somethings lined up, but nobody took off more than a jacket. I just couldn’t let this pass. I got up and danced the slut walk, off came the jacket and the top. My bracelets and rings flew in all directions. Sometimes, you have to do it yourself.

Tobi is creating our future, and the future is a conga line with a chicken in the lead. I like that future. I believe in it.

We Kates don’t give up easily. I won the slut contest and walked off with the champagne. Red Hen Press will not go quietly into this good night. Tomorrow is another day.

Kate Gale, Not With a Bang: Finding Our Future in Community

My anguish can be washed in warm water, with a mild soap, when it’s soaked then rolled in an old towel lay it out in the dappled sun, beside lilies of the valley where it can hear the tinkling of its bells and exchange its sour breath for their small beads of sweet aroma smelling of fields and fields of the smallest hope.

Jill Pearlman, Anguish is like Laundry

Now here they come again, the immaculate men.
Here they come, smelling of incense and failure.
They walk past the pot-holes, weeds, broken glass,
into my dreams, while I sit in moonlight with my
book. What’s this pressed between the pages?

Bob Mee, THE JOY OF STREAM-WRITING IS NOT KNOWING WHAT’S HAPPENING, WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN

It’s summer, for sure this time. Gave my author site a cleanup for broken links and to be better organized. Read a bit. Sent a couple more submissions. Took a walk. Transcribed some.

Birdsong of various chirps, and another, somewhere among cat’s meow, falsetto donkey and door hinge. Took a horsefly, a wasp, a few deerfly out to see the sky. Snacked, drank, read some more. Received a few more submissions for my one-line chapbook call. Wrote some more.

Pearl Pirie, Getting Resettled

This week: the clay-dusted air of the workshop, the rambling treasure hunt for a poem, writing nothing but sonnets for a year, the poets on the farthest end of the table, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s a bright morning in Yorkshire. The trees are in full blossom and there’s a fierce little breeze which scatters their petals like confetti. Today is Earth Day. It’s also the twenty second day of National Poetry Writing Month; a writing phenomenon which began in the States and now extends around the globe. According to the NaPoWriMo model, a prompt is issued and poets are invited to write (and share) a poem in response .

Yes, that’s right – a poem a day, every day, for 31 days. I can’t remember when Kim and I began following this crazy instruction – seven years ago? Nine? Ten? My blurriness is partially the result of late-night-writing-sessions and sleep deprivation by the end of the month; partly the sense of almost-total immersion in the world of the poem.

For all of those years I’ve been doing NaPoWriMo, April has functioned as a sort of creative reservoir – a time when I know I will produce a stack of drafts which will go some way to sustaining me through the rest of the year. It’s not just about quantity either: the daily discipline; the heady exposure of knowing that I’ll publish my early drafts on social media no matter how imperfect or incomplete; the delicious combination of mutual support, appreciation and competition I always feel when I’m writing with Kim – there’s no doubt that I produce some of my best writing in April.

Clare Shaw, Running with the Pack: NaPoWriMo

Early in my social media times I began adding a link to a piece of music to each of my poems. I’ve been doing this for maybe … eight years?? My playlist of these songs exceeds 30 hours now. Why am I doing this? The thing is …

A poem takes us into a waiting room.

We open a magazine on a random page and read. The person next to us changes their position on a plastic chair. The wall clock ticks on. The air is stale, infused with the deodorant of the man who has left before we entered. These lines. We reread them, not having quite got it. A fly that has landed on the table is shuffling its legs.

Then we look up.

Outside, mute, the branches of a tree. Traffic. A person hurries down the street and a piece of paper falls from their trouser pocket, but they walk on, not noticing.

We look back at what we’ve just read and it has changed.

Kati Mohr, Linking and shifting between poetry and music

Like many people, I am intrigued by bird calls. Where we live in the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges, just out of Adelaide, South Australia, we are graced by many types of native birds. However in the forty years we have lived here, the number of species found in the area had dropped dramatically. This decline has been well documented and is due to a combination of habitat destruction, mostly for human housing, and climate change. Nevertheless, most of the time, the air is filled with the calls of birds, some regular residents, others infrequent passers-by. But what are they saying to each other? what are they trying to tell us?

Here are a couple of videos I have made, in which I give voices to the birds in different ways. Both these videos have had many screenings in Australia and around the world.

Ian Gibbins, The voices of birds…

With Birds and Duduk

In this piece, I’m playing a duduk, an Armenian double reed instrument made out of apricot wood. I’m also using live digital processing and recordings of birds.

Gary Barwin, This instrument is made of trees and birds

And there is this beautiful thing Ted Berrigan said, as quoted by Ron Padgett:

The gods demand of the system that a certain number of people sing, like the birds do, and it somehow was given to me to be one of those people—and I mean I did have a choice—I could have decided not to, to be a truck driver or a filmmaker. But I like doing that, and I feel that probably the major reason I write is because the gods might destroy… the whole thing could fall apart. I lift my voice in song. I lift my voice in song.

Valium numbs every part of the song that seeks to keep things whole in me.

The administrative precision of the hospital emphasizes the humiliation of being embodied. I will always dread it. But I won’t spend this week consumed by the worry of waiting for results.

I lift my voice in song instead, to quote Ted.

Alina Stefanescu, What started with wax.

I say to the tree growing inside me

It is one thing to taste your bitter
leaves but now I hear your barbets
all day, their song is crawling out
of my ear, do you know they are
planning to escape?

I think they saw a cloudless sky
dancing in my dreams.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -4

During bouts of outdoor work, when I’m mindlessly weeding, pruning, or doing soil prep, I’ve been mulling over whether–and if so, how–I’ve changed as to writing poetry (see closing paragraph of last week’s post). There are vague recollections of getting really on a roll and drafting new work into late hours of the night when I was 20 or 21 years old. But how I went about it, what approach I took to writing back then? I barely recall. It’d require research into my old journals to figure that out; there, I dare not go! And what happened to all the poems I typed up on my heavy, electric typewriter (an early 1970s Adler, if I recall aright)? They’ve mostly vanished, though a few reside in my attic in several boxes of old literary magazines which chose to publish my efforts. […]

I’ve just finished reading poems by the 16th c. Korean poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a brilliant person who started writing before age 8 and died at 27. A young person all her life, by our standards, and a prodigy. A frequent theme of hers is yearning for a husband or lover who is far away, a trope as common in Asian poetry as in European poetry. The lover has gone to war, or been exiled, or is in another region on work for the king/emperor/church, or is at sea. Nansŏrhŏn frequently wrote in the style of the Chinese poets who penned this sort of yearning poem; in fact, her husband was often distant, trying to work his way into a higher-status position, while she was left at his home with her in-laws. Her desire may not even have been so much sexual longing as just plain loneliness. Her work, even when it is not more romantic in subject, is suffused with an overall sorrowful yearning.

I recall having that feeling when I was in my teens and early twenties. Often, I wasn’t even sure what it was I yearned for or desired specifically. I just felt the sense that something was missing in my life, and I suspect that many of my earliest poems aimed to describe vague heartbreak about a kind of emptiness. (I assure you, my work was terrible–no comparison to Nansŏrhŏn can be made here.) However, when I read her poems, that’s what resonates with me. […]

[W]hile I recognize and appreciate the sentiment that accompanies yearning, my work has not been animated or inspired by that particular kind of longing for awhile now. It’s not that I lack desires, but the tenor of the feeling is different. Romantic love or an unrealized self? Not so much. The longing is for new places, further questions, better solutions, comfortable nearness, safe space, peace. I find much to learn every day, much to love, to admire. In spite of everything.

Ann E. Michael, Learning & yearning

Kelli Russell Agodon came out to be our featured reader at the J. Bookwalter Poetry Series (just rebooted!) on Thursday night and she did a great job, as did the open mic-ers, and a wonderful audience. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with poets here in Woodinville, and the weather obliged, not being too cold or too hot, and the evening ending in golden light as the last reader read.

We also got to introduce Catherine Broadwall’s upcoming book, Afterlife, which will debut on May 5, and she’ll be our featured reader on June 18. I feel very lucky to have so many talented friends and writers around for inspiration.

Kelli read from her upcoming book with Copper Canyon, Accidental Devotions, which if you haven’t thought about preordering, think about it! It’s got Alexa solving existential crises, mermaid dreams, Emily Dickinson’s phone messages, and a whimsical take on a world in chaos. Kelli and I have been friends since before our first books were taken, so we were reminiscing a bit, how we’ve changed as people and writers, how we haven’t changed. I think both of us have become better writers, and part of that is a function of having supportive writer friends, and part of it is not giving up, and another part is becoming more comfortable with who we are as people, which somehow translates into poetry.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Kelli’s Reading in Woodinville, Goldfinches Returns with Cherry and Crabapple, Birthdays Approaching and the State of Publishing (And Fear of Failure)

“In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago” is a poem that came together over many years. In 2005 I first jotted down notes about the canyon, the view from Airport Mesa, and the Milky Way while on my honeymoon in Sedona, Arizona. Over the next twenty years or so, I returned to that material now and then, but never had the poem in my grasp, just images. After my divorce, I went back to those old, failed drafts to see what I could find. That excavation led me to a poem that is, in its own way, about excavation, and about seeing things later through a different lens.

What helped me find and shape the poem was seeing an opportunity to play with repetition and variation. Like jazz musicians, we writers can improvise and riff! I’ve noted some of that riffing in the handwritten annotation below.

As I note here, I saw the opening—“Our honeymoon was a strand of scenic overlooks”—as an opportunity to play with variations on that sentence. Mid poem it becomes “Our honeymoon was a stranded scene I overlooked,” and in the end it becomes “Our honeymoon was a strand, a strangeness, a look ahead.” Riffing on the words in those sentences inspired me to play with other words and to find possible variations. Ultimately I built the form of the poem around those variations and revisions/distortions, with the end words in lines 1-3 (stand, wrote, scenic) corresponding to the end words in lines 4-6 (strange, penned, scene), and so on.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago”

In the summer of 2023, the poet and translator Aaron Poochigian posted on social media a link to an article about an unusual archaeological find: On a fragment of an amphora from Spain at some time in the first four centuries CE, some words were scratched into the wet clay that are quite different from the usual commercial information. The article’s authors identified the words as coming from Vergil’s Georgics. Theorizing about the sort of person who might have inscribed poetry on a pot, they note that children and youths were commonly employed in pottery manufacture of the time, and that the Georgics might well have been used in pedagogy in the agricultural area where the fragment was found. Whether or not their scenario is likely, it struck a chord with me, recalling my teenage encounters with Vergil’s hexameters, a rhythm I’ve tried to echo with the stresses of modern English, and used in several poems. The poem I based on this article has finally, finally, appeared in the little magazine Vergilius, so I can show it to you.

On some words of the Georgics,
inscribed on a fragment of Roman amphora unearthed in Spain

Journal of Roman Archaeology, June 5, 2023

Picture him, down on one knee in the clay-dusted air of the workshop,
bent to the wet terra cotta. He’s mouthing the sounds of a poem,
working the spelling out roughly; misplacing the start of the sentence—
wrong, but we see what he’s after. Underside up, the amphora,
waiting, still soft, is a near-irresistible draw to his stylus.

Everyone writes on amphorae—the contents, the names of the sellers—
what’s to deter him? His memory’s zephyred away to the schoolroom
now, and he’s singing it—quietly, quietly—wheat fields and grapevines,
oxen and beehives; he’s singing the gyre of the year in the heavens,
Bacchus and Ceres. He’s etching his love of it into the softness […]

Maryann Corbett, Vergil, dac-hex, and me

Much is written about how to be a good listener. Far less is written about how to be a poetic one, or rather, how to listen for the poetic.

When I write poems for strangers as I do on my podcast, There’s a Poem in That, I I don’t write affirming poems that reflect the client back to themselves, merely. Instead, I take a more assertive stance. It’s not about listening and repeating, it’s a poetic processing I’m still learning how to think about.

Nomenclature for this practice can still only be borrowed. The stranger asking me to write a poem for them—do I call them a client (medicine)? A subject (visual arts)? A querent (Tarot)? Do I talk about this work as clinical? Service-oriented? Socially engaged? A healing art? Isn’t it all those things?

Listening, too isn’t enough of a word for what constitutes the rambling treasure hunt for a poem in someone else’s story. The process is more journalistic than therapy-based, but art’s the goal. I get in there, and I tangle. It’s almost physical. I tangle with what people try to tell me.

My standard three hours of interview provide ample opportunity to learn whether, and how, to challenge my querents’ narratives, test assumptions, and clarify loose language. I begin to make demands. If someone is bold enough to require a poem from me; I’m emboldened to require they take the project seriously. I do them the favor of holding them to task.

Active listening is one thing; proactive listening is a more recently advocated set of advanced techniques in which the listener pushes back a little harder in a more deliberate effort to understand not just the words a person is saying but what, in fact, they mean by them. It’s a kind of parsing in which a subject’s words need not be taken at face value if their meaning is obscure. It’s worthwhile work for poets, who are trained to interrogate the language.

I listen for images, metaphors, motifs, patterns, and archetypal hero’s journey stuff. But I also listen for those narrative gaps in querents’ stories into which a poetic conversation can fit where nothing else seems likely to. I hasten to those clearings in a client’s imagination where only a poem might spark new fire.

Todd Boss, Call it “Anthrophrasis”

My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn’t do in the Gospels:  bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on.  But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.

This morning, the solution came to me, and it’s so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn’t come to me sooner.  I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis.  Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate. 

There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go–it’s so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that’s closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

I’ve noticed that more of us are questioning the platform. Like me, these other users — most of whom, in my case, are artists or writers — don’t want to leave a place where they’ve staked out a long-time presence and do have a sense of community, but they are also putting more energy into their own websites, blogs, and other online forms that are not corporate, not part of the big system, and remain under one’s own control. They are also hungry for other forms of activity and community that require — and acknowledge — genuine connection and greater attention. I’m not going to leave the site, but I’m now much more aware of what it is, how it affects me, and how I want to use it.

None of what I’ve based my life upon is disposable. When we take the time to create a work of art, to play or listen to music, grow a garden, learn a language, write a set of poems, or build a relationship, we do so because our effort feels worthwhile and we hope the result will last. Our lives themselves are short; time is precious. I want to make intentional choices and to spend most of my time in the real world, as positively as possible. So I think the right thing for me is to limit my intake of news to what’s necessary for knowing what is going on, and not get drawn into the maelstrom of debates and opinions; to limit my time on social media; to write as thoughtfully as possible, to keep learning, to devote myself to music and art and the people I care about — many of whom are online friends, some of whom I met through Instagram itself — but in a thoughtful way that honors the best aspects of who we are and what we respect in each other.

Beth Adams, Instagram, Revisited

So where are we now with the gift economy as artists/writers/creatives? I remember when I started blogging 2000 years ago and it was very much an exchange of ideas, freely given. I remember when I saw blogs like Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) monetize. It was the first blog I can remember doing that and it blew my mind. Like, jealous! A bit. But also, it seemed odd? And now I think, how my life would have been so much better if I’d figured all that out way back when. These days I still struggle with the whole Ko-fi thing :) And I’ve whined about how maybe I should move to Substack all the time and then never do.

And now the question, the problem of AI, stealing our gifts but also messing up the gift economy. And then the feeling that it’s foolish to be putting almost anything on the internet at all. I honestly don’t know what to do with all these thoughts currently. Because just the pure giving online has brought me a lot of goodness in this world. So anyway, I’m sitting with the Wittgenstein quotation, the gift as a problem to solve.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Thinking about The Gift

This week, on a tiny writing retreat, I’ve been thinking about the idea of running without fuel in the tank. And sometimes, not just fuel: no oil, no coolant, and the car needs some work as well. I’ve been thinking about what makes it possible to move forward when your resources are depleted. To be your best self, whatever that self is.

I used to find that whenever I traveled, I ran on empty. I was eating badly, not exercising, I lost connection with my game, and when I got back, I grasped at reconnecting with my life. But I like to think that being able to be my best—my most creative self, my most wild and fun self, my most dedicated self to Red Hen self, my most focused self—all requires some care, attention.

Some people need a lot of time with other people to feel good. I need a certain amount of alone time, and I need to spend that alone time reading, writing, or exercising, not doomscrolling. The apps raise my anxiety, and they convince me that everyone else’s life is much better than my life. They give me a fidgety unhappy edgy mash of dark to mess.

Alternatively, reading centers me, exercise brings my brain into focus, and writing reminds me of who I am. During my alone time, I rein in my urge to deep-dive, and I return to my focus. […]

On this, my birthday week, I think of Molly Fisk’s poem “Cedar Waxwings.” It is a good example of finding yourself through silence. It’s a poem that makes me think about healing and finding grace and getting back to equilibrium, and all of those things that I hope are possible while I am breathing, writing, finding my pulse.

So much depends on my finding my breath again. On refilling my tank. On resisting mournful isolation and embracing good solitude. I look to Molly, now, who is such a centered, soulful person. When I talk with her, when I hear her, her voice is large and surrounds me, and I feel like she is someone who climbed a mountain and saw the surrounding fields and all the trees, who saw devastation, too, and managed to stay sane and lived to tell the tale. She’s at the center of her own stillness, writing and seeing. Let us all aspire to such grace.

Kate Gale, Solitude, Stillness & Sanity: On Remembering Yourself Through the Empty

I’m back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I taught a surrealist poetry class with poet and librettist Melissa Studdard. We were the last class, which made me a little worried because I thought everyone might be tired and thinking about midday snacks & drinks—however, I was so wrong! What a joy to be overfilled with people—two rooms, all chairs taken, and people on the floor—all writing surreal poems. It made me realize that even with everything in the world, people still want to create something, to write poems, to be in community. I needed that reminder.

Melissa and I also did a little photoshoot for our poetry series, Poems You Need, and I, of course, wore the wrong shoes and sliced my foot (this should be no surprise to anyone who knows me—I always wear the wrong shoes).

The problem was—we had no tissues to stop the blood; it was just me, bleeding onto my discount Italian flip-flops and the sidewalk like a very low-budget horror film. Our photographer, who turned out to be a quick-thinking hero, pulled out a tiny white baby sock (clean! her son’s!) she’d been using as a lens cover and saved the day. (And yes, I was fine, no stitches, just alcohol, Neosporin, and a very tight bandaid!)

Kelli Russell Agodon, The World Is Too Much and Also Beautiful

Being at a yarn show with hundreds of people is a complete contrast to my one-to-one coaching or the times when it’s just me writing poetry, but there is also a lovely cross over with my values of being helpful, listening to people and taking time for reflection. And this week while simply being in a show ground I have felt the lovely tingle of tears of happiness in my eyes when recounting moments that have brought me pure joy in my life and listening to other people tell me theirs. I have laughed a lot and remembered to stay in the moment because after all it is the moment that counts. Oh, and I remembered to still myself and say thank you when complimented by a stranger so that I actually got to feel the complete glow of how that feels.

Here’s to finding the ways we laugh with others, supporting those we love and being ourselves in the moment.

Graphene, from my first collection Magnifying Glass, is shining in my mind as a great poem with which to end this blog…for the wonder of celebrating the shine and the marvel of being human.

Graphene

Perhaps, before their pencil, in that building

it was in me – that flat form carbon atom;

hexagonally honeycombed
undiscovered and waiting.

And before that, did it come from a star?

Maybe it was once inside you.
You are a study in graphene:
cleaved graphite, harder than diamond,

stronger than steel.

Exceptional.

Sue Finch, THREE TIMES A YARN SHOW

over the last couple of years, by far my richest and most rewarding poetry experiences have been the launches of work by long-time friends. these gatherings mean an immense amount to me, and i wouldn’t trade my participation for anything in the world. but – there is always a but – the very things that make these these celebrations so joyful, so moving, and so special – their warmth and intimacy – are also the things that make them tricky. and by “tricky” i mean… what, precisely? i suppose i must mean the sensation of emptiness that assails me in the midst of the social. […]

people are very mysterious to me: how they think, feel, fit together, move through the world. i can – and do – enjoy and admire many of them – but i do not understand them even slightly. it’s like… it’s like life is a fundamentally different force for most humans than it is for me. they have all of these experiences, achievements, ideas, relationships, and these things fill them up, or they enlarge them, give them a shape and a substance, a weight in the world; they anchor them to reality and to each other. for myself, life isn’t like that, it’s momentum without mass, just restless moving energy; it forces me forward, and it thrusts itself through me, but there’s nothing to hold on to, nothing to build on or around. i feel flimsy, i guess. i feel.

Fran Lock, MORNING PAGES

When I look up and away from the screen, there is a community I adore. Throughout multiple visits to a local wetland, I watched a discarded iced donut in the grass slowly get eaten away. Simply because I went for a walk to escape nonsense, I once observed ants protect aphids on a plant called Fireweed because the ants love the honeydew that the aphids produce. Community is everywhere. Symbiosis is necessary. Communication is necessary. Ten years now I have bent down to a plant or pointed to a bird and said their name to my husband. And now he says them back to me, his finger pointing up at the sky.

Sarah Lada, Rich Rich

I’ve drafted three poems now, one each morning. I’m also accumulating a windowsill full of spruce and alder cones, bits of moss and quartz, and other stray items: a rose hip, a mollusk shell, dried stalks of some kind of aster.

I hear owls at night: the deep hoots of a great horned owl, the faster, higher calls of a northern saw-whet owl. I missed some aurora activity last night, though. I gave up and went to bed at a quarter after midnight, thinking it was too cloudy, and others saw the flickering just fifteen minutes later.

Heading toward summer, Alaska, or this part of it anyway, is gaining five minutes of light a day. The sun currently sets at 9:30 but the glow lingers longer, hovering at the horizon until 10:30 or later.

Today, Saturday, is brilliantly bright, at least for now. The snow-blanketed volcanoes across Cook Inlet are perfectly clear. Directly across from my desk rises the cone of Augustine (Chu Nula, translation in progress). Visible at the edge of my view is Iliamna (Ch’nagat’in, One that stands above). I have to walk outside to see Redoubt (Bentuggezh K’enulgheli, One that has a notched forehead).

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemera pt. 3 (the wild life)

Today, my birthday started the day off with French toast made for me by J and sitting down to write some poems to catch up on NaPoWriMo hi-jinks I have fallen behind on.  We don’t really have plans for the day since J has three gigs today stretching from early afternoon til 2 or 3 am. So I am on my own, and will probably work on editing things, tidy up the bedroom, and watch something trashy later. […]

In the end 51 was a wild year. Depressing on a global scene, and dysfunctional even on a level that my previous half-century had not seen. Yet, on a personal level, things feel good, though ever precarious financially (but then again, while things are more expensive, I have never quite been flush there even when they were cheaper.)  I probably wrote over a hundred poems, edited dozens of chapbooks, made many collages and cover designs. I published three physical books (one a regular full-length collection, one a text/visual hybrid, and another special-edition hardcover w/ fauxtographs for Patreon. ) There were also a handful of e-zine editions. A smattering of video poems. Meanwhile there have been countless movies, many plays and musicals, occasional weekends away, and of course, the wedding last summer, which was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. 

Kristy Bowen, 52

Once upon a time, around the time I first moved to London, I wrote nothing but sonnets for a year. They weren’t strictly sonnets, because they mostly didn’t rhyme and when they did rhyme they didn’t follow the right patterns; the metre, to the extent there was one, was rough and ready even by my standards. Never mind. I’d been reading a lot of Robert Lowell (possibly too much). The not-quite-sonnet tradition goes further back still.

More interesting, looking back, was how addicted to the form I was. I couldn’t stop writing and whatever I wrote came out in fourteen lines. Here is Ken Gordon, writing about his own sonnetification in Sonnet by Other Means: “It was like a fever. I began writing sonnets continuously. Daily. Sometimes two or three (or even four) in a day. I was like a chain-smoker: One sonnet lit another.” I don’t think I ever wrote four in a day, but yes—it was like that.

Are people drawn to certain forms? It’s a good question. I am still a sonnet reader, but I haven’t started a new one in years. Maybe it is also a question of timing: to everything its season and perhaps particularly to sonnets, that form which is so contained, so combustible, and apparently inexhaustible.

You can read one of those London sonnets in the The Sonneteer. I am grateful to Ken not only for taking it, but for providing the title—the only title possible, but I didn’t know that. The poem riffs on Jackson Browne’s song of the same name (written when he was a teenager, made famous by Nico). 

Jem Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 24/04/26

Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins.

Leafing through the ballots, one other name appeared over and over, so much so that I was impelled to count.

Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, never knowing how close she had come. It would be many more years until, at 77, she was finally awarded the fellowship.

Long before that, before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had set down her views on writing in a series of essays later collected in the out-of-print gem Predilections (public library). Pulsating through them is a reckoning with the impossible task of the writer — to weave tapestries of truth and meaning from the tenuous thread of words on the ramshackle loom of language.

In an essay titled “Feeling and Precision,” Moore writes:

Feeling at its deepest — as we all have reason to know — tends to be inarticulable. If it does manage to be articulate, it is likely to seem overcondensed, so that the author is resisted as being enigmatic or disobliging or arrogant.

How we name what we feel is not so much a matter of our writing style as of our style of being, because in order to articulate something we must first apprehend it and we apprehend every smallest thing with the whole person — with the frame of reference that is our entire life, the sum of our experience and memory. When “one of New York’s more painstaking magazines” asked Moore to distill her poetic style into a formula, she fought back the “dictatorial” reflex to quip:

You don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of the personality.

And yet a personality can write with more or less persuasion — that is, write more or less well — depending on what the person brings to the writing.

Maria Popova, Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing

This week, I attended a phenomenal reading at the Poetry Foundation featuring Ashley M. Jones, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Donika Kelly, and Patricia Smith. The poems asked a great deal of us—our attention, our emotional depth, our fullest humanity. They were not always easy—that is, they did not always say the easy or obvious thing. They did not lead with something “everyone can relate to” to win us over. They often centered on confronting and difficult subjects.

And that’s one of the things I love about poetry, the way it can immediately deliver identity and experience grounded in the complex and ongoing web of history. In other words, these poems were ambitious. They seemed to hope to outlast their moment in the grit, music, and scope of what they offered and asked of the listener. I felt challenged. I felt moved.

It made me reflect on how I’ve been teaching writing for 14 years, and my list of similes for what the process is like has grown stranger by the year.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

In the opening poem in this collection, “Dear Life,” Popa writes, “I can’t undo all I have done to myself / what I have let an appetite for love to do me.” These lines set the tone for a book that again and again catches us on its barbed hook. Language hooks us. Ghost crabs are a “speculation on shape,” water, “an artifact of loneliness.” Can I capture the essence of this book after only one reading? Probably not.

Toward the end of the book, toward the end of a long poem, “Pestilence,” Popa writes: “Each day I remember / Each day I strategically forgot,” and “how human     is the future / will it let us let / I am listening through my terror for yours…”

Olawaseum Olayiwola in The Guardian described Wound Is the Origin of Wonder as “purposefully heart-decelerating.” It balances contemplation with a sense of walking through the natural world, balances woundedness with a deep, profound healing. I’m wholly intrigued.

Bethany Reid, Maya C. Popa, WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER

I can’t let Poetry Month go by without sharing a few notes about books I’ve spent time with this month. So, here are a few brief recommendations:

#evolutionarypoems

by Mihret Kebede and translated from Amharic by Anna Moschovakis

When’s the last time you read an Ethiopian poet? Or poetry translated from Amharic? Well, it was a first for me, and I continue to be impressed by the incredible work that the good people at Circumference Books are doing. So many of their books are from regions and languages that are so rarely represented in English translation, and thus, feel so very new and surprising in all the right ways. And if you, like me, are looking for an activist poetics for our times, these are politically engaged poems that provide a very personal model for literary resistance.

Yes & Now

by Yvette Nepper

Yvette may be one of my earliest friends in poetry land—we met our freshman year, when we were both at Ohio University for a time. I greatly admire Yvette’s work within the poetry community in Cincinnati, and we share a Gen X love of DIY and zine culture that continues in many of Yvette’s chapbooks and projects. Yes & Now is one such limited edition chapbook (in this case produced by FTP), “printed on a mimeograph machine in Mike Cowgill’s mom’s basement.” I love Yvette’s ability to balance profound thought with humor and play that makes one feel like it’s totally okay and maybe even preferable sometimes to have a dance party within what feels like an apocalypse. Come hear Yvette read at my house this September, and while you can’t buy Yes & No online anymore, check out her other chapbooks.

Carrie Olivia Adams, April Sunbeams & Books

This, Ian Storr’s second, beautifully-titled collection of haiku (and haibun), has been a long time coming, 16 years in fact, since Seeds from a Larch Cone. Ian is my friend, and was my long-time colleague at Presence haiku journal – he was the managing editor from 2014, following the tragic death of Martin Lucas, until last year, a stint in which he undertook much more than the lion’s share of the work involved in cementing its reputation as one of English-language haiku’s best journals, if not the best.

I know I’m biased but I have no hesitation in saying that Late Light, published by Alba Publishing and available here (scroll down) is the most important collection of haiku by a British poet since (at least) Thomas Powell’s Clay Moon (Snapshot Press, 2020) and the two collections by our late Presence colleague Stuart Quine (Alba Publishing, 2018 and 2019).

Ian hails from Sheffield and still lives there. He spent his working life as a children’s social worker, an immensely important and difficult job. The compassion, objectivity, resilience and intelligence needed for that profession shines through in Ian’s haiku.

Matthew Paul, On Ian Storr’s Late Light

Marriage is one of the most marked gaps in classical literature. I can’t, off-hand, think of a single good classical poem about being married, and barely any even about a wife (as opposed to a lover or would-be lover). Marriage is of course depicted quite often in Greek tragedy, though generally not very positively. But that’s not to say there’s no good Latin poetry about marriage — around 1500 the Renaissance Latin poets Pontano and Sannazaro, in particular, pioneered the Latin poetry of marriage and this sub-genre remained fashionable for a good century or so. […]

I’ve been thinking about marriage in literature, and especially in poetry, partly because I have been rereading Women in Love for the first time in decades, and partly because this week I finally received the copy of Matthew Buckley Smith’s Midlife, which I’ve been waiting for — I ordered it a while ago but it took a good few weeks to make it across the Atlantic and through French customs. Smith is the host of the popular, if oddly named, Sleerickets poetry podcast, which I’ve been on a couple of times — once a year or so ago and then just last week. I’m not a big podcast-listener myself but I enjoyed talking to Matthew, who’s a gifted interviewer, both times. Sleerickets’ trademark is plain-speaking so in that spirit I hope Matthew won’t mind that this week I’m writing about his own poetry.

Midlife, published in 2024 by Measure Press, was Smith’s second collection and the winner of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award in 2021. (This is an American poetry prize that recognises excellence in formal poetry, with a particular interest — in recognition of Wilbur’s legacy as a translator — in poets who also translate; previous winners have included A. M. Juster, A. E. Stallings, Rhina P. Espaillat and Maryann Corbett.) Last year he was also one of the Rattle Chapbook Prize winners, which means that his pamphlet The Soft Black Stars was circulated to all Rattle subscribers (including me) a few weeks ago (if you’re not a Rattle subscriber, you can order it here).

The first thing to say is that Smith is a very good poet in various ways: he is technically accomplished, he has some range in both form and style, and — a feature that readers of Horace & friends will I think particularly appreciate — he conveys an enjoyable impression of literary depth. Midlife contains one excellent (and one less good) version of Horace, one fairly good version of Catullus 51/Sappho 31, one version of/response to Rilke, as well as versions, responses and allusions to Homer, Tennyson and (especially) the dramatic monologues of Browning. The Soft Black Stars, though on the whole a bit less ‘literary’, contains poems responding to the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’ and to Ezra Pound. (The title of the pamphlet is taken from a short story by the American horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, but I haven’t read these stories so won’t comment on that.) Smith is writing in that American formalist tradition that sometimes sounds to my British ear just a bit too clickety-clack, and at times I find him a little boxed-in by his forms. But this is a pretty minor niggle: if you enjoy collections written entirely in “traditional” verse, he is obviously one of the very best US poets writing in this way today.

Victoria Moul, On marriage

Rhina P. Espaillat published this sonnet, titled “Here,” after the passing of her husband, Alfred. And it is as precise a description of what remains after losing a spouse as anything English literature has to offer. It is a poem, in my own lingering grief, I can hardly bear to read and yet cannot bear to set aside.

After the death of Dylan Thomas, Caitlin Thomas published a 1957 memoir of her time married to the poet, with the unbearable title Leftover Life to Kill. Espaillat catalogues instead the actual leftover objects.

Born on January 20, 1932, Rhina P. Espaillat had her 90th birthday in 2022 celebrated by several of the better poetry publications. Back in its heyday, Prairie Home Companion featured her work. The godmother of the New Formalism — the counter-current that emerged in the late 1980s to offer alternatives to the endless free verse of modern college writing-program poetry — she occupies a section in every contemporary anthology of rhymed and metered verse.

The authorized translator of Robert Frost into Spanish, and the translator of such works as the poetry of St. John of the Cross into English, Espaillat is a major poet working in our lifetimes. Which is why we’ve featured her work several times here in Poems Ancient and Modern: the comic “Undelivered Mail,” the dimeter of “Things That Go,” her translation of “Songs of the Soul in Intimate Amorous Communion with God.”

And in “Here,” the reader will find several of the features that recur in her verse. The sonnet form she often uses. The simple rhymes, for example, that do not strain for effect. The list-making. The precise observation of “his red Swiss Army knife / hiding its tiny arsenal of blades” and the near personification of those knife blades: “like legs tucked under.” A refusal of hyperbole: “I almost hear him say . . . ” And a powerful emotion never named but completely expressed, with the unbearable ending […]

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Here

The latest from Colorado poet and critic Camille T. Dungy is America, A Love Story (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a powerful collection of poems that provides a table of contents listing single poems and poem-clusters, arranged in untitled sections counterpointing with occasional stand-alone pieces. The book-length suite of America, A Love Story is exactly that: a heartfelt declaration and examination of a complicated country and culture, and a history of aggression, devastation and racism that still ripples across the landscape of generations. “America,” she writes, as part of the brilliantly-devastating opening poem, “This’ll hurt me more,” “there is not a place I can wander inside you / and not feel a little afraid.” Writing of childhood, her father and grandmother, the use of the switch and of her father being pulled over by the police, the second page of the same poem offers: “Of course my father fit the description. The imagination / can accommodate whoever might happen along. / America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire, / you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface / looking placid though you know the water deep down, / dark as my father, is pushing and pulling, still trying / to go ahead. We were driving home, my father said. / My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way / home.” This is a book of consequence and heart, and the cruel nature of love itself, articulating a detail of people and movement, history and storytelling with an attention to intimate detail. Amid the story of the neighbourhood women amid a shared stray cat in the poem “True Story,” a piece that tells far more than I’ll offer here, she writes: “One woman believed, as Issa believed, / that in all things, even the small and patient / snail, there are perceptible strings that tie / each life to all others.”

There is such a delicate way that Dungy articulates her narrative collage around the idea of love, of America, including an America that will impact her children, and all that might lie ahead; of the ties, and even the traumas, that bind people together, offering poems from a variety of sides and perspectives, coming together to form a coherent shape around how she understands and approaches her love, her America, from the best elements to the worst, and what all that requires and declares, demands and articulates. 

rob mclennnan, Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story

If [Liam] Guilar’s approach to translation is to reimagine, then the way Kit Fryatt and Harry Gilonis work in Book of Inversions is to take things apart and then put them back together in carefully random disorder. As the author/translators note in their introduction, it’s ‘a book of inversions, turning the world upside down’.

The introduction also mentions some antecedents to their approach, including Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s homophonic Catullus, Anne Carson’s versions of the same Latin poet, Richard Caddell’s transmogrification of I Gododdin in his elegiac For the Fallen, and Geoffrey Squires’s My News for You: Irish Poetry 600-1200, not so much an antecedent as it was published while Fryatt and Gilonis were hard at it, but certainly a kind of gold standard for anyone tackling the field. There are also notes that indicate textual sources, other translations (full disclosure, three of them are mine), and further interesting titbits about each poem inverted. The notes also indicate if the version is by one or other of the authors or a joint effort.

Their title plays on the Lebor Gabála Érenn, englished as The Book of the Takings of Ireland, or The Book of Invasions. As such, it is fitting that, after a couple of dedicatory snippets, they open with a version of Amergin’s Song from that text. Not the famous, or infamous, ‘I am the wind on the sea’ one, but Amergin’s third song. Amergin Glúngheal is Ireland’s mythical first poet, and the songs represent a moment of claiming Ireland, which, maybe, makes this a doubly appropriate opener. Here it is in the Irish Text Society version by Macalister, the official version, if you like:

A fishful sea!
A fruitful land!
An outburst of fish
Fish under wave,
In streams (as) of
A rough sea!
birds,
A white hail
With hundreds of salmon,
Of broad whales!
A harbour-song—
An outburst of fish,
A fishful sea!

And here’s the Gilonis take:

Fishfilled sea!
Fertile land!
Fish erupt!
Fish in waves
bird-flock-like!
Ocean’s wild!

White sea hail,
salmon hordes,
widespread wales!
Harbour song:
‘Fish erupt,
fishfilled sea!’

And the Irish text as best as I can manage to reconstruct it from what’s to hand:

iascach muir
mothach tîr
tomaidm n-eisc
iasca fothuind
rethaib ên
fairge chruaid
cassar finn
crethaib én
lethan mîl
portach lág
mniportach lugh
tomaidm n-eisc
iascach muir

What’s immediately apparent, even to readers with no Irish, is that the new version adheres much more closely to the chant-like terseness of the original, short lines and an emphatic rhythm and an echo of the Irish tendency to composite word formation. 

Billy Mills, Celtic Matters

The poet J.H. Prynne died this week, at the age of 89. I’ve been reading his work since I was a student. My first experience of it was very like the one described in this tribute by Ian Patterson for the London Review of Books blog:

[the] poems were like essays in their apparent substance, but they had a manner, a rhythm and a music, as well as a density of thought that shifted my idea of what poetry was and what it could be and do

So this week I thought I would try to give some account of that experience: the reading of words that sound explanatory but resist explanation, and which resonate with a musical air of meaning that repeats itself as a kind of thought.

[…]

wresting the screen before the eyelet lost / to speech tune you blame the victim: I’ve quoted these unpunctuated lines together because I don’t know how to split them apart. Following the clear but abstract statement of the distinction between knowing and doing, we are suddenly plunged into a confusion of violent action. To “wrest” is usually to “wrest control” of something: here, “the screen before the eyelet lost”. This is — to use a synonym for darkness — “obscure” (Latin obscurus, dark, hidden, secret). But obscurity is also what is being (obscurely) described: to put a “screen” before an “eyelet” is to block a small hole for light. So clarity of knowledge has been followed by a cover-up. “Lost”, at the line-break, is the hinge word here, the moment of maximum confusion before an immoral argument emerges which inverts the dynamics of power: “you blame the victim”. How / why do “you” do this? Because you are “lost / to speech tune”, like a good poet. But here it sounds as though your eloquence is a bad habit.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, In Darkness by Day

We’ve been thinking a lot about the poetry of Douglas Dunn recently, especially Douglas’s superb and undervalued pre-Elegies poems. This seemed a good excuse to give this little essay a second airing; it appeared in a recent-ish issue of The Dark Horse devoted to Dunn and his work. It’s about my own debt to Douglas, and to one poem of his in particular. Since that poem is unavailable online, I’ll risk reprinting it at the end of the piece until I’m told off. You can, however, still read it in Dunn’s essential New Selected Poems. […]

I remember reading ‘Remembering Lunch’ in an appropriately wine-stained paperback copy of St Kilda’s Parliament, bought in the Charing Cross Road in the late eighties. I’ll have picked it up it from one of the second-hand bookstores where, twelve or fifteen years earlier, Douglas would have flogged his review copies to pay for his long Soho lunch and its longer bar tab. I had just read and fallen in love with Elegies, as we all had; but with the young male poet’s atrocious impatience to have everyone sprawling on a pin, I decided I had Dunn’s measure. I opened at ’Remembering Lunch’. So much for that theory. For one thing, even the measure was new to me. What’s with the long line? Isn’t it prose when you keep bopping your head on the right margin? Clearly not; but are poets permitted such long sentences? At the time, one knew just enough to reach for the word ‘Jamesian’ whenever one encountered such fluent hypotaxis, but little else. I was, at least, used to poems ending with the sea. The sea is literally a great place to stop. But it was clearly going to take me years to catch up with the rest of it, and I had best make a start.

Don Paterson, Learning from Dunn

At age 76, [Robert] Cording has been writing a long time; he started before he was out of college, and he published his first book of poems in 1987, almost 40 years ago. To look back over that lengthy career is to begin to understand something about the meaning of his new book’s title: what he’s been able to achieve through decades of devotion to his craft, which produces both an accounting and an appraisal of all that he has written and published, and what is possible to ascertain from what the poems tell us about the life Cording has experienced and lived and shared, not only with those he loves but also with his readers.

About the latter, Cording’s poems make quietly clear his life’s through-lines:

[. . .] family and friends, [. . .]

our blessings—the disarming joy of being
loved, the bounty of the natural world
that still takes our sight beyond ourselves. [. . .]

~ from “Talking Through a Storm” (p. 114 )

As that excerpt implies, Cording is an observer of the interior life, one from which he draws energy and consolation, as much as he is a poet who looks out into the world of both the ordinary — “all that is / too humdrum for our notice,” the “nothing much” that characterizes daily goings-on (“Ode to Ordinariness, pp. 130-131) — and the inexplicable and divine, whether it is “the perfection of birdness” (“Lord God Bird,” pp. 132-133) or “some accidental loveliness / we put our hopes in” (“Massachusetts Audubon Chart No. 1, 1898,” p. 185).

As attentive as Cording is to these constants, as much as he can praise the recurrence of “the sun returning like a second chance / after this evening’s shower” or “the moon rising like a clockface” (“Ode to Ordinariness,” p. 131), the world, he writes, “keeps moving to its tasks, random with pain, / rich with surprise” (“All Souls’ Morning,” p. 54), landing him in an “in-between” space where grief and lament reside alongside praise and “a source of awe”: “the colors // of dawn on the earth’s other side. Everything— / the tamaracks and maples, the spruces and their / smoke- winged / sparrows, the painterly sky darkening toward infinity” (“For Rex Brasher, Painter of Birds,” pp. 75-76). The lesson to be drawn, then, is that both suffering and cause to celebrate can and do coexist, that a day can be “perfectly made for delight” while “grief is endless” (“Four Prayers,” p. 151).

Maureen Doallas, Robert Cording’s ‘What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems’

May 2026, next month, marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of my first book of poems, The Silence of Men, which I think is worth celebrating because it is—and this is a testament to CavanKerry Press’ commitment to its authors—still in print and, somewhat remarkably (to me at least), still selling. I just received my 2025 royalty check for $4.83. It’s easy to laugh at that amount, and we’ve all heard the jokes about how poets are only in it for the money (right?), but I have always believed that poetry does its work in the world very slowly. I don’t know how many copies of the book that check represents, or how many people will ultimately read those copies, but it makes me happy and not a little bit humbled to think that poems I wrote more than two decades ago are still doing their work somewhere.

[…]

How To Write A Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times, by Adrian S. Potter:

Perhaps we sink too much energy into pretending to be unoffended when we really should feel insulted. As part of his unapologetic reign of bluster, one of our so-called leaders keeps teaching a master class on how to parlay hot takes and brash rhetoric into votes and profit. Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to write a poem that will finally put an end to bigotry, and yes, even within the false mythology of a post-racial society, bigotry still exists.

The tension in this piece is between the self-important navel-gazing that characterizes the way some writers live “the literary life” and the implicit call to action with which Potter ends the piece: “But when I try to write about [these unprecedented times]…my hand instinctively tightens into a fist hoisted high above my head.” The essay was published in 2004, and I imagine that, in light of what’s been happening in the United States and the Middle East, it lands with even more urgency than it did back then. I found myself thinking of Louise Glück’s essay “The Idea of Courage,” in which she critiqued the use of the term courage to described what it took for a poet to write poems that revealed aspects of their life they might not otherwise have revealed. Specifically, I found myself remembering Glück’s point that this usage of courage “concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech.” We all know the stories of the poets in totalitarian nations throughout history who risked that political result and paid with their lives. Iran, of course, is one of them. How far are we, I asked myself when I finished reading Potter’s essay, from a time when the difference between writing a political poem and raising one’s tightened fist into the air will not be as different as he suggests.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #54

in the front yard, the ferns
are unfurling their fists. i wonder what it is
that they reach for. i should probably open
my hands too. catch something. not a star,
maybe just a petal from the peach tree who might,
if the world is real enough this year, bear fruit.

Robin Gow, poem in which i am an activist

The Heart of American Poetry

Based on A Poet’s Glossary, a book I always enjoyed opening, I impulse-purchased this new critical work by Edward Hirsch. But it is not a book I will finish, though I will keep dipping. The attempt to link poetry to the state of America is far too blunt, the readings are often too anecdotal, and thus the page count is far beyond the actual interest, though the book is not without interest and if some compressed version of this was available in online essays, I would read it. In general, this might be a worthwhile book for someone new to the topic, but it feels old-fashioned to me. If the topic at hand is so important (as I agree with Hirsch that it is) some other way of discussing it must be found. No easy task, and perhaps an unfair criticism, but that is where we are.

*

The Modern Element

Adam Kirsch’s 2008 book about modern poetry is much more lively, gets to the point, and has Kirsch’s own strongly-held views to sustain it. It is less about “who we are now” or whatever, but has a lot more to say about the poets and the nature of poetry. Kirsch is against “poetry’s neurotic obsession with the modern”. He thinks the “poetics of authenticity” which prevailed after the war, and which finished the job Romanticism started and led to the removal of formal qualities, “has thoroughly failed” and has prevented poets from writing major works. He wishes us to return to the pragmatic tradition of Johnson, Aristotle, Horace, and Arnold. A very worthwhile book.

Henry Oliver, Palms, poems, moderns

It was late May, and I had a day off, or was killing time between my day and evening jobs, and I missed campus, with its grassy quad and emerald oaks and bobbing tulips, its redbuds and dogwood, magnolia and cherry, and so I went to the park in search of something like it. There was nothing there that one would call manicured, and what I missed most of all, I’m sure, was the people who’d sit in the grass and read poems with me. I remember I wrote a letter to a friend—we had email, but nobody had a computer; word processors hulked on our desks like suitcase bombs—and then I read Sweet Machine for the first time, and “Door to the River” is the poem that left me breathless in the grass.

What’s to like? I’ve been asking another version of that question a lot lately: Why do I like what I like? It’s a simple poem, so far as the literal circumstances: it begins in ekphrasis, more specifically interpretive ekphrasis—the speaker doesn’t tell us what the painting looks like, but attempts to interpret de Kooning’s intention or meaning—then progresses to narrative description, recalling yesterday’s meadow, then proceeds through a series of questions that feel by turns existential and self-directed, arriving at something like certainty, then a turn to exhortation and another narrative that leads to a moment of lyric epiphany—of transcendence. Why do I like it? Because it is transcendent, and it brings us along on its path towards insight.

Maybe simple isn’t the word.

“Door to the River” is sort of the antonym, conceptually and formally, of another field poem, Mark Strand’s compact little “Keeping Things Whole.” I’m tempted to call it an antidote as well. There’s paradox at the heart of Strand’s poem: If his speaker is what is missing, he is also the missing piece; in that sense, he belongs wherever he is—and yet the division seems to be absolute. There is “the air,” and there is “my body,” and though the two meet, they remain separate. There is such a thing as lack: the air can lack the body; the body can lack the air. Together they “keep things whole,” but this wholeness is only accomplished by continuous motion, is comprised always of its individual components.

In “Door to the River,” we have another mind contemplating another field, but the insight that arrives is entirely opposite: in this field, there is both stillness and fullness: “some / balance . . . no lack, nothing / missing from the world.” It’s an experience of completion, wholeness, abundance. And so the final revelation at the end of the breathless penultimate sentence—this is a sentence that began thirty-one lines earlier, with “It was her voice”—arrives as an utter surprise: that this experience of wholeness must be the same as the experience of death. Having tumbled through to the end of this astounding claim, we end with the simple finality of a one-word sentence: Fine.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Door to the River” by Mark Doty

Spring of course is the season of possibilities. April has been a busy month but now the big weighty tasks are behind me — giving workshops, which is not a task I do with ease, memorializing a friend — and I feel lighter and the mornings have been so sweet with a perfect mix of chill and warmth from the heating sun. Trees are crazy with buds and blossoms and the azaleas across the street are laden. A squirrel ate my one lone tulip, as it does every goddamn year. And it’s been very dry and my least favorite season, summer, is on its way, and it could be a scorcher. So it goes. I try to give participants in my workshops a sense of possibilities, but memorials for friends signal an end to possibilities. One possible outcome of possibilities is nothing. I think of this often. And so. The old eat-drink-and-be-merry, the old eat-dessert first, the old be-here-now. I can only shrug or laugh or be wry. I like the word wry — it’s a tricky little devil: that sometimes-y vowel, that silent w. You can speak it without opening the jaw, the maw of possibility. I like this wry poem by Aidan Chafe for that very thing, its wry embrace of what is possible.

Marilyn Mccabe, with snot and ice cream

Listening to Kathy Acker, dead twenty-five years, read her translations of the poet Sextus Propertius from Blood and Guts in High School … let there be no double winter dead winds … I understand my missteps are all colossal flaps for the wind to carry me, whether I want to be carried or no. The landing isn’t up to me. The wind decides. All my successes or perfections don’t need the head of a pin to stand—that would be too vast—so I never keep one around. My journey needs no island. I’ve given up maps. Since having is believing, I don’t believe. Call me useless, call me criminal, call me undigested pizza with hallucinatory moments of despair—but nothing has always been greater than something.

If one assumes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is correct … Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away … then perfection is the blank page before the poem gives words to lyric, the imagined story before its told, before the idea of Venus de Milo Apollo gives shape to stone, before strokes of paint find a fence or sky or face on canvas, before the note is played. The saying, the doing can only muck the truth.

How to have one and not the other is the real task at hand, the work behind the work—the bottom of the glass reached as the meal is finished—plates carried to the kitchen—the chair returned to its place.

Sam Rasnake, Monday Works… #14: “On Perfection and Flaws”

The poets on the farthest end of the table are laughing
and the visiting scholar on the other end is trading
jokes with the futures trader, and no one quite notices
when the waiters come to fill and replenish cups of water
and tea. Your colleague is rhapsodizing over the thick
clouds of chicken and corn in the soup, and you give
your whole mind to all of this, for here as in the world
attention is a practice that asks nothing from you except
to be here. Though when all of you walk back into the night
and the air is cooler and all are hugging and waving goodbye
or someone is suggesting you find somewhere else to go and
have margaritas, you know the world is waiting to slip into
your mouth again— another kind of communion, the kind
you have every day, the kind that stains your fingers
and leaves a slight film of oil, even now in this kitchen
where, standing barefoot on cold tile, already you are
chewing on the future.

Luisa A. Igloria, Poem at 3 AM with Leftovers and Rilke

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Window strike

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

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

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

Sue Finch, WOLF MOONS

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

Here are some things that brought me joy:

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

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

Sandra Beasley, Farewell to 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Pollard, Into the Woods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, myth and the female epic

A poem by Basho

(tr. RH. Blyth)

Toshi doshi ya
saru ni kisetaru
saru no men

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

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, Toshi doshi ya

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

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

Matthew Paul, A Twixmas Meditation

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Leaps of Faith

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Favorite 2025 Reads

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, 2025 in reading (playing Yesterday)

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

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

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

Kersten Christianson, 2026, Snow, Much Writing

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

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

Writing Intentions

–I’m going to keep one of my intentions from 2025.  Here’s what I wrote last year:  “I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I’m also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead.”

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Intentions for 2026

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

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

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

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

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

Donna Vorreyer, Out with the Old and All That

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

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

Sarah Russell, Butterfly

The complement to mindful living is mindful reading. 

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, 2025 Self-Audit

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

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

Ruth Lexton, Watching, January 2021

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

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

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

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

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

My dad had a beautiful overcoat.

The lamb’s white fur got smudged.

My brother was a baby,

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

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

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look

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

Alina Stefanescu, For Lynne.

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

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

Brad Skow, Found / Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gerry Stewart, Scottish Book Tour 2025

Literature works through a special force of language.

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Ten reasons to read great literature in 2026

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

conglomerate by tom clausen

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

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

Josephine Corcoran, Hello, China

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Two Books

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

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

Jill Pearlman, New Year’s Spin/Reboot

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

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

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

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

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

Happy beginning and ending to you.

Sarah Lada, Annus difficilis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week: 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: synapses on fire, cryptic colonial zooids, a hearth of spiders, open secrets, a big smashing life, and more. Enjoy.

I’m thrilled that spring is finally here and with it, the National/Global Poetry Month. I’m particularly excited to be writing ekphrastic poems this year. Many thanks to Maureen Thorson for gathering the NaPoWriMo community around another poetry feast and for setting our synapses on fire with each of her wonderful prompts.

Like in previous years, the first draft of each poem written this month will expire when the next day’s draft is posted.

Romana Iorga, NaPoWriMo 2025

Welcome to my *fifth* annual installment of poetry prompts for NAPOWRIMO! You can find past editions here:

• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2024
• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2023
• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2022
• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2021

As you write to the poetry prompts for NaPoWriMo 2025 (or any of the writing prompts published here), please be mindful of these important rules:

• Follow these prompts *wherever* they take you. Don’t get hung up on the details.
• Never, never, never, never, never, never copy the sample poems. They’re for inspiration only! If you borrow style or quote excerpts in your drafts, please be sure to credit the original and the poet.

Carolee Bennett, All new Poetry Prompts for NaPoWriMo 2025!

In my own current writing journey I am pleased to say I have made a small breakthrough: the daily exercises are helping. In short, I have allowed myself to play with the writing exercises, sometimes using them specifically on the project, sometimes just writing for fun. Reader, I should really take my own advice more often because I’m writing now. I’m writing well and writing with joy and not dreading my desk on a morning. I’m back in the writing flow that I enjoy and it’s because I stopped taking it too seriously and started enjoying it. A mix of less pressure, more joy.

This is the power that a daily external structure can bring to your work and while there is always a danger of becoming over reliant on prompts and exercises, a dedicated practice for a short amount of time is such a good way to boost your motivation and put the determination and JOY back into your work.

Wendy Pratt, April Write-A-Thon

Yesterday I graded the daily writing that I had students do on Monday, the day of the quilting bee.  I had decided to have a quilting bee because we were doing a module on Susan Glaspell’s one act play, “Trifles” and her short story that she created after the play, “A Jury of Her Peers.”  We watched this presentation created by The Edge Ensemble Theater Company, which was filmed in a historic farm house.

Ideas of putting a quilt together by quilting or knotting are integral to the play, and even when I first taught the play in the 90’s, students had little to no experience with quilts.  I thought it would be fun to do a quilting bee for the entire Spartanburg Methodist College community, along with my students.  I hoped that students would make connections to the play, but I wasn’t sure that they would, so we had continued discussion on Wednesday.

As I graded their daily writings, I was impressed with the connections they made without my insight.  Most of them made the connections about the wrung neck of the bird, the noose, and the knotting done on a quilt, connections that I hoped would be obvious but often aren’t.  Several students said that working on the quilts helped them appreciate what a lonely life the farm women in the play had had.   Some of them talked about the stories that quilts show.  Their writing reassured me that the effort to do it was worth it.

I’m at a school where the medieval lit professor has her students make chain mail and illuminated manuscripts, and her efforts made me want to do something similar.  Almost all of the English faculty do more with their classes than have writing assignments, and I’m impressed with the kinds of posters and presentations that they create.  I’m so grateful to be at a place where we all know that there are more ways to assess student learning than in written papers that we keep on file until the next accreditation review.  I’ve worked in places that discouraged genre-stretching assignments for fear that the accreditors would see them as suspicious.  It is so wonderful to be at a liberal arts college.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, More Pictures and Insights from a Quilting Bee

I’ve never read Homer’s Odyssey, so it was a surprise to me to find out that the word mentor is derived from Mentōr, an old man and an incarnation of the Goddess Athena, Goddess of wisdom. Fitting, Mentor offered Odysseus and his son Telemachus advice – and these days, of course, “mentor” describes someone who guides a less experienced colleague.

I’m not sure I had even heard of the term before I was lucky enough to be given my own mentor. For six months, as part of my Arvon/ Jerwood Young Poets Prize, George Szirtes and I communicated by email where he shared his wisdom and insights with me. George is a prolific writer of incredible skill, grace and wisdom, and his role as my teacher is hard-wired into my brain – to the extent that I still ask myself “What will George think?” when I share poetry news or opinions on social media.

George set the bar high: becoming a mentor myself was a scary business. But over the last fifteen years it’s been one of the most rewarding parts of my career. A mentoring relationship is intimate and committed – like Anegla Chevaux says, “Mentoring involves much more than careers advice and feedback on poems, it is an intimate relationship of sharing and listening, of support and trust”.

For the last year, I’ve been a pastoral mentor for four writers on the Writing Chance programme; a New Writing North scheme which supports new writers from working class and lower-income backgrounds. Instead of focusing on their written work, I’ve spent time discussing self-care and wellbeing, helping writers to develop writing routines and to explore career possibilities. It’s left me with an even keener sense of how various and complex our writing lives are; how the writing we produce is just the tip of the iceberg, just the quickest glimpse into personal, emotional and professional world of the writer.

Clare Shaw, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”

I was recently reminded of the poet June Jordan (1936-2002) by the stellar human and 2024 National Book Award winning poet, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Ms. Khalaf Tuffaha was visiting Highline College, where I teach, to read her work to over a hundred students, most of them, who had never heard a poet read before. It was an alchemical afternoon of poetry, politics, and much-needed community.

But things didn’t end there. Before Lena read her spectacular poem, “Dear June Jordan,” she told the students of finding a copy of Jordan’s book in a shop when she was a college student herself. She told my students in a teacherly voice that they heard, “Go home and Google her tonight.” And to my delight, many of them did.

I remember reading June Jordan for the first time in high school but not for any high school class. I found her in an anthology of women poets, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women Edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. It was 1973.

To be honest, her direct, short-lined, approach to poetry and it seemed, to life, alarmed me. And thrilled me. She wrote poetry about what mattered: Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa. She wrote from her lived experience as an African American woman in the United States “though never solely as or for”(Adrienne Rich). She wrote of police brutality and racial profiling. She wrote (and published) poems for her friends Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker.

She wrote about joy! She once described her poetry as “voice prints of language” and stated:

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream or bumper sticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.”

Who was this woman? I had not read anything like this before. Now, decades later, Jordan still stands out as a poet (and activist, children’s book writer, librettist, political journalism, memoirist, musical playwright, speech writer…and the list goes on).

Susan Rich, Perhaps the Poet We Need Right Now

One hundred daffodils have opened in my yard, and the rocket arugula is ready to pluck for salads. The blueberry bush survived its first winter, though last year’s berries were all eaten by the catbirds, and there’s new growth on the hydrangeas.

It wasn’t so long ago—last spring, in fact—that enjoying these things came without remorse and regret. This spring, though, watching the doves do it in the redbud tree can sometimes make you feel a little guilty for enjoying nature’s spectacle while fascism rises. You can concentrate on lining up the rusty glider’s heaves and hos with the grackles’ squawks for only so long before it hits you that democracy is dying in bright sunshine, too. […]

I’ve been making lots of signs and flyers and even t-shirts for my daily walks around the neighborhood. My first was a test to see how Indivisible Baltimore’s logo would look on apparel. For me, Indivisible is the point at which creativity meets activism. Here’s another: A Torch for the Long Night: Voices Against Fascism. Poets, please consider contributing to this journal, which I am coediting with the phenomenal Ren Powell.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, pièce de ré·sis·tance

Physalia is highly successful organism, widespread across the world’s oceans. Nevertheless, its environment is under increasing threat from pollution and climate change. Its potent armoury of highly toxic stings is no match for this type of attack. Perhaps new forms of cryptic colonial zooids may evolve to reverse the damage… If they had the words, what would they tell us? […]

I have used invented or code-based languages before on my videos, eg The Ferrovores. They have all followed their own internally consistent grammatical rules and meanings. But in Physalia, the “language” is purely phonetic and has no underlying structure or meaning, other than what was in the source sentence.

The biomorphic creatures in the video are not real Physalia, not least because I didn’t have any footage I could use. Instead, the Physalia biomorphs were variously constructed from Particle Illusion (Boris FX), coralline red algae, Muntrie flowers and Eucalypt flowers. Very few people have seen Physalia out at sea (I have a few times!) so using imaginary shapes seemed fitting.

Ian Gibbins, Physalia

In the beam black scraps of stealth
strobe in and out of existence
it hurts to chart their orbits

and I question my eyes
all the way to the car

Paul Tobin, BLACK SCRAPS OF STEALTH

I’m excited to share that I have a new poem published! Check out “Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” which is currently featured as part of Split This Rock‘s Poem of the Week series. It’s always meaningful to see my work find a home, and I’m grateful to everyone at Split This Rock for featuring this poem. This poem will also be included in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, which, for those unfamiliar, is an amazing resource for general readers and educators alike.

“Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” is a poem that comes out of my history with speech therapy as a child. The first draft came from a writing exercise I did alongside my students in the poetry workshop I taught last year. The exercise in question is Rita Dove’s “Ten-Minute Spill” from The Practice of Poetry.

José Angel Araguz, new poem up at Split This Rock!

On Monday, we were with the above group in front of the U.S. Consulate in Montreal, standing up for Canada’s sovereignty. Similar demonstrations took place all across Canada, at consulates in every province. I met some good people. One woman had come in from the Eastern Townships, motivated by the controversy over the small library in her community that straddles the border. As of Oct. 1, US officials will prohibit direct Canadian access to the main entrance of the Haskell Library and Opera House, which has been used cooperatively by local residents of both countries for over a hundred years. The border is marked on the floor of the library, but library patrons have always come from both sides, with patrols making sure everybody goes back where they came from and nobody unknown goes out the wrong door. Soon, Canadians wishing to use the library will be required to go through U.S. customs first. […]

I think of the remarkable city of Montreal where I am privileged to live, and how most of us view diversity as one of its strongest aspects. I live in the very mixed-ethnic neighborhood of Cote-de-Neiges. When I enter a metro car, I am always — as a white person — in the minority. This is, frankly, a good experience, and if more white people had it, the world would be different. Around me are people from all over the world, speaking many languages, wearing all sorts of clothing, from elderly to newborns. As we observe each other going about our daily lives, we see our similarities and commonalities: everybody’s cold, tired of winter, bundled up, sniffling — in another month, we’ll all be smiling because it will be spring. We’re tolerant and accepting, as a city; we eat each other’s food and love it, we learn languages as a hobby, we travel a lot, we all share the parks, the river, our bike paths and transit system, our crazy northern climate. In the very rare events when there is a racist incident such as an attack on a mosque or a synagogue, the reaction from our city leaders and population has always been, “This is not who we are in Montreal, we won’t tolerate this kind of hatred.” This ideal of tolerance and protection includes all oppressed groups, from women to indigenous people to those of various sexual orientations and genders. When accusations of racial profiling by police arise, citizens push back. Of course racism and prejudice exist here. However, we do pretty well as a city, living together.

How I wish that more of the world could be this way — and how worried I am that it could so easily be lost! All we have to do is read the news to see what’s at stake. Last night’s video of a Tufts University graduate student being arrested on a Boston street and abducted in under four minutes by a swarm of masked, black-clothed ICE agents was absolutely terrifying. Her crime, so far as we know? Co-authoring, with three other students, a letter to the Tufts administration criticizing its position on Palestine/Israel and calling for the university to divest. She and other students and professors across the U.S. have been doxxed by Canary Mission, an organization targeting pro-Palestinian (they use the term “pro-Hamas”) activists on college campuses. This likely led to her arrest. Canary Mission also has a website in Canada, which exposes the names and faces of 431 Canadian professors, university staff, and students that the group similarly accuses.

Free speech is the bedrock of our human rights; when it’s gone, our humanity goes with it.

Beth Adams, Speech Must Remain Free

ten-word salad
no more sewage-talk
nothing wrong with cardboard

from ebay
from my fridge
from a rubber plantation

Ama Bolton, ABCD March 2025

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been going through my days with half a mind grasping toward prayer, and mostly coming up empty. None of the ones from my childhood make sense for me—I’m not a Christian—and many of the Sanskrit mantras feel both too short and a little too distant, not being in my own language. In the early morning hours when I’m driving my child to school and the beauty of the sunrise awes us both to silence, when a giant hawk watches us drive by from his brief perch on a neighbor’s mailbox, when I’m overwhelmed by the “muzzle velocity” of illegal and inhumane actions coming out of the White House, or when my Telegram chat thread is full of new photos and videos of the dead coming out of Gaza, what words can my mind hold to?

What language to honor the heart-rending generosity of Spring in North Carolina alongside the mechanized death machine?

So, last week I finally sat down and wrote my own prayer—the one I need right now. I’ve been repeating it to myself multiple times a day, honing the language of it as I do, and have also shared it with my son. It feels too intimate to share it here (maybe I will some time in the future). However, part of my inspiration was The Emerald Podcast, in which the host Joshua Michael Schrei often intersperses beautiful prayerful passages amidst the larger experience of each episode. The most recent one of these episodes, “Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis,” arrived right when I needed it, as it is devoted to this ancient yearning I’ve been feeling to hail the Sacred when the everythingness of the world has been turned up to eleven.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Staying with the Trouble

i see a video on tiktok about ways
to leave the united states. you can pour yourself
into water bottles & throw them into the ocean.
you can bury yourself in a time capsule.
hope that when they dig you up
that the world is softer & less terrifying.

Robin Gow, what does not grow legs

So. I’m back in Los Angeles, my old stomping grounds (writing grounds, eating grounds, loving grounds) for AWP and I’m suddenly flooded with emotions. To me, these hills are haunted with the ghosts of my past selves. Failures. Triumphs. Men who dumped me. The one who didn’t. The friends I’ve made and lost. The poems I’ve had published and the many, many, many projects I’ve abandoned, given-up on, or failed to get accepted. They’re all up there in those barely-green hills. Or they’re waving at me when I drive by the sea. All of them mocking me for what I’ve failed to accomplish.

I’m used to that, but then I saw on the calendar of events that a poet who was very mean to me ten years ago (won’t start rumors about who it is), is headlining at a big event. Worse, she’s headlining with some of my favorite poets who I want to headline with. […]

It reminds me again how challenging it is to be an artist. 90% of the time we’re failing. The 10% of the time that we “succeed” we still have to ask, “is this good enough?” And then you throw into it a situation like AWP. This is where all of the “great” writers go. Some of them are your age. Some are much younger. All of them are amazing and you look up at the luminaries on the stage and ask “Why isn’t that me with that book deal, major prize, panel position and group of adoring fans?”

I was feeling really bummed the other day, and got on the phone with a long-time poetry pal. This is one of the writers I most admire and look-up to and wish I could emulate. Instead of flicking me away like the little piece of dried up hair dander that I feel I am these days, she told me that she too is feeling less-than at AWP. Her latest book isn’t ready. She didn’t get the deal she wanted. And at the age she is, she isn’t yet a household name.

I was so glad she told me this. It’s not that I want to see a fellow writer struggling, but at the same time, it reminds me that none of us are alone in this struggle. This poet is one of my favorite people to read, learn from, and most importantly, spend time with. If neither of us ever get to become household names, I’m still so glad I get to/got to spend my time sharing poems with this one true audience member.

Tresha Faye Haefner, A Pep Talk for Those Going (and Not Going) to AWP. With advice from Danusha Lameris and Elizabeth Gilbert

Yesterday evening Peter Kenny and I stood in the doorway of the wood-panelled hall at the Art Workers’ Guild in London and surveyed the throng: who were all these very tall, young people? I’ve no idea who gets invited to these shebangs, but it was a mystery to me – ten years ago the event would have stuffed full of the grandees of the poetry world. Now it’s all become a very youthful. Which I’m not complaining about, just observing!

So on to the ceremonies, and we were given readings of all the seven commended poems and then the top three. All poets did a good job, and the judges too, particularly the smiling Romalyn Ante. I particularly enjoyed Kit Buchan’s ‘Hallow’een Ghazal’, read very confidently from memory, and Matt Barnard’s second-prize ‘Two Boys at Midnight’. And then who should be announced as the winning poet but Fiona Larkin –  out of the Pindrop stable no less! –  and someone I feel actually know, with a lovely poem ‘Absence has a grammar’ – actually the title alone is prize-worthy.

I asked Fiona afterwards – what was it like getting the call? “It was back in January,” she said, ” I had a message to call the Poetry Society, and I assumed my direct debit hadn’t gone through or something…” Haha! An anecdote to dine out on for some time I think. How wonderful!

Robin Houghton, At the National Poetry Competition awards night

VerseFest runs March 25-29. The kickoff was at Saw Gallery, Ottawa. It runs every day. We are so lucky to have access to this and some events are even offered for free.

What a strange thing for this rural hermit to be in a city, teeming like an anthill. More pedestrians per block than I’ve seen in months and months. And in a low-ceilinged room, so many tables and familiar faces. (I was too gobsmacked to be social but a few people hallooed me.) […]

I wasn’t going to take the mantle of thankful posting for the privilege of witnessing the poets this year but this process gives me a chance to reflect.

I’m not going to be obsessive like some years, going to every event, livetweeting, taking hundreds of photos, even with fresh concussion, migraine, meds and hiding in hoodie, cap and sunglasses. That was a mad caper.

Pearl Pirie, VerseFest is now on

J and M made me laugh like the monocle de mon oncle in the Gopher alcove. We chatted in earnest about the unwritable book and the literary urge to fuck around and find out being no less urgent as the world burns. This is how friendship works between writers: we converse through various texts while wrangling quotations and interpretations as if the world depended on it. As if we, too, depend on it. The as-if is our solace and our shared joy. We refuse the world we are given. We argue over the other ways it could be. We blow up the given to realize the otherwise. We entreat our readers to imagine more— and urgently. We fear dying before the book that escapes us, the book that will free us, the text that will loosen the compulsion or obsession to write. We covet the pure products of pears and apricots. We ode them for blowing our minds. When we leave each other, we return to the world where literature, art, philosophy, humanities, and words don’t ‘really matter’ — or matter instrumentally. But these moments are called upon in nights of despair, and we remember that we are not alone. Not entirely alone. Not utterly so.

Alina Stefanescu, Notes on what the programs called “AWP 2025”.

This morning, as on every morning for the last two weeks, the wood was loud with birdsong. I heard robin, wren, blackbird, an extremely jazzy thrush, and somewhere at the back of it all, like Ringo Starr making his presence known in the corners of Abbey Road, a woodpecker, his knocking persistent and timeless. Two dipper came out of nowhere, trailing each other’s twists and turns like Spitfires in an aerial display of astonishing dexterity. Apparently exhausted, they came to land on separate rocks in the stream, their white bibs bobbing. Take away their markings, give them a black beak, and you could be looking at a blackbird. Their song is not a million miles away, either. Then they were away again, lost in their spirals. Leaving the wood for the road back to the car, a wren, briefly at eye level on a fence post, glared at me for a second, then treated me to a solo of distilled purity and scorn.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember my blog post from last year on Tom Paulin’s great poem of anger and healing, ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. Again without going into details, it has been in my mind again recently, as we negotiate the slow-slow-slow-slow-quickquickquick of our beloved NHS as it limps to put right that damage. Not the closing of the poem this time, but the first line of its final stanza: ‘the vicious trapped crying of a wren’. As fulfilment of the lyric utterance promised in the poem’s title, this is worth the admission fee (sorry kids) on its own. Everything you can possibly know about wrens and wren-ness is in those six words. I can’t prove this; I just know it to be true.

This led me, by way of faulty memory, to the much unhappier reading experience of being given 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson for my birthday several years ago. It’s not just a book I was unable to finish, it joins a select group of books I have actually thrown across the room.

Anthony Wilson, Birdsong

Let me here jump on the Ada Limón bandwagon. I have not read her work in a while. Here’s one. It’s this line that sticks with me: “I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.” Isn’t it great? A hearth of spiders! I see a flat stone spread before the gape of a fireplace, see the detritus of insect leavings on the slab and the dusty crisscross of webbing, frayed and swaying in a breeze down the chimney. But the fire is just there too, the heat of it also, the spiders warm and hungry, wound in the corner watching, waiting. In an early hour they dart out at a floundering in the lines, something tiny and caught. It breaks free. Something else causes the web to sway, the spider to dart, but it’s a cinder, dry, useless.

But also I love then the quotidian: the ritual garbage rolling. The idle chitchat.

I love that the poem then stops short. I bump into it as it says, “Look, we are not unspectacular things.” Yes, I say. That is true. So true!

This poem billows out into the world just like the stars are fabric-spread across the sky, and we, we too billow in our possibilities. You. Me. All of us. Our hunger, our burning, our wonder, our promise.

Marilyn McCabe, what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Blueprint produce a series of elegant pamphlets wrapped in a distinctive, iridescent blue cover. “Year of the Rat” has a central sequence about a large family of rats who’d moved into the woodshed, but it doesn’t start the collection. […]

Most of these poems would have been written during Covid lockdowns, pushing the idea of survival and what family connections mean to the fore. Covid is not explicitly mentioned, these are not lockdown poems, but it lurks. These poems are an unsentimental, compassionate look at family, how blood connections and inheritances survival and can either strengthen or weaken familial bonds.

Emma Lee, “Year of the Rat” Charles G Lauder Jr (Blueprint) – book review

In the curtains are still we see [M.C.] Gardner’s talent: it is a characteristically vivid depiction of a scene which has a powerful emotional resonance. Not a word is wasted. Each line strives to convey as much as possible, in as few words as possible. As her drop-in revealed, Gardner deploys these skills to explore the nature of male-female relationships. Many of the poems in the collection explore the frustrations, the anticipation, the hopes, the joys, the disappointments, and the memories of love affairs. There are, however, other themes too. For example, melted in cubes examines the transience of life; a walk in the woods explores the palliative effects of nature during Lockdown; the project the unreliability of appearances; the wedding canvas, and the summer exhibition the nature of visual art and the life of the artist; and all rules are suspended and manipulation the nature of freedom.

There are also poems that are informed by Gardner’s Romanian heritage. I found remember the locusts particularly interesting. Here the style is significantly different: ‘we are trapped- / mile long Sovrom train with Cyrillic labels/ locked freight trains with a message of friendship…/ Sovrom wood, Sovrom meat,/ Sovrom grain, Sovrom cement,/ Sovrom pipes…/ we are trapped.’ The cumulative effect of repetition and listing conveys the repressive nature of the regime. Furthermore, it is the directness in these lines and in lines such as: ‘I must watch over my shoulder/ there are informers everywhere’ that makes the reality so authentic and imaginable. Its debilitating effect, however, is left to Gardner’s characteristic imagery of: ‘broken pavements, bare poplar trees,/ silent streets of decaying villas/ with blue paper at the windows…/the old and the young walk shrivelled…/ ghosts of long queues’ and to the symbol that concludes the poem: of ‘the silhouette of the street beggar/ rummaging into the street refuse bins.’

I have always been an admirer of M.C. Gardner’s poetry and consequently had high expectations of this collection. I hope it is clear from what I have written above that those expectations were realised in full. Lovers of imagist poetry will find much to enjoy in discarded objects of a love affair.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘discarded objects of a love affair’ by M.C. Gardner

Through seventeen extended sequences, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge [by MC Hyland] exists as a suite of prose poems within the nebulous space of short stories by Lydia Davis and the essay-poems of poets such as Anne Carson, Benjamin Niespodziany, Lisa Robertson and Phil Hall. “Against the onrush of history,” the sequence “Essay on Weather” continues, “I sought the register of clouds, of breezes, of minute shifts in actual or perceived temperature. Against the dying present, I accumulated a small log of instances.” Directly citing Canadian poet Anne Carson infamous Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), the back cover offers: “In the tradition of Montaigne’s Essais and Anne Carson’s Short Talks, MC Hyland’s poem-essays weave together the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight.”

With titles such as “Essay on Paper,” “Essay on Ophelia,” “Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender I),” “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets” and “Essay on the Prose Poem,” the collection holds as a single, book-length unit, offering echoes of structure and titles to contain an absolute array of multitudes. Through spellbinding prose, Hyland offers sentences across vibrant thinking, attempting to connect disparate thoughts and the chasms between, as she writes, the dead and the living. “In a poem addressed to either a lost lover or an unborn child,” the four-page, four-stanza poem “Essay on the Optimism of Attachment” ends, “I wrote I didn’t want to make you the referent of my theological longings. The space of either love or belief: a space of absence, of silence. A dazzling cloud into which I lean.” Hyland holds the form of the prose poem as complex as Carson’s suite of talks, offering the prose lyric as capable of containing entire realms of complex meditation, weaving multiple threads on reading, writing and experience, and even the limitations through which one attempts to examine through writing. “Which is to say: the experience of pain cannot be reliably witnessed,” Hyland writes, in the third part of “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets,” “at least not through language.” As well, there’s a shared element of Carson’s, as well as evident through Phil Hall, of the poem as a means through which to discuss, through a kind of collage or weaving, the very act of attempting to understand how best to live in and experience the world. I’ve long been an admirer of Hyland’s work, but if this is an example of where their work is going, I am very excited to see what might come next.

rob mclennan, MC Hyland, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge

I was very happy this week to learn that one of my favourite writers, Anthony V. Capildeo, has been awarded a prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for their poetry. Twenty years ago — when they were writing as Vahni Capildeo and I had a small poetry press called Landfill — I published their prose poem Person Animal Figure (2005), a sequence for three voices expressed through three typefaces. Typesetting a text is one way to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and my ongoing interest in the nature and history of the prose poem began with the making of this pamphlet.

Capildeo has since published many more books and pamphlets of poetry in both prose and verse, and this is the achievement that the Windham Campbell Prize recognises. Something that doesn’t yet exist, though, is a collection of their critical prose, which I admire just as highly. Their gift for fluent reflection on writing as a kind of thought woven into the wider business of living seems to me comparable to that of Virginia Woolf (who once wrote “the peculiar form of an essay implies a peculiar substance; you can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other”). So this Pinks is a selection of passages that I find particularly illuminating of their own poetry.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #30: A Poetics of Reverberation

The bit of Latin immediately preceding the Shakespeare quotation is from Erasmus’s Lingua. Pointing out how Erasmian Shakespeare is seems to have gone out of fashion — probably just because not many people read Erasmus any more — but in my (unoriginal, if dated) opinion he is much more like Erasmus than anyone else, and I suppose the anonymous compiler of this collection thought so too. (For the avoidance of doubt, being like Erasmus is a good thing.)

Scholars trying to build an academic career have to reserve any such “discoveries” for a big splash in the Review of English Studies, ideally with a linked piece in the Times Literary Supplement. But one of the fun things about not being a career academic any more is putting this sort of thing on substack instead. I’ve done this a few times already — pretty much all my posts in the “from the archives” section on the contents page contain original research. Many of the manuscripts I’ve written about here haven’t been studied by anyone else, and that’s even more true at the level of individual Latin poems: I’ve written before about a tiny bit of Latin that might possibly be one of John Donne’s lost Latin epigrams, for instance.

But today I thought I’d try to write a slightly more systematic account of what you do, as a scholar, when you make what might be a “new find” — when you come across in manuscript what might be a “new” (i.e. previously lost or overlooked) poem by a reasonably well-known author. In this case, a Latin poem that looks plausibly as if it may be by Robert Southwell, the English Catholic poet and Jesuit martyr, hanged at Tyburn in 1595, but which is not any of the relatively small number of his Latin poems that have previously been known, and — more interestingly — is also not at all like them.

Victoria Moul, A possible new poem by Robert Southwell (with a bonus smidgen of Shakespeare and Erasmus)

For Auden and his fellow social realists, the world was to be understood, to a greater or lesser degree, through the lens of a particular kind of Marxist thought, with its essentially Victorian view of history as linear, the arrow of time pointing on to inevitable progress. This was married to a relatively unproblematic view of language and its relationship with the world the poet wished to evoke and the ideas he (invariably a he) wanted to expound. In the 30s at least, the MacSpaunday poets had something to say and every confidence in poetry as a vehicle through which they could say it. The result was a body of work, much of it very powerful, that was ironic in tone, impersonal, favouring (in theory at least) the communal over the individual, suspicious of the profound; what their Irish contemporary Brian Coffey described as the poetry of the audenary.

Of course, decades are not impermeable containers of the homogenous, and not all 30s poets were the same. Indeed, there was a strong counter-current of writing that moved to a different rhythm, or set of rhythms to the mainstream. Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne and the small group of English Surrealists associated with him forged their own individual styles during this time, and that most individual of all 20^th century British poets, David Jones, published his Arthurian epic of WWI, In Parenthesis in 1937. This poem, in which history is absorbed into the mythic, appeared just a year after TS Eliot published Burnt Norton, whose opening lines are an implicit rejection of linear time:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

Barker and Gascoyne were to discover their voices in the decade that followed, while Thomas and Eliot, the Eliot of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, along with Yeats, were major influences on the younger poets who came after them. And many of these poets were beginning to publish before the end of the 30s, in student magazines out of Oxford and Cambridge and the anthology The New Apocalypse, which appeared in 1939.

Something had clearly happened to cause this shift, and that something was the imminence, and then the actuality, of a second World War. In the face of such a definite instance of history repeating itself, it must have been difficult to accept the idea that time was a steady march towards a Socialist utopia, and ironic indifference to the difficulties of expression through language may well have seemed an unaffordable luxury. Auden himself tacitly acknowledged this shift by sailing for America as a prelude to more or less abandoning his left-wing politics.

Billy Mills, The Collected Poems of Terence Tiller

You stir the substance of memory:
start and stop and start again, not knowing

what you’ll turn up, where it will lead—
you know it goes deep, down to the water table.
That’s where you seek the roots of conversation.

When you stand at the lip of the well and call,
only your voice bounces back and echoes. Do it again,
start and stop and start again, not knowing but knowing:
in conversation you’d talk with someone besides yourself.

Luisa A. Igloria, In Conversation

Many writers were stunned to learn last week that Meta, the tech conglomerate that owns Facebook and Instagram, has been using their books to train its AI assistant, Llama 3. In a major story for The Atlantic, Alex Reisner outlines how Meta wished to circumnavigate time and financial costs, and so turned to LibGen.

What is LibGen? According to one site, “Library Genesis is a Shadow Library, and a useful and comprehensive online portal that offers free access to millions of ebooks, articles and pdf files in a range of languages.”

But what exactly is a “Shadow Library?” According to Wikipedia, “Shadow libraries are part of the open access and open knowledge movements. They seek to more freely disseminate academic scholarship and other media, often citing a moral imperative to make knowledge freely available.^”

Fully-flowing information? Open access to knowledge? Free books for everyone in the world? Sounds pretty good. Except, according to Reisner, “Over the years, the collection has ballooned as contributors piled in more and more pirated work.” Now, that pirated work is being used to train Llama 3 and ultimately enrich Meta rather than the authors themselves, many of whom were unaware their works were even available.

The Author’s Guild has initiated legal action “against Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other AI companies for using pirated books. If your book was used by Meta, you’re automatically included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action…”

To see if your own work, which includes pieces published in literary magazines, appears in LibGen, you can search the database here or use Reisner’s “cleaned-up version” here.

Becky Tuch, How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By Lit Mags!

Today, as I walked across the L.A. Convention Center at this year’s AWP conference, someone asked me, “Are you important?”

“No,” I said, “absolutely not. Are you? I’m nobody.”

She seemed to give it some thought as I continued on my way. She watched me like she might know me, despite my explanation: I’m nobody.

I think of Emily Dickinson’s follow-up line, “Are you nobody too?”

Being nobody has always been a comfort to me. No parents. No expectations. Writing Nobody to contact in case of emergency in my young years. If I’d become a drifter or a grifter, it would have been par for the course. “I figured you’d steal your way across America,” Charity said to me once. Charity, my biological mother.

“Making enough money to support one person isn’t that hard,” I said. I was still in college then. “I suppose if I want to build a big smashing life, that might be something.”

In many of the stories I read, women are not presented as reliable or valuable narrators. You can’t quite believe the woman’s version of the tale.

A man’s story is another matter. In literature, a man’s story is a great thing, a revered thing. A big stomping thing in the world.

When I have a conversation with a man, their words stomp all over God’s world, and mine walk around the edges of the room. A man and his story stare at the sun, the whole face of the sun.

A woman’s story is a small, smudged thing, a stepped-on thing, a hard-to-see thing, a crowded back thing.

In my childhood, adults were not reliable. Other kids were not reliable. God was not reliable.

I always knew my mother was an unreliable narrator. Nothing she said was true. She said I was evil.

I’m not really evil, I thought. Evil is relative.

Now that I’m an adult, evil feels real, not relative.

Kate Gale, Are Women Reliable Narrators?

A lawyer sends me a pdf of my mother’s handwritten will. I’m not in it. I have a legal right to contest it. I think it’s funny that contest as a noun is defined as a competition to obtain something, as a verb it means to oppose something as wrong.

It’s funny in that kind of laugh or it will kill you kind of way. Who wins? And what does anyone get out of calling out the monsters under the bed. In the bed.

I print the will, rip it into strips, put it in a blender with this mossy Norwegian water, and I make new paper out of it. Then I make collages in the shapes of wasps.

And only then do I write to the lawyer, removing myself from her obituary.

Ren Powell, Estranged

I’m still thinking about what Rebecca Solnit says in Hope in the Dark: “Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.”

This past week, I found joy in a March snowfall — out like a lion and all that. I was also working so just had to do quick little clicks on my way there. I would have liked more, but also, I did get a few okay ones! Joy! And there was a lamp in the window, with books. This seemed to symbolize so much for me at that moment. All this weather. So. Much. Weather. But also, a light in a window, steadfast. It feels like we’re all living in a snow squall, in a spring storm. Still, there is hope, there are those making of themselves a light, offering light, keeping a light on.

Shawna Lemay, A Lamp in the Window and Other Joys

There are still wars raging, crying for
attention. There are still pictures of blood
and rubble, renewing grief. There is still a
world falling apart, demanding correction.
There is still a lopsided reality begging
for the weight to shift. The language of
being has bent itself into errors: we
debate in the wrong tense, our curt
apostrophes are in faulty places forcing
mistaken belonging, an unequal grammar
is purging all meaning, leaving untethered
words: words that fall like fire into the
stubborn mouth of disbelief. The moon
hangs like a sword over us. How should
we deliver ourselves to the clouds?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The unravelling

beneath a sky that may or may not answer
i bring out my heart
i begin to read

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: a voice the size of an acorn, a seahorse on a dander, dancing foxes, singing earthworms, and much more. Enjoy.

The breath scent of mother fig

under the chuppah of life

time got sucked up into a late-summer straw

fully enjoyed, fortunately, but fast fast fast

leaving us reeling – never ready, breathless 

standing under canopies of scarlet leaves, 

in wind faster than the mind, among unheard cries, 

before doors of the open ark

leaning face to face with All That Is

Jill Pearlman, Shanah Tovah

The autumn rain last night
left the earth boggy, trees dripping, 

sky fog-murky and chill. My dog 
doesn’t brood over this. He sets off […]

Sarah Russell, Sharing October

It’s peak leaf-peeping season in Maine, where I’m spending a week visiting my eldest at university, taking in all of the crisp autumn air and the morning sunlight through the pines. There’s something about being in the land of Hawthorne and Longfellow and more that moves me to write. I’ve missed this weather and this work — focusing on my writing life, committing the time to the writing habit, to the “peace of the writing desk” as David Huddle calls it in his book, The Writing Habit.

Perhaps I am also writing out of sadness, for recently I learned of Lewis Putnam Turco’s passing. I had thought about visiting him during this most recent trip to Maine, yet I learned a day after his funeral that he had passed before I arrived in the area.

Lew was a force in the poetry world and a meaningful part of my writing life — I knew him mainly through one chance meeting at the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative around 2008 and via correspondence afterwards. He was witty, playful, irreverent, and at times cantankerous, but generous and kind and willing to accept me into his world of formalist poets. I’ll be ever grateful to Lew for corresponding with me over the years, and for including my work in the fourth edition of The Book of Forms when I had only had a few publication credits under my belt. In fact, it was at our first encounter, washing our hands in the mens restroom at the West Chester Poetry Conference, that we struck up a conversation about textspeak and how it was being used to write novels in Japan.

Scot Slaby, A Maine Post: Remembering Lewis Turco

I want to be autumn’s secretary in soft
corduroy and velvet, shades of russet,
saffron and auburn. I am burnt caramel,
warmed chocolate in a tight toffee skirt
and heels.
[…]

It is pouring with rain as I type this, the sky is grey porridge. I’m at my desk and racing to finish the new draft of the new novel this month, it’s so close now.

I’m at the stage of writing where I have no idea why I am doing this and who cares, but I know I care and therefore must keep going so I will be where I want to be with this story, and say what I mean to say, which is a very big and scary thing. Right now writing hurts, it is a bit like stirring a risotto, you think you made a mistake and you have pot of weird raw rice soup, but you keep slowly stirring, and very slowly adding the stock, and then all of a sudden the risotto thickens and comes together and the rice is cooked perfectly and it is the right consistency and so delicious and creamy and you cannot believe you made it.

Salena Godden, Autumn’s Secretary

I started this blog post almost two months ago. I’ve always admired people who can write dispatches from life when it’s moving at high speed, and for that matter, I’ve always admired diarists. That’s never been my way. I can move and think fast, but I write slow when it comes to my personal creative work. In less than 24 months, I have had to try on several lives for size. One was too small; one was too big. The good news is that I’m working at a nonprofit that feels humane and sustainable, with room to grow, and the skills I’ve used in teaching for much of the last decade are also a great match for being a director of communications. But still, it’s a lot of change! Bruce Feiler is just one of the thought leaders in talking about “lifequakes,” and his work has helped distill what I’ve been processing. And will need to keep processing. 

Sandra Beasley, Goldilocks, and Beyond

I do miss the ease of working for copywriting agencies, but times have changed and I’m hopeful that for now at least AI cannot write bespoke wedding poetry! The privilege of helping people express their love, sorrow and joy is beyond measure, and the fact that people trust me with such milestone events is a wonderful thing. This year my poetry prints have helped celebrate numerous weddings, milestone birthdays, anniversaries and two new jobs! It means the world to have my words as part of so many occasions knowing the prints are on people’s wall is an honour. As I move into writing poems that will be gifts for Christmas, this feeling of being part of significant moments in people’s lives continues to grow.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Autumn – a time to prepare for renewal

The only scary hurricane I’ve never ridden out was Wilma. This was the same year as Katrina, which in Fort Lauderdale came through as a category one that did plenty but was a baby compared to what it became. Wilma was a fading category two when it hit us, but the eye was 70 miles wide and the storm bands pretty much covered the state. We lived in an old Florida apartment, low to the ground, walls made of cinder blocks and rebar, with hurricane shutters and strong doors. We thought about leaving, but where would we go? With regular traffic, it’s a ten hour drive to Georgia and we didn’t know anyone there we could have stayed with. We didn’t have the money for an extended hotel stay, not for three humans and two cats at gale force wind prices.

We hunkered down, got supplies, put blankets on the floor of the most secure interior closet we had in case we actually were going to try to sleep. The rains came and the winds picked up. Every once in a while I’d ease the door open to see what it was like outside. The wind bowed the palm trees and I thought about Victor Hernandez Cruz’s poem “Problems With Hurricanes” and the lines “How would your family / feel if they had to tell / The generations that you / got killed by a flying / Banana.” I shut the door. I thought about the one person killed during Hurricane Charley, a guy who stepped outside while in the calming eye of the storm to have a smoke only to have a tree fall on him. The winds calmed and I looked out. The table on our porch had come over the fence and wedged itself between my car and Amy’s truck. The winds picked up, blew directly at us, and then the water was coming in under the door, and we were mopping it up with towels and trying to push it back.

Brian Spears, Running from a storm

It has been a day, no, several
days now. The animals have fled through
the torn brambles. People watch as houses
topple: their chicken legs bow in the swell
of water, and windows fold like postcards
on a revolving rack. A voice the size of an acorn
comes out of the dark. What will you surrender—
your comb, your pillow, your blue thread and needle?

Luisa A. Igloria, Eye of the Storm

As I’ve thought about all the hurricane poems I’ve written, I’ve gone to the blog to see how often I’ve posted them.  So, rather than repeat one, let me offer a new one here.

In the Asheville area, we’re in a time period where lots of folks are applying for FEMA assistance.  I will likely not apply; we haven’t had any damage, after all.

But in part, I won’t apply because of how past hurricanes have shaped me.  We’ve had damage that wasn’t covered by insurance, so I applied for FEMA money.  Each time, each hurricane, we were turned down because we had insurance.  Different administrations, same result.

In 2017, after Hurricane Irma, we applied for assistance, and even though we were turned down, I still had an exit interview.  My memory is that it was a phone interview.  Did I know it was an exit interview?  Did I complete it hoping there was a chance of some money?  Probably.

It was later, after seeing how the poet Oliver de la Paz transformed screening questions for autism into a poem, that I thought about doing the same with the FEMA exit interview.  I probably gave a simple answer to the question that begins the poem, the lack of money and supplies answer.

I have other hurricane poems that I like better.  But this one might be one of the more honest hurricane poems I’ve ever written.

FEMA Exit Interview

“What factor has been most important
In your inability
To fully recover?”

a. Lack of money

b. Lack of supplies

c. Your inability to find a contractor or other workers

d. Your insurance company has been non-responsive

e. Your mortgage company is a cosigner and has unreasonable requirements before they will release the funds from the insurance company

f. Not wanting to invest any more resources in this house that has betrayed you

g. Your exhaustion

h. Your irrational fear of the phone

i. All of your friends have decided to move and you cannot make any decisions because of your mournful state

j. You realize you have made a dreadful mistake by moving to the coast in a time of sea level rise

k. This house was the cornerstone of your retirement plans, and the storm has made you realize that these plans are untenable and you don’t want to invest more into this sunk cost, but if you don’t invest the money, you will never sell the house, and your sunk cost will be lost forever

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, FEMA Exit Interview

“shore-bound by force ten gales we dream about the ones that got away… far from any dimly recollected grasp… a compass misplaced forever…”

I’m very pleased that my video Preening will be streamed on-line as part of the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival on 15th October. I’ve had work there before and they are always really good programs, covering a diverse range of topics and styles.

Preening is a strange, slow meditative piece, using a single sequence of seabirds (Crested Terns, Thalasseus bergii cristatus) waiting out a storm on a beach at Marion Bay, South Australia. As they quietly preen, they wonder about their increasingly imperilled future in the face of climate change.

The footage has been slowed down using a frame-blending algorithm that occasionally creates interesting distortions. The sequence was then overlaid on itself with a time shift of several seconds using a complex composting procedure so the birds appear to be interacting with themselves.

The text adapted is from Lessons in Neuroscience, Lesson 1: Phantom Limb, originally published in my 2012 collection urban biology.

Ian Gibbins, “Preening”

Something to think about . . . do some of us still cling? . . . obediently and thoughtlessly . . . to beliefs such as

                I can’t / poets can’t     understand mathematics
                                or
                I can’t / math people can’t     understand poetry 

Current interactive teaching/learning processes are helping to revise those negative attitudes — and my thoughts on the subject were brought to mind by a poem that showed up recently in my email.  It is Poem 15 in the Poetry 180 project, an activity initiated in 2002 by Poet Laureate Billy Collins in 2002 — a project that provides a poem for students for each day of the traditional school year.  (Each Sunday subscribers get an email that provides a link to a poem for each day of the coming week.)

    Poem 15 is by poet Tom Wayman and entitled “The Poet.”  Here are several of its lines — not words I agree with but related to the ideas expressed above and possibly useful for provoking classroom discussion!

        Has difficulty classifying and categorizing objects
        Has difficulty retaining such things as
        addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables
        May recognize a word one day and not the next

Tom Weyman’s complete poem, “The Poet,” is available here.  Another Weyman poem, “Stacking Chairs,” was featured in this 2021 blog posting.  

JoAnne Growney, Classroom Difficulties with Mathematics

Happy National Poetry Day to all those who worship at the altar of words. This year’s theme is ‘counting’.

In November my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, will be published by Nine Arches Press. I can’t wait to share it with you.

Blackbird Singing at Dusk by Wendy Pratt is a bold exploration of place within nature through themes of rural working-class identity and the female body, alongside explorations of loss and the repetitive nature of time. 

Today I want to share with you one of the poems from the collection.

As the theme of the day is ‘counting’ I’m sharing a poem called ‘Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Blackbird’.

My intention with this particular poem was to embed myself within a group of poetic observers, poets in particular, who had written ‘thirteen…blackbird’ poems, and other series of polaroid-like observations of nature. Poets such as Wallace Stevens, who wrote Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which influenced RS Thomas’s ‘Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man’, which used to be available to view online but doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

There’s an interesting article here, if you can access it, about that connection between Wallace and Thomas: An Abstraction Blooded. I’d be interested in your thoughts around that connection, and other poems that you think fit into this observed, short poem canon.

Both the poems play with the idea of observation and perception. Both of the poems play with haiku style poems rooted perhaps in the Japanese artist Hokusai’s ‘Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji’. Hokusai was influenced by other artists viewing landscape from different perspectives, and he in turn influenced future artists to do the same. I wanted to be influenced by these artists and in a very small way take up space in that lineage. I wanted to add to the observed stances around nature and landscape. The beginning of that process was looking back through my life to times both significant (the blackbird at the hospital window) and seemingly insignificant, to build a picture of the blackbirds existing, living, dying, singing around me oblivious to whether I was experiencing a significant life moment or not. I wanted to capture these tiny moments of interconnectedness, of noticing. And to recognise that the lives of animals are not significant because they are attached to our lives. They are significant in their own right.

Wendy Pratt, For National Poetry Day: A poem from my new collection

The poem I’m posting here, in English and Spanish, refers to a news report from June 2018 about a Salvadoran single father and undocumented migrant who was deported back to El Salvador while his six-year-old daughter remained in US custody. The poem incorporates details from the news story and text from Catholic liturgy. I’m sharing ‘Six’ today because it’s National Poetry Day here in the UK and this year the theme is ‘counting’. My thanks to Lorena Pino Montilla for translating my poem into Spanish – her translation is published below. Lorena and I will be reading poems from my zine, in English and Spanish, on Saturday, 2 November at Walcot Chapel, Bath, at 5pm.

Six

Papá, when
are you getting me
out of here?
asks the small voice
on the telephone
¿Cuándo?

I am counting the days
How old are you now?
holds up six fingers
Where is my beating heart?
¿Dónde?
Silence replies

Her little bed
a small country of songs
now a lonely place
Where are you, Papá?
¿Dónde?
Is my voice small?
[…]

Josephine Corcoran, A poem for National Poetry Day

Someone remembers the voices of the dead. / Remember the voices of the dead.

It is unacceptable to take a life.

Someone remembers the laughter of the dead. / Remember the laughter of the dead.

It is unacceptable to take a life.

The smiles of the dead. The joy of the dead. / The smiles of the dead. The joy of the dead.

It is unacceptable to take a life.

The dead are dead are dead are dead. / The dead are dead are dead are dead

It is unacceptable to take a life.

War spreads/ Wars spread.

It is unacceptable to take a life.

Bob Mee, A LITURGY FOR GOVERNMENTS EVERYWHERE

Academic and artistic life have been a whirlwind, as is usual this time of year, but luckily there’s been lots of art in the mix. On Tuesday Rena Priest gave an inspiring reading on campus. Wednesday my spouse and his collaborator talked about their new book, Revising Reality. On Thursday a colleague, Emma Steinkraus, delivered a fascinating artist’s talk about a new campus exhibit of women botanical artists, “Impossible Gardens,” and we drove to Charlottesville on Friday to see another exhibit by a friend, painter Carolyn Capps: “The Ocean: Vastly Empty, Infinitely Full.” A LOT, but I wouldn’t have missed any of it.

This weekend was mostly grading, but I also went to a panel put together by a new local arts organization, MidMountain, about murder ballads and the southern gothic–there’s a linked concert on 10/12 that I’ll miss. I need to tip life balance back a few degrees toward resting-thinking-writing time, but teaching and art eruptions aside, when you’re closing in on a book launch, the to-do list is long. I did see a gorgeous cover design for Mycocosmic this week and spend many hours on the second round of interior proofs, so the big reveal and digital ARCs are coming soon. […]

The news is hard right now–war, election fear, catastrophic flooding not far from here–but as Rena said, poetry can be a “secret medicine,” reminding us that we’re all connected. I’m grateful that even in my small town, art is so abundant.

Lesley Wheeler, Impossible, improbable, and infinitely full

Foghorn

I blast my splintered words
into storm-tributaries
 
 
and
 
 
           maybe
 
 
a seahorse on a dander
senses a faint splash.

Karen Macfarlane

My own poem from the Wee Gatherin workshop in August. Inspired by the tiny foghorn at the foot of the lighthouse. You can read more about my poetry here.

Karen Macfarlane, Foghorn

This week I took the Eurostar to London for just 24 hours, to attend a few meetings and — of all things — a school reunion. Every time I go to England these days I find myself just a little farther removed from the country, just that tiniest bit more “French” (even though however fluent I become, I will never sound like a native speaker). […]

While in London I passed through Westminster Hall (part of the Houses of Parliament), where a plaque in the floor commemorates the trial of Thomas More, who was condemned to death in this room in 1535. Westminster Hall is also where Queen Elizabeth II lay in state following her death in September 2022.

That’s not to say that there isn’t English poetry of comparable sophistication at this period, but just that the great majority of it was still in Latin — Thomas More’s very popular Latin epigrams, for instance, were published as an appendix to Erasmus’s 1518 Basel edition of More’s Utopia.

Victoria Moul, Crossing the Channel in 1526 and today

I tried my best to get to grips with Kay Ryan’s Odd Blocks – Selected and New Poems (Carcanet, 2011), and liked her quirky, playful poetry to start with; but as the book wore on, it felt like I was reading a weird mixture of Lorine Niedecker, Anglo-Saxon riddles, the Martian Poets, Dr Seuss and the utterances of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.

Ryan was one of the poets new to me in the truly excellent anthology, Women’s Work, subtitled ‘Modern Women Poets Writing in English’, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, published by Seren in 2016 and available here. It’s a chunky book, divided up by (loose) themes, and is as readable and enjoyable as any anthology I’ve ever read. Come to think of it, I’ve rarely read an anthology all the way through like I did with this one. Other poets featured whom I was aware of but had never really read before include Dorianne Lux, Ruth Fainlight, Sarah Hannah and Olive Senior. I’ve since bought collections by some of them to add to my TBR pile. It reminded me that the purpose of an anthology should never be an attempt to be fully representative of a cohort or period, because that would be impossible; but rather to shine spotlights, however brief, on poets and poems as little known as some of the others are well-known. It’s that rubbing of shoulders which provides the delights for seasoned readers. That’s not to say, though, that Women’s Work wouldn’t make an excellent introduction for readers who haven’t read much contemporary poetry because it most certainly would.

Matthew Paul, September reading

Verso de Medianoche is a pseudonym of a writer, now settled in Spain, who chose to publish these poems under a pen name because “some stories are better told at midnight”. There’s a content warning in the book for “dark and sensitive themes, including intense emotional distress and heartbreak”. The title is a mash-up. “Más” is Spanish for “more”, “cara” is Spanish for face or look (depending on context) but the second “a” has been struck out and the word becomes the English “caring” (“caring” in Spanish is “cariñosa/cariñoso”.) Readers are being asked to look beyond the surface, look beyond the brave face someone may put on their trauma or distress.

There are images drawn onto photographs interspersed with the poems (the images on their own pages so don’t interfere with reading the poems). A striking one shows a lounge in grey monochrome with a drawing of an elaborate birdcage in green with a woman’s figure sitting on the interior base, hunched with one arm hugged her knees pulled to her chest with the other holding her head. Long brown hair spills over her shoulders with red marks on her cheeks, possibly from crying, possibly from being slapped. She has a yellow top, yellow socks and blue jeans splattered with yellow. The implication is that life is grey, the cage is organic from herself and the yellow perhaps an attempt to brighten herself or bring some sunshine into her life. The poem that follows it, “The Essence of Unforgotten” is apt.

Emma Lee, “[Más] Caraing” Verso de Medianoche – book review

Today I turn my attention to the work of the well-known, prolific poet, Margaret Royall. 2024 has seen her author not one but two publications: Owl Fetish, (Dreich), and her full collection Toccata and Fugue with Harp, (Hedgehog Press). I intend to focus this review on the latter: almost a hundred pages of intensely personal poems that reflect on an engaging and varied life.

The collection is split into three parts: the poems in each part have a distinctive character and focus. In part one, Toccata, which makes up almost half of the collection , we find narrative and character driven poems that focus on Royall’s early life. We meet her parents and her extended family, featuring such unforgettable characters as Nanny Buttle, Grandma Browning, her great aunts in Louth, and Aunt Jessie. We also experience with her what it was like to be alive in a very different time to that now, when houses were heated with coal, when man first stepped on the moon and when London was swinging in the sixties. In these poems Royall demonstrates the ability to create a strong sense of place, time and person through well-selected sensory detail and imagery. Take for example, her characterisation of Nanny Buttle in her poem Nanny Buttle Sings a Hymn to the Tune Cwm Rhondda. She writes: ‘That all-pervading scent of Pears soap/ caught in her aura, the pungent kick of/ Amami setting lotion from Friday night’s/ shampoo and set; loose overalls baggy across/ shrivelled breasts that mourned the pert nipples/ of a lost youth…/   moulded from local clay/ from daisy chains    from May Day revelries/ Harvest suppers   first communion/ sunsets that gobbled up the sky.’ Royall describes her characters with such economy. Yet there is more than enough here to enable the reader to pick Nanny Buttle out of any crowd.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Toccata and Fugue with Harp’ by Margaret Royall

Movement by Suzanne Maxson
The poetry world tends to celebrate the emerging artist, the young promising writers who come into the writing world in a whirlwind. I have been finding, however, what an over-looked treasure older poets may be. Movement is Maxson’s debut collection, and, judging from the back cover, she has to be at least…well it would be rude for me to guess her age, but maybe as old as my grandma. And I’m no spring chicken. Age aside, there’s a depth of wisdom in these poems that you just don’t find in most debut collections. Much of her poetry asks questions concerning privilege, wealth, the brevity of life (she doesn’t have a website, but I found some of her poems HERE). A good example and one of her shorter poems is “The Shoes in My Closet,” where she utilizes rhyme to create almost a chant-like rhythm, culminating into asking “Is it right that I own these many shoes / for every possible weather, work / or celebration, while so many / have no shoes?” So if you want a collection that will make you slow down and consider life for a moment, I highly recommend Movement.

Renee Emerson, Maria Parr, Poor Bishop Hooper, and, my new hero, Suzanne Maxon

You just need to say this with feeling to feel its power. Phrase after phrase, line after line seems to nail intense feelings in a way that combines extreme concentration and focus with expansiveness. The metaphor of winter and the flatly relentless tread of the opening swallows you into the poet-lover’s present depression but ‘the pleasure of the fleeting year’ cuts through that gloomy stillness like a momentary flash of joy and light, simultaneously here and gone, like an afterimage on the retina. Gloom tightens its grip again in the next two lines, the images of freezing darkness reinforced by repetition of the ‘ee’ syllable. In the following quatrains, when images of summer’s abundance wrestle in vain with the poet’s sense of emptiness, it’s important that they do put up a real fight against it – the swelling syllables of ‘the teeming autumn, big with rich increase’ make one feel how much summer offers, if only the poet had been more receptive.

Edmund Prestwich, Note on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 and Nashe

I love the shapes of the two sentences that form this poem. I love that it’s stretched over two distinct sentences across ten 3 line, two feet per line (mostly) stanzas. The first sentence is all spiky shapes and angles akin to the “isosceles triangle” of the first stanza. It’s the “angles” that cause the issue, the possibilities pointing in many directions.

The second sentence is softer in some way, more rounded like the “protractor” mentioned at the end. The first stanza is pointing, the second is “flapping” with “bunting” – already more decorative than the practical elements of the first sentence (“backgammon boards, / boat sails, / the hands of a clock”. The degrees in the protractor speak of multiple possible jumping off points, more confusion, where as the triangle is pointing in three directions…(I’m making this up now).

Mat Riches, The Elbow of Barnsley

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

Nearly every poem in Where Babies Come From, like Mr. Peanutbutter’s memoir in Bojack Horseman, “just fell out of me”: beginnings, parallel worlds, childhood (which is a parallel world), alternate realities, anxieties, and strange explanations for how we live in a time that’s simultaneously magical and mechanical. I’m still looking for explanations for how we live, but now rather than finding an unexpected feather to treasure, I get into the dirt and comb through it, like someone who has stopped dreaming of flying and instead falls asleep to burrowing.

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

The first words we understand must be a poem. It’s always been there. But then there were so many stories: Aesop Fables, Blueberries for Sal, and the tales of Chelm read to me by my parents, and Taran the Wander, read to me by my brother.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Some poets set themselves to write a crown of sonnets about how 14th century Slavic puppeteer Vladimir Richevski losing his leaf-stuffed kupalo in a fire foreshadowed the triumph of morality over superstition in itinerant minstrel shows, and each word and each day is a step towards completion. Every poem is a leaf caught falling from a tree: I tend not to be able to grab more than one at once, but I do like making a pile.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ori Fienberg

According to the critic Cyril Connolly, in the early years of the Second World War, newspaper columnists often asked, “Where are the war poets?” The idea of war poetry as a kind of public service had become established after the First World War, when Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other combatants sang of the new horror of trench warfare. Connolly’s answer to the question, given in the middle of the Blitz, was: “under your nose”. “War poets”, he wrote,

are not a new kind of being, they are only peace poets who have assimilated the material of war. As the war lasts, the poetry which is written becomes war poetry, just as inevitably as the lungs of Londoners grow black with soot.

The poetry of the Second World War, as Connolly saw, would be more diffused — like soot — among the population than that of the Great War, composed on the home front as well as overseas. It would also prove to be much more dispersed across time. In January 1945, the anthology War Poems from the Sunday Times returned to the question “Where are the war poets?” and suggested:

We still await the masterpieces of war poetry, and it may be a lifetime before some village Hardy finds his powers summoned forth by the events which we know only too well and he knew not at all.

Like browsing a bombed library, anthologising the poetry of the Second World War is a matter of digging out what survived.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Lincolnshire Carried Through London

The zipless portion of the old black suitcase, the most important space in my packing, is reserved for the selection of books that will accompany me. Clothes are the things forgotten, left behind—I don’t remember what I wore in Seattle, Burlington, Demopolis, New Orleans—- I recall what I read, the shape and feel of the words that accompanied me.

I dress in books as if each trip is another wedding, feet feeling their way down an aisle with the sounds of strangers rising from the space around me, the silence of not turning to them and saying: “We are here for different reasons. This means something different to each of us.”

The formula disciplines my tendency towards overlarge desirousness; it tames my book frenzy. After decades of travels, I limit myself to the bridal idiom: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And so I packed for the wedding of New Orleans with the following:

The old was Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.

The new was Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful.

The borrowed was Kenneth Burke’s Counterstatement.

The blue was Osip Mandelstam’s Noises of Time.

Alina Stefanescu, A train, Ada, and recitations in New Orleans.

Now that the contract has been officially signed, I can announce that Megan Volpert and I are co-editing a Stevie Nicks poetry anthology for Madville Publishing. The call for poems will go out on Halloween (of course!) and the anthology will be published in 2026.

Many of you will be familiar with Madville, since they published the Mother Mary Comes to Me anthology that Karen Head and I co-edited back in 2020 and the Dolly Parton anthology Let Me Say This co-edited by Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke.

If you’re a Stevie fan, get busy! We can’t wait to read your work.

Collin Kelley, Stevie Nicks anthology coming in 2026

some in the water
some in the boat:
falling leaves

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: October ’24

I’ve known Kevin Craft a long time. We were colleagues at Everett Community College, beginning in 1998, and our bond of poetry drew us into friendship. He was always the star, with awards and grants and travel—including to France each summer to teach. He had a knack for making opportunities for himself that I (frankly) drooled over. But we had other, more home-bound threads connecting us as well, including many of the threads found in these poems: parenting, adoption, navigating the intricacies and interstices of family. Who do we belong to? Who belongs to us? Sometimes this theme plays like a lament, as when he echoes Emily Dickinson with, “My life had stood me up one too many times” (“Only If You’re Feeling Better”). In others, it’s a messy celebration: “Into gravity a history of spontaneous alleles” (“Game Theory: A Primer”).

I love the way the poems in Traverse aren’t linear (not usually), but always complex and witty and woven. The first poem, “In Extremis,” launches with: “One man skis alone across Antarctica. / Another pulls morning glory // off a rotting backyard fence.” One world, multiplied. In another poem, a daughter rescues a ruby-crowned kinglet; in another poem, two daughters rescue a father. (I have to add, birds are woven throughout the book, too—snow geese, an Anna’s hummingbird, red-tail hawks, hermit thrush…). I had a sense, reading this book, of circles within circles where human varieties of existence and all of nature nest together in contiguous if uncomfortable relationship. Like they do. 

Bethany Reid, Kevin Craft, TRAVERSE

When I read Robbi Nester’s book, Narrow Bridge, I found so many poems that speculated on the creation of the world, that made out of everyday modern life a kind of mythology to explain our surroundings. I settled on discussing this poem because right now it is early morning as I write this, and this poem seems an appropriate companion for someone up early in the morning at the beginning of a new day and a new week in a new season. […]

Throughout the poem the speaker is making a mythology about the world, going back to the beginning of time, and showing how she connects with the origins of the world, but also how the world continues to change. There’s darkness and light sparing with each other. They are hot, and angry, and sizzle up close, as looking at the stars or sun would feel like witnessing a sizzle. Far away though, this sizzle become the stars. The clouds, says the speaker, are both solid and liquid and she is their kin.

Everything in this world seems to be in flux, holding the possibility of being gentle, or becoming violent and overwhelming. Everything in the world seems hungry, able to consume or be consumed. This might make the world feel frightening and unpredictable, a difficult place for a person to live in. Yet the speaker begins the poem by saying “Call me an optimist.”

Tresha Faye Haefner, Fried Egg as Philosopher

a poem gestates and names the boat dylan
it is willed to sail the oceans until it rests
amongst every like-minded smoke-wreathed breath
that drew the rising tide of some dark ire for
his penned finger pouted and pointing out
the damned words that dragged that tide
across the moon sea’s road to stay afloat
clinging to that broken-leaded pencil talk

Jim Young, the estuary at laugharne

In Seattle, I had the pleasure of being a featured poet at the Fall Convergence on Poetics, an annual symposium of experimental writing hosted by the University of Washington Bothell. There, I was grouped with the amazing Ronaldo Wilson and Mita Mahato—artists whom I’ve admired for a long time—for presentations and conversation. The theme of this year’s Convergence was Connection, and the greatest pleasure of participating in the event was the connections I made with artists whose work I already knew (Mahato, Wilson, Ching-In Chen) as well as those who were new to me and whose work I’m excited to delve into (Jeanne Hueving, Eleni Stecapoulos, Juan Carlos Reyes). Appearing alongside these writers also felt like a gift because although our work and backgrounds are very diverse, there seemed to be a shared language, a shared rangy approach to genre, a bravery about trial and error. It was a place where I didn’t feel the need to explain or justify the hybridity of Feathers (though I don’t mind talking about this with people who aren’t familiar with hybrid genre literature). The conversation could begin a couple of steps forward from the starting line.

And connections there were. In the conversation portion of my time on stage with Mahato and Williams, I asked Mahato—whose gorgeous new book Arctic Play comes out next week—how her imagination works: whether it usually begins with a linguistic, visual, or material spark. She answered that it’s not one of these, but rather her imagination engages as a result of a weaving between these elements, when she experiences the connections or overlaps between seemingly separate things, or, as she described it, “metaphor as hallucination.” For example, glaciers in Arctic Play are “played by” pieces of light blue plastic that indeed look, hauntingly, like glaciers.   

This answer resonates deeply with how I approach my own work, and especially my composition process for Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal which relied heavily on juxtaposition as a method of thinking/feeling my way through my enthrallment with bird hats. When asked about how I brought the different modes and forms together in the book, I’ve made analogies to collage, which uses spatial relationships to bring forward unexpected connections, and to musical composition, where a composer might bring in a certain instrument to create a particular effect.   

Wilson, too, is so deeply tuned to the links between embodiment and language and the present and past that his “readings” are most often improvisatory performances. He seems to arrive on stage with a small menu of possibilities, or something on his mind/heart, but follows his intuition and body once he’s there, riffing, changing direction when needed. For example, at the Friday night reading at an art gallery, he pulled out his iPhone and played a recording of an “opera” he’d improvised that afternoon while walking through the airport. The song was about a tense interaction he’d had on the airplane with an older white couple who were behaving badly, and who he eventually decided to “read for filth.” While playing the recording from his phone over one mic, he improvised back up vocals on another mic, while also hanging a couple of rubber (“white face”) halloween masks around the stage. At Saturday’s performance, he showed a poetry video while dancing in front of the stage and wheeling around his roller bag suitcase on top of which he’d put one of the masks and around which he’d wrapped a jacket, creating an eerie dance partner. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, What Moves Us

Last night brought immersion in words and the company of good poets at a visit to Port Sunlight for the Wirral Poetry Festival. It was good to listen to some poems I had heard or read before and enjoyed as well as many that were new to me. Five poets at two events, time to talk with like-minded people, news of events I might enjoy, and a jar of honey. I loved hearing Martin Figura and Helen Ivory referred to as ‘the king and queen of poetry’. And I loved being there for their superb readings.

Sue Finch, BE MORE JAGUAR

Most of us don’t think of reading as a communal pastime, so much, but why is that? Yes, you still need to sit down with the book and read the pages, or listen to an audiobook version, and that is usually a solitary act — though I have one friend who has read books aloud with her husband every night for years and years, and loves to read this way. During the pandemic, I knew of transatlantic couples who read to each other daily, via phone or zoom. I was part of several memorable online events where the participants gathered to read a novella or a play aloud, taking turns and passing the text to each other over and over again, like a baton, over a period of hours. In our group, we often read passages aloud. I suspect there is something powerful and even primal in human beings about animating the word, and hearing it out loud.

Beth Adams, Reading Can Be Difficult

I’m uneasy about the way my children and their friends talk about world-building. They prize it highly; too highly, it seems to me. Thorough elaboration and consistency are virtues for an engineer, not for a storyteller. When it was pointed out to Ursula Le Guin that she had created two different planets named Werel, in different stories, she was entirely unconcerned. So what? These are fictions. We’re making them up. They’re for visiting, not for living in.

—

Meditating on that, I realize that I’m engaged in the same thing as my children. I’m holding Milton to standards of realism he never undertook to honor. He’s writing a poem, and he’s drawing shamelessly on all the literary traditions and devices he knows. He is not engaged in world-building. Arrogant as he is, he’s not that arrogant. He’s a man writing a poem, that’s all. He’s not pretending to be anything else. The problem is not that he’s unsophisticated, It’s that I am. My kids are just a bit further down the dead-end of realism, where the literary ideal is a novel so huge that you never need to come out the other end, and so consistent that the author has not changed at all between the writing of volume 1 and the writing of volume 83. Everything will be exactly where you expect it to be; all the pieces interlock; you will never be ejected into your own lived experience. You will never have to fend for yourself.

—

I have Milton’s Sonnet 19 by heart, so it’s not true that he’s never spoken to me. Someday I hope to be able to receive from Paradise Lost more of what he was sending: I’m old enough in reading to know that its not Milton’s deficiency but mine that I’m dealing with here. Maybe not this year, or this decade, or this life; but I’ll leave the door ajar. You never know.

Dale Favier, Milton and World-Building

I love to travel, and I am lucky to have a husband who is the detail guy – finds the hotels, researches what to do, books the flights, etc. We plan our trips before we leave, but when we are engaged in the actual place, we try to be open to whatever adventures or sidebars or unexpected pleasures may arise. For example, a road closure in Iceland on the way to a waterfall in the west led us on a detour through one of the most gorgeous landscapes we’d ever seen. We eventually arrived at our destination and fulfilled our plan, but the sidebar was pretty astounding.

I tend to use both planning and intuition when I write. In drafting, I try to let the writing go wherever the language is leading, even if I’m not sure what it means. I still draft long-hand (I’m even typing this post from notes I already took in my journal), and I often don’t read back what I’m writing until I reach a stopping point. I find that this leads to more surprises. (It also leads to a lot of nonsense, no lie, but so be it.) It’s only then that I switch on my planning brain and tend to turn methodical in revision. Cut, add, change the order, tighten the language, hone the sound and diction. Even though this seems like an intellectual process, intuition is important here as well. A feeling about a word. An instinct to go against what seems logical. Both the head and the heart have their place, which is why my first draft of a piece is NEVER the way it ends up. Editing puts the head back in play, and then the heart needs to decide when a piece is “done.”

In making visual pieces, I find I lean more heavily on intuition. I almost never plan a piece of artwork beyond having materials at hand. I start and then go with whatever looks right to me at the time. I’ve found in the past that, when I make something I’m really pleased with, it almost never works when I try to recreate it. Whatever it was that was happening in that moment is gone. Maybe I can get close, but usually not.

Donna Vorreyer, Head Versus Heart

I’ve been working steadily on the vampire poems and a little on some flash fiction experiments. Also a little on plotting out and the first portions of the thrifting and writing book I’ve been saying I’m writing, though it’s much less writing and still more getting my ducks in a row (I guess I have “concepts of a plan” at this point, lol). Like all things, planning only takes me so far and really I should just dive in and see what happens.  

I’ve been buried in freelance work otherwise, working this weekend steadily on what will likely be some of the last of the Halloween specific things I will be asked to write as we move further into the month. Thankfully, the few Christmas pieces I was assigned have paused. They were causing a whole lot of temporal whiplash, especially the days I was sitting working on them with the A/C humming behind me. I am also hung up again on some chaps that are a bit more difficult in layout, so have been working out the kinks on those and getting the final versions prepared to start printing.  They’re a handful of last season’s books to get out, as well as the beginning of this year’s list. Plus submissions from the summer for the next round that will begin next fall. I’ve fallen behind on some content things I hoped to make for my own stuff, so will hopefully be able to chip away at them–including some reels I want to make for #31daysofHalloween.  

I am trying not to let the more shortened days make me feel like I am rushing to get things done, but they always do. Meanwhile there are still little bits that are not work—quiet breakfasts, plays, lots of horror movies to get me through a busy month.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/6/2024

Thank goodness for writing residencies! I’d been in a bit of a funk lately, and what I really needed was a chance to change my focus (I almost wrote foxus, and you’ll see why later) and think about my project in a new way. The residency is at a marine wildlife center on Friday Harbor. There’s no television or radio (or guarantee of electricity all the time,) but it’s right on the harbor and perfect as a place to write. In fact, I wrote two new poems, sent out two submissions, and reconsidered my next manuscript in a way that I hope will make it much better. But it wasn’t really about productivity – it was about not listening to the news, but listening to the ocean – not looking at screens, but looking into fields for foxes – about paying attention to the light instead of listening to my anxieties.

Besides spending time in nature, I ended up talking to people on trails, nature photographer hobbyists like myself, grandmother-aged skinny dippers. Besides leaving me wishing for a better zoom on my camera (almost everyone there had a more expensive, better zoom lens than I did, which allowed them to get better fox pictures! Jealous!) I felt like I was part of a community. Loving nature is something I had in common with these people – all so joyous. And I got to witness the coolest thing ever – fox dancing! A black fox and a red fox both got up on their hind legs, put their paws together, and twirled around for about four minutes. My pic isn’t spectacular, but you have to realize it was so amazing to see.

So in the five days or so I was away, I took a look at my manuscript not poem by poem, but the big picture – how do the sections hang together? what’s the trajectory of the book? what’s the story behind the story? So it was time for some reshuffling, some deletions, some additions, and focusing on the story. And also, something about taking photographs – and waiting for the light – got me thinking about the right timing in books, the right light, so to speak. It takes time to see your own books – the shifts in tone, the difference in cadences – in the right light.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Away at a Writing Retreat on San Juan Island, Chance to Rethink My Manuscript and My State of Mind

失ひしものは戻らず蚯蚓鳴く　宮谷昌代

ushinaishi mono wa modorazu mimizu naku

            a thing I lost

            will not return

            earthworm sings

                                                            Masayo Miyatani

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

Fay’s Note:  “mimizu naku” (earthworm sings) is an autumn kigo.   An earthworm doesn’t sing, but the ancient people believed it obtained a singing voice from a blind snake by giving up its eyes.   

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (October 6, 2024)

I’ve just returned from the task for announcing the results of the competition to a hybrid audience which included nineteen of those longlisters. There was nothing like seeing the faces to bring home the responsibility of judging. It’s something I’ve felt keenly from the outset, and by time the results were announced, I’d developed a personal relationship with each of the longlisted poems. But that’s not true for every one of the 1956 entries – how can it be? It takes over 65 hours – around two working weeks – to spend just two minutes reading each poem.  That’s excluding the time you spend consulting with organisers, and the hours you spend on the shortlist, let alone the awards ceremony, or feedback.

How to choose? Well, first of all – it is fairly obvious when a writer doesn’t go to workshops, or seek feedback, or is entirely unfamiliar with contemporary poetry – self-consciously poetic or archaic language, clunky rhymes, use of abstractions, an absence of imagery, for example. And whilst it’s true that with talent and aptitude, passion and dynamism, someone who has never read or studied contemporary poetry can write good poetry. But it’s going to be flawed. And with 1956 poems competing for 25 places, there’s almost no room for flaws. Poetry is a craft as a well as an art, and you need to learn it to be do it consistently well.

As I worked through the huge pile, I sifted out a pile of poetry which needed a slower, second reading. At this point, I had to say goodbye to lots of poems which showed real skill. Sometimes, it was because I couldn’t see that the poem had another life beyond itself – a fluent or vivid description is not enough. Sometimes, it was because of the ending. A frustrating number of really strong poems were forced into a neat endings.  Be cautious about logical, tidy endings. Try to leave some looseness: some space for the reader, and for chance and magic. Some poems just needed a little more editing. And some poems are just not born to stand on their own – they need the company of a sequence, or a themed collection, to be their brilliant selves.

Kim Moore, How to Pick a Winner

we find oyster mushrooms blooming
like ancient ears on the shoulders
of an old tree. i like to point out to you
the smallest mushrooms. orange ones
& even blue ones. what i really want
is to walk until i become one.
until my gills stretch & my veil pulls back.
this is a fantasy of escape. instead,
i apologize to the forest for leaving.

Robin Gow, (de)forest

I think I gave up on the idea of being famous a very long time ago. These days I’m grateful for that. Grateful for the previous failures that didn’t catapult me into Susan Sontag’s living room (as was vaguely promised to me so long ago—when I was “promising”). It all fades away, so I am glad I am trying to write in the present, not for posterity. I have little stories. But stories so deep that they will sink into the mud like stones under boots, and become a tiny part of the earth itself.

I’m amused by the arbitrary artefacts of humanity. Ancient Greece thrived for over a thousand years. And we have but 44 plays, written by a handful of men all living in the same few decades. Shakespeare, who is a marketing ploy (among other things). What of Fletcher, Marlowe, Jonson? My students know who Shakespeare is. But not Roswitha, not Aphra Behn. And any and all of it is nothing but artefacts, the stuff that dreams are made on, but not the dreams, not the dreamers. I believe I’ve lost all sense of reverence, and have found an enormous peace in doing so.

Today Egil and I walked with the hiking group. Two hours up past the tree-line, then over along the sheepback and the mires. Another two hours down, trying not to slip on the black lichen. I kept an eye out for lemmings, but didn’t see anything moving except the sheep. No eagles this weekend. No wasps. No insects at all.

There was only us, the sheep, the sedges, the bog cotton, and the spots of red lichen that sometimes look like blood.

I like walking with groups, but prefer to walk just the two of us. I want to go slowly, watching the wind pushing the heather. I want to take it all in.

Coming to the end of the trail, a gentler slope toward the parking lot, I had to step carefully to avoid a dead mountain pipit on the ground. I think I made a small gasp, or sigh of some sort because the woman next to me asked what it was and looked around. She’d nearly stepped on it. This perfect, recently dead bird.

Ren Powell, Writing in the Present

Matt Licata says in his book A Healing Space, the “healing will always surprise us.” He says falling apart is a “sacred process.” And this falling apart is “evidence” where in which “the known crumbles and disintegrates, revealing important and lesser-known dimensions of our experience not available during times of clear reflection and “holding it all together.”” Our old ways and ideas of who we thought we were “just can’t contain us any longer; they’re not subtle, nuanced, or magnificent enough.” Transformation is surprising he says, and I can’t disagree given all that I’ve witnessed these past years.

There’s a lot of rubble out there. From which you are required to make something beautiful. There you go — I worked in the tagline for my blog! I really have loved staring at wounds, yours, mine, the wounds of anyone who shows them to me. (I’ve seen so so many!) I think we’ve been changed, many of us, and haven’t we learned things we never would have otherwise? Good for writers, perhaps. Reminds me of the well-known poem by Rumi titled “The Guest House” […]

Shawna Lemay, Repair Shop – Staring at our Wounds

Sally Abed, a Palestinian who is one of the leaders of Standing Together, says, “We need a new story. Our mission is to build a new majority around peace, equality for all, and ending the occupation.” She acknowledges that, “peace right now is a very, very radical word. But it’s also the only option. I think in very deep crisis, you also have great clarity.” 

I keep returning to this short poem by Mahmoud Darwish: “She said: when do we meet? I said: after a year and a war. She said: when does the war end? I said: after we meet.” Genuinely meeting may feel impossible – but it doesn’t have to be. Not for Israelis and Palestinians on the ground there; and not for us.

It is easy to get caught up in where we feel different: one’s focusing on a ceasefire, the other’s focusing on the hostages, so we feel like we’re in opposition. We divide into camps based on where we place blame and with whom we feel kinship. I encourage us to go deeper and plumb the Jewish values at the heart of our yearnings. The one who’s grieving for this side and the one who’s grieving for that side actually have a lot in common, if we can let ourselves feel it. Trying to feel-with each one of you has been my profoundest spiritual practice this year. 

Rachel Barenblat, Rosh Hashanah 5785: Many Views, One Community

what started as rapture
may write itself as pain
what started as unbidden grief
could spell a simile for joy
the poem expands in all
directions like the mother void

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The fifth poem is a prayer

This week: midsummer nightmares, turning into a woodpecker, an idea of wrongness, a flat-bread moon, and more. Enjoy.

We have just come off the hottest year on record with extreme weather events dominating the news cycles. The scientists tell us that we are close to climate tipping points, where there will be disproportionate consequences of small additional changes in global temperatures. Already we are seeing prolonged droughts, unprecedented hot spells, widespread floods, and more. Meanwhile, the polar ice caps and alpine glaciers are melting at increasing rates. Underlying all these changes is water as it cycles between the atmosphere and the oceans via ever changing patterns of rainfall.

As these weather patterns fracture and distort in the face of accelerating climate change, how do we define the types of rain than have come and gone, maybe never to return? How do we understand a future when we have failed to comprehend the past?

This video was assembled from footage obtained mostly around Adelaide, its hills, and the coastal regions of South Australia, supplemented with some sequences from coastal regions of Victoria and New South Wales. Unlike many of my videos, all the scenes here are natural: there has been no compositing or animation.

The soundscape is constructed from a single sample of the spoken word: “parch”. The sample has been variously time-shifted, pitch-shifted, filtered and sequenced to generate the audio.

A different version of the text was originally published in my first book of poetry, Urban Biology (2012).

Ian Gibbins, Types of Rain

I’ve never been to Stonehenge, though it’s on my bucket list. I have watched the summer solstice at Stonehenge on TV and never really wanted to be there for the event. I’m sure it is a great atmosphere, and there is something to be said for many humans coming together to witness, but because we are all so distanced from the original rituals and meanings of Stonehenge, we are all making it up as we go along, creating our own rituals, our own methods of witnessing, and that means a great big group of people joined by the event, but all marking it slightly differently – loudly, quietly, drunkenly, soberly – I would find it difficult to settle into my own sacred space among the energy of so many people. The site itself though i find amazing. I feel a kind of awe at the sacredness of those stones. Again, it is the connection point, the continuity that I like, and finding myself on the end of that long trail of human experience.

Yesterday, activists from Just Stop Oil threw paint at some of the stones.You can read about it here: Stonehenge Sprayed with Orange Powder Paint

You can read JSO’s statement here: Just Stop Oil

My immediate reaction was to be horrified. What on earth does damaging the stones accomplish? They are going to distance people from their cause. How dare they damage our ancient heritage…etc. The lichen! The porous stone surface!

Knee jerk stuff born of hurt to see something you admire, even love, being targeted. It took me a while to think through my reactions and to assess the actual damage done. I’m still not sure how I feel.

These stones are not just a marker for an ancient civilisation, they are a mirror reflecting our own values and our own actions, they are a continuity of our society. This too, is a part of our human species story.

I will be angry if there is permanent damage. But as far as I can see, it was cornflour paint, stuff that has been mainly blown away with a leaf blower this morning.

I’ve just seen an article about JSO throwing orange paint over the private jets at an airport, including Taylor Swift’s jet. The story is getting much less coverage than the Stonehenge story.

I feel torn about the actions of JSO around art and heritage. It feels unfair to be targeting the ordinary people who actually value their connection to the earth. But the thing is, because we are tied into a style of existence in which we are annihilating the environment – insect numbers reduced due to pesticides, half of UK bird species in decline, people literally dying of floods, heat, pollution, a raft of plastic the size of a country drifting across the ocean…etc if we don’t act then all we will have is a bunch of stones, probably damaged by the pollution in the air, the lichen dying because of what we are doing to the planet. There will be no one to witness the solstice. There will be no one to feel the sacredness of continuity. We will not continue.

Wendy Pratt, Marking the Summer Solstice

Past the solstice, the longest day, 
        summer begins to reel in its boundlessness. 
I write a letter to you, because I dream 

        the moon will swallow me whole when I leave 
this life if I don’t remember how to let go 
        of the thread that tethers these flower boats 

to the dock.

Luisa A. Igloria, Lengthen, Loosen

Is there hope for humanity? I guess that’s the bottom line, if you’ll forgive the accounting metaphor. Is there hope for our continued existence, and is there hope for our mortal souls?

Are we less awful than we used to be? I’m thinking, e.g., the Crusades, the witch burnings, the hangings; or does our awfulness just look a bit different with each passing era?

I think I’ve spun quite far past the musings of this William Wordsworth poem I’ve been thinking about as well, and I can’t say much for heaven and glory, but if there are forces in the universe, I do kind of wonder what they think of us all, our restless pokings and proddings of land and sea, our endless array of little vehicles. If as it seems some clear nights the stars bend closer to peer, do they shake their starry heads and glance at each other in dismay?

Marilyn McCabe, Thee, Vesper! brightening still, as if the nearer

This summer, I’m taking one seminary class, a class on protest music.  It only meets for 4 weeks, and last night was the first meeting.  The class is one quarter over, and I am already wishing we had more time.  I did not feel that way with last summer’s class, which was 6 weeks.  The summer before, I decided not to take classes because we’d be moving, and that summer, there were lots of classes I wished that I could take.  This summer, the protest music class was the only one that looked interesting and could be done from a distance and didn’t have an intensive section during Music Week.

Each week, we’ll do a deep dive into four songs, and we’ll have more general discussions about protest music, about the history of the times that birthed the songs, and about music theory (the very light version).  Our class book, 33 Revolutions Per Minute:  A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day by Dorian Lynskey,  is great!  Last night we looked at “Strange Fruit,” “Mississippi Goddamn,” “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

This morning, I’m thinking about how it was such an appropriate choice for the day before Juneteenth.  

In the middle of the night, I woke up thinking about alternative lyrics to “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.”  For the class, we have a choice of writing a short paper (750 words) or a protest song of our own.  I am thinking about a protest song about climate change.  I drifted off to sleep thinking about “This Land Is Your Land” as a song base, but woke up with “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” in my head.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, One Summer Seminary Class: Protest Music!

Kat Dixon catches a world emerging from lockdown(s) and beginning to negiotate a path through this newer world’s contradictions, complexities and disconcertions in a landscape of increasing division. “Dear Arts Council” muses on possible projects for a funding application,

“a life-sized replica of Pinchoet
a sculpture made of dinosaur bones
or a book / do you have a Navel Gazing Fund?”

The applicant is struggling to come up with a novel idea for a project when all she wants to do is buy time to write a book. The poem concludes,

“be a love / stuff some cash in an envelope
whack on a stamp / I swear / I’ll spend it good”

It voices the frustration felt at having to spend an inordinate amount of time justifying why an artist needs funding when that time could be better spent creating art.

Emma Lee, “eat the glitter” Kat Dixon (Broken Sleep Books) – book review

The poem began when Nick and I spent the night of our wedding anniversary at Gravetye Manor in Sussex: wonderful, but very expensive. Our room was named ‘Magnolia’, for the lovely old tree outside the window.

I absolutely love the way magnolia is pretty much the first tree to blossom, at a time of the year when we’re all desperate for some life and colour in nature. But being early February we were just a little too early. The surrounding gardens and landscape had that barren, wintry look.

As it happened, my sister had recently died and her funeral was to be a few days later. I think the poem was a contemplation of this strange moment of extravagance, wishfulness and ‘vanitas’.

You can read the poem here.

Robin Houghton, New poem up at Ink, Sweat & Tears

Writing the transformation exercise, designed to help us “transcend metaphor”, I wound up turning myself into a woodpecker. Tap. Tap. Tap. Banging my head against the tree. It’s hilarious when I consider that everyone else was turning themselves into wolves and foxes. I suppose a woodpecker could offer protection: raining down bark on serpents, gouging out the eyes of bears. Very Shakespearean.

Death is a metaphor. And transcends the metaphor. No death, no rebirth.

Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me when E. told me my writing lately has been as dark as he’s ever seen it.  And maybe, just maybe, this is a good thing.

Ren Powell, Nature Metaphors

Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma (2024) is an accumulation of essays, poems, handwritten notes and other scraps that provides this explanation on the back cover by the author: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.” While it is important to acknowledge coherence, or even incoherence, there is a sense of shared tone throughout this assemblage, and I would even suggest that Wrong Norma holds as singular unit of shared purpose and thought far stronger than, say, the pieces within her Decreation (2005). Wrong Norma might not be structured as a book-length piece, a “verse novel,” in the same way as Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) or Men in the Off Hours (2001), but as a whole, Wrong Norma sustains a myriad of threads that interweave across an exploratory prose lyric, a structure she’s been honing now for decades. Where, through this, could anyone argue for wrongness? In a recent interview conducted by Kate Dwyer for Paris Review, Anne Carson opens:

When people ask me, “How are Canadians different from Americans?” I say, “Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong.” All the time, polite but wrong.

Don’t let her provocations distract you, dear Canadian reader, even if she is saying exactly what she means. An idea of wrongness, that connects to the collection, that connects to her own impossibility.

rob mclennan, reading in the margins: Anne Carson

Days after I arrived in America as a lone teenager, the same age Mary Shelley was when she wrote Frankenstein, not yet knowing I too was to become a writer, I found myself wandering the vast cool halls of the Penn Museum. There among the thousands of ancient artifacts was one to which I would owe my future life — an alabaster disk from Bronze Age Mesopotamia, inscribed in Cuneiform with the name of the world’s first known author: Enheduanna.

Born in present-day Iraq with a Semitic name lost to history, the daughter of the Sumerian king Sargon of Akkad named herself en (“high priestess”) hedu (“ornament”) an (the Sumerian sky god) na: high priestess of the ornament of the sky, our Moon. Her father — himself the son of a priestess single mother, who had borne him in secret, then cast the infant on the Euphrates river in a straw basket into a life as an orphan — had conquered the major Sumerian city of Ur in 2334 B.C.E. and set out to unify the tessellation of warring city-states that was then Mesopotamia, creating the world’s first multinational empire.

He did all the practical things that help people cohere into a people — fostered a common language, standardized weights and measures, introduced taxes to support soldiers and artists — but he came to see what all leaders eventually see: that nothing binds human beings more powerfully than ideas. His citizens had to believe in one thing to become one people.

Sargon hired the best man for the job: his daughter; she anchored her strategy in what Margaret Fuller called “that best fact, the Moon.”

Maria Popova, The Birth of the Byline: How a Bronze Age Woman Became the World’s First Named Author and Used the Moon to Unify the World’s First Empire

It’s just a fragment of moon,
I think, that stabs thru the trees
into my night-blinded eye,
astonishingly bright, white —
I think it’s bleeding light — wake
up, it’s trying to say, time
to vault right out of yourself.

PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 35

I’ve been challenging myself to write 7-line poems lately. Half-sonnets? Not necessarily. Just an exercise in writing a poem in brief. I have used haiku and tanka as brevity/image exercises in the past, and that work has been helpful. While I seldom write poems that are longer than, say, 30-35 lines, practice with conciseness never hurts, especially when my inclination is to go narrative.

I’m not knocking narrative poetry: I love it. Love reading it, love writing it–especially the lyrical narrative. In addition, I’m a big fan of the discursive and tangential in poems and essays (looking at you, Ross Gay). But one does tend to fall into familiar territory, and it’s useful to push away at what’s easy. That means, every now and again, trying something unusual: persona poem, aphorism poem, Spencerian sonnet, cadralor, surrealism, slant rhyme, golden shovel, or an invention of one’s own…something to freshen up the craft.

Ann E. Michael, Practice makes poetry

you start in the middle
with dried-up dandelion stems
lung-scars of aliens

the rag-sorters of Ivybridge
jumping down every rabbit-hole
in a private library

Ama Bolton, ABCD May and June 2024

Choix de poèmes is a selection of poems by Geoffery Squires in facing page English/French that ranges chronologically from the 1975 volume Drowned Stones to the as-yet unpublished Triptych (actually just published as I write this review; I hope to review it soon), 58 pages in each language. The poems are well chosen and the versions in French scrupulous while communicating something of the quiet, calm movement of Squires’ verse:

Flower
that opens to me
in the dark
when flowers do not open

Fleur
qui s’ouvre à moi
dans la noir
quand les fleur ne s’ouvrent pas

There are, inevitably, points at which the deceptive simplicity of Squires’ English forces Heusbourg to make interpretative decisions, as when the line ‘Might or might not and anyway if it did’ which, to my mind is open-ended, is rendered as the more closed ‘Pourrait ou ne pourrait pas et qu’importe’.

One of the great benefits of this kind of compressed selected poems is that you can quickly see the poet’s manner change over time […]

Billy Mills, Recent Reading June 2024: A Review

the thought of staying the same
makes me ache. i want the bright transformation.
a city of wings. of cloud festivals
& trees that crack the sidewalks open
& release colonies of ants.

Robin Gow, 6/18

Spurred by this movie, this morning found me postponing my poem work in favor of generating some fun little fairies, some of which are definitely more insect-alicious than humanoid. Last night, the heat made it hard to get to sleep, so this afternoon found me napping for a little while between writing tasks. The kind of summertime nap as the sky lingered toward sundown, where, if outdoors, you could snatched away by the fae so very easily. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 6/18/2024

I can’t believe it’s been just over a year since the poet John Foggin died. It came up on my Facebook memories a few days ago. Since then, I’ve been re-reading some of his many collections, straining my ears to hear his voice again in those poems, and feel some of the joy that poured out of him when he got excited about a poem or a poet.

His last collection, published a few months before he died is called Pressed For Time, published by Calder Valley Poetry.

The first poem is A Commission to Paint the Butcher. It is a wonderful poem to start a collection with – and it’s John all over. He cycles through a few hundred years of art history in the space of a poem, teaching me something on the way, but doing it so lightly, so artfully. In fact, it is almost as if he is teaching himself, reminding himself what he knows, which is not just the style of Beryl Cook or the Old Masters, but about perception. That it matters how we look at things, how we look at art, how we look at people. And following on from that, it matters how we then represent them. So this poem, ostensibly about painting becomes about perception, about our responsibility as artists, as makers in the world. Perhaps it is about the way that art (and by art, I mean any artform) can change the world because it changes the way we see the world.

Kim Moore, And who knows what happens next

This little story has a long history that began in 2011 when it was first written as a two-part narrative poem titled “What’s Shoes Got to do With It” posted on my blog, ZouxZoux, and shared in a poetry workshop website called dVerse Poets Pub, which is still going strong today. It began on a day where I was exhausted physically and emotionally as the first lines in Part 1 illustrate:

Sometimes she feel like
a skuzzy ole flip flop
in a world full of
silver stilettos, the crystal
studded kind with red
polished toes poking out.
The kind that holds
tiny ankles decorated

with delicate gold chains and
long silky legs that move like
sweet cane syrup over a
hot buttered biscuit.

From those first few lines the narrator and her work world were created. The movement of “long silky legs” turned into a poem about a strip tease dancer (silver stilettos) and a waitress (scuzzy ole flip flop) working in a bar in a seedy part of town.

Charlotte Hamrick, The Story of a Story

Poetry, poetry is the thing. And small press. And being makers, valueing makers. It’s energizing to make instead of solely consume. It’s the process of falling into a project that I love. I’ve been editing for so many months. New things in spurts but mostly editing. And teaching. And anyhew, more later.

Come to the fair if you can. If not support your indie bookstores. And make a thing. Definitely, you should make a thing.

Pearl Pirie, Pssst, small press fair

I was intrigued by [Taylor] Strickland’s translations because this collection [Dastram/ Delirium] won a Poetry Society Translation Choice Award while he says he doesn’t speak much Gaelic. The answer to the questions raised by that last sentence is Subversive Translation. According to Strickland via the poet/translator Rody Gorman, subversive translation is ‘less a technical methodology and more an accountability act that represents the text through translations, but which accepts the failure in worthwhile translation as sufficient in its own right’. 

I don’t claim to totally understand the concept, but my gut is saying these translations owe more to the author’s interpretation of the text rather than the exact translation of the words. This appeals to me as this is how I exist in Finnish at the moment. I have enough of the language to understand the gist, mood or theme of a text or a conversation, but I cannot directly translate or understand the nuance and details. If I read a poem in Finnish I can get something, but it’s heavily weighted towards my surface understanding of the words rather than a deep dive into the language, the place and the time it’s coming from. I also hang my own sense of self, place and time over the poem. 

And this I feel is what Strickland is doing. The first section of poems, praise poems to a lover Morag, are already erotic in the original Gaelic, especially considering they were written by a minister’s son (the translation of his name) in the 1700s. The subverted translations in this collection bring a modern sense to the poems, stylistically and thematically. They are loose, savouring the modern freedom of playing with the language in English and with social mores. There’s no pulling punches here, but there is a beautiful sense of forbidden and furtive love throughout this selection,

I left you and you left
a burr of whispers in my head, 
a beehive of sex and nectar,

blocked up my nose
as I inhale lenten rose,

                    (‘Crùnluath’) 

As I can’t read the Gaelic well enough to know what’s been changed, how the music is different from the rhythms of the original Gaelic, how the poet has adapted them to English, I can only get caught up in his versions. They are like hearing one side of the conversation with the original poems. A chance to embrace being out of sync. 

Gerry Stewart, Subversive Translations – More than Just the Gist

This little poem is an epigram, of course, not a lyric poem: it is a kind of concise distillation of the hope of the ode and the power of its concision relies partly upon the reader’s recollection of the greater length and subtlety of the lyric original. But it’s not only the first line that alludes to Horace. Stanzas 2-5 of Odes 1.2 imagine flooding — first the ancient flood of which Pyrrha and Deucalion were the only survivors (a punishment for human sinfulness) and then an imagined flooding of Rome itself, in vengeance for the assassination of Julius Caesar. There is no flood of blood in Horace, but the threatened flood of Rome (stanzas 4-5) is linked directly with the sinful loss of life in civil war (stanza 6). The epigram responds to this association by combining them.

Generations of readers of Horace have been struck by the way in which Horace’s ode uses the Deucalion flood myth to point to human sinfulness, and the obvious links with the very similar story of Noah’s ark in Genesis. The epigram literalizes this connection, since the third line refers directly to the hopeful end of the Noah story: Noah realises that the flood is finally subsiding when the dove that he has sent out returns with a fresh sprig of olive in its beak, here the ramum florentis olivae (‘branch of flowering (or just ‘flourishing’) olive’).

In the epigram, this reassuring sprig comes not from a tree, however, but caelo, from heaven, sent directly by God. It is surely very likely that olivae is specified here to suggest Oliver [Cromwell], as this play upon his name was very common in the period. This too links back to Odes 1.2, since the second half of that poem asks the question “which god will Jupiter send to save us?” — settling finally, after considering various possibilities, on Mercury in the form of Octavian. Our anonymous Latin epigram suggests that the contemporary answer to this question might be Cromwell.

Victoria Moul, “Pulvis et horror”, allusion and war

For the record, what I term here as a lyrical alignment falls under the category of found poetry. I typically take a quote or excerpt of prose, then work it out into lines. I find that working with other people’s words allows you to focus on pacing, enjambment, breaks across line and stanzas, etc. without worrying about “saying” something.

The cool thing has been said; this is just poetic celebration.

José Angel Araguz, Richard Serra & what it comes down to

During the writing process I looked at the myth of Pandora from a number of angles, and I wanted to reflect this in the poem – hence the somewhat fragmented stanzas that veer between the ancient story and the present-day landscape.

My Pandora is haunting a rubbish-strewn twenty-first century landscape, complete with Covid-era detritus. She has spent millennia trying to gather up everything unsavoury she released into the world, but it is a futile exercise.

I was interested in the idea that Pandora herself was intended to be both a gift and a punishment. I tried to reflect some of these elements by playing around with the etymology of Pandora’s name, which means both ‘gift’ and ‘all-giving’.

The poem also explores the relationship between creator and creation, and the inevitable splintering of the creation from the original vision. Woven into this are some undercurrents about the guilt of falling short of other people’s expectations. But in the myth, the one thing left behind is hope – and while the mood of the poem is quite bleak, I hope that the character’s enduring determination to right her wrongs, no matter how impossible, shines through as a positive force.

Drop-in by Lucy Dixcart (Nigel Kent)

After a good experience with a residency this year in Palm Desert, I applied on a whim for this one on San Juan Island, and I was so happy to have it. The cabins are quirky and rustic, but afford beautiful views of the harbor, you have access to a science library and equipment, and previous visits have inspired poems that ended up in some pretty good magazines, most recently, “Cassandra as Climate Scientist” in California Quarterly. The first day a golden eagle circled overhead when I stepped out in the morning, which I took as a good sign. We saw lots of foxes, a healthy deer and rabbit population, multiple bald eagles, and even a few whales (humpback and orca). It’s really a biologist/poet’s dream.

So, my goal this time was to shed some poems from my overly long manuscript, and maybe tweak some of the order, and so far, I’ve been able to do that. I split it into sections to work on, making sure sections read as little mini narratives and led into each other logically. I don’t want to worry the manuscript to death, but when I started it, Trump had just taken office, and the pandemic had not happened, so some changes, new poems, and new arcs were necessary. A couple of new characters jumped into the book.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Solstice, Strawberry Moon, and Part 1 of San Juan Island Writing Retreat with Foxes

We’ve reached light’s peak
but that doesn’t mean
everything is downhill.

The riverbed to loss
is well-carved.
Keep your cup brimming.

Even if you can’t name
the tree of white blooms
it flowers anyway.

Rachel Barenblat, Peak

Advice for proceeding in the creative life? Thomas Merton said this in an essay titled, “Writing as a Spiritual Calling”: “I would say that there is one basic idea that should be kept in mind in all the changes we make in life, whether of career or anything else. We should decide not in view of better pay, higher rank, “getting ahead,” but in view of becoming more real, entering more authentically into direct contact with life, living more as a free and mature human person, able to give myself more to others, able to understand myself and the world better.” He then ends by saying, “I hope these few notes may be of some use.” Same Thomas Merton, same.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – What is Your Art Story?

Flame and flow, glow and grow.

I cast these bones like dice, read between the broken and unbroken lines of me.

Even when the heart is heavy and lost, no retreat. 

Rich Ferguson, I Ching of Me

This past week I have been doing things I dreamed of last September. I have been working 1:1 with people. We have talked, thought deeply, thought long and wide, reflected, laughed and thought some more. This felt distant back then and that makes me chuckle because back then feels distant now. That link between dreams and goals is being seized and I am so grateful to the people that are part of my journey. It’s like my own yellow brick road and that reminds me of some very special people who got me to this path in the first place.

In memory of one of those special people I took an old flatbread I had saved specifically for the occasion out into the garden. It was the night of the full moon. That flat bread was going to be the moon. All because that wonderful person once sent me a photo from social media of a tortilla on a double-glazed window and said ‘Look here’s your full moon’. We had much fun tossing it in the air trying to get the ‘perfect’ photo. That didn’t happen this time, but if you ever see me throwing circular bread in the air around the time of the full moon then you will know why.

I will leave you today with a link to Susan Richardson’s podcast, A Thousand Shades of Green’ where she reads poems from my collection ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’. Three reasons:

1. I am glad that our paths have crossed.
2. Her readings are wonderful.
3. If you like podcasts and poems and podcasts you will find much to love in all the episodes she has put together.

Sue Finch, Two Golden Tickets

passing through
the heat and humidity
a brief breeze

Tom Clausen, brief breeze

This week: the experience of totality, poets in youth, rime royale, octopus poems, poetry in video games, and much more. Enjoy.

The shankbone is for houses across Israel and Gaza
where the Angel of Death has not passed over.

Maror for the hot tearful bitter sharp pain
of hostages held underground and children imprisoned.

Haroset, for mortar: Gaza bombed to rubble. 
The egg is roasted like charred kibbutz walls. 

Everything is dipped in tears like the sea that closed 
when God rebuked, “My children die, and you sing praises?”

Rachel Barenblat, Symbols

I darken the box with an angry
pen. It rips a hole in the middle.
I lift it to the light. Through the
little tear, I can see the endless
sky. The edge of the universe.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Value of life

It’s easy to imagine a different solar system in which eclipses of the Sun by our Moon never happen or happen constantly; where the apparent size of the Moon is much smaller or much larger than the Sun. Nevertheless, here we are, on this particular planet, where eclipses of the Sun by the Moon happen rarely enough and locally enough that they are worth seeking out.

As I stood there in a field adjacent to a motel parking lot in far eastern Oregon, watching the August 2017 eclipse happen with my wife, my children, my father and my stepmother, this experience of celestial motion touched me deeply. Just how deeply would not become apparent for several years. But that moment of witnessing the Moon covering up the Sun, plunging us into almost-night, caused something to start moving in me.

Like a struck bell, I experienced a vibration that continued long after the Sun returned to view and the black disc of the Moon slid away and disappeared into the blue light of day.

Annie Dillard has written about the experience of totality, when “the sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover.” She writes that at that moment, she left the world of the living and entered a dead universe, her mind light-years distant, looking at her husband through the eyes of ancient ones living in the Euphrates River valley harvesting einkorn with stone sickles. She wrote: “It was all over.”

Unlike Annie Dillard, I did not lose my mind right away. In my case, it took time.

corona
the light
hiding beside the light

Dylan Tweney, Notes from a totality

overcast eclipse …
I find a baby bunny
that didn’t make it
through the darkening
stillness

Tom Clausen, overcast eclipse

The solar eclipse! Holy wow! My kids and I (and Phoebe the Boston terrier) watched on a quilt in our backyard, and when it got dark and cool, the patio lights blinked on.

We laughed pretty hard at how ridiculous we looked, staring at the sky sun in those cardboard glasses, trying to get decent photos with an iPhone. *womp womp womp*

My kids and I have laughed really, really hard at a few things lately, including the truly absurd spoken word version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” by William Shatner and—also absurd—70s episodes of The Price Is Right. The outfits! The hair! The inappropriate kissing! The genuinely perplexing pieces of furniture! Whew.

Maybe laughter is the best medicine because there is no copay, even with terrible marketplace insurance.

What’s spring like where you are? What’s bringing you joy these days?

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

I can feel that spring cleaning urge bubbling up inside me, and when it reaches full boil, I will clean, or, if the weather cooperates, get back out in the garden, but it’s also possible I will just hunker down and read. Reading has been my comfort and my downtime for a long time, but is lately a bit like water, something I need to live. So it might be a Slattern Day for me, a Saturday of reading and writing poetry, chores only as they arise, and keeping an eye on my husband, who had the back of our Ford Escort fall on his head yesterday. It’s a 1991 wagon, and we have to prop open the back loading door as the appropriate replacement parts…no longer exist? But yesterday was so windy, the box he was unloading was whipped against the prop, dislodging it. “That’ll leave a mark,” said the hubby. A dent. […]

For National Poetry Month, I am, as usual, writing a poem a day and providing prompts for such in an online workshop, where I commune with a bunch a lovely people, most of whom I have never met. For many years now, we have gathered in April. It’s a joy. I am also celebrating by reading and reviewing poetry books by EIL poets over at Escape Into Life, most recently a selected works gathering by Keith Taylor, whose bird poems have delighted me in the past. This is a life’s work! 

Kathleen Kirk, Spring Cleaning

Once again, I am failing at National Poetry Month.  Once again, it barely registers.  Occasionally I see that someone is hosting a reading or actually doing a reading–or just reading extra poetry.  Or any poetry.  People weigh in with their wonderful news of books being published or books being accepted for publication, and I feel like I’m in a distant country thinking, oh, yes, I used to do that.

Part of the problem, as I have said before, is that National Poetry Month is in April, which is not a good month for me, and probably for many academics.  All of the classes that I’m teaching rev into high gear as we race to the ending.  I’m taking classes too, and similarly, those classes will be over at the end of April.  And I usually have at least one retreat.

But I do want to remember that I haven’t actually failed.  I have been revising one poem, “Cassandra Keeps Her Own Counsel” and drafting another, “Good Friday at the Mammography Center.”  I am trying not to remember past years when I might have been creating a poem a day.  Most of those poems from past years, created in a daily rush, weren’t very good.  I feel much better about the two I’ve been working on.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Failing at National Poetry Month

i have jars full of noises i no longer
allow to escape my throat.
bird call. yell. scream. cough.
once i screamed & my dad became
a chainsaw. i saw him spin.
who has shaped you? who has
carved you with an audience?
who has said, “i’m so sorry”
as if the machine were not in his hand?

Robin Gow, chainsaw carving

I’m never bothered if I go off-topic, I enjoy how the mind finds a way of saying what it wants when you give it free rein. It’s often how I find out what I want to write about, what topics are niggling at me. Sometimes I get stuck on writing the same thing over and over, but it never lasts. I find focusing my writing on a subject I feel I need to approach often restricts me, the writing seems forced. Allowing ideas to flow freely brings the most interesting results. 

I’ve been pleasantly surprised this month by the topics I’ve stumbled on, but also the emotion of my writing: unexpected anger, bitterness and grief. Not always places I want to go, but it’s good to give them a bit of space to see what develops. Sometimes it’s touching a wound I thought healed, but maybe I just need to face it one more time before stepping away. Writing helps me do that. 

Gerry Stewart, More GloPoWriMo and Writing Off Topic

Oh, I am absolutely delighting in the structures and shapes of Ottawa-based poet, editor and collaborator Ellen Chang-Richardson’s full-length poetry debut, Blood Belies (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2024), published through Paul Vermeersch’s Buckrider Books imprint. Even the back cover copy provides a liveliness, working to prepare any reader for the wealth of possibilities that lay within: “In this arresting debut collection Ellen Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as they bring their father’s, and their own, stories to light, writing against the background of the institutional racism in Canada, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the head tax and more. From Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville in the late 1990s, Toronto in the 2010s, Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Ottawa in the 2020s, Blood Belies takes the reader through time, asking them what it means to look the way we do? To carry scars? To persevere? To hope?” There is such a wonderful polyvocality to this collection, a layering of time and tales told, including asides, overlapping and faded, fading text; a multiplicity within a singular frame, representing multiple ways, furrows and threads across this collection. The poems offer quick turns, clipped lyrics and inventive speech, writing heredity, silence and open space.

Set through three sections, and a poem on either end of the collection to bookend, Chang-Richardson plays with space on the page through word placement, composed absence, swirls of text and image, erasure and hesitation, providing a forceful book-length provocation of slowness, storytelling, pulse and punctuation.

rob mclennan, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Blood Belies

Sometimes a book drops through the letter box that turns out to be just the one you never knew you needed. Taylor Mignon’s Visual Poetry of Japan: 1684–2023 is, it turns out, just such a book. […]

[Karl] Kempton makes the very important point that while Apollinaire and Pound convinced many western readers of poetry that ideograms are ‘pictorial, not phonetic’ the reverse is actually the case. This fact presents problems for the translator of Japanese poetry, the chief being that in the absence of romanji transcription of the text being presented, the reader without Japanese (the target audience) is missing out on a lot.

Billy Mills, Visual Poetry of Japan: 1684–2023: A Review

For me, one of the primary attractions of video art is that I can create visual worlds that do not exist in real life. The roles of juxtaposition, movement, and the tension between familiarity and strangeness in the visual domain act like metaphor and allusion in written poetry. When audio is added, we gain an additional dimension within which ambiguity, shifting mood and rhythmic energy can inhabit.

My video DEMOLISHED was created for a group exhibition curated by Tony Kearney at The Packing Shed, Hart’s Mill, Port Adelaide, South Australia, as part of the 2024 Adelaide Fringe Festival. None of the scenes in the video exist in real life. Every one of them has been composited and, in some cases animated, from multiple images recorded in the immediate area around Hart’s Mill, including some from inside the Packing Shed itself. The soundtrack was created from a single spoken sample of the word “demolished”.

For me, the video incorporates the feeling of a poem in some way. I originally had intended to include much more text, but as the video came together with the soundtrack, it became clear that the visual imagery told the story, following the rhythms of the soundtrack. If you know the area, the scenes look strangely familiar but impossible to pin down, perhaps like images from a dream or a poorly-recalled memory. Hopefully, they act as metaphors for the loss of human and natural history extending back generations, as old work sheds, warehouses, docks and wetlands are demolished in the name of so-called development of the Port Adelaide district.

Ian Gibbins, DEMOLISHED

When we talk about sensuousness in poetry we tend, I think, to mean the intensity of the sensory evocativeness of imagery and description. We might be thinking of lines like ‘The luscious clusters of the vine / Upon my mouth do crush their wine’ from Marvell’s ‘The Garden’. There, physical sensations of taste and touch are directly referred to by ‘luscious’ and ‘crush’. The sensuous impressions evoked by the meanings of the words aren’t just a matter of meaning, though. They’re powerfully reinforced by sound, and even more by the physical sensations of forming the sounds in our mouths. ‘Luscious’, ‘clusters’ and ‘crush’ are powerfully foregrounded by the assonance and alliteration between them. Collectively, they embody that meaning in a physical way. They’re mouth-filling words that we linger over uttering. There’s a clustering of repeated phonemes between them (that may be partly why ‘cluster’ makes me almost physically imagine the grapes in the bunches crowding together and pressing against each other). The ‘sh’ sounds in ‘luscious’ and ‘crush’ give a hint of drunken slurring to the ‘st’ of ‘clusters’.

But the first stanza of ‘The Mower to the Glo-Worms’ is more interesting in this way because the intensity of impact which I think affects the brain in a way that transcends explicitly physical references and isn’t tied to the actual physical nature of glowworms […]

Edmund Prestwich, More vivid than the merely ‘concrete’ – Marvell’s ‘The Mower to the Glo-Worms’

When I first read Larkin’s poems, ‘Days’ was one of the ones I kept coming back to. I don’t think it’s particularly typical, although it’s surprising how many Larkins you can say that about. There’s a curious (but also typical) combination of chattiness and an almost continental existential doubt in those short, aphoristic lines. Days are where we live, but also a kind of object. It’s as if the speaker is alone in a bare, sunlit room with one of them, turning it over with a pencil.

There’s something a bit… instapoet to all this. Is it profound, or are the lines just short? It’s almost (almost) the kind of thing a moody teenager might stick on their wall. You only ask what days are for if you have a lot of time to kill. But then, I think it helps to understand and appreciate Larkin if we recognise that many of his best poems are just that: young person’s poems. It is no slight on them although, again, it doesn’t fit the familiar image. Much of Larkin’s poetry imagines an argument between freedom (for Larkin, often the same thing as selfishness) and something which we may as well call responsibility, or commitment, or simply other people. The other people rarely win out.

Jeremy Wikeley, What are days for?

For young writers, I suggest that they read at least one challenging book a year and force themselves to finish it, even if it’s confusing or difficult or just plain boring. I ask them to revisit that same book ten years in the future. I’ve done this with books such as Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Each time I reread them, more of the books’ meanings appear to me as if by magic. My increasing level of insight reflects the experience, as well as any wisdom, I’ve gained since the last time I read the book.

I also advise young writers to choose an author they admire, and study his or her life, read that author’s early books, and see if they can spot the developing writer in the early work. Someday some aspiring writer might study them in the same way. 

A community of writers builds on itself, needs other writers, and can’t exist without them. I tell young writers to find other writers. Hang out with them, meet them at coffee shops, invite them over. As we all discover, writing is an excruciatingly lonely pursuit. It’s vital to have the support of a group of friends and colleagues. Young writers need to feel secure enough to share their innermost thoughts with a trusted group of peers. This gets easier with practice, so we need to make sure young writers have plenty of opportunities to practice.

Youth is wonderful and flits by quickly. I tell young writers that they have a unique opportunity to capture this time in their lives before it’s over. They are sponges, eagerly seeking new experiences (or they should be). This stage in life offers myriad opportunities for them to find subjects to write about. 

This is why my most urgent piece of advice for young writers, and indeed all writers, is to keep a journal and write in it faithfully. Think of the great journal-writers: Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Leonardo da Vinci, Anais Nin. 

Keeping a journal is a defense against too much criticism. It’s a way to preserve your thoughts, experience, and voice. As Anais Nin wrote, “Writing for a hostile world discouraged me. Writing for the diary gave me the illusion of a warm ambiance I needed to flower in.” Virginia Woolf wanted her journal to be “so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.” The journal is a refuge, a place of creativity, and an exercise.

Erica Goss, Advice for young writers

April is poetry month, and I’ve been reading poems as part of my morning ritual. I also dug a book out of my TBR pile about writing poetry, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress, essays by Craig Morgan Teicher. The title comes from a Wordsworth poem, the lines, “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” Of course, it doesn’t have to end in madness. Teicher talks about how “poetry is a conversation, an extended one, occupying, perhaps, the span of an entire life.” He says, “language is humankind’s greatest technology, inexhaustible, endlessly adaptable, a mirror of a poet’s own time and, hopefully, of the endless unfolding of all time.” He quotes from the poem by Cavafy that he says gave him hope as a young writer:

“Even if you are on the first step, you ought
to be dignified and happy.
To have got this far is no small thing;
what you have done is a glorious honour.”

And I liked this, because the advice to be dignified and happy works, no matter what step you’re at, as a writer, or in whatever field you pursue.

Shawna Lemay, Perfect Days, Gladness, Dignity, Darkness

Recently I took an armchair trip to the Italian Alps  thanks to Snowlines , Rebecca Gethin’s latest book of poetry. The poems are inspired by the unexpected world she discovered in these mountains. […]

Mountains are exhilarating, but by their nature, immense and dangerous. Hikers can get lost in blizzards. The weather is unpredictable. There are steep cliffs, rock slides and snowfields. Gethin’s poems are a wonderful mix of narrative and descriptions of what she finds on her treks.

Visually,  the poems are full of shadows –and the contrast between light and dark which occurs in the mountains.  A wonderful word “chiaroscuro ” is used to describe a snake who is half hidden in shade.

E.E. Nobbs, Snowlines by Rebecca Gethin

and some fell on stoney ground
his words weeded away by the wind
some on shallow ground turned
in a grave attempt to reach the sun
while others ploughed on unaware
that the field’s nurture was a rare gift
on an early morning the weeds that flowered
were the harvest of his souls

Jim Young, thoughts on a poem by r s thomas

A little while ago a poet and editor in Canada sent me a copy of Wonder-Work: Selected Sonnets of Catherina Regina von Greiffenberg, translated by Joanne Epp, Sally Ito and Sarah Klassen. Von Greiffenberg (1633-1694) was a seventeenth century Austrian poet of whom (I have to confess) I had never heard. […]

I hugely enjoyed reading these early modern German sonnets, which are described by the press — not inaccurately — as in a ‘metaphysical’ style. This is a sensible marketing ploy, since the style is indeed quite a lot like, say, Herbert or Crashaw (although fans of Gerard Manley Hopkins will also be interested). Greiffenberg is not, of course, imitating the so-called ‘metaphysical’ English poets themselves — it’s just that those poets were part of a European-wide stylistic phenomenon better known as ‘baroque’. This term was consciously avoided by English literary critics some generations ago for religio-political reasons (essentially, it sounded too Catholic), and as a result books about English poetry still tend to talk about the ‘metaphysical’ poets as if they were a home-grown phenomenon and not, as in fact they were, the Anglicisation of a huge European-wide vogue.

But gosh Greiffenberg’s poems, call them what you will, are just awfully, unmissably good — immediate, but dense with metaphor, strung tight with rhyme and parataxis but essentially easy to read.

Victoria Moul, A German metaphysical

Back in December 2022, I sang the praises, here, of Jackie Wills’ SmithǀDoorstop book, On Poetry*, and noted the excellence of her exegesis of Patience Agbabi’s superb ‘The Doll’s House’, a poem written in ‘rime royale’; 12 seven-line stanzas, each in an ABABBCC pattern, originated by Chaucer and used by Spenser, Yeats and Auden among others. The poem slowly but surely nails Britain’s terrible culpability for its colonial crimes and practice of slavery, the horrors and legacy of which it, as a sovereign state, is yet to acknowledge fully, let alone provide any restitution for.

So I thought, a month or two ago, that it was time to read some more of Agbabi’s poetry, and I bought her 2008 collection, Bloodshot Monochrome, published by Canongate and available here.

It has an arresting cover, in orange, red, black and white, but it’s let down by being printed on is the sort of low-quality paper which Puffin Books used in the Seventies. Thankfully, though, the poems don’t disappoint. As ‘The Doll’s House’ demonstrated, Agbabi is a brilliant, sometimes offbeat formalist poet, and there are, inter alia, many fine sonnets in the book, concluding with a 14-sonnet sequence, ‘Vicious Circle’ which unfolds a Noir-ish tale of dangerous desire; an unorthodox crown of sonnets of sorts. As much as her subject-matter and viewpoint, it’s Agbabi’s play with form which makes her poems stand out.

Matthew Paul, On Patience Agbabi’s Bloodshot Monochrome

St. Augustine wrote, Inhabit, and you shall be

inhabited. Dwell, and you shall be dwelt in. You could
call it love, this investment in another; this shared

appetite for what sustains life. But the bats are only
being true to their nature. If they lick each others’ mouths,

it’s precious currency rather than a kiss: not ardor
but a social bond.

Luisa A. Igloria, On the Back of a Cow, Vampire Bats French-kiss with Mouthfuls of Blood

I can’t remember when it began, but reading Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness years ago escalated the passion. Considerably.

Montgomery writes, “Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste with its skin. Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart.”

Brilliant. Mysterious. Otherworldly.

And yet, as Craig Foster shows in My Octopus Teacher, she’s an earthling, same as us. “What she taught me was to feel,” he says of the octopus he befriended, “that you’re part of this place, not a visitor. That’s a huge difference.”

We’re all in this together. Connected.

“That is the essence of why we write poetry: wanting to share one’s own experience of the world and hoping that there’s something within one’s own experience that might break through to another psyche and have some kind of effect,” says Brenda Shaughnessy in an interview in Michigan Quarterly Review.

In her poetry collection The Octopus Museum, Shaughnessy “envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans,” says Penguin Random House. “These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.”

I love where the octopus takes Shaugnessy. It makes total sense. Octopuses 1000% give “things-could-be-so-very-different” and “anything-is-possible” vibes.

Carolee Bennett, The One With the Octopus: 19 Poems

A few days ago I was taking a group of four year olds to the marina at the lake and one of the girls kept turning around to tell me about what we were going to see.

“Aren’t you excited to see the turtles?” She asked, “and the snakes? And aren’t you excited to see the bear?” Then she asked again, “aren’t you excited?”

And I was excited. I love turtles and snakes and bear. But I also knew that I wasn’t nearly as excited as she was. At this age I’ve seen the turtles and snakes and bear and I can’t muster as much enthusiasm as I had for them at her age. To be honest, I’ve got other things on my mind. I’ve got regrets, and mistakes I’ve made. I’ve got memories and messes I need to clean up. These things weigh me down, even when I’m looking at aquatic life.

Plus, I’m getting older. I know now in a way I didn’t understand at four years old that my time is limited. There’s still so much I want to do and I’m trying to figure out how to get it all done while there is still time. I feel constantly this push pull between two parts of myself, the part that wants to get excited with the kids, and the part that is starting to feel a severe sense of melancholy. To be honest, I’ve felt this intense push-pull most of my life.

This is why, of all the poems I’ve ever read, my favorite has to be “How to Like it, by Stephen Dobyns.” If you don’t know this poem, allow me to introduce it to you now.

Tresha Faye Haefner, My Favorite Poem Is…

It must be warm
enough to stir
their dormant
blood, speed
the small hearts &
waken senses in
the porous skin.
In the headlights

they can be
mistaken for
last year’s leaves

tumbling over road
but there is
no breeze.
Their eyes gleam.

Ann E. Michael, Toad night

Somewhere along the way, scholars accounted for Dickinson’s psychic complexity and epigrammatic vision by turning her into a steely, nightgown-wearing spinster, a mind alternately cooled by the language of the stars or agitated by death. We’ve looked away as she baked gingerbread and pressed flowers. We have framed her genius in the way that is comfortable to imagine: the result of an intensity exclusively achievable in a vacuum, acquired in seclusion hinged on temperamental proclivities. What selfishness, what loneliness—we might achieve some genius ourselves, but at what cost? All along, it is our vision that has been too small, not Dickinson’s.

What is made plain in these letters is that the reality is far more wondrous than the prefab myth of Dickinson that has so long existed, in part, to rationalize how so extraordinary a mind could come by its power. What if Dickinson’s vision wasn’t arrived at through hermetic seclusion but in company? Is it not, perhaps, the ancient refusal to acknowledge women in their fullness that has denied Dickinson her social life, diminishing her inherent playfulness, renouncing the warmth of her intimacies in favor of otherworldly fevers? Might it have seemed incongruous to past scholars to wrestle with a picture of a person as at ease on earth as on Parnassus—a poet who could toggle her vision from wide to atomic, traveling the reverberations of a single word and following that mental thread to its essential, unknowable nature? When we deny Dickinson a chance at triviality, we deny her the fullness of existence, the very material from which she drew her strength. Can we accept that being a loving friend was at least as important to her as her poetry? Can we imagine a person whose social life unfolded on her own terms, and who, in fact, turned to it for inspiration? In doing so, we honor Dickinson not as a myth but as a flesh-and-blood woman who once walked—and wrote—among us. We let in the richness of life for which Dickinson stood.

Maya C. Popa, What Have We Done to Emily Dickinson?

I’m currently comparing two books dealing with lockdown – Gillian Clarke’s The Silence and Tom Kelly’s Walking My Streets. Both collections are heavy with grief and the loneliness of the deepest lockdown, but where Gillian Clarke looks out onto the countryside where she lives, watching the birds and the rain, the quiet and the undifferentiated days when the dead are reduced to daily numbers, Tom Kelly looks backwards into memory at his early life, his community and the lost members of his family. My lockdown was more characterised by fear and the desperate need to maintain communications with people who were in trouble, rather than grief, but these two collections have brought back some of the deadly quiet of those weeks. It’s important not to forget.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Reading Winter into Spring

I shall tell them
of a princess
locked in a tower.

I shall tell them
of the life
she dreamed she’d have.

I shall watch
their little faces waiting
for the rescue, the escape.

I’ll let them wait
and then I’ll say
The End.

Sue Ibrahim, The old poems

Like many others, when I was young, I found the notorious poetry of William McGonagall so awful it was funny. Wikipedia still celebrates his badness by saying ‘His only apparent understanding of poetry was his belief that it needed to rhyme’. During readings of his interminable, scanless ballads it was not unheard of for him to be pelted with vegetables, eggs, flour, even fish.

Now, maybe, I’ve grown to admire his stubbornness and realise he was probably somewhere quite far along the autistic/aspergers scale. Nothing, it seemed, could put him off believing in himself. He read his poems in the streets, on the stage, and was sometimes paid. He once walked 60 miles from Dundee to Balmoral to perform for Queen Victoria. Unfortunately, the guards at the gate wouldn’t let him in and he had to trudge home again, frustrated and disappointed. It disappoints me, too. Maybe Her Majesty would have enjoyed his work and found some way of downgrading Tennyson and installing McGonagall as Poet Laureate. At least we might have been spared The Charge Of The Light Brigade.

I suppose there are many of today’s poets, some of whom are considered masters of the craft, I might feel inclined to bombard with rotten tomatoes, bad eggs and fish several weeks past their sell-by date. But best not to go there.

Yet what gives me the right to judge? A West Bromwich Albion fan recently released a book of rhymes under the (dis)guise of poetry. I listened to him reciting a couple of them at a supporters’ club meeting and wanted to crawl under a table and hide… but most people in the audience plainly loved them, so who am I to get pompous and sniffy about what others like, or think of as ‘poetry’? His book has, I am told, sold out and is on its next print run. Good luck to him.

Bob Mee, GOOD OR BAD POETRY, WHAT IS IT REALLY?

My translation of this poem by Anna de Noailles was recently published, and maybe that’s why its opening lines are so in my mind of late. Spring is arriving with all its fits and starts, its bright crocus and mud, the dread “wintry mix” of precipitation, stirringly blue skies, riots of clouds, the strange quacking racket of mudpuddle peepers. Her lines more or less literally mean, “I will lean so well and so strongly on life, with such harsh embrace and such tightness…”  I don’t always feel this way consciously about life, given as I am to vague dysphorias and distractions. So maybe it’s all the more that I admire her frank passion. It’s a good reminder to me. My joie de vivre is more sly, perhaps, understated, if none the less felt.

On what I thought was my last ski of the year (which, thanks to two rounds of another 10 inches turned out to be my THIRD to last) I stood looking out at the view and tears came to my eyes. I put it that way, in a passive tense — tears came to me, because that’s the way it felt: unbidden and surprising. I was glad for it, that seizure of whatever that kind of feeling is: some melange of gratitude, awe, connection, enlargement, en-small-ment, the wordless wow, the oh of the mouth in that moment, opening into ah and circling back to oh like an oculus.

Maybe my attempts to translate some of the poems of this romantic and passionate young French woman (young, that is, in the early part of the 20th century, when she wrote these; she died in 1933) are a way for me to embody her traits, to borrow them in my own body/mind/eye/breath. Maybe this is what translation can offer the translator, whose task is essentially impossible — a kind of essential cosplay, the wearing of another tender skin for a moment, a mask of another’s vulnerability standing in for my own.

Marilyn McCabe, Je laisserai la forme unique de mon cœur

They’ll tear out your liver for eternity.
The magical thing is you can take it.
This myth lives in the wounds’ mask
as worn by the children in your fan club.

RM Haines, “SO THEY MADE ME A STAR”

Anyone interested in contemporary poetry will know the name Mark Antony Owen for his tireless promotion of others’ poetry through his curation of the online poetry library, iamb and his ekphrastic poetry space After… . He is, however, a remarkably gifted poet in his own right. I remember hearing him for the first time as an open mic contributor to a Zoom session I attended, when he eclipsed all the other open micers and guest poets with the poems he read and his performance of them. As might be expected from his enthusiasm for technology and its capacity to serve poetry, Mark has chosen to self-publish digitally, rather than in print. His unfolding online collection (or project, as he calls it) is called Subruria, and not only can Mark’s poetry be read here for free, but there are also recordings of him reading every poem. It’s the third release of Subruria that I’m reviewing today.

Mark describes Subruria as the place where countryside and urban landscape meet. He writes ‘Neither wholly residential nor classically bucolic, Subruria is a blend of them both. A place of unclear boundaries.’ It’s certainly true that poems in the collection, such as All fields and Scarecrow Somme, explore the shifting boundary between urban development and the rural landscape. The poems, however, deal with a number of other boundaries. For example, Subruria is a place where past fuses with present. There is much looking back in these poems.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Subruria’ by Mark Antony Owen

In March I had the chance to participate in a short workshop in the region of Umbria in Italy —  under the auspices of Civitella Rainieri—with poet Mark Wunderlich and art historian Dana Prescott. It was remarkable to travel with a small group of artists and writers to see frescoes and altarpieces in small museums, churches, and shrines in rural Umbria—in and around Perugia, Monterchi, Arezzo and Urbino.

I wrote drafts of poems about Mary Magdalene, about the lapis lazuli blue in della Francesca egg tempura, about the incredible archaeological arboretum; hilltop orchards preserving ancient species of pear, apple and fig.

The whole trip, from Vermont to Italy and back again, was a whirlwind immersion into the raw wind, fresh rain, soft sunlight of the countryside of Umbria and into the warrens of little cobblestone streets of the villages and the deep conversations that I was lucky to have with new and old friends about the work of this transcendent artist.

I’m still working on the poems from this trip—some much new light and color in my brain! It was a reminder that there (almost) never is (enough) time or the right time to travel, take a break for yourself, or even to write your poems.

Katharine Whitcomb, A Late Letter from Umbria: Poetry & Piero della Francesca Workshop

“Mystic Orchards” is a collection of poems, including prose poems, and hybrid pieces, which mix prose and poetry, which explores environmental and cultural concerns including heritage and identity. The mystic part of the title suggests a spiritual (although not necessarily religious) journey and the orchards a space for seeding, growth and nurturing. An early poem, “Stilled Wings” which has the speaker moving sacks of dead fireflies where he will

“Toss fistfuls into a wishing well
Watch sound-circles
remember glimmering tails
In the cold black water
moonlight envisions gardens
their stilled wings will soar”

The lack of a final full-stop implies there’s more to the story after the word “soar”. Perhaps these fireflies will come back to life. The shift from the quiet “i” vowels of the penultimate line to the longer “oa” in “soar” suggests a build to a climax. That “soar” is hopeful.

Emma Lee, “Mystic Orchards” Jonathan Koven (Kelsay Books) – book review

He was a strange cat. The only cat I ever knew who didn’t like sitting in boxes. His moods were unpredictable, he was shy. But when he did come for comfort or for cuddles, it was magical, he would become ecstatic with love. God, I miss him and his strange ways.

My lovely old dog was put down at Christmas, and I felt that I was only just getting over that loss and getting used to it just being myself and Pye (the cat) during the day, and now it is just me. I find myself drifting round the house like a ghost, picking up his toys from under the bed, thinking I’ve heard him padding up the stairs. I feel wretched. It will pass, but while it passes I feel crumpled and useless and my confidence has gone. All I want to do is hide away and read, because reading is a refuge.

This is what books can be; not teaching aids, though they can be that, or pure enjoyment or deep journey’s into other people’s experiences, or ways to enhance your knowledge, or ways to have your mind blown by new concepts, or your heart broken, or your loins girded, they are all that too, but they are also, for me at least, a way of escaping. I’m a fidgeter – twitchy, anxious, I can never quite settle, can never stop my brain from over-exploring. Sometimes this is a good thing, a lot of the time it’s a challenging thing. With books, though, I can just stay in one place and rot, while my mind goes off and does all these other things. And when I come back, I come back rested, because physically, I am rested, mentally I am enriched and soothed.

Wendy Pratt, Notes from the quiet refuge of reading

Michael [Donaghy] himself was incredibly personable, modest, humble, approachable and brilliant. I was impressed by the way he recited his poems rather than read them off the page. Chatting with him later, he said, quite simply, that he had written them so therefore it was easy to learn them, and mostly poets had their book to look at because they lacked confidence in their memory, but if they tried, they could do the same. This is why I read with only one eye on the book and most of my focus on the audience, though I have never mastered his easy grace and confidence – but then he was a musician, and actually treated us to some of his flute playing on the night. Playing tunes he’d committed to muscle memory must have helped him with his reciting.

The poem I shared with my group is ‘The Hunter’s Purse’, which is about a real tune, though Donaghy has fun with it and invents an entire backstory. It is discussed in depth by Don Patterson in a video I found online. Donaghy’s poems are always layered and complex, so always fun to re-read and discover more between the lines. I still have one postcard he wrote to me, wishing me good luck with my poetry, and inviting me to send him some poems to look at. I know of poets who attended his workshops in London, who speak of his generosity and acute critical faculties.

I only met him that once, as I had little free time to go on poetry jaunts, but that one precious time is still treasured, and it has blest my life.

Angela Topping, Michael Donaghy 1954-2004

How many waves have slapped the beach already today?
Bringing with them torn nets and glass floats
like witch balls filled with salt.

There’s a second heartbeat beneath her ribs.

Later the waulking begins.
And she sings with the other women. Pounding
on the wool that will become a fisherman’s sweater,
or a bonnet to cover a newborn’s soft skull.

And as the sun sets, she looks to the sea. Knowing
its pull. Its insistence. She carries the weight of it
into her bed. Another heartbeat
settles in her throat
like that of a ghost.

Ren Powell, What Women Carry

Here is another book bought on impulse during one of my foraging expeditions to Edmonds Bookshop. To borrow from the Copper Canyon description:

“This bilingual collection of over 160 verses chronicles Tao Yuanming’s path from civil servant to reclusive poet during the formative Six Dynasties period (220–589). Familiar scenes like farming and contemplating the nature of work and writing are examined with intimate honesty. As Red Pine illuminates Tao Yuanming’s sensitive voice, we find the poet’s solace and sorrow in a China transformed by modernity.”

Modernity! One wonders what the poet would say about today. I have been turning over that question all year, reading a few poems each morning, copying scraps into my morning journal, and trying to imagine what I might say in a blogpost.

Choosing to Be Simple is, simply put, irresistible. Tao Yuanming (365? 372?-427), who lived in the eastern part of China near the Yangzi River, left his employment as a civil servant around the age of 40. He chose to live simply, propagating his own food, making his own wine, and writing. The translator, also known as Bill Porter and now living in Port Townsend, embellishes Yuanming’s words with an introduction, generous footnotes, photographs, and maps (I include a photo of a page with the Chinese and Red Pine’s notes below). But the poems star […]

Bethany Reid, Choosing to be Simple: Collected Poems of Tao Yuanming

Recently, I had the delightful experience of joining Syd (aka thechosengiraffe) for an interview on her stream (available to watch here). Together, we played Minecraft and discussed game development, poetry, and the writing life. Syd is a wonderful interviewer and her skills led us in a fantastic conversation.

One of the questions asked by the chat was whether or not I would ever consider blending poetry into one of the games I make — and I answered that I had not considered it. As much as I love both poetry and games, I didn’t have any concepts that made sense to me. And I also could not come up with many examples of games that incorporate poetry on the spot.

After the interview ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about the question. What games did I know off that included poetry? I found a few examples that specifically comprised either an interactive poem or the use of actual poetry in the gameplay. These included:

• “The horse is dead.” by Nico May was probably the first interactive poem I played. It involves clicking between two options to reveal increasingly strange and beautifully unsettlingly imagery.
• “House of Poems” by Kyra Jaeger is an interactive narrative in poetry, which invites the player into an ethereal fantasy and leads them on a journey into discovering witchyness and personal power.
• Battle Poet is a game currently being developed by Jesse Calder. The game involves battling demons by combining lines of poetry to create certain effects.

Andrea Blythe, Exploring the Potential of Poetry in Games

After a merry crop of encouraging but ultimately disheartening longlistings I sat down to try and understand why my work didn’t have the pizazz it needed to take it over the line. What was it that was making editors and competition judges go “It’s good, but nah, there’s something missing”.  I’m confident in my structure and techniques. There’s always stuff to learn and I constantly seek to improve but I have an idea of the impact of various aspects of the poets toolkit and the magical way rhythm and sound can say things we don’t even know we feel. I think it’s more about the content. I know that I hold back in my writing. A little of this is fear of sounding “too poetic” in a “who does she think she is” kind of way. That’s the easy one. The real challenge is saying what I actually feel, what I actually think, and the worry of giving too much of myself away.

This reluctance make myself vulnerable was brought home during in an ad-hoc project, born on Substack.  After an innocuous exchange with Allegra Chapman on Notes I set out to explore why I want to write in public with a vague plan to compare our ideas at some point in the future.

We wrote without reading each others thoughts and whilst we shared many similarities, one key difference struck me. Allegra was proud to say she wanted to change the world.

Ultimately, though, I write publicly – and seek out a career writing words in public media – to have an impact on the world. I have something I want to say.

This pulled me up short. Somewhere along the line I’ve lost my courage, lost my willingness to stand tall and say that I want to change things, and that I believe what I write could make a difference. I’ve implied it, sure, with gentle sentences about connection, but I lack(ed) the courage to say it out loud.

This lack of courage means I hold back in speaking my truth, my reality. Yet that is the one of the most important things any writer can do. Years of writing training manuals, and working as a content writer have meant that I am an expert in writing in the clients voice – perhaps at the expense of my own. The time has come to push myself into my discomfort zone.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I’m writing

Tiny white spears. Fingernail
sized stars. Petals dripping rain.
Clusters and buds lined with light.
When winter has been so hard
you stop believing in spring,
forget to look for it, then,
stare hard, as if it’s leaving.

PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 14 #NaPoWriMo

Sometimes life requires perseverance and hope that is not logical.

I planted this cherry tree after I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and then MS, after the 2017 solar eclipse. Now it is over 20 feet tall and in bloom.

The day I took this picture, a few days ago, I was told by one of my doctors I should stop trying to make money and go on disability (not an easy process—or one I want to go through at this point), then went to the book club I curate for a Woodinville winery where we did a book-club open mic and I stayed late until the stars came out, and I looked up and saw a crescent moon weirdly aligned with a bunch of planets. I felt alive and connected to my community and able to contribute.

Today’s news with “WWIII” trending on Twitter and the threat of global war seems very dark, and outside of my control.

Sometimes you have to continue on with life even when confronted with things that could leave us feeling that hope is unreasonable. Sometimes it’s important to call the people you love just to tell them you love them. It’s important to plant something that looks like a small dead stick in the ground and hope something will come of it.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Upcoming Reading with Jack Straw, Unreasonable Hope (in Hard Times), Meanwhile Cherry Blossoms

Behind several eighteen-wheelers, I can’t see what’s happening till I’m right there at the accident’s jarring tableau.

A woman prone on the pavement.

A uniformed man reaching into ruckled car.

Medics leaping from orderly ambulances into chaos.

I’m still moving at three mph, but a different slow motion takes over. For what must be only a moment it seems I see past and future slide into now. I can’t explain it.

Some glitch in the filter between what we can know and cannot know shows me the injured woman already recovered. I hear her say, improbably, the accident turned her life around.

I see the cop who is waving us along with an orange-nosed flashlight recognize, much later, he will train to be a paramedic. He shakes his head at all the schooling it will take to save lives yet earn half as much. I even see arguments about this with a wife, who holds a small child between them like a wall. I look right in his eyes as I pass and see somewhere in him he already knows this too.

I recognize whoever is trapped in the car has left his body long enough to see Beyond before coming back. It changes him.

Something like an incomprehensible geometry shimmers over the whole scene, illuminating patterns too large and complex for me to comprehend.

This all happens in the seconds it takes me to drive past. Did that really happen? Already it seems unreal.

Drivers accelerate, normal traffic flow resumes. I don’t know what to make of any of it. Maybe every second we pass a tableau. Every second we are the tableau.

Laura Grace Weldon, Tableau

high noon / climbing the sky / a little spider

Bill Waters, National Poetry Month @ Kunkel Park

This first week of Poetry Month, doves abound and emptiness has teeth, finding dusty corners to live in, while April asks, “What, me? Cruel?” Enjoy.

I’m pretty sure this is the twentieth year in a row I have done NaPoWriMo alongside Maureen and others. I just went back to my old blogspot to check, and yep, April 2005. Amazing. I have lost count of how many poems I have written in that many Aprils, but I can say that all of my books have at least a few that made the final cut, with the exception of Midwinter Constellation, since that was cowritten in December 2018.

I’m posting over at the Bloof blog, as I have done for the last many years, in excellent company. I’m probably going to be doing some visual poetry stuff like collages and altered book pages, but perhaps some text-only too. You never know what will happen.

Shanna Compton, Two decades, how?

Scraps of paper fall
on the floor — petals,
leaves, leavings. Later,
perhaps, as snow, dust,
they drift, transform
to fatigue, a flaw,
a fatality.

PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 3 #NaPoWriMo

I’d forgotten it’s GloPoWriMo, Global Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo, even though I’ve started Angela Carr‘s writing prompts course, A Pagan Place. I’ve managed to write something every day, even though I’m back to work. The course is brilliant, based around Irish mythology, but the prompts include music, other poems and stories often inspire something totally unconnected. I don’t expect to continue to write every day, but I like having the prompts for the days when I do get a chance. 

In today’s prompt, I especially liked this poem by Mahmoud Darwish though my writing was inspired by the Big Country song In a Big Country.  I don’t usually listen to music when I write, but have been stuck on a Big Country loop today. 

Gerry Stewart, Brightening into April – GloPoWriMo

This was a week where parents were on the mind of many poet friends. I traded abcderian drafts with Jared Beloff (poet/teacher/friend) and both of us, on the same day, miles apart, wrote poems that spoke of our fathers and faith.

Also this week, Joan Kwon Glass (poet/teacher/friend) shared her poem that was featured in Mayday. (Go read it. You won’t be sorry.) The poem “Blind Fish” details a moment with a father, one that is bittersweet.

I just finished listening to Leah Umansky (poet/teacher/friend) read from her new collection Of Tyrant on Zoom, poems about reclaiming voices, about a world where tyrants intrude on joy. The first poem she read revolved around a scene with a mother and a small girl. You can feel both the tension and care of parenthood in the poem.

Alina Stefanescu (poet/teacher/friend) read at the same reading, and her poem about losing her mother, about wearing her mother’s favorite perfume as a protective talisman, made me tear up a little. She is also one of the most generous people I know in the poetry world – the resources on her website alone could nurture a poet for weeks.

These are just a few examples of the connections that keep me writing. I always say that I’m not going to attempt writing a poem a day in April, but then here I am, following along with a form calendar created by Taylor Byas and Seamus Fey.

Donna Vorreyer, Kindred

In second grade we planted seedlings. They came up vivid, lusty shoots. I understood then there was a kind of order, that this was nature’s outcome. It was impersonal and pleasing. Could I now proclaim, I am feeling full, or I must fill up, or, I am fully felt. I flounder with seeds and window boxes. The problem is that emptiness has teeth, and wishes of its own. The emptiness is un-content. It will not do with the least it can survive on. No stones, no feathers, no shells settle in my hands. Only a crusted thing, grown around its nut, seed of all nourishment, jewel of the essential.

Sit and think of nothing. Sit and engage only in the hollowness of breath, its motion in your veins. I tell people all day long because I believe it is important: We breathe in oxygen, we breathe out carbon dioxide, the lungs lunge, the lungs do their job. There is nothing easy in the effortless.

Kristen McHenry, Doubting Thomas

The female wasp can lay eggs that will produce male wasps without the help of fertilization. It takes sperm to produce a female wasp.

It’s a fact that spins in my head. It’s something my mind refuses to consider and pushes at it with a force like magnetic repulsion.

As a metaphor, I hate it. This fact.

But maybe it’s necessary to define what it is to be a female—for the sake of metaphor. We’ll say what it is to be a woman. A woman, who’s learned how to name her challenges. Whether or not she’s learned to overcome them all—to tame, to ally, or to split them wide open.

This is how I’m re-entering the wasp poems: I have no choice but to see things as I am now. I can’t write from who I was a year ago. It seems like a lifetime ago.

Maybe it was.

One average, a queen wasp lives a year.

Ren Powell, Memory, Metaphor, and Facts

April, if any time of year, seems the perfect time to write a letter to your past poet self. To that 19-year-old addressing SASE’s frantically  over summer break. Or that 15-year-old writing poems about flamingos as dead seagulls in her diary. (Even then, so many birds.) Or maybe to the poet who looked at the world one day, amidst grad school and other plans, and said THIS. This is what I want to be doing with my life. This is what I am good at. I’ve done it somewhat before. A letter to that girl, or maybe to poets in general. A calling out across time and inky pages. A holler across great distances of time. 

Truth be told poet, this poetry thing will bring you as much occasional angst as it will joy. You will get better, but mostly readers will probably care less as the shine wears off and the newness wanes. Getting that first book will be hard, but sometimes the subsequent ones will be even harder or may even never happen for some, so be grateful if it does. You will probably face down the specter of quitting at least a half dozen times, sometimes when the world, either yours or the world in general, will be in upheaval. When poetry seems like the most over-indulgent way to spend time or exist in the world. When you will wonder why you’ve sunk years and resources and mental energy into something that usually takes more than it gives by far.

Kristy Bowen, dear poet, revisited

Long ago, long ago: why bother with it? I’ve gotten by, sidling through the world, finding dusty corners to live in, like a wary spider in an untidy house. The weird kid had a will, and a brain. He did all right. Burned out spectacularly twice; threw away two promising careers, but he had a nice family; he ended his working days comfortably doing part time data entry and part time massage: and he had time enough to spend on meditation, prayer, history, literature, and philosophy to actually understand some things. To write some essays and poetry. More than most people ever get. Far more than that kid under the florescent lights of the gymnasium, bewildered by the rhythmic bellowing of the neurotypicals, dared to hope for.

Still the mind goes back, and gnaws on things; misspoken words return, the scent of chalk dust and gym ropes.

Dale Favier, Autistic Kid

I’m thrilled to have been asked to take part in this year’s West of England Festival of Textiles (WEFT) which is held biannually at Trowbridge Museum. I’ll be talking about and reading poems from my pamphlet One Deliberate Red Dress Time I Shone at Trowbridge Museum on Friday, 17 May, 5.30pm – 6.45pm. Tickets for Poetry, Pimm’s and Punch are available here. My pamphlet was a winner in last year’s Coast to Coast to Coast Writing Prize and was made into a beautiful, limited edition handstitched journal by writer and artist Maria Isakova Bennett. All of the poems in this mini-collection are to do with fabric, clothes and making, and include seen-while-walking poems, odes, poems after art, and self-portraits.

Josephine Corcoran, Poetry, Pimm’s and Punch at Trowbridge Museum Friday 17 May, 5.30pm – 6.45pm

I’m absolutely delighted that my video Eviction has been selected for the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival for 2024, screening in Wales in May. This is a very fine festival indeed where I’ve been fortunate to have work screened previously.

The video took over three years to make after I had the original idea. Nearly all of this footage was recorded in the Belair area of unceded Kaurna Land in South Australia. Much of it was filmed among the native plants in our own garden, with key elements recorded in Belair National Park and the Sleeps Hills Quarry reserve across the street from our place.

The music is in 11/4 time and includes samples of birds, frogs, machines, engines and alarms in and around the environments where the videos were recorded.

As human-induced global climate change threatens the viability of nearly every ecosystem on earth, small refuges, the microrefugia, may provide safe havens for the organisms that can successfully survive there. Small plants, fungi and species yet to evolve may yet be long-term survivors, if only we give them a chance…

Ian Gibbins, Eviction screens at Carmarthen Bay

We’re warned not to turn
our eyes directly toward the Sun.
It could burn earthquakes
right into our brains.

Instead, we look into its reflection
on viewing mirrors. The very trees learn
how to break it apart into hundreds
of bright thumbnails on the ground.

Luisa A. Igloria, Totality

Saif’s writing is heavily influenced by journalism. But he also picks up details that demonstrate a compassionate side, moments of levity within the horror. A mother trying to talk a young child out of asking for a pet cat. Noticing a man is wearing shoes normally worn by a woman. Another mother teaching her young son to write using a stick in the sand.

One of the final observations in the diary, is “I smell the smoke of the fire, breathe in the steam of the boiling tea. I still see everything”. There was an earlier quoted saying about “the perfume of the Bedouin is the fire”. The implication that despite all, the focus is on survival.

It’s hard to take in social media reports of thousands killed, thousands more injured plus estimates of at least a million displaced into makeshift camps. Saif’s diaries give a focus to the people behind those numbers, the humans pushed into desperate situations. Saif’s journalistic instincts steer away from propaganda and hyperbole and flesh out facts with details of how it feels to be forced to move, to search and queue for a daily meal while trying to keep in touch with distanced family members, necessarily scattered to different areas. “Don’t Look Left” invites compassion and asks that readers do not look away from the destruction of Gaza.

Emma Lee, “Don’t Look Left” Atef Abu Saif (Comma Press) – book review

Yes, it IS National Poetry Month. Instead of my usual every-day-in-April poetry-binge, I am committed to reading a book of poems each week this year, and posting a review here. So far I think I’m 13/14, but this week I’m determined to catch up.

For the last couple of days I have been reading Risa Denenberg’s Rain/Dweller. The poems are, as Rena Priest says in her cover blurb, “honest and unflinching.” They are also, Priest continues, “temper[ed]  with tenderness, vulnerability, beauty, and delight.” Indeed. David Guterson says of reading these poems: “Part of the loveliness for me was the expectation of arriving at yet another arresting line—of being brought to a halt by something piercingly true.” These 71 poems remind us that if difficult truths are … well, difficult … there is something beautiful about looking closely, unflinchingly, at them.

Bethany Reid, Risa Denenberg: RAIN/DWELLER

It’s always good to examine your strong emotions. Recently, I’ve read two poems that feature Alaska written by poets that have only visited for less than a week. Two poems that are in anthologies and being publicly lauded. They are good poems by great poets, but both of them reinforce a vision of Alaska that has little nuance. Because nuance comes from existing in a place for more than a week. The poems made me angry. Like hornets in my head angry.

The anger comes from the fact that there are so many fine writers who live in Alaska who never get the opportunity to be chosen by a “famous” poet to be in an anthology. And lest I sound too altruistic, I’m also disappointed for myself, for the poet me who has lived in Alaska for 24 years and can write about things that someone who only visited cannot.

Which is where the self-examination comes in, because remember I’ve been working on a project that takes place in Ireland. I was there for two weeks last November doing research, getting a boots-on-the-ground level of immersion that was meant to help me give authenticity to the work.

I haven’t written a single poem in that series since I returned. I learned while I was there that it isn’t enough to know what plants grow along the side of the road, to write honestly about it, you must have a storied relationship with those plants. More than two weeks can give you. More than a four-day trip. 

But here’s where it gets slippy. I mean, how much connection is connection? How long do you have to live someplace to form a true relationship that goes beyond extractive? 

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Who gets to write about it?

Below is my new translation of a poem [by] the contemporary Italian poet Andrea Inglese. I have translated this poem before, about ten years ago and it was published (together with another Inglese poem) in Litter magazine. I think it is a wonderful poem, and revisited it this morning on Poetry International , where you can find more of Inglese’s work, and a translation of this poem by Gabriele Poole.
I was never quiet satisfied with my previous translation, so have had another go. […]

The role of the breath, of hands,
of saliva, are clear, the cascade
of blood through our organs
is clear, the shadows that pass
in our gaze, manifest, the surfaces
and depths of our vessels, their tunnels
and pleats, tint of our fabric,
folds and linings of our flesh.

Roy Marshall, Translation of Andrea Inglese poem

I began to drift into old habits. Trying to understand the algorithm. Wondering about SEO. Trying to emulate other successful (i.e. heart gathering) articles. I began to get a flutter of anxiety every time I thought about opening the app – would there be any interaction? Would I have finally cracked it?

I’m not competitive about anything other than writing. And maybe quizzes. But most other things leave me unworried about winning. Writing though – well that’s my thing. If I’m no good at that, what do I have to offer? Writing matters to me and metrics are a measure of that. And one of the most alluring metrics is money. I’m not a “big writer” and I’m unlikely to ever reach that status. Unfortunately, so many people measure success in terms of how much money is earned – and by that metric I’ve failed before I’ve begun. It takes a will of steel to keep going and keep believing that there is someone out there who needs to read what I write.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Writing to live, living to write

Right now, the Elephant in the Poetry Publishing Room isn’t funding, which is eternally being debated. No, there’s another issue that very few poetry publishers are prepared to discuss in public, and that’s the collapse in sales of single-poet collections. […]

It feels like a fundamental shift has taken place, as if the rules of the poetry publishing games have all changed, though most of the players haven’t noticed yet (or aren’t making any public acknowledgement of having done so). In this context, it’s especially important to assert the poetry collection’s value as an object, as a sensory experience, as a physical connection with the words that are printed on its pages, as an act of communication that reaches far beyond a screen. As a consequence, production values become even more important. The quality of the paper, of the cover design, of the typesetting, fonts, all become something to savour, something that lifts print-based poetry above a phone or tablet. That said, however, a balance needs to be struck between these materials and the affordability of collections, as sales are inevitably connected to retail prices.

And then there’s the permanent qualities of books against the transient nature of the internet. As readers, if we don’t buy, read and treasure poetry collections, we’ll be left with a random succession of poems to be scrolled through for free on a screen, consumed and forgotten in minutes.

Matthew Stewart, The Elephant in the Poetry Publishing Room

This month’s new CBe title – following Lara Pawson’s Spent Light in January and Katy Evans-Bush’s Joe Hill Makes his Way into the Castle in February – is Paris 1935 by Jean Follain (1903–71), a prose book by a French poet I deeply admire. The translation by Kathleen Shields is the first full version in English. I think I first knew of the book from August Kleinzahler’s poem ‘Follain’s Paris’ in Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow, 1995, which mines phrases and scenes from Follain’s book. Since the start of CBe I’ve always wanted to publish Follain – back in 2008 I wrote to Christopher Middleton, asking if I could publish the translations of Follain’s poems that he was working on, but he had promised them to Peter Jay at Anvil – and now I have and it has been worth the wait.

Charles Boyle, Paris, spring

The children played games, played outside, played on their tablets, did quiet things. I focused my attentions on the growing mounds of books over the past couple of months I hadn’t even had a chance to open yet, for the sake of potential review. I think I managed to start more than two dozen reviews (and a couple of books I realized I didn’t think I would have anything, or enough, constructive to say, so those were set aside). There is simply too much remarkable material being produced these days to be able to account for it all (I know I’m seriously behind on Graywolf Press titles, for example, as well as Copper Canyon and Flood Editions; at least Sylvia Legris’ new title from New Directions landed, as I was writing this). I sat in the sunroom and I poured through books (and also made significant headway, I must say, through two short stories I’ve already been months working on, plus a few other odds and sods of note-taking). Christine, on her part, finished reading the book she’d been going through, and went through two different books on L.M. Montgomery (including the short Penguin biography by Jane Urquhart) for the sake of working a small write-up for an exhibition on and around her works.

rob mclennan, the laurentitudes: eastering in sainte-adèle

While it seems the culture of poetry has largely abandoned any pretense to being “anti-establishment” and “counterculture,” I am beginning to think these terms are in need of a revival. And in our present moment, I would argue that funding is the prime indicator of one’s position relative to any establishment. I think that, if a print-based counterculture for poetry is desirable, then those who want to be a part of it should begin to sort things out around this factor and to develop strategies for surviving outside of the financial nexus of “state verse culture.” In many cases, this will simply mean dropping out and doing things cheaply and on a smaller scale. That is, it will mean abandoning the idea that one’s efforts as a poet must contribute to a national cultural project.

RM Haines, “State Verse Culture” & the Poet as Public Servant

I promised myself, when I began pulling together the first poems that would later become the start of Subruria, that I wouldn’t try to illustrate both the suburban and the rural in the same poem. For the most part, I’ve kept that promise – the project being made up of roughly two thirds suburban poems to one third rural.

Every so often, however, a poem like Childhood these days happens. A poem that encompasses both the suburban and the rural within its span. I don’t recall specifically what sparked its writing. Maybe I was trying to make a nostalgic comparison between the way I grew up in the 70s and 80s and how my kids have grown up over the past 15 years.

What I do remember is that my own boyhood, though not filled with wild adventures, had more of the outdoors about it. Occasionally, that outdoors could be dicey: the time I was hit in the head by a boy with a brick; when an older boy suggested something unsavoury that I now recognise was an attempt at sexual abuse. Don’t let Subruria’s thin veil of bucolicism fool you: there are daisies all right, but also dangers.

I wanted part of Childhood these days to touch on the dangers both I and my children faced as part of our formative years. What I didn’t want was for this tinge of darkness to overshadow my central point: that there was something to be said for the freedoms my generation enjoyed away (sometimes, very far away) from home. Kids nowadays lead such relatively small, overprotected lives.

Drop-in by Mark Antony Owen (Nigel Kent)

Still, there are aspects of Catholicism I miss: the ritual, the poetry of mass, the belonging. I like that I can still recite the apostle’s creed, even all these years later, words said and heard so many times they became part of me. That I find so much meaning and comfort and poetry can be traced, in part, to my early experiences in church.

If I go to mass now, even though I no longer believe, I still feel something sacred. What can be more sacred than people coming together in hope and faith, looking for comfort, guidance, and ways of being a better version of themselves? I have often felt the same thing in schools. Once I almost cried at a middle school talent show, overcome by the earnest courage and joy of an awkward girl dancing in front of her peers as if no one was watching, and the kindness with which they held her. I feel it often in libraries, those monuments to so many kinds of faith.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Finding my religion

Someone will dress their madness in drag and claim it’s the lover for whom you’ve always been waiting.

Someone will drag you down into dark waters while someone else will sprinkle you with holy water.

Rich Ferguson, Someone

i know very little about cleansing
though once i spit up a dove
after eating the largest meal
of my life. i am always trying
to rid myself of something. does anyone
live whole? when i see a stained glass window
i always want to live there. fragments
glued in place & legible.

Robin Gow, juniper

How do we celebrate Pesach in a year like this one? Everything about the seder lands differently after the last six months. This offering emerges out of grief and hope. No two pieces are coming from exactly the same place. There are so many emotions — even within a single heart, much less around any given seder table.

On behalf of my co-creators at Bayit, I hope these prayers, poems, and works of art will help you make this Pesach what you need it to be.

Click through for This Broken Matzah, available as a downloadable chapbook / PDF of liturgical poetry and art, or as google slides suitable for screenshare. 

Featuring work created in collaboration by the Liturgical Arts Working Group at Bayit, this collection includes work by Trisha Arlin, Joanne Fink, R. Dara Lithwick, R. David Evan Markus, R. Sonja Keren Pilz, Steve Silbert, and R. David Zaslow — and of course also me. 

Rachel Barenblat, New poetry, liturgy, and art for Pesach

[Simone] Weil’s remark about Troy and Carthage becomes a bit clearer in context; in the preceding paragraphs the text focuses on the idea of the ‘void’ and the ‘consolations’ which may falsely fill the void:

Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void — to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses.

[. . .]

We must leave on on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events — in short the ‘consolations’ which are ordinarily sought in religion.

The austere difficulty of this message seems to me to have something in common with both those Tamil poems and with the Yeats. With the Tamil poems because they depict the reality of the cycle of war and destruction without any attempt at consolation, without the consolatory emphasis that we might expect — and find, for instance, though uncertainly, in the Iliad — upon the possibility of glory or the immortality of fame. And in Yeats because all the strivings of civilisation — of war and politics and (in the final stanza) of art — are set against the recurring image of the fly somehow poised upon the water, the mind that ‘moves upon silence’. Perhaps this is what it means to go à travers the destruction of Troy and of Carthage.

Victoria Moul, Doing without consolation

April stares back at us and asks: 
What me, cruel?

Because mournful windows
rattle in my winds

and pots tip over, green 
with rust or lichen?

Because hairs on your bare legs
shiver like crocus?

She finds us in her glassy eye
and springs: 

You are morose, but life revives 
on my terms (her smile impervious)

Jill Pearlman, “What Me, Cruel?”

On X/Twitter this week, lots of people have been reporting the number of rejections they’ve received for submissions to poetry magazines.

I am pleased to report that I have had 0 rejections this week. That is because I do not currently have any submissions in.

And it would appear that even if you get a poetry collection published, the chances are you won’t sell many copies (30-60, but definitely under 100).

I am therefore also feeling pretty pleased because my self-published genre-defying poetry/words/photograph book sold 87 copies, back in 2019/20. (I gave away the rest of the 100 print run to friends and family.)

So, while not submitting or getting published, I have, as I said I would, spent my time recently exploring the many online poetry resources. There are so many, I could spend my entire life doing just that, if inconvenient chores like shopping, cooking, cleaning, repairing my collapsing home, etc didn’t get in the way.

This exploration has left me both inspired and overwhelmed. My mind keeps darting off in different directions and won’t settle on any one. I have, however, drafted quite a few new poems, and even tweeted one or two. They have received a positive response. And I’m pretty chuffed about that too. 

The road to happiness is clear.

Sue Ibrahim, The road to happiness

I encountered Rubbish Day online a few months ago and it has been rolling around in my head ever since. I’m grateful to Jo Bratten and Fly on the Wall Press for permission to share it here. As ever, what follows isn’t intended to be a comprehensive reading of the poem (not that such a thing exists!) but just some reflections, informed by my work as a clinical psychologist. 

I love that this is a poem about rubbish. This metaphorical recycling of possibly the least ‘poetic’ topic you could think of is proof, if ever you needed it, that anything can be the subject of a poem. There’s a brilliant blend of humour and threat here. Bratten seems to be poking fun at the ridiculousness of etiquette and the lengths we go to in order to fit in – even our waste has to be clean. I love those images of the mixed-up refuse, blended in with meanings and imaginings, hopes and fears. And though it’s peppered with allusions, the poem stays grounded in the physical: much of our domestic waste, after all, is concerned with bodily needs and functions. Bratten draws attention to the body as vessel – its own bag of ‘bones and fat’ – scrutinised and sanitised. When concealment is the norm, it becomes habitual, internalised. What happens when we can’t conceal, when our animal selves (even this wording has certain connotations) are in full view?

Jonathan Totman, Rubbish Day

doves are nesting in a yard i’ve stopped speaking to

Grant Hackett [no title]

Today it’s been snowing on my yellow tulips, my white bleeding heart (tiny but already blooming!), and the various blossoming trees outside my workplace and on my route to and from. I might be a little grumpy about this, making it another Cranky Doodle Day in the blog, as well as the Hump of the Week. It’s only Wednesday, but it feels like a Friday, and I’m doing laundry, so it feels like a Monday. Clearly, it’s April, the cruelest month.

I am, almost an afterthought, writing a poem a day. It’s something I do every year, providing the prompts at an internet site I participate in. This year, I almost forgot, distracted by too many personal things. Now, it is its usual absolute joy, and I am grateful.

Did I mention that clematis leaves have appeared on a trellis?! That daffodils I forgot I planted continue to surprise me by blooming, lately in the snow? That soon, possibly, my backyard will be overtaken by white anemone, coneflower, and oregano. It just keeps happening. Again, I am grateful. Maybe this year, in August, I will again read a book of poems a day outside on the glider. I don’t know what will happen next. But I am grateful to have a baby in my life. She has found her foot! [Click through for the photo.]

Kathleen Kirk, Poetry Month

In all my born days, I’ve never had a Poetry Month start off with such an abundance of publications–and, as it will probably never happen again, I’m going to post the links here.

“Siren for Somebody Else” offers a mother’s perspective on waiting, unable to get to sleep, for a child who is out late on his own. It appears in RockPaperPoem.

“Interpreting the Conversation from Another Room” shows up in Stick Figure Poetry #13. The poem originated during the years our son lived with us and played online multiplayer games in his room, but it morphed into something a little more sinister.

“Fevered” came almost out of nowhere but resonated with some early readers who contend with mental and emotional challenges. It’s also a poem about love and compassion, I suppose. The journal Philadelphia Stories published it in the latest issue.

Gyroscope Review is a print journal that also offers a Kindle and a PDF version, the last of which is free to download, though the paper book is lovely and only $12 on Amazon. My poem “Bach and Birdsong” starts the issue off…a meditation on springtime.

Ann E. Michael, Abundance!

The solar eclipse is tomorrow, and it’s almost my (and my book’s) birthday, so may I suggest some eclipse reading material? Flare, Corona has eclipses, solar weather, supervillains, terrible diagnoses, surviving, and a surprising number of foxes and coyotes. You can order Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, Ltd., or from local bookstores like Open Books, or a signed copy directly from me. Okay, that’s enough eclipse cross-promotion for now.

I was thinking about my last birthday, and the book launch last year, and seeing my parents and little brother and friends all together. It was a really fun day. The last four years have not had enough celebration in them. I’ve been so stressed lately I haven’t taken the time to be grateful for the good things that have happened in the last year. Even in the last couple weeks, when I’ve been stressed about a) trying to get an ADA bathroom remodel done without losing my mind or all my money, b) my purpose as a writer, and c) just general depression, I’ve had so many friends encouraging and supporting me, so thank you to all of you who sent me a little note or bothered to say something nice. I am grateful to you!

And, thanks to friends’ encouragement, I’m going to run a few Zoom classes, including one on “Possible Futures: Apocalypses and Solarpunk,” and another on persona poetry.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Solar Eclipse Reading Material (and book birthdays), Flare, Corona, Under the Weather in Springtime, More Reading Notes, and Upcoming Zoom Classes and Readings

I remember singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the choir of the Bulgarian Math Academy as a child. I remember my awe at learning that across centuries of warring nationalisms, this piece of music, based on an old Schiller poem and born of Beethoven’s unimaginable trials, had become the official Hymn of Europe — a bridge of harmony across human divides. I remember wondering as I sang whether music is something we make or something we are made of.

That is what Pythagoras, too, wondered when he laid the foundation of Western music by discovering the mathematics of harmony. Its beauty so staggered him that he thought the entire universe must be governed by it. He called it music of the spheres — the idea that every celestial body produces in its movement a unique hum determined by its orbit.

The word orbit did not exist in his day. It was Kepler who coined it two millennia later, and it was Kepler who resurrected Pythagoras’s music of the spheres in The Harmony of the World — the 1619 book in which he formulated his third and final law of planetary motion, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. For Kepler, this notion of celestial music was not mere metaphor, not just a symbolic organizing principle for the cosmic order — he believed in it literally, believed that the universe is singing, reverberating with music inaudible to human ears but as real as gravity. He died ridiculed for this belief.

Half a millennium after his death, our radio telescopes — those immense prosthetic ears built by centuries of science — detected a low-frequency hum pervading the universe, the product of supermassive black holes colliding in the early universe: Each merging pair sounds a different low note, and all the notes are sounding together into this great cosmic hum. We have heard the universe singing.

Maria Popova, Marie Howe’s Stunning Hymn of Humanity, Animated

In a blurb, Melissa Allen writes of [Cherie Hunter] Day’s haibun that ‘the terrain of the natural world is vividly and precisely rendered’ which is, to an extent true but possibly understates what Day is at; it strikes me that the real strength of this writing lies in how it makes the familiar different, distorted, strange:

How to Fold a Bird

The legacy of stories told during the day are collected at dusk for safekeeping. Robins are the last entry. Night knows how to fold a bird starting with its song. The hills soften. Dust returns to dust. Everything is rounded up to the nearest whole number. Night starts its song. During the journey dust softens for safekeeping. The hills wrinkle as the first entry of morning.

the handsewn name tag
for an easy return –
daybreak

The robins are both real and not, their folding a cross between origami and the fading light. The effect is underlined by the careful repetition of key words: safekeeping, song, soften, dust.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading: March 2024

This poem is a flag tied to the olive tree.
This poem is a dove perched on an olive branch.
A single strike can incinerate all three.
This poem burns
and becomes white ash.
Under the blazing April sky
it looks incongruous.
Like snow that
no longer
has the strength
to melt.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Peace

I spent parts of the weekend digesting the whole of Netflix’s Fall of the House of Usher, something I have been waiting for for over a year, being a huge Mike Flanagan fan and lover of Poe in general. It was everything I expected and more–a modern day gothic chilling tale of corporate greed and evil, of extreme moral ambiguousness, set within the frames of Poe stories and poems. And so many poems, enough to make this writer and one-time English major, quiver with delight. I found myself thinking about Poe and how well it all holds together, even nearly 170 years later. How influential his work still is on the literary consciousness of writers, despite his entire life and career riddled with depression and addiction. How Flanagan takes the work and bends it into something new, yet immensely true to the original. […]

I often think about the Greeks and how pervasively their stories remain in Western thought, but Poe is up there on the list as well. For all of Poe’s wraith-like rants against other writers and his worry that he was an utmost failure (all too often related), he manages to stick. Beautifully horrific things still bear his fingerprints. While if you asked me who I liked more, I would say Nathaniel Hawthorne (who examined similar ideas with a little more subtleness), I still love Poe for all his darkness and bluster, which make the series an especially delightful experience that also got me thinking about my recent waffling in regard to writing poems. How I often feel like no one is listening and maybe no one is. But then Poe thought this as well. So maybe I just need to leave my worries to time and allow the chips to fall where they may. 

Kristy Bowen, darkness and bluster: thoughts on Poe

The drive took a meandering trajectory dodging abandoned belongings and storm-broken dreams. They coasted gingerly along the city streets under the huddling live oaks, still recovering from the trauma of a demon breath, reflection reaching its barren bones to snatch away any good sense. Outside dried mud cracked under the tires leaving crumbly hints and gaping possibilities, inside half-formed intentions simmered between them hazy and tingly like heat lightning. 

Years Later

Long forgotten ghosts are unexpectedly uncovered, teasing her memory, challenging her self-respect. She puts on Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Begins cutting.

Charlotte Hamrick, Snatched: the Means and the End

Writing, at least for me, and at its heart, is necessarily inchoate. Words come out. You work out what to do with them later. Or not: one way of thinking about literary modernism is as a kind of cult of the first draft (see, for instance, Virginia Woolf’s diary). Poetry, in particular, seems to grow in the gaps. Small poems, lyrics, appear like changelings in and among other things I thought I was writing. I might work them up in the ‘poetry’ book later, but they rarely start there.

This doesn’t mean they always come out looking like prose. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they are trying very hard (possibly too hard) to get away from the prose around them. I’ve come to think of poems like the mushrooms put up by fungi: sometimes they disguise themselves as the detritus they are feeding on, sometimes they look very different indeed. But it’s all one forest.

Without wanting to labour the metaphor, they are also, quite literally, feeding on wood.

Jeremy Wikeley, Why poems are like mushrooms

Dear special you,
This is not yet
a cat. This is
a bird hiding
from cats. It is
a butterfly
masquerading
as bird feathers,
a flock of dead
butterflies whose
still wings have been
repurposed as
art, frozen in
time.

PF Anderson, Dear You

I’ve been reading and thinking about the power of place lately. I’m reading for possibly the third time Rebecca Solnit’s book from the late ’70s called Migrations. It is about her ambling around Ireland thinking about ambling, about immigration and exile, about power and poetry and the land, about belonging, about what ties someone to a landscape.

She is so freaking brilliant, which is why I’m on my third read. It is so rich with ideas and beautiful prose that I can barely read it, so often do I have to set it aside to think about what she’s said. I’ve never been to Ireland and although I’m of Irish heritage, I don’t feel particularly connected in the way that so many Americans seem to feel. But the sense she talks about of a land and people integrated, stony and lush, windblown and scented — I get this. I walked out today into a damp autumn day redolent of leaves and dirt and pine, hear the strong song of the stream, high from recent rains, and I felt this land settle around me. To quote an old poem of mine, “I wear this world, a wedding gown, a shroud.” I often feel like I can’t get enough of this land, can’t ingest it enough into my cells. I stand helpless and smitten. [….]

When people are willing to kill over, to die over, land, its “possession,” am I to understand that inherently, as someone to whom landscape means so much? Territorial wars, I know, are about much more than enjoying the view from a ridge. “Land” is access to resources, control, power, as well as history, culture. In this way my own connection to land seems innocent, shallow.

War seems the corruption of that kind of innocent connection to land, borders a persistent, baffling machination of land and idea, of land and love. Call me naive. A word derived from words meaning natural, as well as native, born. Maybe our ideas of place are much too small.

Marilyn McCabe, In my dreams I’m always walkin’; or, On Writing, on Place

I am rebuked for silence: hear then my words, O Israel!
I love you beyond reason and beyond sense,
and the wheeling track of the stars knows
the darkest thoughts we’ve shared. I will not

repudiate my love. And this also is a silence, for which
I also will be blamed. So be it. If the shoe were on the other foot
would a Jew be left alive, between the river and the sea?
I’ve heard their words. I listen. silence is good for that.

Dale Favier, I Am Rebuked For Silence

Because I still have an oven, I can bake bread and knock on the crust: 
a hostage might answer.
Because yeast is alive for a short time,
embroider my name in your handmade world.

Oh long reams of sheets on the ironing board, 
I give you my full attention.   
I give you Simone Weil and Malebranche: 
attentiveness the soul’s natural prayer 
Is prayer.  Pray, pray. With feet.  With flowers, stones.
With undone lips, with murmuring surf.

Jill Pearlman, Half-Baked Prayer (So far, so near)

I am happy to announce that you can now pre-order the press’s two latest chapbooks: Corey Qureshi’s What You Want and Jonathan Todd’s Shift Drinks. Both poets are from Philadelphia and both collections address themes of work and struggle, and I’m very excited to have them join the press’s growing catalogue. […]

Also, with each sale, we are proud to be raising money for the Community Action Relief Project (CARP) in Philadelphia. According to their website, “CARP is a mutual aid and harm reduction project committed to sharing resources and redistributing wealth throughout the Kensington community of Philadelphia. . . . [They] provide essential supplies needed for survival, including hot meals, snacks, clothing, hygiene kits, on site wound care, and safer drug use kits.” In addition, they offer community education and a library of radical literature. As before, writers will receive half of all income from sales, and the remaining half will be split equally between the press and CARP.

Lastly, I am aware that this release comes at a moment of acute suffering and horror in the world. As we speak, Palestinians are enduring a genocidal siege at the hands of the Israeli military, all with the direct support and encouragement of the United States government. In solidarity with the Palestinian people, who have lived for decades under brutal apartheid, I will be making an immediate $200 donation in the press’s name to the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), an organization providing emergency aid to the people of Gaza. Half of the Gazan population consists of people under the age of eighteen, and MECA is providing vital support to families there. In effect, this amount will match what we anticipate raising for CARP, but with the benefit of being given immediately. Receipts for this will be provided soon.

R. M. Haines, New Chapbooks Available!

on the days i can touch what is lost, what is said?

death of depth
we dare call heaven

milk makes a prison
of skin

tears of grace
original face

Grant Hackett [no title]

Years ago I started using a little patter before the prayer that I borrowed from Rabbi David Markus. It was originally ad libbed to be singable to the Rizhyner’s melody for the prayer, but it’s basically become liturgy in my community. My son sings it to me sometimes. Other members of the community quote it. The opening has become part of the prayer now. And this past Friday night, as soon as I played the opening chord, everyone knew what was coming.

“Maybe you’ve had a little bit of a week,” I sang.

“I don’t know about you, but I’ve had –“

That’s when I noticed the tears pouring down my face.

*

…For the people torn from their homes and shot. For the concert-goers at the all-night dance party whose dancing ended in a massacre. For children, killed and kidnapped. For lifelong peace activists, killed and kidnapped. For over a thousand Jews slaughtered last Shabbat. For my friend whose partner grew up on one of the now-massacred kibbutzim. For the first responders whose job it was to locate and cover every dead body. For the people who were traumatized seeing Torah scrolls draped in tallitot at Simchat Torah because they evoked Jewish dead bodies draped in tallitot. For everyone struggling now with generational trauma. For the hostages in Gaza. For the families of the hostages, frantic and afraid. For the mother I know whose child couldn’t fall asleep in the bomb shelter. For the children and adults who have no bomb shelters and nowhere safe to go. For Awad Darawshe z”l, killed by Hamas while doing his EMT work. For the recognition that someone out there is wailing and mourning every single death this week, including those who weren’t EMTs or peace activists, just “regular” Palestinians and Israelis. For every life snuffed out. For every child now without parents, and every parent now grieving their child. For the inhabitants of Gaza, with electricity and water cut off, whose buildings are now rubble. For the hopelessness and the anguish. For the fact that grief becomes politicized, and strangers on the internet critique for whom and how we grieve. For the fact that I had to firmly instruct my teenager not to watch videos of hostage executions that Hamas has threatened to broadcast. For the fact that not everyone has the luxury of looking away from the death and loss and horror. For every heart now shattered. For the near-certainty that it’s going to get worse before it gets better…

*

“– a little bit of a week,” I managed, somehow.

By now people were singing along with me, quietly.

“And if you’ve had a little bit of a week — ai yai yai yai yai yai yai yai!”

The words of the prayer don’t really matter, I’ve said more times than I can count. I’ll sing some Hebrew. Maybe you’ll sing some English. Then I’ll sing some Hebrew, and you’ll sing some English. But what really makes this prayer work, what gives us the spiritual capacity to let go of our baggage and be fully present to welcome Shabbat, is the krechtz. The cry from the heart, from the gut, from the core. The ai yai yai. We have to let it all out before we can let Shabbat in.

Rachel Barenblat, A little bit of a week

Should we be grateful for banality?
Just the ordinary day when nothing much
happens. A day of choices: act or not, understand

or not, feel or not, live or not, be on the right
side of history or not. This is the blessing. The
ordinary day. The luxury of choice. The safety

of power. The power of safety. The sky too,
just blue, clouds unbothered, drifting. This
day when nothing happens. Thank you, we

can whisper to the unremarkable night […]

Rajani Radhakrishnan, A day of choices

It’s a hard week to write about wonder, but I began the day thinking that it’s moments like these that ask us to recommit to what is best about humanity, in the face of so much evidence of what is worst.

It was always my hope to study wonder not merely through an aesthetic or critical lens, but as a fundamental aptitude and resonance in our human experience. Today, I want to revisit the writings of thinkers who, to my mind, summed up the stakes of wonder as a vehicle for empathy.

Rachel Carson said that “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race,”[1] and I stand by her thinking that wonder and humility are incompatible with a lust for exploitation. If we can wonder at the unlikeliness and singularity of a human life, then we safeguard against the impulse for violence. St. Thomas Aquinas also connected wonder with pleasure and desire “that culminates not so much in knowledge as in encounter with majesty,”[2] waking us to what is most essentially human in us, and what is most capable of feeling.

Reflecting on this quality in Wordsworth’s writings, Kate Rigby argued that the reader is “restored to a sense of wonderment before that which we cannot grasp,” which in turn allows us to “be better placed to live respectfully amongst a diversity of more-than-human-others, without seeking always to subsume them to our own ends and understanding.”

Maya C. Popa, Why Wonder

Today we celebrate Columbus Day: October 12 was the actual day of the first sighting of land after almost 2 months at sea. I’m always amazed at what those early explorers accomplished. At Charlestowne Landing (near Charleston, SC), I saw a boat that was a replica of the boat that some of the first English settlers used to get here. It was teeny-tiny. I can’t imagine sailing up the coast to the next harbor in it, much less across the Atlantic. Maybe it would have been easier, back before everyone knew how big the Atlantic was. […]

I keep thinking of the ship’s logs and the captain’s journals, which Columbus kept obsessively. Perhaps we need to do a bit more journalling/blogging/notetaking/observing. Maybe it’s more calibrating or more focused daydreaming. These tools can be important in our creative lives.

Maybe we need a benefactor. Who might be Queen Isabella for us, as artists and as communities of artists?

The most important lesson we can learn from Columbus is we probably need to know that while we think we’re sailing off for India, we might come across a continent that we didn’t know existed. Columbus was disappointed with his discovery: no gold, no spices, land that didn’t live up to his expectations. Yet, he started all sorts of revolutions with his discovery. Imagine a life without corn, sweet peppers, tomatoes. Imagine life without chocolate. Of course, if I was looking through the Native American lens, I might say, “Imagine life without smallpox.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Thinking about Columbus and Our Own Creative Lives

I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Louise Glück. She is, perhaps, best known for her poetry collection The Wild Iris, which was published in 1992 and for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem opens the book: At the end of my suffering / there was a door.

Her 2014 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, also from Carcanet, gave me both comfort and confidence as I was struggling to complete the manuscript of Remembering / Disease. ‘You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it’s the same place but it has been arranged differently.’ Each time I entered this world, I felt closer to home.

Fokkina McDonnell, Austere beauty

It’s overwhelming to spend time with her poetry; you end up steeped in her mythologies, baffled by a personal story both tantalizingly near the surface and never quite within reach. (Consider a poem such as “The Dream,” a poem with two voices, beginning: “I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed we were married again,” and ending with the prosaic explanation, “Because it was a dream.”) […]

I’m trying to share enough so you see the range—this is a poet who published in The New Yorker for fifty years, after all—and the power present in even her early work. I’ve been noticing, as I flip through the pages, how often the color red occurs, as if Persephone’s pomegranate seeds keep replicating into other forms, and reminding us that, whatever is here, in our troubled and besieged turbulent world, it is our world.

Bethany Reid, Louise Glück, 1943-2023

In 2008, I was lucky enough to be one of Louise Gluck’s poetry students at Boston University’s MFA program.

I remember taking the T to her Cambridge apartment, the breakable vases of dried flowers from her garden everywhere, all of us crowded on the couch and floor hoping not to be the one dumb enough to bump something over.

We were all (I think–or at least I was) a little afraid of her, this tiny steel-gray haired woman, so cutting and dry with her poetry and her remarks (but always a bit of sly humor there).

She had pink Himalayan sea-salt on the table–I hailed from Tennessee backwoods and I’d never seen that before. She used a typewriter in a windowed room. I thought she was the most elegant person I’d ever met.

I remember her telling me the end of one of my poems was “Flaccid”–I knew it was bad from my classmates’ giggles (yes, giggles), but had to look up what it meant when I got back to the dilapidated broken-window Victorian apartment my husband and I (21 years old, newlyweds) were renting. Flaccid, added to the vocabulary. And I sure as hell fixed that ending.

Renee Emerson, Tribute to Louise Gluck

My local public library’s poetry section is on the sparse side. However, after renewing my card today, I felt determined to borrow a poetry book. I considered taking out one of Louise Glück’s collections, but I already own copies of the two on the library’s shelves (Wild Iris and Meadowlands). I chose Maxine Kumin’s 1992 book Looking for Luck instead. When I returned home, I learned that Glück has died (age 80). There will be time to return to her books and to seek out her most recent collection, which I have not read; but hers is a voice readers of poetry will miss.

One thing that her poems do is to face, without shying away from, sorrow or grief. They seldom offer sociably-conventional consolations. The consolation is in the spare beauty of her observation, her control of language. That is difficult to do. When I write from despair or deep grief, I find I want to bring some kind of–call it hope?–into the last few lines. I wonder whether I’ve a tendency to want to comfort; maybe my readers, maybe myself.

Ann E. Michael, Poets, horses

Neither the calls of zebra doves nor the down-

sliding notes of the golden crowned sparrow
can quiet my restlessness, this sense of how,

even in the middle of paradise, grief’s mottled
eye continues to offer itself as a gift of welcome—

strands of black tiger eye kukui nut and ti
leaves, a ceremony wreathed around my neck.

Luisa A. Igloria, E komo mai means “welcome”

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 am someone that gets really paralyzed if I think too much about theoretical concerns. So I try to engage with them but limit them. When I was in grad school, I wrote a poem about a character from Arabic literature. One of the critiques of the poem, in workshop, was whether or not I had a right to take on that voice. Several of my classmates spent the majority of the workshop discussing this question, not even really getting to the craft of the poem itself. They were concerned that the answer was no, I didn’t really seem to have the right. It was a troubling experience for me because 1) The assumption that I was not Arab myself was incorrect 2) It brought up a whole lot of existential tailspinning (am I Arab enough since I don’t look as Arab as some of my family, for example, since I’m not totally fluent in the language, etc.) and 3) It scared me that there was this possibility we couldn’t engage with certain things that elicit our curiosity as writers, and that this list of things we can’t engage with are constantly shifting and hard to predict. Isn’t that an obstacle to empathy? At the same time, yes—it’s hugely important to me that writing is genuine and that writers are aware of their own positionality AND do not obstruct or co-opt the voice or tradition of another. In that way, I suppose I’m always asking: where is my work in relation to empathy, honesty, originality? And do I have a reason why I’ve written this? Those are the questions that feel most important to me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with A.D. Lauren-Abunassar (rob mclennan)

Over the last decade, Emma Simon has quietly but impressively built up a reputation as a gifted exponent of quirky, well-honed poetry, good enough to grace many well-known journals and to win or be placed in several prestigious competitions. Her two pamphlets – Dragonish (The Emma Press, 2017) and The Odds (SmithǀDoorstop, 2020; a winner, chosen by Neil Astley no less, in The Poetry Business’s annual pamphlet competition) – showcased her poems’ qualities. Notably, as well as containing first-class content, a number (but not too many) of the poems have ostentatious titles, e.g. ‘A Pindaric Ode to Robert Smith of The Cure’. Emma has completed both the Poetry Business School Writing School programme and the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA programme and thereby been fortunate to receive the tutelage of some of the UK’s finest poet–teachers.

When Emma announced that Salt would be publishing Shapeshifting for Beginners, available here, I was very glad, and keen to see how she would work across the broader canvas of a whole collection. For me, Emma’s poems, though distinctively her own, remind me of Vicki Feaver in how she draws, often playfully, upon memories, reveries, a wide range of cultural references and a generally wry viewpoint, to consider the place of women and girls in, and the occasional accepting befuddlement at the weirdness of, our contemporary world. Her tone throughout is commanding: the reader follows her train of thought without question. Glyn Maxwell’s blurb says that the ‘poems are shaped by lockdown’, but they are largely far from being about the pandemic, even, it seems, at a subconscious level. It’s a very witty, clever and enjoyable collection.

Matthew Paul, On Emma Simon’s ‘White Blancmange Rabbit’

Hélène Demetriades’ debut collection, the plumb line (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2023) , is a superbly crafted, touching exploration of parenthood and of family relationships. The poems are grouped into three sections: Beginnings, Gravity and Departures, each focusing on a distinct stage in the evolution of those relationships, particularly between the daughter and the father. […]

I’ve got to say I thoroughly enjoyed this collection. It is so human, so touching, so authentic, so relatable. It gets right to the heart of family relationships, revealing both the challenges and the rewards.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘the plumb line’ by Hélène Demetriades

“Ophelia” has a content warning for non-specific sexual and domestic assault. These poems explore allegories for the complexity of feelings that such assaults trigger. Interspersed are fragmentary erasure poems titled “Ophelia”, using Shakespeare’s character. Ophelia is cast as, “torrent, tempest/ whirlwind her body/ the theater of others”. Later, “she will choose cold/ the poison of deep grief” and is described as “o’fire that drowns”. […]

The collection successfully weaves historical and contemporary reactions and trauma from domestic and sexual violence, using allegory and symbolism to explore and illustrate how such violence impacts its victims. “Ophelia” is sensitively and compassionately drawn.

Emma Lee, “Ophelia” V C McCabe (Femmé Salve Books) – Book review

John Guillory writes in Professing Criticism, a 2022 book, that literary criticism “originated millennia ago, achieved a maximal state of organization in the twentieth-century university, and now faces an uncertain future” (xv). He begins with a well-known story: nineteenth-century literary critics were self-trained journalists publishing in periodicals, while universities concentrated on philology–language instead of literature. “Literary scholarship” came into being as a profession after World War I, when it began to serve universities to offer electives and majors to its “clientele,” future members of a professional-managerial class (50-51). From a critic’s point of view, why not jump into the breach with your close-reading skills in pocket, since “professionals” receive higher status and compensation? The new English specialists stressed the exercise of scholarship (knowledge) rather than criticism (opinion). And here we are.

I’m reading Guillory’s tome while preparing to speak on a roundtable called “Avenues of Creative Scholarship,” and I’m only partway in, but what made my jaw drop when he speculated that since literary criticism wasn’t always a university discipline, it’s reasonable to imagine that the whole English Department enterprise was a blip, now ending. Arts and humanities curricula are being destroyed at places like West Virginia University–and declining in power and attractiveness at my own college–so why should this speculation surprise me? But somehow I’d always imagined that the eclipse would pass, perhaps once we got smart and recentered the discipline on what draws students in: reading personally, making their own literary art, asking high-stakes questions about what literature is and does. I mean, that could be true. Even now, there’s a bright ring around the shadow. But Guillory is right. To count on my discipline’s survival–to count on universities surviving in some shape comparable to their twentieth-century versions–is irrationally optimistic.

Witness the shuttering of The Gettysburg Review this week by the administration of Gettysburg College, apparently from a mixture of ignorance and indifference. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a deeply interesting (and paywalled) interview with GR editors Mark Drew and Lauren Hohle in which they discuss how consultants, framing themselves as efficiency experts, draw paychecks from many institutions by targeting the arts and humanities; Drew also reminds us that Kenyon College closed the Kenyon Review for a decade before thinking better of that decision. His own speculation: “The ideal fix, to my mind, is for the magazine to be endowed, either wholly or in part, so that we’re protected from the vicissitudes of changing administrations.”

Lesley Wheeler, Arts and humanities in annular eclipse

When Lesley talks about the closing and narrowing of academia’s support of poetry, literature, liberal arts in general, I am reminded of all my reading on Cold War Culture than indicated the American government was secretly propping up—and using for propaganda—many of the big journals we have come to think of as “permanent” features. Between the fifties and the eighties, the intelligence community thought it was important to show that America had its own artists that could compete with Russia’s—and, of course, they wanted to follow any potential communists into artistic enclaves. So, they gave money to Kenyon Review, Poetry, Paris Review, they helped publish books like Dr. Zhivago. Now, anti-intellectualism is king in politics—the government’s no longer interested in being a patron of the arts. Lesley mentions the patronage that most artists need to live as disappearing—but maybe it was always a sort of mirage. How many people in my generation could even procure a tenure track job in English Literature or Creative Writing? And the chances for the people younger than me, even less. Last week I talked about money and the awards system—a sort of insider trading post about how being wealthy enables you to get more money from grants, awards, and fellowships because you know some sort of secret password—whether it’s a certain college degree, championship by a wealthy mentor, or other. These things feel forbidden to talk about in the poetry world—but I feel it’s also important to point out that the poetry world is as corrupt and given to influence as any field, but also has its havens from that corruption if you look for them.

As a writer, I’ve always felt like an outsider—first, being a woman who did not come (or marry into) money, now, being a disabled and chronically ill woman who still has not won the lottery—and part of me feels like I’ve been beating a fist on the big blank walls of poetry institutions for more than twenty years. I’ve written hundreds of reviews, too, a world that is apparently disappearing, the idea of literary criticism itself being valuable enough to be paid for—was that a waste of time?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Solar Eclipse, Loss and Sadness, a Tribute to Louise Glück, and Some Thoughts on Poetry, Academia, Ambition and the Establishment

And yet, here I am, able to recognise in my own body that things are changing, that my body, once again, is unpredictable, uneasy, causing me more anguish. I wrote a poetry collection, When I Think of My Body as a Horse a few years ago. It was about finding a way to be friends with a body that had let me down so badly; a body that had lost us all our children. The collection was about grief, but was also about recognising that my body was precious, my body had done its best.

But somehow, as menopause approaches, I find myself back to feeling my body is an enemy to me. What is there to say? The door is closing, the door is slamming, there is no going back. It is the finality that is daunting. I don’t want to go back. And yet, the well of sadness that is a part of carrying the death of your baby around with you is open again. I look down into it and I see the person I was, in the body that I was in, looking back up at me hopefully. There is no real difference, it is the same body, it is still doing its best, I am still doing my best.

What am I trying to say? That the loss never goes away, but that you fold around it, like scar tissue forming around a foreign object, until it is a part of you, a part of your body and your story. I have stopped trying to fix myself, I have stopped punishing myself, and am embracing myself.

Wendy Pratt, A Childless Woman Approaches the Menopause

Reflecting on my own time in the [Australian Poetry Slam] scene, I’m proud of the performances and the poems, but also wondering what was it that drove me to compete in slams. I was first introduced to them in Adelaide 2016 when I was asked to be a ‘sacrificial’ poet at the SA State Slam Final. I loved  being the ‘warm-up’ poet but it was safe. It took me a couple more years to find the courage (was it courage?) to perform as a competitor. Ironically, I was working on a novel at the time and was writing in residence at Writers SA where I saw the poster advertising the national poetry slam every. single. day. Was it desire to win that made me compete, or something else?

It was 2016. I was 48 years old and peri-menopausal. It might seem strange to say that at 48 I was only just finding my voice; but that’s how it felt. I think there is an alchemy that occurs in the body and mind in the years leading up to and during menopause. However, in our youth obsessed culture, it’s the negative effects of aging & menopause that are emphasised; so much so that older women can feel, at best, devalued & invisible and, at worst, whinging hypochondriacs. Pre-40 me found the idea of women being invisible incomprehensible. To my shame, I remember thinking: what the fuck are these women complaining about, what do they mean … invisible? I’m starting to get it. But it’s a bullshit story. And I’m working hard to let go of these bullshit stories. (More on this to come in future posts, I’m sure …)

So perhaps there were a number of competing reasons that I stepped up to the microphone and performed in a poetry slam. A desire to write something short (writing the novel was a torture and it’s still unfinished), a desire to be seen (fuck invisibility), and a desire to be heard, which became stronger than self doubt or fear. The more I performed, the more confident I became. It’s no coincidence that my first collection of poetry & prose is titled SIARAD, a Welsh word that means to speak.

Caroline Reid, POETRY SLAM PERFORMANCE: Stars

I think I just want to find a life that isn’t centered on how sick I feel, how cancer-ridden my boob is, how ashamed I am of my swollen, painful, unhealthy body.

I need a new hobby that doesn’t function like a mirror – or a selfie.

This morning as I think about running to the lake, fear builds up. I am afraid that the weird sand-feeling will cause me to stumble. The last thing I want now is a broken wrist.

But the squirrels are really active now for some reason. Seasonal? I want to see them. It is one way to stay in the moment – to be with them in those seconds before they scamper out of sight.

Negative capability is just about being in the moment, after all, right? Not judging, not needing to surround anything with meaning or purpose?

Just put the map down for a minute – eh?

Ren Powell, Oh, the Negative Capability

This week had brought renewed creativity. I’ve joined the peaceful space that is Dawn Chorus. It’s a simple concept of bringing writers together to work for an hour before the nitty gritty of life begins. There is a prompt to use if other inspiration if scant, but more than anything this is a place of calm focus, a place to enjoy the simple act of making time to write.

This act has been fruitful. I’ve written two new poems, and a piece of creative non-fiction. They will need to be polished before they go on their adventures, but it feels good to write something new, and to simply give myself space to think. Being a writer is a solitary pursuit, and being a writer with a chronic illness brings an extra edge of invisibility.

Whilst working alone is one of the positives of the surprise redesign diagnosis with M.E. wrought in my life, there is something about working in community with others that brings a different dimension. Accountability feels like too strong a word – no one is relying on me to turn up each morning. Perhaps it’s simple community – the sense that we’re all working to reach a similar goal. A quiet synergy, even if just for an hour. This space to think is hard to pin down amongst the constant chatter and pull of needing to be visible, needing to be part of the world regardless of whether it is a space that feels welcoming. I often wonder how it must have felt to live with so little sound, without the constant hum of traffic or radios, odd clanking of another redevelopment, whirrs of gardens being tidied and the simple presence of so many people. This level of external distraction makes it difficult to simply be part of the world without shouting.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Being part of the world without shouting

The blockage has finally cleared! Poems that had been gathering dust in numerous in-trays have finally come back to me, all with a polite ‘no thanks’ attached. Oh well. Although having said that, I’ve two poems forthcoming in South magazine and another two in the Hastings Stanza Anthology ‘Bird in a Wilderness’ which we’re launching on Friday October 20 at The White Rock Hotel, Hastings at 7 pm – if you’re anywhere near, do come! The book is partly in aid of The Refugee Buddy Project that does wonderful work in welcoming refugees in the Hastings area.

Robin Houghton, All kinds of poetry news and shenanigans

It was a huge pleasure to be interviewed by acclaimed poet David Adès for Poets’ Corner hosted by Westwords. Each month a poet is invited to read and talk about their poetry on a theme of the poet’s choice.

For this episode, we talked on the theme of Limits of language, limits of experience. in the context of my poetry videos. We covered a lot of ground but the conversation falls naturally into more or less bite-sized chunks. We start with an extended discussion on the nature of video poetry, how they are made, how they can work, and more. Then we go on to talk about some of my specific pieces.

The Youtube clip includes excerpts of these videos, in order: after-image; Palingenetics; and furthermore (indexed); A Captain’s; The Ferrovores; FUTURE PERFECT; and An Introduction to the Theory of Eclipses.

Ian Gibbins, Limits of language, limits of experience – extended interview with David Adès for Poets’ Corner

I’m very pleased to announce that Mark McGuinness’ excellent poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air, which has recently featured poets such as Mona Arshi, Judy Brown, Rishi Dastidar, Ian Duhig, Mimi Khalvati, Clare Pollard, Tom Sastry, and Denise Saul, has recorded a discussion about my new Salt collection, Between a Drowning Man.

Mark’s method is to focus on one particular poem and between us we chose the poem ‘you are not in search of’, on page 57 of the new book, from the latter end of the ‘Works and Days’ sequence. You can listen to the podcast here. It’s about 40 minutes in length and includes a reading of the poem at the beginning and end. There is also a helpful transcription of our discussion.

Martyn Crucefix, New podcast discussion on Between a Drowning Man

I lost my mind.
I put it here somewhere,
I know I did.

The rain sweeps against the window.
Tonight’s autumn rain.
Waves of it, light, then heavy.
It’s 2 in the morning.
I pace the room,
listening to rain.

Bob Mee, Untitled

the soldiers return
but no one believes them
for they are mute

if you don’t like this war
there’s another one
on the next channel

the adverts are sweeter
a new car in the bright sunshine
turns into a hearse

Jim Young, rumours