Ian Gibbins – Page 2 – Via Negativa

December 4, 2022December 4, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 48

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week, an exceptionally varied gathering of posts as the semester winds down and the holiday season is upon us, ready or not—a “stripped, dry, testing time at the end of the year” as Beth Adams calls it, a time that seems to prompt writers to look and think more deeply about their lives. Enjoy.

I found this portion of a poem in Etel Adnan’s Time (trans. Sarah Riggs): “… In the splendor of the/gray morning,/in the death camp/of Beit Sahour,/with a little dew/and a handful of clay,/we created/life…”

And then this snippet from Martin Amis’s Sweet Tooth: “…ultimately reality is social, it’s among others that we have to live and their judgments matter.”

And I think about the poem I was trying to write about a kingfisher, that quickblue and chittering presence I value so much when I encounter it, and why it is an image in my mind just now, as I rail in my way against my own petty sufferings. Yes, I see you, self. What ails thee? And I find myself finding myself rich in the presence of other minds.
Marilyn McCabe, I been all around this world; or, On Thematic Convergence

We have raked our leaves toward the street–but not into it, which is bad for the storm drains, etc.–and they await the second coming of the great leaf-sucking machine. We’ve had glorious warm sunny weather for the Thanksgiving holiday, and I took long walks, alone and with friends. I took a notebook with me on the long walk alone and was grateful to have poems tumble out. I stopped at various benches to write them down. At one I found a key and a dog leash in the leaves underneath, attached the one to the other, hung it over the bench, and moved on to the next. A woman came by, looking at her feet. “I’m looking for my keys,” she said. “I found it,” I said, “a single key, and a dog leash.” “That’s it!” she said. Yay!
Kathleen Kirk, Leaves, But No Leavings…

I would have called you
today to tell you this,
on what would have been
your 90th birthday. Instead

I am holding this jar, a gift,
and proof of something

I am struggling to find
the right words for
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Pulse

Poetry in general feels not at all important but maybe then that’s when I need it the most. That when I am not writing is maybe exactly when I should. I looked at the very pretty proof copy of the book yesterday and felt the weight of sitting down to make those final edits. To even care about releasing a book when I do not feel like reality is quite real anyway. Or that poetry life and real life are not even meeting each other. Not to mention the drag of December when I swear yesterday it was well on its way to darkness at 3pm.

But then again, barring the heft of all that has happened, this feeling is always here, the uncertainty of December, especially without even a glimmer at the end of Christmas, which is less bright this year and sort of murky in the distance. I will hopefully snap out of it by New Year’s–all of it, the holiday funk, the SAD depression, the writing fallow ground. Or at least I hope so.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 12/2/2022

Maybe then I’ll get back to writing? I hope so. I miss it, truly. But the words seem stuck inside/between endless spreadsheets and Zoom meetings and oh my god the emails. (This is not about my students. I love teaching them.)

Is it any wonder my synapses are scrambled?

But painting is not stuck. Painting un-scrambles me in continually surprising and energizing ways. I am excited to paint almost every day. (Will I ever feel this way about writing? Did I? Is it even possible to?)

My son recently discovered he likes watching World Cup soccer. This is surprising. Shocking, even, to all of us living in this totally un-sporty home. But he’s delighted and I told him I was so glad he allowed himself to be open to discovering this about himself.

That’s what this year of painting has been for me. An incredible process of discovery.

I had no idea how much I needed it.

I can’t imagine my life, now, without it.
Sheila Squillante, Still at It

This graduate class was a beautiful gift. Maybe it wouldn’t have been if I was submersed in a regular semester of teaching at the community college, but I kind of doubt that. There’s something to be said for students who show up ready to learn … whether it’s from me or each other or the work that we’re reading and discussing. There’s something to be said for older students who have shaken off the cloak of high school and undergraduate nonsense and are present because they’re in possession of themselves as people in the world.

To be clear, I’m also really appreciative of my students who are decidedly NOT in the world. Students who don’t really know what they want to do or where they want to be — I love having honest conversations with them and acknowledging that sometimes not-knowing is part of the process. But it takes a particular kind of energy to engage like that — and after almost two decades of that kind of engagement, I’m happy to try something different.

The difference comes down to the students who wrote some really cool prose and poetry this semester. And some of them failed in their aims, but it was awesome to see them try to meet those aims, and to hear them speak about what they learned in the process. AND to hear them talk about their “final projects” in terms that made it clear that the projects themselves aren’t over, aren’t final, aren’t anywhere near complete.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Lessons & Gratitude

How do you know when a poem is finished?

A couple of years ago, I asked one of my poetry mentors this same question. She chuckled and told me about how she recently dug up the Microsoft Word file of a poem that was published many years ago and started editing the poem again, because she “felt like it.” That was incredibly liberating for me. My relationship with poems became much more fluid once I understood that a poem may never be finished and instead, I could aspire for the poem to be good enough.
Thomas Whyte, Jaeyun Yoo : part two

So Peter and I managed to get the latest episode of Planet Poetry edited and up last Thursday, featuring Peter’s interview with Sarah Barnsley on her first full collection The Thoughts. It’s an excellent book, in fact it’s one of my recommendations in the forthcoming edition of Poetry News. The poddy is going well. Now all we need are <unsubtle-hint> a few kind donations to help us pay the costs of the recording and hosting platforms! </unsubtle-hint> We were especially chuffed to hear that Kim Moore (who we interviewed in our Season 3 opener recently) won the Forward Prize! We bask in the reflected glory! Our Christmas episode is coming up on December 15th, featuring my interview with Matthew Stewart plus party hats, carols and bloopers. Don’t miss it!!

Meanwhile I’ve just sent out the updated spreadsheet of poetry magazine windows, and although I’ve lost patience with a few of the mags that seem to be permanently closed and/or never updated, there are some interesting additions. Even one journal that’s finally open for poetry after I took it off the list some time ago because it was never open and didn’t respond to queries. Perhaps poetry mags never die, they just pass out for a while (to nick a line from Prole).
Robin Houghton, Subs, pods and mags

This morning I read Anne Helen Peterson’s latest newsletter offering (linked above), on reading, and so much hit so close to home. I miss reading the way I once did. I keep trying to find my way back to it, and it eludes me. I then spent a good amount of time deleting apps from my phone. I’d already deactivated the dumpster fire that is Twitter, which I rarely used anyway, but I’ve put both Instagram and Facebook in timeout. I really love some Instagram accounts I follow (e.g., poetryisnotaluxury), but I would rather be the kind of reader I once was. I’m not sure this will do the trick, but I’m willing to try it.

Not much in store for today. I’m sitting at our dining table in the living room, on new-to-us old chairs we bought and recovered last weekend, watching snow blow out the window. The weather app tells me it’s supposed to be rain and 37 degrees, but my eyes tell me those are snowflakes and that they are sticking to the ground. I’d rather believe my eyes than my phone.
Rita Ott Ramstad, ’tis the season…

There is something curious about how so much poetry out of Vancouver is centred on movement, whether [Edward] Bryne’s compositions while riding BC Transit, on bicycle or on foot, comparable to Meredith Quartermain’s walking [see her 2005 collection Vancouver Walking] or George Stanley riding a similar Vancouver bus route [see my review of his 2008 collection Vancouver: a poem here], to George Bowering thinking his way through Duino Elegies via Kerrisdale. In comparison, there aren’t many poems I’m aware of composed overtly across the lines of the Montreal Metro, or Toronto’s GO Trains, let alone their expansive subway system (although bpNichol famously spoke first-draft thoughts into a hand-held tape machine while driving the distance between Coach House and Therafields). In certain ways, there’s almost something comparable to Vancouver’s transit-poems to England’s handful of poems composed on foot, responding to the uniquely-English meditative tradition of walking vast countryside distances [see my review Mark Goodwin’s 2014 collection Steps, for example, here]. Frank O’Hara may have composed a collection of poems during his lunch break, but, more recently, Mary Austin Speaker composed her 2016 collection, The Bridge, while riding daily commuter distances across New York’s Manhattan Bridge [see my review of such here]. How much, we might begin to ask, has literature been shaped through the physical requirements of each author’s particular geography? As Byrne offers as part of “MORNING SONGS”: “I saw Kirilov / fifty years ago / on the Barton Street bus / and again this morning / on 6th Avenue // One of us hasn’t changed / in all those years [.]”
rob mclennan, Edward Byrne, Tracery

Once I had writing habits, some that worked better than others. This past year has given me one disruption after another: job loss which might have opened up extra time, had I not broken my wrist, coupled with a huge move mid-summer and a smaller move at the end of the summer and a heavier class load than in the past.

Next term, I will try to set up some writing habits that will result in more writing time. What will that look like? I don’t know yet. Let me think about it before 2023 gets away from me. For now, I’m trying to keep my poetry legal pad close to me, and to go ahead and start writing, even if I only have a glimmer of an idea.

Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast about the end of Byzantium. I thought about the Yeats poem, and as I read it, a line came to me: This is no country for young women. I decided to write it down and to keep going. I decided to have something inspired from the Yeats poem in each stanza. […]

I will continue to work with the poem–one of my habits that has developed in the past few years is that I write a draft and don’t return. I’d like to actually finish a poem, type it into the computer, and send it off to see if anyone would like to publish it. But more than publication, I want to have the joy of having crafted a rough draft into a more finished draft. These days, I often end a writing session without a complete rough draft. I write a few lines or stanzas and drift away, thinking I’ll return when I’m more inspired, and I don’t return, not yet.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sailing from Byzantium: Process Notes

Downtown, counterfeit angels wander dark streets drop kicking smiles for kicks.

Mispronounced junky dreams fumble through alleyways, mistaking fentanyl for sentinels.

All across the city, many spend their time waiting for something great that comes a little too late, like winning the lottery while on the way to the electric chair.

I press an ear to a cloud to listen in on the heavens.

I hear someone say a kiss is fluent in all languages.
Rich Ferguson, When Pondering the Language of Salvation

A while back I wrote a series of poems about Amy Winehouse. I’ve always been a huge fan of her music and her second album, Back to Black, will forever be one of my favorites and I listened to it on repeat when my first marriage fell apart so those songs and these poems weave together a lot of emotional topics: her untimely death, disordered eating, dysfunctional relationships.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with the poems – they didn’t fit in my forthcoming collection but there weren’t enough for a chapbook. After thinking about it for a while, I decided I would handmake a microchap of the Amy Winehouse poems. Of course, I just had to figure out how to do that…

I spent an afternoon figuring out how to format the pages correctly. Then I spent $500 on supplies – paper, an awl, book binding needles, heavy duty thread. Once I had the supplies I spent another afternoon printing all the pages. I decided I wanted to make 100 copies. Which seemed ambitious but still doable. Famous last words? Maybe…
Courtney LeBlanc, Your Hands are Going to Ache

I’m just back from a very wintry dog walk with my very slow and elderly dog. There is something to be said for the slow walk and the honesty of bad weather, how a really good soaking freezes you so deeply it’s like it’s cleaned the very bones of you. And going so slowly allows for a close examination of the landscape; not just the valley and the hills around you, but of the landscape with a small L, the place where we exist every day, the areas that, in some ways, become background. I think of hedgerows like that. Hedgerows are a constant in the landscape, acting as dividers, boundary lines, shade for livestock. They sew the lands together, tracking across the countryside and lining the lanes. The hedgerows around my village feel timeless, and some are in fact likely to be boundary lines going back a thousand years or more. Hedgerows are like that – timeless, ancient, magical. Even the name – hedgerow, feels old and rounded with time, so close to the old english hegeræwe I can feel the weight of all those years in my mouth as I say it. I like the way you look at a hedge and see its history. Here’s a picture of a hedge in my village that has a history of being maintained in the traditional way, in which the living Hawthorn is cut down through the stem almost to the ground and then bent over and woven through the other stems to create a living fence. This is called ‘plashing’ and the bent part is the plasher. It’s an ancient technique that is lovely to see still in use. Sometimes you might see a lovely old hawthorn on its own and you might notice that it has a strange ‘elbow’ shape to some of its lower branches. That is the history of the tree, its brethren all gone and only the angle of its branches telling how once it was part of a hedgerow, a living fence that kept sheep in.
Wendy Pratt, The Winter Hedgerow

I’m delighted to announce that The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, will be published with Blue Diode Publishing in June 2023.

The Wind and the Rain is a book of loss. It combines personal and environmental grief through the metaphor of rain.

You can read recently published poems from the book by following the links here.
Anthony Wilson, The Wind and the Rain – due in June 2023

I was gathering strangeness, like little stones. Tossing
them into a jar, waiting for the water to rise to the
top. A thirsty crow, negotiating with the universe.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 23

According to a 2006 study funded by the Poetry Foundation and the National Organization for Research at the University of Chicago, the sneak attack is the best approach when attempting to reach people who say they don’t read poetry.* Non-readers of poetry were more likely to read or listen to a poem when they were exposed to one in unexpected places. These unexpected places include billboards, public transportation, events, and the newspaper.

I wonder if this willingness to tolerate a poem is due the nature of the encounter. If a person doesn’t like poetry, and knows she’ll have to sit through one at an upcoming event, she’s probably already prepared to tune out. But if she happens to glance up while driving on the freeway and pass a poem in giant letters on a billboard or see one while riding the subway, the surprise might just startle her into a new appreciation.

When I was Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA, I decided that the most important part of my job was to increase those chance encounters with poetry. I tried my best to put poems in places where people were forced to stand or sit for undetermined lengths of time: the bank, grocery store, cleaners, coffee shop, hardware store, dentist’s office, etc.

My hairdresser hung a short poem by Hafiz on a wall in her salon, framed like a painting. She told me that people would look at it, first thinking it was a picture, and then, puzzled, ask her about it. I also organized a “Poem in Your Pocket” day, where volunteers handed out poems to unsuspecting members of our town. The reactions were varied—some people seemed delighted, some confused, and a few shrank back in horror. I also conducted holiday-themed poetry events (Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day), which were surprisingly well-received.

After three years of being the town’s self-appointed poetry sniper, I was worn out, happy to retreat back into my previous persona as a private person. But every once in a while, I’d come across a tattered poem printed on mint-green cardstock, taped to a cash register in a local business. And I would smile a secret smile of satisfaction.
Erica Goss, Poetry: the Sneak Attack

One cool perk of blogging is that occasionally complete strangers contact me out of the blue and ask if I would like to have a book. My answer is always, Yes! Book, please!

This week’s mail brought me a chapbook of poems from Atmosphere Press, a debut collection by Damian White, of Columbus, Ohio. When I receive poetry books, I often set them aside until my April poetry blogging binge (a book a day), but I Made a Place for You was just released, and I told Damian I would blog about it right away.

The poems are short—“language poetry crossed with gospel,” as one reviewer puts it—but they well up from the poet’s own life and are a testament to how dire circumstances (in White’s case, homelessness) can be “channeled … into poetry to heal a fractured identity.” Predictably the poems are often ontological, a chronicle of a spiritual journey.
Bethany Reid, I Made a Place for You

the urn is light but heavy
weight upon his shoulders
unscrews the lid

grey ash onto white water
tips three times
on three outgoing waves

shakes the canister
grey motes on the air
retraces his footprints
Paul Tobin, GREY MOTES ON THE AIR

I had the pleasure of being on library shift with Wakefield’s Village poet emeritus, Phil Cohen. Phil started in New York City, went to MIT in engineering, and somehow ended up Quebec by 1984. […]

Phil’s a big deal in town, with his birthday celebrated as part of February’s Dragonfest. There’s a DVD of his poems in tribute. He has at least 2 books. One of his poems was the source of the name of the TaDa arts fest.

He says there are big P poets who do it for a living, small p poets who do it seriously and no p poets like him. He says poetry is in the living, and in involvement in the community.
Pearl Pirie, Village Poet

As it is poetry manuscript contest season, and I’m once again finding myself reading manuscripts, I thought I’d offer some “notes from a manuscript reader.” These are all just my opinions, and your mileage may vary.

If you’ve never heard this before, make sure your first five poems are doing a lot of heavy lifting for the book—and then the last final poems. Because you know what? Tired and (mostly) unpaid readers are probably not going to sift through every single poem unless you’ve already hooked them.

This is for contests that allow acknowledgements (some do not, so just ignore this if that is the case.) Do acknowledgements matter? Well, if you have none, it might. I think if you haven’t done the work of submitting individual poems for publication, you’re probably not ready for the work of publishing and publicizing a book. I don’t really pay attention to number or the names of the publications, but having none or only one or two acknowledgements kind of puts you in the danger zone. Now, if I still loved the poetry, I might still put it through. Just know that getting individual poems published shows you’re trying, you’re part of the literary world, and you’re trying to build an audience—all things I’d care about as a publisher, and as an extension, a reader.

For books leaning heavily on one historical period or incident—this can work for or against you. I’ve read terrific books done in this way, but also a lot of boring ones. If you choose this route, make sure you vary voices, styles, and forms to keep the reader’s interest.

There is a weird sameness of tone in the manuscripts I’ve read this year—and granted, it’s just a portion of submissions from one publisher—but there’s a monotone in the manuscripts. They’re not poorly written, but they lack emotion, power, passion. I wonder if this is possibly the effect of pandemic fatigue—it’s flattened out our voices, our writing? Anyway, don’t be afraid to be a little weird, out there, or show you care about something or someone. It’ll likely jolt the readers – which is usually a good thing.

Good titles never hurt you. Once again, don’t be afraid to be a little weird.

I hope this was helpful! (And not too cranky! Anyway, as I said, this is just one person’s opinion.)
Jeannine Hall Gailey, First Snow (with Power Outages, Haircuts and Holiday Things), Pushcart Nominations, Notes from a Manuscript Reader

Because we’re about to embark on our other family Xmas tradition of watching a film together on a Sunday evening in the lead up to Xmas (Mainly Xmas films, obvs), time is tight today, but I do want to post a poem—especially as I have permission to do so from the poet themselves.

Given the last thing we put on the tree was the star, this poem feels even more timely. It’s Each Star is a Sun by Jo Haslam from her second collection, ‘The Sign for Water‘. Sadly, the book appears to be out of print, but it’s one of the earliest poetry books I can recall buying in Waterstones, Norwich. I hadn’t read the book in years, but stumbled across it on my shelves last week. I knew I had to post something from it, and asked Jo’s permission. Out of the two I suggested this was her preference, and it’s the perfect choice.

I love the way the poem contains an element of the magical, and alludes to the way that we know the science of things, but still ascribe some sort of magic to the light that reaches us from such a distance. The way the lines of the poem seem to expand and contract like a galaxy and the universe seems entirely right.
Mat Riches, It must be a sign (for water)

Someone kept
watching the stars.

They were always
watching the stars.

They kept listening.
That’s how we

got here today,
the old monk said.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (354)

Issue 59 of antennae – the journal of nature in visual culture is now out on the theme Microbial Ecologies. It is an extraordinary collection of multidisciplinary practices, approaches, methodologies, and conceptions to help us see and value the microbial worlds that until recently have remained invisible. As editor Giovanni Aloi says, “It is only by recognizing and engaging with microbial agencies that fuller networks of interconnectedness will enable us to tell the stories we truly need for our time and for the future.”

I’m delighted to have a piece in this edition. Ferrovores: the iron eaters is an extended version of the text of my video The Ferrovores.

Iron is the most common metal on earth. Indeed, it forms much of the molten core of the planet which in turn generates the earth’s magnetic poles. The red soils of the world are due to iron. At a biochemical level, iron is essential for human life, amongst other things, making our blood red. In the societal domain, iron is essential for manufacturing, electricity generation, and much more. Certain bacteria can derive energy for life directly from dissolved iron compounds (“rust”) rather than from oxygen as we do. Perhaps, at some time in the future, we, our descendants, the Ferrovores, may need to do the same.

Yet the Ferrovores are a product of digital code: generational, mutating, synthesising. Even so, the environment collapses around them, as they mine the language of pre-industrial times for reassurance and comfort, dreaming of the days when manufacturing really was handicraft and shared skills.
Ian Gibbins, Ferrovores: the iron eaters in Antennae

In her book Index Cards, Moyra Davey quotes someone saying that everyone should take a one year sabbatical — the person dares her listeners to “imagine what that would be like.” And I think the word “dares” is meaningful here, and maybe now especially. Because it did feel even quite daring to take a month (especially during a pandemic, admittedly). The idea, Davey says, is that everyone in their time on earth should get to experience an interval of just freaking joy. Just as Cixous talked about fecundity being the natural state for writers, I believe that the state of feeling joy and being delighted on a daily basis is a basic human right. Which of course is so hard to attain. But there it is.

And I don’t think we’re likely to feel delighted and joyful all day long or anything like that. But in my month in Rome, doing whatever we wanted every single day which included looking at amazing art, writing, photographing, being creative, really reset my beleaguered pandemic brain. For the last couple of years, I have not felt myself. I’ve hit some distressing levels of depression. I know I’m not alone in that.

And so, to live a month in utter happiness, contentedness, joy: I can tell you that it rewired my brain, reset my soul. Obviously, I want to keep those good vibes going. How? So that will be my ongoing quest.
Shawna Lemay, A Month in Rome

Friday: Late fall in the north: this is the stripped, dry, testing time at the end of the year. Short days, distant pale sun, bare trees, and an increasingly penetrating cold. Ironically, when there’s more snow covering the ground, it often seems warmer, and easier to be outside: during these current weeks, though, the landscape feels like a bed without a blanket. We are all driven more and more into the interiors of our homes, and of ourselves.

I swam, early this morning. Sleepy and not in the best of moods when I pushed myself into the elevator, into the locker room, on with the suit and cap and goggles and into the water, the rhythm quickly took over and after five laps I was already feeling better; after twenty-five I felt renewed, at home in my body in spite of its creaky and achy parts, ready to face the day. A couple of afternoons ago, I rode down and walked back up the many flights of stairs to my apartment — this is something I should, and could, do regularly. And while swimming does stretch and use most muscle groups, some yoga focused on balance and strength would be good this winter too.

For someone who tends to be pretty consumed with thoughts and words, I know that I can’t live entirely in my head, or let myself become distracted and immobile for hours on end. I need to use my body to make music, make art, knit and sew, chop and cook, move from place to place. It helps to feel my lungs breathing and my heart pumping blood. I think that one of the problems of living in harsh winter climates, especially as we get older, is the feeling of enclosure and constriction which can lead to a lack of embodiment.
Beth Adams, Squalls

“Hope is a Silhouette” is a contemporary, empathetic look at life, particularly love and desires. Lana McDonagh explores how hope can become two-edged if ill-defined: it can keep a gambler hooked on his downfall, it can make a building look like a home, it can consume lovers and trick them into isolating themselves from a wider world. It can be as in/fallible as memory. Slender but thought-provoking, like a song you somehow keep noticing in the bar, on a passing car radio, an advert’s anthem that becomes a soundtrack to life.
Emma Lee, “Hope is a Silhouette” Lana McDonagh (Wordville) – book review

Often enough, I don’t fully understand the origins of what I write until long after. I had a funny correspondence with a high schooler a couple of months ago, not long after “Prescriptions” was published in Poetry. She asked, “What does it mean?” I knew that I’d drafted “Prescriptions” shortly after my mother’s death; that it was originally longer but I had to pare it down; and that while I was grieving as I wrote it, I was also relieved for my mother that she got to shed some of the harder aspects of her life. It consoled me to imagine her moving back to a state of openness and possibility. As I tried to distill all these thoughts into a short email, I realized there had been a more specific trigger: the hospice nurse advising us to tell our mother that it was okay to let go, if she wanted to; that we were grateful for her years of caring for us but we would be all right without her. She was unresponsive by then, but my siblings and I did, one by one, speaking to her privately. She died that night.
Lesley Wheeler, Haunted Matisse & packing light

surface ripples
the songs my mother
knew by heart

Almost as soon as I’d pressed ‘publish’ on my previous post (in which I mentioned I had a poem forthcoming in Tinywords, ) the poem was published. So, here it is (above) a little more abstract than I’m used to writing, but hopefully it works!

Far more important than my small poem though, is this bit of news: let’s celebrate Kim Moore winning the Forward Prize for best collection. What a fantastic achievement. I was fortunate enough to read alongside Kim when we both had pamphlets published by Smith/Doorstop in 2012. She is hugely talented, and also incredibly hard-working. Since I got into haiku, I’ve been a bit out of the mainstream poetry loop, but luckily I had 6 Music on the radio on the way home from my guitar lesson today, and there was Kim, being interviewed by Cerys Matthews. So, congratulations Kim. I’m so happy for you and I know there will be more prizes to come! You are an amazing poet who works incredibly hard and your achievement is testimony to that. Hats off to you!
Julie Mellor, Surface ripples

May the leaves continue
to open their pores and soak up carbon
          emissions. May we reward the industry
of their green and saffron, their ruby
          and bark. May we bring the parched
envelopes of ourselves and be filled with
          the languages of all we love, at tables
overflowing into the end of the world.
Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer in Aid of Continuance

November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 47

I expected to feel sad. After all, my characters never got to dance through the dramas I invented for them or which, more accurately, it seemed they dictated to me. I expected to feel guilty too. In my busiest years I got up early or stayed up late to write hundreds of thousands of words, yet still didn’t have sufficient attention span or vision to finish writing those novels.

Instead I am simply relieved. The silent weight of these must-get-around-to manuscripts is gone. Once, the secret worlds of these novels accompanied me so closely I felt I was living several lives simultaneously. But no more. Time to let them go.

I dumped the books in the recycling bin without a farewell wave, not even a tang of nostalgia. Turns out the freedom to give up on projects feels liberating. I like to believe I’m making space for projects closer to my heart. I’m going to let those ideas stretch out into this new space and see what happens.
Laura Grace Weldon, Freedom Of Giving Up

There’ll also be days bright as fresh flowers in old graveyards.

Days when your brain-dead boomerang gets an anti-lobotomy and returns to you zinging and singing.

When your collide and collapse comes back new and refreshed.

When it feels like you can crawl into the womb of a feather, and be reborn as something lighter than air.
Rich Ferguson, Black Friday

Funds are tight, so I interlibrary loan poetry books as often as I can, and lately I came across Maryann Corbett, a poet who was new to me but not new to poetry.

You know how you can be in the car with a student driver or you can be in the car with someone who REALLY knows how to drive? When you are in a Corbett poem, you are in capable hands. I’m reading Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, a relatable collection of poems of the everyday (but of course with more than the everyday beneath the surface).

I admire how her poems move–the form never feeling too forced or stiff, but rather inevitable. If you want to read a few of her poems for yourself, the title poem of Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter can be found HERE.
Renee Emerson, reading Maryann Corbett

Because I don’t enjoy reading the crowd-pleasing poems that tend to win.

Because competitions implicitly and involuntarily encourage poets to write crowd-pleasers.

Because I write poems that are apparently simple, that accumulate layers, that would never stand out in a mass of fireworks.

Because I don’t write to win competitions. I write for my potential readers. I write for the conversations that individual poems strike up among themselves and with those readers in the context of a magazine or a collection.

What about you…?
Matthew Stewart, Why don’t I enter poetry competitions?

This year has been an extraordinary one. I decided to quit my part-time job and commit to writing full-time. It was a thrilling and scary decision, a long time in the making. Then, as if I needed reminding that life is short so I had better get on with it, my mother died on January 12th, while I was in hotel quarantine. Two days before my mother’s funeral I got a phone call from the UK informing me that my poem ‘A Poem To My Mother That She Will Never Read’ had won the International Mslexia Award for Poetry. That was one of the most poetic moments of my life. Poetic because the poetry that resonates best with me always makes me feel more than one thing.

Being published online meant I was able to submit it to the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry in Australia. It was announced last night that it won that award.

I am humbled, grateful, proud, teary, sad, elated. Thanks to Woollahra Council & Libraries; Ocean Vuong for the title inspo; all the poets whose work has inspired me; my Ma; and Judge Ali Whitelock, who engaged with the poem in all the ways I hoped a reader would, and articulated it so brilliantly.
Caroline Reid, Winner, Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry

How did you first engage with poetry?

When I was in elementary school in South Korea, we were required to keep a diary which was reviewed regularly by the teacher. I used to procrastinate until the day before the deadline. I remember my mom looking stern but slightly amused at my scramble to fill the pages, then suggesting: Why don’t you write a poem for a diary entry? It would be shorter but still meaningful.

So I first engaged with poetry as a “shortcut.” It quickly became fun and special to me. As I became more intentional about the elements of poetry, it often took longer than writing narratives!
Thomas Whyte, Jaeyun Yoo : part one

Remarkably, after nine years of trying to face down his cancer’s spread, [Oliver] Sacks could still describe himself as “intensely alive” and even “lucky” and, perhaps more important, “grateful” for being able to “choose how to live out the months” that remained to him. “I have to live,” he wrote, “in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.” That he did, publishing in the short time left to him five books and “nearly finish[ing]” others, all while completing his memoir, On the Move: A Life, published in the spring of 2015. Declaring his “detachment” from daily news and politics and issues of the day, he turned his focus “on myself, my work and my friends.” His was, in every sense, lived life.

This Thanksgiving, having crossed that threshold that places me among the old, though not the old old, I find inspiration in re-reading Sacks’s op-ed, to consider and affirm, as he did, what an “enormous privilege” it is to be of this world, especially to “have loved and been loved,” to “have been given much” and “have given something in return.”

Note: Sacks’s essay and three others comprise his slim volume of reflections, Gratitude, published the year he died.
Maureen Doallas, On This Thanksgiving

If you’re familiar with Polly [Atkin]’s work you’ll know how her poems fold you into them, how they open worlds. If you ever get a chance to see her read, do it, don’t hesitate, do it. I’ve been lucky enough to have her read as part of a course I ran and double lucky in that she has run a zoom course for Spelt, which has been a big hit. I read this one in January. I read a little bit each day and each day it was like being given a gift. She’s an extraordinarily gifted poet. Much With Body is Polly Atkin’s second collection. These are poems that explore the connection to nature, in particular the authors connection to her own place in nature, in the Lake District. There’s a thread of found poems running through the collection that use Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary entries to explore the body through the lens of chronic illness. Every poem in this collection pulls at something in the brain, every description captures something unusual and special. I can’t recommend it enough. Pour yourself a cup of tea and settle in, you’ll not be able to put it down.
Wendy Pratt, Shelfie Stories: Five Books to Curl Up With on a Wintery Sunday Afternoon

The neighborhood where I used to live, Plateau Mont-Royal, was predominantly French, rather entitled, and somewhat closed-in on itself. Our new neighborhood, Cote-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grace, is the most ethnically- and linguistically-mixed in the city, with some 48 languages spoken regularly in homes. In the elevators of our 12-story modern condo building, we hear neighbors speaking French, English, Chinese, Spanish, Yiddish, Russian, Italian, Arabic, Filipino, various Indo-Iranian languages, and many others. English, rather than French, is the most common language people use to say good morning and wish each other a good day. There is a huge Asian grocery market across the street, a Romanian charcuterie and bakery, and an eastern European/Russian/Ukrainian market around the corner; nearby on Victoria Avenue is a big kosher bakery, and that street is lined with Indian, Vietnamese, and Jewish restaurants and shops — to name just a few – while in other directions the concentration shifts to African and Caribbean, Iranian and Turkish, Portuguese, Greek and Middle Eastern, Mexican and Latin American. Not only is this mixture invigorating for all the senses, it encourages me to learn some words in more languages and try to connect with the Chinese butcher, the Ukrainian woman behind the prepared-food-counter, the Romanian couple who run the charcuterie, the Israeli pharmacist, the Lebanese dry-cleaner, the Muslim car mechanic, the Filipino cleaning woman whose schedule is the same as mine for the pool locker room, the Greek fishmonger. But even more than that, living this way is a daily reminder that the people of the world actually can co-exist, and help each other to thrive.
Beth Adams, Present Moments: Our Own, and Others’

In the afternoons, fascists gathered in the park. One November, I put on my coat and mitts and hat—it was cold and windy—and I showed the fascists pictures of the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin. Instead of trying to attain a forcibly monolithic, regimented nation under the control of an autocratic ruler, try these, I said. I figured each minute thinking about Agnes was a minute not being fascist. And it worked. One guy in an armband told me that her paintings show a commitment to exalted subject matter. Yes, another guy holding a torch said, she transforms the seen environment into the language of painting which gives the works their aura of silent dignity. And frankly, a jackbooted woman said, I like the grids.
Gary Barwin, HOW I TAUGHT THE FASCISTS

I read a lovely new book of poetry from a poet I’d never heard of, Adrienne Raphel’s Our Dark Academia. Raphel has a great resume – MFA from Iowa, a lectureship at Princeton, published in Paris Review, Poetry, all the big names – but this was a fairly small press, Rescue Press. One reason could be some of the poems were a bit untraditional – one was in the form of a Wikipedia entry, another in the form of a crossword puzzle, another was paper dolls – but I found myself enjoying the poetry and the quirky forms. The reason to shop at in-person bookstores is to find little treasures like these on the shelves. This one was thanks to my visit to Open Books last week.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Thanksgiving Weekend, Family Visits, A New Poem in Prairie Schooner “The Girl Detective,” and Doctor’s Orders to Relax

First, I’d like to celebrate Luke Hankins’ new chapbook Testament (Texas Review Press) which is now available for pre-order. I had a chance to spend time with this collection early and wrote the following statement:

“Testament shows Luke Hankins deftly at work in a ‘small glory’ of a chapbook! Whether addressing the troubled country that is America or bringing the reader into the prayer-like intimacy of resonant daily moments, Hankins’s poems here create spaces of presence and awareness that are refreshing and which reward rereading. Testament evokes its title by speaking the facts of the self in such ways that we can join Hankins in loving ‘the broken world better / that has broken me.” (blurb for Testament by Luke Hankins)

My second note of celebration is for the recent loss to the poetry community of Bernadette Mayer. Check out her poem “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica” and join me in being “strong” in the way such poets and poems show us to be.
José Angel Araguz, dispatch 112422

On a recent morning, I heard them say something about Patti Smith’s photography and a new book project. “Book of photography” caught my ear as much as anything. It seems so extravagant and, as much as I abhor the word, quaint.

Another word came, too: necessary. It arrived from a place I haven’t visited in far too long, the part of me that needs slowness instead of scrolling. And honestly, that’s all I’ve been offering it, even as it pleads, “Woman! Please… please… send love and light. I’m dying in here.”

And even if it were “just” extravagant, don’t we deserve some extravagances? A fat book to place on our laps or hold in our hands. Quality paper. Dozens and dozens of images curated by a fellow human being and meant to be, as it says on Patti Smith’s website, “a coherent story of a life devoted to art.”

While we are blessed to connect with one another in any way at all (yes, even in our phone’s miniature windows), there’s something this book reclaims. There’s something it opens. It says, in part, “Wait just a minute: You know this stuff is real, right? Its impact — it’s real. This sky, this dog, this trinket — they’re real. They take up space in our lives and our bodies.”
Carolee Bennett, “i see us” (a patti smith appreciation post)

As you travel further into the rubble, you leave the outside world behind. Turn left at the ruined shop that used to sell gravestones.

The shape of the earth alters day by day.

In the photograph a little boy shows another one a dandelion he has found. They sit cross-legged by the barbed wire. The caption on the photograph says they were both gassed a day or two later.

A woman writes on social media I find men’s socks too big for my feet.
Bob Mee, RANDOM LINES ON A SLEEPLESS NIGHT IN NOVEMBER

In October I enrolled in another Hugo House poetry class, again with the amazing poet, translator, and teacher Deborah Woodard. The class focused on the work of Fernando Pessoa, born in Lisbon in 1888. Our main text, Fernando Pessoa & Co., edited and translated by Richard Zenith, gathers together work by Pessoa and three of his heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Pessoa created entire biographies for these alter-egos and considered them mentors and colleagues. […]

Pessoa prided himself on being impersonal, even invisible, a crossroads where observations took place. He deplores philosophy and metaphysics. I had difficulty caring about him for almost the entire stretch of the course. But…as usual…as I read and considered (and attempted to write my own poems), I began to feel curious about this poet, writing in another language, in another time, and living in a place I have never been. I have a feeling Pessoa would have approved of my journey, both the reticence and the curiosity.
Bethany Reid, Give Thanks

If you have some quiet hours this week, I hope you’ll read the amazing poems in the new issue of Shenandoah. Hot-flashing in your Thanksgiving kitchen? Ann Hudson has you covered. Missing green horizons? Look at Oliver de la Paz’s Diaspora Sonnets. Craving something funny-dark? See Kelli Russell Agodon and Julie Marie Wade. Want a poem that’s a doorway, a dream, a marathon, a shopping expedition? Step into Jesse Lee Kercheval’s “Coronillas,” Akhim Yuseff Cabey’s “Complex,” Lucien Darjeun Meadows’ “Mile 11–,” or Jane Satterfield’s “Errand Hanging with Emily Brontë.” Ned Balbo’s poem talks to a firefly. Emily Pérez recreates a writer’s desperateness to produce-produce-produce and illuminates what a mess that mindset can make. Grief poems by Leona Sevick and Destiny O. Birdsong just devastated me. There’s more in the buffet, too, as many poems as we could cram into one issue (and pay authors for).

As far as my own literary news, this little plot of earth is dormant. I have one lyric essay I’m nudging along, but mostly I’m feeling uncomplicated happiness over others’ success. Just in my English department last week, a student won a Rhodes, a colleague published a short story, another colleague won sabbatical funding, and yet another was offered her first book contract. Term is winding up and it looks like a few of my students have learned a few things.
Lesley Wheeler, Word-feast

Today was not a normal day of work for me. Instead of teaching my amazing students, I chose to participate in the UCU industrial action over attacks on pay, working conditions and pensions.

I have blogged about this issue before, in 2018, which included a series of poems about work and working.

Today, in support of the strike, I collect them all in one place for the first time. [Click through for the links.]
Anthony Wilson, UCU Strike: a list of poems about work

Yesterday after church, we went to a concert, the kind of concert put together by a group of skilled musicians who live in the community and have found each other. My spouse knows two of the musicians because they all sing in the church choir.

Yes, there are days here in western North Carolina when I feel like I’ve fallen through a hole in time: “People still do this? How cool!” Of course, I went to many small symphonies and chamber orchestras in south Florida too. I love these examples of creative types who aren’t trying to break into big time in the big city, that aren’t posting TikToks of themselves in the hopes of getting the notice of huge masses of people.

I like a symphony orchestra that isn’t afraid to put animal ear headbands on when they play Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” I like a symphony orchestra that’s raising money for an animal rescue, and so they’ve chosen an animal theme that threads through the 4 pieces of music.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Joys of a Local Chamber Orchestra

it was love at first note
the wind and the bass solo eloped
straight out of my car

[I was crossing the bridge at the time
but this is their story not mine]

seven miles out bopping on the sea
the notes rearrange as they please
delighting the dolphins with their atonality
Paul Tobin, DELIGHTING THE DOLPHINS

My recent video palingenetics has its world-premiere screening at the 2022 edition of Festival Fotogenia – Poetryfilm, Videoart, Experimental Cinema, Avant-garde films run out of Mexico City. This is one of my favourite festivals: it has broad, inclusive remit, and it is incredibly well organised with a strongly supported sense of community. Through participation in previous festivals, I have built a network of friends and colleagues not only in Mexico, but across the world. Along the way, I have been learning to make Spanish text versions of the videos, such as this one (with help from the DeepL AI translator and a good dictionary).
Ian Gibbins, palingenetics at Fotogenia…

It’s been what can only been described as an absolute kick-bollock-scramble at work of late (no, there are no other phrases that work. I’ve tried them all), and that has left me struggling to keep up with reading journals, emails, books, road signs…anything really. And that starts to build up a pressure, a feeling that I’m not reading enough, not being engaged enough. That is likely entirely wrong, and very much a pressure of my own making, but it’s there and if I stop I worry I may never start again.

That won’t happen, but it can sometimes feel over-whelming trying to keep up with the journals that arrive, the books to review, the books I’ve bought and want to read, the music to listen to, the films and programmes to watch, the articles to consume…

Every new thing to read/listen to, watch, probably smell, maybe even touch that arrives can feel like email at work does, sometimes. Each one responded to begets another one and so on and so forth. Each journal sends me off to explore new poets, work by poets I know already, but may to have read, new albums, new shows, etc…
Mat Riches, Magic Darts

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?

My first book Material Girl didn’t change my day-to-day life much because I was a broke grad student when it was released and couldn’t do much to get the word out about it, but over time, the book found its audience and connected me to other writers and thinkers who I eventually felt I was writing with and for. Material Girl now feels like a digest of my influences at the time, a very New York School inflected-book about living in New York, montage-y, talk-y poems. I think my new book Making Water tries to make a new form, one that is maybe less inherited and more my own. My poetics up to now have been grounded in geographical place, and I wrote Making Water while living in North Carolina, which is a little bit urban, a little bit rural, and a little bit suburban all at once so I wanted to write something that really reflected the experience of moving through this new swampy viney parking lot-filled landscape. I think there’s an idea from people who live in major cities that moving to the south is giving up on being part of culture, or something, but what I found in living here was that having more time and space for study gave me the capacity for an expansiveness to my writing that I has lacked living in cities. I reflect on this in the new book: “Give it up for space // transmuted into time // By year three // Memory will become // Imagination tall as // loblolly pines
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laura Jaramillo

“Crow Funeral” looks at the darker underbelly to maternity and motherhood. The pressures on mothers to be perfect, to be self-less and centre the lives of their children even when they lack support and dare not seek help due to stigma and fear. The use of nursery rhyme is appropriate and interwoven within other poems, a reminder that fairy tales and rhymes for children also have a darker side: behavioural advice for a dangerous world. Kate Hanson Foster writes without judgment or sentimentality. These are loved and desired children of a mother doing her best not to lose herself but to find a way of combining being a self-less mother while also retaining individual personhood.
Emma Lee, “Crow Funeral” Kate Hanson Foster (East Over Press) – book review

Sister Margaret John Kelly died last night at age 88. I was blessed to be with her when she died.

She had been my major professor for English during my college years; a wonderful teacher. She also was an alumna of my college, fourteen years older. She suffered greatly through the last three years, battling against the dementia which left her without speech, and without independent movement.

She loved poetry.
Anne Higgins, The bare sun, skinned, slides through the grass

The iambic spin off is a comfort. As is the rhythm itself. And for a decade or more I carried the original poem in my pocket as an antidote to the despair of depression. To it I’m grateful for its help as a bridge.

As I encountered it first in the 80s, it was only the first two stanzas and marked as written by anonymous.

In fact [Robert] Harkness (2 March 1880—8 May 1961) wrote it. He was an Australian composer, musical genius, and pianist on the Revival circuit. […]

Much like Emily Dickinson poems can be sung to the Yellow Rose of Texas, this can map a regularity like the heart. And how can you unlove anything you once loved?
Pearl Pirie, Loved Then, Loved Now: In Jesus

“The colorists get it entirely wrong: nature is colored in winter and cold in summer, there’s nothing colder than full summer sun.” Tell me more, Camille Pissarro! Tell me, French landscape painter, about winter’s color, now that leaves now lying dry in piles, like potato skins or paper bags, light, giddy in the wind, when the pale tones of sky seem colored by remainders. What am I, color addict, missing — what can I see better?

Oh, the brave red leaves still bright on the chokeberry!
Oh, the clouds, neatly and darkly swirling as I leave the wine boutique, seemingly curated for a consumer outing.
No, those eruptions of drama are too easy, low-hanging fruit.

Pissarro was sure of his paradoxes, having meditated on painting, perception and landscape with a young Cézanne. (I’m reading T.J. Clark’s “If These Apples Should Fall.”). As I unravel this, I see that Pissarro was a consummate stylist suppressing the tick of giving humans what we want and need from nature, of pressing human eros onto landscape. Instead, he gives us nature without desire. Instead of our narratives of drama and excitement, he gives us a swath of everything without hierarchy or privilege, the totality in concert. It’s less a harmony than monotony, a stretching of a country moment, as Clark writes, “unique, noticeable, difficult unrepeatable persistence.”

Not beautiful because of a hidden light, but because it is stubborn. Winter’s long contemplation.
Jill Pearlman, Colorists on the Brink of Winter

Step through the narrow
fissure that opens— a glass waistline
where sparkling particles of sand suspend
in the space between the country prior to
this one and the country it will become
after anything passes through it. Believe
there’s a time and place where not everything
has happened yet, where somehow there might
still be lessons to learn from the not dead trees.
Luisa A. Igloria, Learning to Flow

November 21, 2022November 21, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 46

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This (late) edition continues the sombre tone from last week, albeit with some joyful news as well. The season of death is upon us. But late autumn and winter is also a time for deeper thinking, and we have some of that as well.

Note that I will continue to share links to these posts on Twitter for as long as a significant portion of us still maintain accounts there, but in general, like many folks, I’m using the opportunity to move most of my microblogging over to the Fediverse, which as an open-source project was always a much better fit with my values. I hope you’ll join me there. (I’m on a medium-sized Mastodon server, here.)

Oh bathroom window, what are those ash-gray clouds,
needle in the morning’s eye —

dawn too early in its strange light-threading.
To 6am, I bring another party:

my thoughts, light and frisky in dark crevices […]
Jill Pearlman, The Early Bird and other Myths

An interesting week. The tory clowns have come up with a forecast of a £60 billion black hole in the national finances. It’s their latest wheeze to make the poor pay more than the rich. JK Galbraith once said that “economic forecasting is there to make astrology look good.” But this has not stopped them from delivering one punitive budget after another. […]

there is a second
when the mop bucket’s contents
after being slung into the air
seems to just hang ignorant of gravity

in that moment you could mould the water
into any fantastic shape you pleased
if only you were quick enough
Paul Tobin, THE MOLECULES SIGH

As the wind howled, I thought about all the ways I have tried to make my way as a writer in the world: build a website, develop a presence on various social media sites, try to publish everywhere, try to have a series of readings/presentations, slog, slog, slog. Because it was the middle of the night, I wondered if I could have done anything differently, even though I know the stats about sales and who is making a living from their writing (not very many people).

And if we’re being honest, in many ways, I’m glad I’m not relying on any of my creative endeavors to pay the bills. I am astonished at the ways that people hustle to try to sell their work, and I know all the ways that the various hustles would be hard for me. And statistically, it’s hard these days to sell enough work to pay the bills. Lots of people out there competing for fewer readers. I’m glad that I can write what I want to write without worrying about marketability.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Winds of Metaphor, Winds of Change

What do you remember about the earth?

I am six and the terrible grandmother has come to live
with us. She smells of tobacco and the green eucalyptus-
mint Valda pastilles she is always popping into her mouth
from a tin hidden in her robe pocket. A game I like to play
with some of the neighborhood kids involves taking turns
putting Necco wafers in each other’s mouths while intoning
“The body of Christ.” We are careful not to bite down
so as not to cause the body of Christ to bleed. Then
we walk around the grassy perimeter of the truck yard
pretending we are floating, until the candy has melted
and our tongues turn lime green, orange, or pink.
Luisa A. Igloria, Six Questions

A commissioned poem is always a leap of faith in the dark. You get a phonecall with a request to write about a particular topic or idea, and you must decide whether you can do it, whether you want to do it, but most importantly, whether you can do it in the time available.

For this commission, and for many commissions for radio, there was a very tight turnaround. I think I got a phonecall on Friday evening from the producer of Woman’s Hour, Clare Walker. She wanted a poem that celebrated the different sounds that women have heard over 100 years. the poem would be two minutes long, but the whole thing would be about eight minutes becuase they were going to weave through the poem lots of archive recordings. “Brilliant!’ I replied – thinking this was a really interesting commission, and an enjoyable one. I briefly envisaged some peaceful weeks trawling through archive recordings of suffragettes and the sond of the first washing machine.

“There’s just one snag” Clare said. “We’re on a bit of a tight deadline, so it has to be finished and recorded by Wednesday”. “Ah” I said. I thought about my looming deadline for a book of hybrid essays (more news to follow on that!) which was due just a few days later. I thought about the five days I had available to write the poem, and how for at least two of those, I wouldn’t be writing, or in fact even thinking because I have no childcare at the weekend.

“That will be fine!” I replied recklessly. “Let’s do it!”. What kind of person would turn down a commission from Woman’s Hour, I asked myself, even with a book deadline, and just five days to write it (well really three).
Kim Moore, The Commissioned Poem: A Leap of Faith

Tough, in its various meanings, and tender are the poems in Kathy Fagan’s Bad Hobby. Painful, in parts, as it recalls my own mother’s failings of memory, but funny too, as such things can be, in the right moment, with a good spirit, and with nothing left to lose.

From “Snow Moon & the Dementia Unit”:

Dad called again to see how his daughter Kathy’s doing,
and when I tell him I’m doing fine, he asks,

So you’ve talked to her recently? What did she say?
and really, what could I say then…

Through these poems we glimpse the inner and outer life of the speaker, especially the presence of her parents, real or ghostly. From “Animal Prudence”:

…Even when he was
a young drunk going deaf from target practice,
my father preferred picking his teeth
to brushing them. My mother preferred
crying. They bought or rented places
on streets named Castle, Ring, Greystone—
as if we were heroes in a Celtic epic.

The author is unsparing and unsentimental in her observations. Here she regards her own self through a sight of a hawk and its squirrel prey in “Cooper’s Hawk”:

… My tolerance for ‘Nature, red in tooth
and claw’ rose as my estrogen fell. The wish
to die died with my hormones, and with all that
powering down, I could finally hear myself
not think.

The wry wit, the dry eye, and the imagination that instills these poems made this hard book a pleasure to read.
Marilyn McCabe, Hello goodbye hello; or, On Kathy Fagan’s Bad Hobby

“Naming the Ghost” is a gentle, sensitive journey through bereavement and acceptance. It is not just the loss of the narrator’s father, but also that the newborn daughter will never know her grandfather, which exacerbates the sense of loss. However, the narrator acknowledges that she cannot let her daughter’s sole experience be a grief for someone she did not know. On her journey, she learns to adjust to looking to the future, informed by the past. These are poems that linger and haunt rather than grab the reader.
Emma Lee, “Naming the Ghost” Emily Hockaday (Cornerstone Press) – book review

What I was going to say is that I have reached an age where my peers all seem to be facing cancer. Illnesses like Parkinson’s. Bones that break all too easily. Unexpectedly. Everything hurts. Everyone hurts. And we are still comparing ourselves to one another.

Some of us move through the days thinking: but that won’t happen to me. I’ll be one of the shining septuagenarians on Instagram snatching more than their own bodyweight. Some of us hold on to the moments.

Some of us. Maybe only me. Have given up on narratives and justifications.

Here is my beginner’s mind. I pause in stillness. Then inhale and rise along the gentle slope of a polished pearl. Then exhale into stillness. One rich movement at a time, like gusts of wind slamming the body.

I read once that the ghazal was a series of discrete couplets, connected like pearls on a string.
Ren Powell, Life as a Ghazal

Here is what we do in our church:
we never gather and we never sing
we blame but never praise
we cultivate indulgence; we wallow in dread;
we pick the scabs of anxiety.
The stupidest Congregation of the Bigot
in Podunkville does better than that.
Dale Favier, Inventing the Wheel

Readers accustomed to Fokkina [McDonnell]’s poems will know that she has a great gift for sudden shifts of thought and emphasis which wrong-foot and surprise the reader. Many years’ practice as a psychotherapist must have informed Fokkina’s acute sensitivity to how the brain and heart interact. Her poems implicitly ask questions but usually stop short of providing answers – as with effective haiku, the reader is invited to do some work, in effect to complete the poems. There’s a lightness or playfulness among the trauma which sporadically surfaces; a sense which I can only really explain fully by using the Japanese haiku concept of karumi, which Michael Dylan Welch explores so well in an essay available here. And where Fokkina does apparently provide answers, the reader has to wonder if they are the answers of an unreliable narrator of sorts.
Matthew Paul, On Fokkina McDonnell’s ‘Safe House’

What are you working on?

After a two-year hiatus in writing (due to parenting a 3yo and 1yo without childcare during the pandemic), I have just begun to write again while my baby naps and my 3yo attends preschool. My question the past few weeks has been what I can effectively work on given time constraints. Before my children were born I was working on a volume of Norse verse translations. The unpredictability of baby naps has made it nearly impossible to return to this. What surprised me was having inspiration for a fantasy novel and actually being able to write chapter drafts. Holding scenes and characters in my mind until I can work on them again has proven easier than holding the intricately-woven webs that are skaldic poems, with all their linguistic and historical threads.
Thomas Whyte, Emily Osborne : part three

More poets and songbirds. Shopaholics at the mall of mercy.

A Congress that engages in friendly congress.

For the homeless to become homeful. Wildfires to take a chill pill.

Gun muzzles to nuzzle love.
Rich Ferguson, What the world needs now

I’ve noticed in recent years, on social media since that is where I see discussions of poetry, is a criticism of poetry reviews. First the criticisms were about the reviews not being published in mainstream newspapers any more or, if they were, the tiny wordcount afforded to them. Then the criticism shifted to the reviews themselves, their “lack of critical engagement,” that they are “puff pieces”, concerning themselves with the poet and the “poet’s identity” rather than the actual poems, the craft and technique. All of these criticisms are valid, and perhaps the reviews under discussion seem ubiquitous because of the proliferation of online platforms like Goodreads, online journals and blogs, as well as in some poetry magazines. Also, there has been a trend to simply photograph a book or poem and share on social media without also offering any kind of considered review. Perhaps this has also offended people seeking detailed critiques. Unfortunately, in my view, the criticisms risk silencing a group of people who might want to review, or even to express that they like a book or poem, but who now won’t, for fear of being on the end of such criticism. I think it’s far to say that some of the criticisms I’ve observed are from poets who are also academics, used to the rigor of academic principles, and critical of work that strays from from, or seems to disregard, this rigor. I think that’s a shame. The poetry world has room for a rigorous, intellectually challenging approach to appraising and analysing poetry as well as a different kind of response, perhaps personal to the reviewer, regardless of their academic training and experience.

Unfortunately, perhaps because of the nature of social media, particularly Twitter with its limited wordage, these kinds of criticisms can appear aggressive, especially when a lot of people seem to join in. Perhaps one of the good things to come out of the current implosion happening at Twitter will be that this kind of ‘pile on’ will become less prominent in poetry (and other) circles.
Josephine Corcoran, On Reviewing

I read somewhere recently that writing poetry reviews (the traditional kind, for poetry mags) is a good discipline as it makes you really read closely and engage with poetry collections. I have to say that interviewing a poet on a podcast takes all that and then some – thinking up relevant questions to ask, talking with the poet about your reading/understanding of their work, suggesting which poems they read and commenting in a way that listeners may find interesting… it’s not easy, and I often curse myself for sounding like an idiot, a sycophant or a ‘womansplainer’, sometimes all three in the same episode. It’s all good fun though!
Robin Houghton, Self-sabotage, womansplaining and other poetry joys

Winter is more insidious than summer.
The low-angled sun is a dull blade,
sheathed in bitter grey.

In winter I play old music.
The music my grandparents listened to
as they took me to Friendly’s or to

a clarinet lesson in the next town over.
It’s the music of nostalgia and longing
and emptiness. Winter music.
Jason Crane, POEM: A Winter Poem

I once borrowed her jean jacket so I could look cool, as a group of us made for Montreal for a Peace Concert at the Montreal Forum in 1987. The illustration she made of our pre-concert group in the park, drinking beer and playing guitar with a few dozen others, made its way onto the cover of the zine we invented as part of our high school “writer’s craft” class: assembling poems, stories, drawings. All of it published anonymously, of course. She could fall helpless into fits of giggles, including when dancing at the Carleton Tavern somewhere in the 00s, realizing her friend Joy’s dancing had caused Joy’s pants to fall off, without them noticing. There was an element to our pairing that rendered chaos, a joyous silliness that not everyone else had patience for, akin to six-year-old twins: each encouraging the other.

I published some of her poems in the first issue of my long poem magazine, STANZAS, in 1993, and in a chapbook, not that much later. She’d been working on a poetry manuscript she’d titled “Naked,” some of which sits in a file on my computer. The poems from STANZAS, her “Garden” series, that later fell into her novel, The Desmond Road Book of the Dead (Chaudiere Books, 2006). As the first of the series, “Garden,” reads:

I can make the garden grow, the sun fall up and down in the sky, a man full grown from passion in my tissue, in secret places I hide my fat and wait for rain for rain for rain

In August 2019, the last time I saw them, not long before Covid: an afternoon visiting Clare and Bryan on their farm in North Glengarry, a few miles east of the McLennan homestead, as my young ladies admired their two horses, and later accidentally stomped on a hive of bees at the end of the yard. At least we discovered neither young lady allergic, once they both stung. Clare offered them colouring, toys. They played a football game on the porch, and she delighted in them both.

How am I supposed to experience a world that Clare Latremouille no longer occupies? I shall have to be attentive enough for the both of us, I suppose. I shall have to be silly enough. An image in my head of the remaining members of Monty Python at Graham Chapman’s graveside, the first of the troupe to die: every one of them standing with pants at their ankles.
rob mclennan, Clare Latremouille (July 4, 1964 – November 16, 2022)

My recent video and furthermore (indexed), is getting its first public screening on 23rd November 2022 in the Living With Buildings – IV program in Coventry, UK, as part of their fabulous Disappear Here project, curated by Adam Steiner. This is a quarterly screening that explores human experiences of the urban environment through people, poetry and place.

In Ancient Greece, public notices were engraved in stone on building walls. Now, we find ourselves surrounded by texts: advertising, warnings, directions, graffiti… Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones are in town, violence, scandal and political intrigue vie for attention, someone won the football, and we worry about the future for our youth…

The video samples every occasion that the word “and” was used in the “NEWS” pages on one day in the local Adelaide newspaper. The words following each instance of “and” are listed alphabetically and read by Karen, the MacOS Australian female text-to-voice interpreter. In doing so, it creates a snapshot (indexed) of a day in the news of a contemporary city.
Ian Gibbins, and furthermore (indexed)…

In the old days writers would iambize their prose and dangle rhymes on their line-endings to make their words seem more significant, adding poetic words as glitter. As Samuel Johnson said, some people think that anything that doesn’t look like prose must be poetry. Nowadays writers use strange punctuation, deletions, discontinuities and line-breaks instead.

There’s still something about the label “poetry” that writers find tempting. And why not? Poetic license still exists. If you label a piece “poetry”, readers will look for hidden meanings. The meanings will expand to match the readers’ expectations. It saves the writer needing to do so much. A short text (about doing the housework, say) can go far given a big title like “Death”.

But readers might not be so compliant nowadays. They might distrust the label. They might think the shortness is a cop-out.

They’re more alert to tricks of ads, the lure of mistique, aura, etc. They know how the addition of false eyelashes and tan can trick the eye.
Tim Love, Ornamentation and aura

A first thing the poetry business and the wine trade have in common: the best way to end up with a small fortune in both poetry publishing and winemaking is to start off with a large one. In part, this is because winemaking is often a highly personal project, just like poetry publishing, and people thus often do stuff that makes little business sense.

And then there’s the question of personal taste: I don’t like big, oaky wines from Ribera del Duero. I do admire them in technical terms when they’re well crafted, but I can never bring myself to enjoy them. Same goes for certain types of poetry.
Matthew Stewart, A comparison between poetry and wine

I grew up in a valley bordered on the east by the Rocky Mountains and on the west by the Nevada desert. Both landscapes were awesome and terrifying–people died in both. When we drove across the desert on the way to California, the emptiness was so overwhelming I hid on the car floor. But the sight of the mountains was central and powerful, and I missed them when I moved east. When I took the train home I spent the last few hours staring out the window, desperate for my first glimpse of them. Westerners are landscape snobs–I needed that scale. In the east I sneered at the hills people referred to as mountains. When people said, “Isn’t this landscape beautiful?,” I literally couldn’t see what they were talking about. If it wasn’t awesome it didn’t even matter. It took me years of living in it to realize one day, setting out for a hike (walk) with friends: Oh, this landscape is human scale, you can just walk out into it without risking your life. And for the first time I saw the value in that.

I think the sublime has to do with extremity and intensity, with things larger and deeper than the human scale of things, with situations where one person encounters whatever it is–the void, the abyss, the unfathomable, immeasurable. I think the sublime is something we can visit but not live in–the intensity would crush us, as Rilke says. And the solitude. Most of our lives include relationships with other people. When it comes to poetry, the awesome/ sublime may be the most powerful, but I think more poems, including many great ones, are written out of our human relationships–that scale, the one with emotions that range from happiness to rage to love to sadness, subtle and nuanced, looked at closely. I don’t think I’d describe any of Shakespeare’s sonnets as sublime, for example, however beautiful and moving they are.
Sharon Bryan, Poems of Daily Life

The poem is not simply a clever convolution of words but does ‘make sense’ when read carefully. Apart from its description of a time that is gone, it examines and exemplifies the tortured ambivalence between memory and fact. The slippery methodology of examining a personal memory when looking at a visual depiction of that place in that time. Indeed, can memories be altered by the holder of that memory, other than by recognising its inherent subjectivity.
Jim Young, poem with explanatory notes

Number of books read while here: 14 – 8 collections of poetry and 6 novels. (You can see all the books I’ve read this year on Goodreads – follow me if you don’t already!)

Number of manuscripts read for Riot in Your Throat: 22 and counting – the independent poetry press I run, Riot in Your Throat, is currently open for full length poetry manuscripts. I’m looking for 2-4 collections to publish in 2023 – submissions are open all month so if you haven’t yet submitted there’s still time!

Number of dreams about ex-lovers: 3 – seriously, what is going on in my brain?!
Courtney LeBlanc, VCCA: By the Numbers

A deer drives into a parking lot. It desires nothing. It’s my voice. I’ve been looking for you. Yeah, out on a joyride, now here to buy pants. Later, parking spots turn into breath. My voice full of venison and wheels. Fog and knives. What I desire, the deer says: An on and off switch. My thighs in lake water. But I’m wearing pants. I’m always wearing pants.
Gary Barwin, Pants

Tuesday is my dad’s memorial service, when we will placing both his ashes and my mother’s, which have been on the mantle for the past 5 years, in the ground of the plots they owned since around the time they got married. It is all moving very fast and I have yet to catch my breath or spend much time with my thoughts. I’ve mostly been working furiously and napping frequently in equal measure. I have to keep reminding myself that its the holiday season, that Thanksgiving is this week. I am not really feeling it, but am hoping to fake it til I make it, procuring new garlands and stockings from Amazon for my bookshelf, some new evergreen sprigs for some vases. I was going to just wait til I get back to the city next Sunday, but I may just put it up tomorrow.

I write this post now as I would normally be embroiled in my twice-weekly call with my dad, an hour I have cautiously watched approach on the clock on all day as I did the usual Sunday things like sweep the floors and clean up the kitchen. The past few years, he had taken over where my mother had left off on Sundays and Wednesday nights. I have always been grateful for that time, mostly since the previous 20-ish odd years of living away from them had involved very little phone convo with him, since my mom liked to do the talking for both of them with him occasionally chiming in from the other side of the room. Only when she was really sick and the delirium had set in did he take over. It was sort of like getting to know someone new, but also very familiar. I am not quite sure what I will do with myself, especially on Sundays when the 6pm call was so engrained in my schedule my entire adult life.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 11/20/2022

clay and paper string
persuaded him not to prosecute
the silent sneeze

even in the cafeteria
her own aeroplane
is made to be burnt
Ama Bolton, ABCD November 2022

Word went out Thursday that he was moving to palliative. By now you’ve probably heard of the quick decline of Robert Hogg and our loss of him on Sunday.

I never did the math that he was 80. He was busy in the 60s with that zeitgeist of poetic excitement. He had a young energy. Even cancer’s “trauma age” didn’t impinge as much as on some people.

Death has offended and hurt many again. Its timing is never good. In the last few years, Bob was redoubling his efforts to get more of his work out before people while he could. Love while you can, write while you can and support while you can seemed to be his driver.

He was like electricity, always there at the ready when you reach for him. He had a calm gentle humour, plain spoken and as if amused by life.

It’s funny seeing the tributes coming out from so many and from so far and yet not surprising at the same time. He had the rare gift while talking to you of making you the only person in the room.
Pearl Pirie, Bob Hogg

What can poetry do?

There have been many who advocate art for art’s sake, or l’art pour l’art, as the slogan was initially rendered in nineteenth century France.

There have also been many, and indeed there are an ever-increasing number, of artists (in the broadest sense) who see their work as a focus for, or extension of, their activism.

I feel fortunate to have had poems included in a variety of charity anthologies over the years, raising funds (and awareness) for Macmillan Cancer Support, Welney WWT and the Born Free Foundation, to name but three.

I am delighted to add another to the list in the form of Voices for the Silent (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2022), the new companion volume to For the Silent (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2019), edited by Ronnie Goodyer, Poet-in-Residence at the League Against Cruel Sports. These companion (or stand-alone) volumes have been produced to aid the work of this charity, and not surprisingly some of the selected poems concern animal cruelty. Others focus on habitats and the wonders and complexities of the natural world.
Caroline Gill, ‘Voices For The Silent’, New Anthology from Indigo Dreams Publishing

My unfinished poems. Technically, what is the status of a half-done poem when life is finished?

The first thirteen lines of a brand new poem. Quite unrelated to the situation at hand. Poetry comes when it comes. Even through a canula.

One person I wanted to apologize to. From way back before way back. Time moves in mysterious trajectories inside a hospital, dodging right angles and ramps, needles and gurneys.

How mesmerizing that infinitely slow drip from the IV pouch is – like an existential morse code. Drip. Dash. Dash. Damn. Drip.

Two questions the universe hasn’t answered yet. The universe needs deadlines and then someone to enforce the deadlines. The united nations of forsaken questions.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The night before surgery: thoughts and stuff…

You wait.
That’s what you do,
whether the poems
come, or not,
the old monk said.
Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (94)

First, while the press aims to be sustainable, it is not trying to be profitable. Breaking even is acceptable to me, and I would consider it a victory to be able to break even while 1) putting good poetry into the world and 2) continuing to donate half of all sales. If there are times when I go into deficit by a hundred dollars or so, this too is acceptable to me personally. However, I am rigorously working to avoid this. And again, even without the $500 donation, I’ve still basically broken even on a relatively large ($1000) investment, and I’ve also managed to give away almost $850 — all while getting my poems into the world. So I’m OK with how things are going.

Secondly, the great majority of the money spent so far was “start up” money, and this does not represent ongoing costs. These initial costs include both tools I will not need to replace anytime soon, if ever, as well as a lot of practice materials I won’t ever be buying again (different weights of card stock and paper, in particular). Thus, the longer the press continues to exist, the more it will produce from these initial materials, and the more it will earn from them.
R.M. Haines, DMP Summary and Receipts: 10/17 to 11/14

So, this weekend, I am working on final edits of Flare, Corona for BOA – including updating last-minute acknowledgements, deciding on spelling conventions that I apparently don’t write twice the name way, and keeping an eye out for wayward commas, and I’m also sending out e-galleys of Flare, Corona to people who might be interested in reviewing it. If you are interested in reviewing it, in a Zoom class visit, or book club inclusion, please e-mail me at jeannine dot gailey at gmail dot com and I will send you a copy!

I’m monitoring the somewhat sad situation at Twitter. If I had 44 billion dollars, I think I’d do a better job of managing the product instead of destroying it, but Elon Musk is a really bad manager with a lot of money willing to hurt others in the process of getting his own way (toxic misogyny writ large, I’m afraid) and I’m sad because I’ve built relationships with not just the poetry community but disability Twitter and even fellow cat and flower lovers and I hate that a spoiled billionaire can make everything crumble in a few days that I’ve built for years. On the other hand, it makes you rethink your whole relationship with social media. For writers it’s essential to connect with audiences—and for a long time, Twitter was the place to connect with Millennial friends, writers, and readers.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, November Sunshine in the Pacific Northwest…

Finally, there is this blog, which has endured all sorts of personal, technological, and societal changes since it began in 2003. As a firm believer in owning and controlling one’s own online content, I’ve no intention of letting it go, and instead, have been thinking about how to infuse it with more energy now that I have some time. Could it be more educational, more helpful? Could it help to launch new projects and bring people together, as it has in the past (quarrtsiluni, Phoenicia Publishing, online groups)? What else is there that I haven’t considered? There’s nothing wrong with social media functioning as a hub where interested people find content and go to it, but as our disillusionment with these social platforms and their capitalist agendas grow, could blogs regain some of their gravitas and a new sense of purpose? I wonder.

It depends somewhat on our expectations. I do know that I don’t care about the number of followers or readers, and we are long since past those heady days where aspiring writers thought they’d become well-known through their blogs — there’s no way that someone steadily writing good but long-form posts would become famous like a seductive Instagram influencer, not in today’s world! But careful and engaged readers and writers still do exist […] Blogs like Language Hat, Velveteen Rabbi, Hoarded Ordinaries, and Whiskey River have kept on quietly, steadily, thoughtfully posting for nearly two decades now, and there are many others. If these are not impressive and worthy bodies of creative work, I don’t know what qualifies.
Beth Adams, Coming Up for Air

The weather is cold cold cold, but the days are so brightly sunny I keep saying I need to get my sunglasses back out. I’m savoring every last bit of true fall that I can, before we pass Thanksgiving and it is officially winter holiday season. I love this time of year, when we go inside and get cozy but don’t yet have a bunch of other obligations. When we love light all the more for its scarcity.

For so many reasons, I really can’t with Thanksgiving much any more, but I will always love taking time to notice and name what I am grateful for. In this funky week full with appointments and phone calls and triggers and wind and wool sweaters, there was one morning where everything sparkled because the temperatures had dropped below freezing overnight, but the sun was rising. Branches were newly bare, but there were still leaves clinging to them–leaves blazing with their final colors.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Pain management

I think some of the things I’m doing right now that are part of my work for the NF book – visiting museums, walking, reading – are exactly what I should be doing and I am realising just how stressed I get if I do too much ‘people’ stuff in one week. I’m trying to train myself out of feeling and labelling myself as ‘pathetic’ or ‘ridiculous’ or ‘weak’ if I need more rest than perhaps other people seem to, or if I’m not juggling 100 projects at once and just want to plod slowly into a book. This is where I have always wanted to be – plodding into my work, absorbed in it like the utter library nerd that I am. I just want to read books and write books and have the time and energy to do that.

Perhaps my dad’s death has opened up a few old wounds, wounds I thought I’d packed and sewed up tightly. I don’t know. It’s been a hell of a year, again. I’m starting to think about goals for next year, starting to think about my rituals of the new year. I’m ticking off some big goals from 2022 and that makes me wonderfully happy, and I am surprising myself with the new goals in my planner, they are much less poetry centred. I feel strangely guilty for moving away from poetry, even if it is only while I work on the non fiction project. I’ve cut my work back to some mentoring, running Spelt and running the occasional course. which still sounds like a lot really, on top of writing a book. Having the opportunity to help other poets progress their own writing is really important to me, and it’s also a source of absolute joy for me, mentoring in particular. And I love the camaraderie of the email courses I still run. When I come to write prompts and notes for a course it feels like putting a comfortable cardigan on, and mentoring always feels like meeting friends. I find, more and more, that the work that I am choosing to do brings me joy, I find that when I look around myself, my life is good. Terrible fretting over what the next terrible loss will be aside, I am happy and enjoying the way my brain works, and I’m looking forward to reflecting that in my writing. But still a part of me clings to the idea that if I’m not cramming in more stuff, applying for more things, winning more things, making more connections…I’m not doing well. I need to change the definition of ‘doing well’ and emphasise ‘feeling happy’ more I think.
Wendy Pratt, Writing and Reading the Trauma Poems

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the good poetry news I’ve received lately, and I’m behind on sharing it here…

At the end of September, my poem “One Way to Use a Deck of Cards” from How to Play was featured on Verse Daily!

Last month, two of my poems were published in Writing in a Woman’s Voice: “After an Older Man from Church Drunk-Texts to Tell Me I Looked Good Topless in His Dream Last Night” and “What’s Something You Love That Can’t Love You Back?”

Also in October, two of my poems were published in Pirene’s Fountain: “This Poem Is about Dinosaurs” and “Choosing a Moon.” This whole issue is fantastic, and you can purchase a copy at this link.

This month, I’ve gotten some happy award news! “After an Older Man from Church…” received the Moon Prize from Writing in a Woman’s Voice on November 9, and “This Poem Is about Dinosaurs” was just nominated for a Pushcart Prize this week! I’m so grateful to these editors who’ve published and affirmed my work and to the folks who encourage me and read my poems.
Katie Manning, Verse Daily & Moon Prize & Pushcart (Oh my!)

Lately I’ve been remembering the dances I’ve already had – the romantic ones with boys/men a long time ago. I now know that at least three of those boys/men have passed on. That’s something else I’ve considered: the synonyms for “died”: passed on, passed away, etc. One of my sisters always says “Gone to God.” The dogs and cats who have “crossed the Rainbow Bridge”

I still have the image in my head from when my dad died. I visited him on a Wednesday, and on the following Friday I was at a meeting in Buffalo and got a call from the nursing home that he had died in his sleep in the middle of the afternoon. I envisioned him on a small boat, moving away from the shore of the living on the sea of eternity, quietly moving on, his face toward the horizon.
Anne Higgins, The Dances you’ve already had

November 13, 2022November 13, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 45

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week, turns in the weather and in politics bring things into sharper albeit sometimes also bleaker focus. I found thought-provoking essays on topics ranging from Twitter to the value of doubt to the importance of public libraries. Plus the usual quirky mix of off-beat observations and musings. Enjoy.

With the COP27 – the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – now running in Egypt, it was even more disheartening to read recent reports in the major science journals that the melting of the polar ice caps, the Greenland ice-cap and glaciers all around the world is accelerating at a pace beyond previous predictions. […]

As individuals, there is depressingly little we can do in the short term – major changes in direction are needed by governments and large corporations alike. Nevertheless, as artists, scientists and concerned citizens, we can continue to sound the alarm bells and spread their call anyway we can. Over the last few years, most of my videos have addressed environmental issues in some way or another.

Many of these videos have been shown as part of events addressing climate change. In November, floodtide and colony collapse are screening as part of the Nature and Culture Poetry Film Festival in Copenhagen, while floodtide is part of the ART Speaks Out program on IkonoTV, coinciding with COP27.

ANOMALY is a new video that combines a plot of the rising sea surface temperatures, recorded by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology over more than 120 years in Southern Australia, with a visualisation of the effect of modest sea level rise along a sunny beach at Moana / Potartang on the coast of South Australia, not far from Adelaide. It’s a depressing graph.
Ian Gibbins, World’s end…

The second full-length poetry collection by New Mexico-based Anchorage, Alaska Inupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik, following the multiple award-winning Corpse Whale(Tucson AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2012), is blood snow (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2022), a collection of meditative, first-person descriptive lyrics populated by birds, inlets, polar bears, the north wind, polar cap and the thaw, moose tracks, seal, birch and berries. “Sunken sod of whalebone,” she writes, to open the poem “Ice Age Two,” “earth houses rising, / out of feathered sea / water.” Grounded in her particular northern landscape, okpik offers a perspective on a culture and climate, as well as man-made pollution and climate change, specifically around northern resource stripping. […]

This is a wonderfully evocative collection, with an open heart and a determined lyric, and there’s a straightforwardness to the structure of this collection that I’m quite enjoying, one that isn’t broken up into thematic or structural sections, but simply a collection of individual poems, assembled together to form a book. Her poems do seem composed to attempt, in her own way, to reconcile a suggested disconnect—the rippling effects of her outside adoption as an infant—between herself and the foundational elements of her culture and landscape. “No, not all at once did they come,” she writes, as part of the poem “When the Mosquitoes Came,” “those takers didn’t know. Then they came in waves of time, / curiosity driven in urgency of a newborn baby girl, / me to be only theirs, no matter what harm it caused me / it was to an Inupiaq family secret, / what they knew meant right makes might.” As a whole, blood snow exists as a document of witness, a love letter and a declaration of belonging, and an argument for both ecological and cultural preservation, simply through the evocative descriptions and language the flow of her lyric, the waves of her words, provide against such book-length shoreline. “I live in a dugout in the cliffs next to the ocean,” she writes, as part of the poem “Twilight Pain,” “bluffs receding filling with seawater rising / from melting glacial ice. Across the inlet seal island / not far from my dugout. / They bark and sun themselves all day, / but are in constant fear of losing ground to walrus.”
rob mclennan, dg nanouk okpik, blood snow

Bear with me now as I unpick it all, if you have the time, or sometimes feel haunted by your own dreams. I am, of course, the anxious woman. And yes, I qualify as a judgemental clientele. But I am myself too, opening the door and stepping into the clean, cool rain. And I am both the absence and presence of kindness which is, perhaps, something we all struggle with at times, when we must choose to bless ourselves over others.
Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ The Reality of Dreams

I was ready to meet the Oracle but she was grumpy and unpredictable tonight, dismissing my almost-poem. I started again and saved a screenshot when she wouldn’t let go of my last word. So, here’s the screenshot and the poem with the last word.

Autumn Sky

Sun, like an eggy lake
a sleeping diamond lazy-gowned,
dream-drunk.

Summer’s sweat
a shadow, a moan,
a whisper.
Charlotte Hamrick, Autumn Sky

It’s November, and it seems that often this time of year good news and bad news comes together. Sharing a bit of good news, AWP decided to feature the panel I submitted on writing disability and chronic illness, so that’s very exciting news, and I’m extra happy for my panelists.

On the sad news, we lost our beloved 16-year-old Shakespeare this week. He has lost half his body weight in six months and was failing to hold down water, so we had a vet to the house and said goodbye to him there. It was incredibly sad, more than I ever expect (why is that the case?) Glenn took it very hard.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Good News, Bad News November: AWP Featuring My Panel, Losing Our Beloved Shakespeare, A Lunar Eclipse, Sprained Knee and a Monoclonal Antibody Shot, A Holiday Visit to Molbaks, and a New Poem in the West Trestle Review

But love must
be Shakespearean: a costume drama,
poetry frothing at its mouth, selfish,

greedy, visceral. Always wanting more,
wanting so much more that nothing is
enough. Not even love. We’re raised
on happy endings. Even tragedies are
normalized as the best possible result,

given the odds. When love fails, we ask
if it was real. Seek existential assurance.
A real love should have destroyed the
lover when it left.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 21

We are now in that dark dip in November, always a tricky place and moreso in recent years. With my dad still in the hospital and the outcome still uncertain, this week we hit the 5 year anniversary of my mother’s death and I am just trying to triage feelings and mounting work and general anxiety that is knife sharp and occasionally bleeds out all over the room and people around me. Or it doesn’t and I feel alone inside it like a dark lake and I am looking for a board or a broken door to float on. There are no poems here, there isn’t time, and outside of some orders, DGP work has been shelved for the coming weeks in favor of getting things done to get paid and pay rent and shit. In between, there are weekly trips to Rockford, which always makes me want to crawl out of my skin–even before illnesses and hospitalizations and this unbearably early dark. I find I have to be away from home base when I also feel I really need to be here–for the structure, for the cats, for some semblance of normality, yet if things go awry, I also want to spend more time with my dad, especially he’s unable to turn this around. Without structure, I am completely ragged and wind-tattered most of the time. I feel completely ill-equipped for almost everything. The time there is a vacuum [I] descend into and re-emerge [from]. This past weekend, a horrific scene in the waiting room that had nothing to do with me rattled me more than I’d like.

I’ve put a pin in AUTOMAGIC release since poetry is not where my head is, though some may argue that is exactly where it needs to be, but I just can’t right now. I still have to make final corrections and adjustments and order the final copies, so maybe in a few weeks I’ll feel more like it. Poetry seems pale and inconsequential.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 11/9/2022

Poets born just off-kilter
from the tipping point between

seasons dance with spinning tops,
teeter-totters, jungle gyms.
Balancing between slanted

light and eclipse, equipoise
and cascade, between anchor

and float, they learn how the thud
feels when it bounces off dirt
on either side.
PF Anderson, Untitled

Dear Graduating MFA Students,

Pssst. You don’t need to go into academia. Has anyone said that to you yet? Because it is so important to receive that message.

You. Do. Not. Need. To. Go. Into. Academia.

But I love teaching!

Then teach!

I understand feeling that teaching is a vocation that you’re called to, enjoying the community that it provides, and wanting to incorporate it into your path of professional experience. But you can do those things without making teaching with being your primary source of income and (ahem, America) health care. For decades, every major city in the United States has had at least one if not multiple community-led spaces for workshopping poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (not that the pandemic is over, nota bene), these organizations had to adapt to moving all their learning opportunities online. Most of these organizations are keeping those channels open, understanding the ways that online learning can increase equity and access–which means that even if you don’t end up living in a major city, you can still offer a class through that hub.

Will you make much money? No. Best case scenario is a 50/50 split of proceeds with the hosting institution. But you’ll teach classes on topics in creative writing that you truly care about, versus composition, and you won’t be saddled with grading or advising (a responsibility that often falls back on beloved teachers, when those assigned to do it fail to do it). You might meet adult students who choose to take your classes again and again, and become a meaningful part of your audience (your “platform”) for when you get books out into the world.
Sandra Beasley, Dear Graduating MFA Students

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

So many for so many different reasons… this insufficient list is baroque! Tomas Transtromer, for unexpected images that haunt with their use of familiarity and alterity. Egill Skallagrimsson, for boldness in wrestling with death and the gods in poetry. Amy Clampitt, for writing with a kaleidoscope of references and sonic effects and still making it all work and build to that perfect pitch. Lucille Clifton, for how she combines directness and nuance with such economy and effect. Marosa di Giorgio, for crafting a world in verse both fantastical and mundane. John Donne, for showing how a conceit can express a thing and then turn on itself again and again.
Thomas Whyte, Emily Osborne : part two

[O]n Friday night I went to Crystal Palace to see Christopher Horton reading with the poet Joe Duggan. Chris, I know from having reviewed his excellent pamphlet, ‘Perfect Timing and having met him at the launch of Rob Selby’s ‘The Kentish Rebellion‘. He read a couple of poems from that alongside some great-sounding new work. All of which make me really want to read a full collection by him. NB he also has a wonderful poem in the latest issue of The North, edited by Stephanie Sy-Quia and Andrew McMillan— the mag, I mean, not Chris.

He was one of the support acts, the other was Magella Brady (sorry, can’t find an online presence) who was making their live performance debut— for Joe Duggan, another Tall-Lighthouse poet. I must confess to not knowing Joe’s work at all before. Although, spookily, there was a review by Chris Edgoose of his pamphlet, ‘Rescue Contraptions, in the latest Friday Poem that came out Friday morning. However, at the time of writing, I’ve not read that review.

Joe read for a good 35 minutes for what I later discovered was his second launch of the book, and the room was packed. There must have been 40-50 people, if not more, in the room. Maybe it’s me, but that feels like a lot for poetry gigs these days. The ranks were swelled by friends of his from his local walking football team and many others. He’s clearly a popular man in Crystal Palace and beyond. But regardless of this, the room was captivated throughout…pindrops were heard, etc..Why would you bring pins to a poetry gig? NB no actual pins were dropped. He covered a lot of ground, from family, family troubles, the troubles in Ireland, mental health–especially the issue around male mental health and depression (as discussed in the excellent recent edition of the Poetry Planet podcast with Peter Raynard and in the current ep of the Seren Podcast with Ben Wilkinson ), the pressure teachers are under, and many other things.
Mat Riches, Bands, those funny little plans…

Rob Taylor: It doesn’t take long to discover a fire in your debut collection, If You Discover a Fire (Brick Books, 2020). The book’s opening poem features matches and cigarettes, and some manifestation of fire/matches/flames appears in more than a quarter of the poems (yes, I counted!). What is it about fire, and the potential for fire, that keeps you returning to it? Are you part moth?

Shaun Robinson: Fire is both completely common and kind of magical, which is what I’m aiming for in my poems. I’m thinking in particular of the free books of matches you can get at a hotel or restaurant or gas station—it’s a minor miracle that a little strip of paper with a few chemicals on the end can turn into this tiny jewel of flame, and then flame can light a cigarette or candle or campfire or barbeque, or light up a dark room, or burn a letter, or start a forest fire. Fire is a very powerful force that many of us carry around in our pockets without giving it a second thought.
Rob Taylor, A Real Donnie Brasco Situation: An Interview with Shaun Robinson

I first started tweeting in 2009 and connected with people interested in poetry – poets, publishers, magazines, and so on. I was looking for ways to get better at writing poetry and looking for recommendations of things to read and new publications. My family of two small children, and a husband who worked in London during the week, had moved out of London to a small town. I was pretty housebound in the evenings so I valued the interesting online connections Twitter helped me to create. I found links to useful articles and online courses (I found ModPo which I still think is amazing and one of the best literature courses I’ve ever done in my life). Over time, I also wanted to connect with people interested in all the kinds of things I’m interested in, lots of culture, the arts in general, music, visual arts, the environment, left-of-centre politics, film, theatre, books, parenting, cooking, small town living etc etc etc. I grew a circle of new friends, some who I soon met in real life and some who I started to communicate with, and continue to chat with, across other internet platforms.

To begin with, Twitter seemed to be mostly about chatting, joking, sharing points of view, opinions, information about things you were reading, seeing, listening to and thinking about. It was something like what happens in real life when you first meet a person you might have shared interests with. At some point, Twitter seemed to be become more about selling stuff. ‘Writers’ who had never followed me before suddenly appeared and, quickly after following me, sent me a link to buy their new book, or a link to a workshop they were running, or an event they were reading at to which I needed to buy a ticket. So it was clear that they hadn’t followed me because they were interested in me, and certainly not in reading my writing, but because they’d identified me as a person they could sell something to. The friends I’d made when I first started out were still in the room but it felt as if they were being crowded out.

So I suppose the initial glowingly warm feelings I first experienced have chilled somewhat since my early social media days. As time has gone on – both of my children are now post-university – I’ve been less stuck at home, more able to travel to live events and to be able to meet people in real life who’ve fulfilled my natural need for human interaction. It’s rare now that I make new friends online – in fact I can’t remember when that last happened.
Josephine Corcoran, Time for a Pause

Doubt afflicts all writers at one, sometimes unpredictable, point or another. It’s good for us. I’ve been going through one of those periods where I want to have a break from the way I’ve been writing recently. As is so often the case when I try to experiment a little, I get the big question-mark in my brain that says ‘Is this worth it? Is it working? Is it just awful?’ The only sensible answer is ‘I don’t know’.

In the end you either think yes, it’s working, or you accept the failure and move on again. I need the doubt. It’s just a part of the process of avoiding churning out the same old type of thing, which I hope is a part of the appeal. Yes, you need what people conveniently call ‘a voice’ that readers might recognise, but if you write for long enough you need to freshen yourself up and challenge your thinking and that of those who read what you do.

I’m not sure what will happen this time. The last two or three things on here have been an excursion into slower writing. I’m doing more each day. I’ll put a bit on the site today or tomorrow. At least, if I look back and think it dreadful, it can be ‘moved to Trash’ as the icon tells me. So it is, so it stays or goes.
Bob Mee, OF GERALD STERN, BERNADETTE MAYER, A SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY WEBSITE – AND DOUBT

I thought about sewing deep into the night, but we do have time this morning, so I decided to quit while I still had feeling in my fingers. I walked down the dark road to our little house in the mountains. I watched the wind blowing and felt a bit fretful about the saturated ground and the swaying trees. I worried about trees falling down.

And then when I was almost home, I saw the bear. He looked at me, and I backed away. He was at my driveway, so I kept walking down the hill away from my house. I turned back to my house, he gave me one last look, and then he ambled up the hill across the street. I remembered Pastor Sarah’s advice during our Lutheridge welcome meeting: “If you see a bear, just sing.” I started singing the song we created during our time together at quilt camp: “Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this quilt square grow.” I did think about trying to get a picture, but I didn’t want to risk the flash making the bear mad.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Quilts and Bears and Progress

It’s downright magical to start reading a new library book and realize it’s a really good one. Like the magic of running errands and every traffic light is green, only a million times better. Lately, nearly every book I’ve brought home from the library has been one of those immersive delights. Good books are downright soul-saving for me in a time when the world’s news is so dire. The last few weeks I savored (among others) Richard Power’s Bewilderment, Javier Zamora’s Solito, Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, Dani Shapiro’s Signal Fires, Anthony Almojera’s Riding The Lightning, and Sharon Blackie’s Hagitude. Compelling, immersive, and entirely free to enjoy thanks to my local library.

Libraries have been a constant in my life from the time I learned to read. I’ve written about why I’m a library addict and the concept of library angels and how libraries changed lives. Libraries are unique public spaces, existing entirely for the common good.

As many have noted, if public libraries weren’t already part of our society, the concept would be considered an outrageous and dangerously liberal idea.
Laura Grace Weldon, Libraries = Freedom: Resist Book Censorship

My body is the sudden drop into darkness
             at the end of daylight saving time;
is the summer of power-washing mold
            from the walls, and the unsettling pain of
posterior deltoids; is the night it heard the green
          mourning cries of crickets in the field, and a chorus
of frogs answering; is the city that comes into view
          as a bus rounds a curve, but only as a faded
outline of lights.
Luisa A. Igloria, Wound With No Easy Translation

I cannot say enough about this amazing book by my good friend and long-time co-conspirator in all things creative, Priscilla Long. Watching Priscilla produce this book, reading drafts, devouring a number of her sources, has been a game-changer for how I think about aging, and how I want to behave in my next chapter.
Bethany Reid, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age

“Based on a True Story” risks being seen as a solipsistic take on dating and gay tropes. Its spare language is that of a plain-talker, not afraid to offend and not that of someone who wilts into the wallpaper. It’s a voice that doesn’t want to listen. However, on the page, where readers can revisit what’s being said and see between the lines, readers can imagine what the poems’ voice is not saying. How, ultimately, in trying to avoid being hurt, the speaker is hurting himself. Stewart invites readers to feel some sympathy for someone who has been hurt and is trying to make themselves invulnerable. There’s a subtle nudge into the world of the brash speaker who is hiding his pain.
Emma Lee, “Based on a True Story” Thomas Stewart (Fourteen Poems) – book review

I forget how I first encountered the poems of Charles Causley, but I was immediately drawn to them. And indeed, I have found some firm favourites among his body of work, favourites such as ‘Who?’, with its brilliant repetition in line 1 of the first stanza, and ‘Morwenstow’, in which the speaker interrogates the sea on the subject of its wildness. I have visited Causley’s hometown of Launceston a couple of times in recent years and have enjoyed exploring the castle, which dominates the scene. I even tried to do a quick pen-and-ink sketch of it.

I was delighted when Sue Wallace-Shaddad asked me if she could include a few stanzas from ‘Penwith Fingerstone’, one of my Cornish poems, in her November post for The Maker, which you can find on The Charles Causley Literary Blog. The poem, which features in Driftwood by Starlight (The Seventh Quarry Press, 2021), was awarded Third Prize by Brian Patten in the 2017 Milestones Poetry Competition, administered by Write Out Loud. As it happens, I posted a photo (here) of the fingerpost on Twitter a few days ago for #FingerpostFriday.
Caroline Gill, Fingerstone Poem Quoted in ‘The Maker’, The Charles Causley Literary Blog

I winnowed a great pool of Shenandoah submissions this week to just 12 poems to hand off to this year’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize judge, Oliver de la Paz. It’s hard to make final decisions on my own, especially when I get down to the poems that move and surprise me most. Distinguishing degrees of power and artfulness can seem impossible. I eventually used a strategy that helps me revise my own work: I read some semifinalists aloud. It’s radically clarifying. You hear sound patterns and other kinds of artfulness; you also hear the wordy or clumsy passages that most poems contain (very much including mine). The poems I rejected this week were really good; the ones I kept in the mix were really good and also damn close to fully realized.

Meanwhile, the fall issue of Shenandoah is nearing launch (proofreading time!); course registration madness is almost done for the moment (SO MANY emails from upset people!); and Thanksgiving Break approacheth. Thank god.
Lesley Wheeler, Book birthday and other shenanigans

I have been working out a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) type flipbook chapbook of haiku for nearly 3 months now.

The number of options in how to read increases exponentially with more poems. A dozen haiku make for 1,726 possible readings. 18 haiku make for nearly 6000 possible readings. The goal is to make twists towards different emotional states with simple components that grammatically and semantically all fit together.

This constrains kigo, unless to make it all winter, or all summer, all day or all night. I have probably subbed in over 5 dozen haiku at this point.

It’s like CYOA, but with haiku. this small singing is based on what’s left unsaid: 125 haiku (2017) by Maxianne Berger, itself modelled on Raymond Queneau’s 1961 Cent mille milliard de poèmes [a hundred thousand billion poems] of strip sonnets, done with the help of mathematician Francois Le Lionnais, in the process of which they initiated Oulipo.
Pearl Pirie, Making chapbooks

did they make
the coffins little
so death could be smaller
or further away?

for fairies you say
found between flowers or weeds
tiny mummified creatures
no larger than clothespins
Gary Barwin, Fairy Coffins

There’s a yellow butterfly in the house. It blew in on the big wind a few warm days ago, when various doors were open, and is now alive among the houseplants and plants I brought in from the patio back when frost was predicted. It went down to the twenties last night, and we had a real first snow yesterday. Or first tiny iceball fall. It stuck a while, though not in flake form, and is gone in today’s sunshine.

I have been tidying again, and now have 5 empty shoeboxes to re-purpose. More shoes I had forgotten are now visible on the rack, and beloved shoes I wore out but was keeping…are gone. As are pants I wore till the seams were giving. And unraveling sweaters. During the process, I did a little decorating and re-organizing of the holiday closet and re-arranging of the wedding garlands, some of which now festoon the glass patio doors, where the yellow butterfly hovers between real and fake greenery. Pale pink appleblossom impatiens are still blooming in a pot that once hung from the eaves, now from a curtain rod.

I finished some books in progress so I could 1) put them away on bookshelves 2) pass one along to my book group. We are reading Annette Vallon, by James Tipton, about a real woman who helped resist the awful violence of (and after) the French Revolution. She was the lover of poet William Wordsworth, and the mother of his child, Caroline! I don’t think I knew that, and the author in his notes explains how England protected the reputation of their great poet, and Wordsworth “hid” her in his writings, as poets often do, but clearly loved her and cared about his child! We chose it from the library display table for The Revolutionists, by Lauren Gunderson, now playing at Heartland Theatre. Funny, moving, devastating play!
Kathleen Kirk, Yellow Butterfly

It’s raining in L.A.

A time when we shed our ghosts, transform those disparate and desperate skins into flotation devices of hope ferrying us from one end of the city to the other.

For the price of a well-sung song, crows become the Uber of the air, taxi us high above crosstown traffic.

Kids giddy with puddle-jumping joy, don’t bother wiping delighted smiles from their faces, and why should they?

Life here can be sweet. But we’re lucky if it rains once in the lifetime of a honeybee.
Rich Ferguson, It’s Raining In L.A.

I went back to my blog posts from November of last year, thinking I might pull words into a poem about the month. I copied and pasted snippets of language, and then I rearranged them and polished them and glued them together with some new words into something that is about late middle-age/early old-age, our current moment in history, and, I suppose, November:
In the November of Our Lives

One day it’s all sunshine-sharp air and leaves blazing against blue skies; 
the next, it’s wet sticks and relentless wind, 
our pumpkins on the front porch gone suddenly garish.
The bedrock upon which we’ve lived shifts 
and breaks, and there is no mending the fault lines, 
no way around canyons of looming catastrophe.  
With our children grown, our dogs buried, and our bodies 
both softer and more brittle than they’ve ever been, 
my missing is so deep it’s not even an ache.  
It’s something I don’t have a word for. 
There are moments I want to last forever, the wanting 
turning them to memory before they end. 
I thought surely we’d have more,
but darkness descends before we’re ready for it,
and something inside turns toward candlelight,
toward small flames still burning, hunkering down for the long haul of winter.
I’ve long liked writing cento poems (poems I’ve thought of as verbal collages), and I’m finding that using my own prose as source material might be a way into writing poetry again.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Good medicine

July 31, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 30

Anarchists should open cafes.
Spill the ill-assorted chairs
and tables onto the pavement.
Go heavy with the red paprika,
shower down the black pepper.
Have trans and Roma waiters
to glide between the tables,
taking orders couched as poems.
Dick Jones, THE ANARCHIST CAFÉ

The apple, small on the table, easily overlooked, will be affected by the wheel of time faster than the desk.
And are we not the apple? Is his sculpture too approaching this idea of temporality? His lean figures are more like their own shadows, elongated in a lowering sun, or thinning and thinning down so by the next step they may disappear, the walkers.
Marilyn McCabe, Leaping and hopping; or, On Ways of Seeing

We did not think of it
as not having a real body
or the body being a stick
the head was rubber, and it rode.
Mine was called Silver before I knew what it meant.
It takes time to understand what time does
to people and things. It takes time
to learn to look back and grasp what it all meant.
The lizards contemplated our journeys
and the tree house was the jail.
Ernesto Priego, 6. El caballito

I wish I could say that I spent my time improving myself but nope! Just trying desperately to keep myself and my poor garden alive. (Hydration is very important for flowers AND humans, it turns out, in this kind of heat, as I was reminded by the ER doc before he put an IV liter of fluids in me.)
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Heat Waves, Bad Air, Sunflowers, and ER Visits

sometimes
at night perhaps
a poem can slip through your fingers
vanish
back to wherever it came from
all you are left with
is a page of used ink
Paul Tobin, A PAGE OF USED INK

You will be trying to name that song the cicadas keep spinning — drone, chant — and might fall into an inspired trance. There are flies on your ankles and the slow swirling scent of the time or its demise, of memories you’ve had or never had, of something tantalizing—
Jill Pearlman, Noon Justice

each page talks to the next
the blueness
sinking back into the landscape
Ama Bolton, ABCD July 2022

For Strange Ladies, I realized that during the past 45 years I’ve written enough oddly interesting straggler poems about/in the voices of/relating to female “characters” of a mythopoetic variety that they might form a coven. Or at very least, a neighborhood. The strangeness of these women comes from their position as outsiders, exiles, shamans, rebels, goddesses, myths, heroines. A chapbook manuscript materialized, and what surprises me most about this collection is that the poems I ended up choosing date all the way back to some of the first poems I ever got into print. At that time (circa 1981), indie-lit mags were photocopied, stapled affairs often using collages of copyright-free art for graphics. My nostalgia about that era led me to go for a retro look on the cover. And yes, I wrote one of these poems in 1979 while living in New York City…but others are as recent as 2019. A span of 40 years, and yet they seem to belong together in their differences.
Ann E. Michael, Why so strange?

as if
the agony of our bodies betraying us
weren’t enough
now
we might be blamed for feticide
we might be jailed
hemorrhaging
we might have to beg the pharmacist for drugs
they still might say “I can’t help you”
Rachel Barenblat, Choice

Never underestimate either the strength or fragility
of power—what ticks quietly all these years beneath
the walls, one day also buckles from the load
it’s made to carry. Between circuits, a current
falters. A bulb goes out, and quiet spreads through
a house in which all the machines have mysteriously
hummed themselves to sleep.
Luisa A. Igloria, The Myth of Permanent Faults

My advice to everyone this summer has been to enjoy summer, enjoy what you’ve got, soak up the sun. Especially if you live at latitude 53 which is where I am, because we all know how sparse the sun is at other times of the year. I know very few people who haven’t had a rough time this past year. A lot of stuff has just really sucked. I recently had a really big laugh when I backed my car into a pole after a particularly not great day where I guess I was having what we will call “a moment.” It’s fine. But who can afford to fix things these days? I need therapy from my therapy but who can afford that either? Other stuff currently is a priority. So like regular people, I just get my therapy from books and poetry and from playing Sheryl Crow and Bruce Springsteen extremely loud in my now banged up car. I’m good, you know?
Shawna Lemay, It’s Not Having What You Want

how senseless ‬
‪when bowing to each other ‬
‪we bump heads‬
Jim Young [no title]

Things sometimes need to be said plainly in poetry. But my pen tends toward curvature. It wants line breaks and metaphors, sometimes rhythm or even rhyme. I’m thinking about how you can say a thing with those curves while buffing its essentials to a clarity that can’t be mistaken. This poem burst into being recently, got some polishing, some additions, and probably will evolve. So I won’t send it out for publishing. I’ll post it here, in my blog, as an experiment. Here I can let my poetry keep morphing. I plan on posting poems here, though I realize by doing so I remove the top layer of the onion of my copyrights (thankyou, literary lawyer, for that metaphor). Sometimes partnering with a zine or litmag is great. Today, I need to speak. Plain and curvy.
Rachel Dacus, What I Know

While there are many things (many) I’d like to take on, I think that realistically I can only keep up with 2 or 3 things Well at a time. For example, this fall my adjunct schedule is pretty full, and I’m homeschooling, and want to continue my poetry writing, so that pretty much fills up my time with what I can do well.
What this means for me is that I can’t also volunteer to start reading poetry submissions for a journal, or start up a book club for homeschoolers, or join a committee. It also means giving some things up to make those things a priority.
Renee Emerson, choosing 2 or 3 focus activities

Scarlet: the mac defining a news reporter’s back, hunched
at the front of a vast crowd flailed by rain, waiting hours
for Amelia Earhart’s arrival at Hanworth Air Park, May ’32;
conception month of my parents, who grew up to nurture
such tasty Moneymaker tomatoes, lining them up to redden
on the south-facing window-sill, behind the kitchen sink.
Matthew Paul, On Sickert

The poems in APOTHEGMS are short, and lean into koans, the short snap of expectation and quiet words placed after another, with an intimacy that allows the dates to become an essential element of small moments that are clearly crafted, while still allowing a sense of immediacy. He writes of time, and the immediacy of it; referencing haiku and the moment in which he is standing, no matter the distance of temporality between thought and composition. Think of the poem “URBANESQUE,” composed from his home-base of Mountain, Ontario “2021-10-04,” that reads: “The tiny / tea bag / plate // in my / cupboard / takes // up more / real / estate // than the / tall / glass // standing / next / to it [.]” In certain ways, the only differences between the accretions of Hogg’s longer poems and these short, near-bursts is a sense of scale: the shorter pieces included here still allowing for a kind of accretion, but one set with a particular kind of boundary. The larger accretion, one might suggest, might be the very assemblage of these poems into a chapbook-length manuscript. […]
Hogg connects time to the physical, and the physical to the body. There’s a way he’s attentive to both physicality and natural spaces, in part, one would think, through his time as a kid on a farm in the Cariboo, or his decades farming a space just south of Ottawa. With references to poets Lorine Niedecker, H.D. and Daphne Marlatt, Hogg doesn’t have to describe the landscape to allow for its presence; as Creeley attended the immediate, and his sense of the “domestic,” so too with Robert Hogg, attending his immediate, whether memory or at that precise moment, and a “domestic” that concerns the landscape, both internal and external.
rob mclennan, Robert Hogg, APOTHEGMS

they held a brush
& painted until
the sky went dark
Jason Crane, haiku: 25 July 2022

Earlier this month, our family went on a little road trip through BC and Alberta. One of my favourite parts (behind only the water slides, mini-golf and dinosaur bones) was visiting book stores.
If you find yourself making a similar trip, here are three you shouldn’t miss:
First up is Baker’s Books in Hope, a used bookstore where every book is $2! They have a small but mighty poetry section, and a strong selection of rare poetry books at the back (they cost a bit more). Always worth a stop at the beginning of a road trip.
Another bookstore I’m always sure to visit is The Book Shop in Penticton. With over 5,000 square feet of floor space, it’s one of Canada’s largest. This time I counted 28 shelves of poetry, ten of which were Canadian (including Laura Farina’s Some Talk of Being Human, photographed here).
My tour of Alberta bookstores was truncated by our skirting around Calgary to avoid Stampede madness (and to spend more time hunting dinosaur bones), but I made sure we popped in to Glass Bookshop in Edmonton. Founded by poets Jason Purcell and Matthew Stepanic, it’s an absolute heaven for poetry fans.
Right at the front entrance you’re greeted by this fantastic array of (mostly poetry) chapbooks. [photo]
And inside – boom! – eight shelves of brand new poetry, largely from Canada and the US. It doesn’t get any better than this.
Rob Taylor, BC/AB Road Trip Report

This past July I spent two weeks in the Zhejiang mountain village of Chenjiapu translating a set of poems by the Nanjing-based poet Sun Dong. She was able to join me for a few days toward the end of the residency, and we worked together on drafts of the translations. I worked out drafts of two dozen poems and the preface to her most recent book, Broken Crow (破乌鸦 Pò wūyā), and published eight of the poems along with an essay — “Meditations in an Emergency: The Cosmopolitan, the Quotidian, and the Anthropocene Turn in Sun Dong’s 2020 Pandemic Poetry” — on the experience and on Sun Dong’s poems. The goal: a book-length collection of her work.
David Perry, Meditations in an Emergency: The Cosmopolitan, the Quotidian, and the Anthropocene Turn in Sun Dong’s 2020 Pandemic Poetry

SALA is Australia’s largest and most inclusive visual arts festival, which takes place in galleries and non-traditional arts spaces across South Australia annually, during the entire month of August. Each year, around 8,000 emerging, mid-career and established South Australian artists exhibit in more 500 venues across the state, from sheds, cafés, offices and retail spaces to wineries, schools, public spaces, galleries, major arts institutions and on-line events.
For SALA 2022, I have compiled a collection of my recent videos that explore the unreliable interactions between visual perception and language. In a world of artificial intelligence, what is real? In a multi-lingual society, whose voices do we hear? When language begins to fragment, where do we find meaningful narrative?
I also have an on-line artist talk in which I explain some of the techniques involved in making one of my most successful collaborations, The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself. You will also find links to recent articles I have written about my creative process, the role of translation in video poetry, and how narrative works in short form video.
Ian Gibbins, SALA 2022: The Life We Live…

I have done a lot of self-improvement work through the years, and progress has never–NEVER–felt as microscopic as my wrist healing has been. But let me remind myself that 13 weeks ago, when I had to hold my arm at a certain angle away to have the splint put on, I thought I might throw up or pass out from the pain. Now I can turn my arm that way with discomfort, not pain. When I first had the cast off in late June, I couldn’t hold a metal set of tongs in my hand and pick up objects. When I tried, I felt a searing pain down my arm. A month later, when I did an exit exam for my hand therapist, I could do the exercise with some minimal pain.
Last night, we played Yahtzee, and I was able to roll the dice with my right hand. I can still roll the dice better with my left hand, but it’s progress. Likewise with using utensils: I can get the food to my mouth, but it’s still a bit easier with my left hand.
This morning, I wrote a poem the way I once wrote poems: by hand, on a purple legal pad. I had started composing it as I walked yesterday morning. I was thinking of all the ways our fathers had taught us to leave: how to pack a suitcase, how to pack a box, how to load the moving van. I thought about the way that grandmothers teach us to stay: which plants we can eat and how to transform scraps into the comfort of quilts. Then I wondered if this gendering was fair. I wrote the poem that begins “They taught us how to pack” and the second stanza “They taught us how to grow.” I like it better.
I have experimented with writing poems by using voice dictation into the computer, but I like writing on the legal pad better. Still, it’s good to remember that I have options. I don’t think that the content of my poems changed radically with the writing process. For poems, I don’t think I even wrote any faster, as I do when I’m writing prose. When I’m using the computer, I still prefer to type. I make fewer errors.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Wrist Update: Fifteen Weeks After Break

As I round the bend on the GRANATA project, I find myself debating the book’s point-of-view. I initially fully intended to use first person, and the first 10 or so poems are written with an “I” narrative. Slowly, it began to slip, and my much favored “you” slipped in–the second person I favor so often over anything else these past years, not so much a conscious decision, but a go-to. I like the second person since the poems have a persona-like poem feel without actually taking on the limited persona of the “I” voice. Lately, the daily poems are “you” driven, and if they stay that way, I will probably just give over to the majority, partly because obviously I want them that way, partially became oy, the edits.
Guidelines for the heroic/heroinic epic I intend would probably have me doing third person. Odysseus, for example does not tell his own story, but relies on Homer to do it for him. Maybe second person is a good compromise here, and something I reach for in my poetic bag of tricks far more often than the third or first person. If I do use first, it’s far more often a “we” rather an “I.”
Kristy Bowen, persephone speaks

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of six books of poetry, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press, 2021), The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press, 2015) and Pageant (Alice James Books, 2009). Her poetry videos have appeared in Triquarterly, Moving Poems Journal, Fence Digital, Posit and other online journals, as well as on her own Vimeo page. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches poetry and multimedia writing at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. For more see: Joannafuhrman.com
What are you working on?
I’m finishing a book of prose poetry called Data Mind about how it feels to live life online as a non-digital native. My generation entered the internet era with a lot of optimism about what online life might offer us, so it’s been painful to watch how social media has exacerbated the problems in our quasi-democracy/necrocapitalist economy. As someone who loves social media, I am trying to capture my own ambivalence. Some of the poems use the tropes of digital life to look back at pop culture from the past.
I’m also working on a different book of poetry, mainly about my mom’s death, called The Last Phone Booth in the World. The prose poem manuscript is dense and surreal, while the newer manuscript feels more magical realist and dreamlike. I’m also hoping to get back into making poetry videos.
Thomas Whyte, Joanna Fuhrman : part one

My review of Christopher James’ new pamphlet, The Storm in the Piano (Maytree Press, 2022), is up today at The Friday Poem. You can read it in full at this link, but here’s a short extract as a taster
Whether using the first or third person, the poet stands far further behind these poems than is common these days, thus avoiding any temptation to conflate the poet and the narrator. Dramatic set piece after dramatic set piece, Christopher James invites us into his vast array of worlds via an aesthetic approach that feels pretty much unique in the context of contemporary UK poetry.
In a juster world, Christopher James’ books books would sell in thousands…
Matthew Stewart, Christopher James’ The Storm in the Piano

“From this Soil” is a compassionate look at how family roots nourish and shape us. Casey Bailey’s poems are self-aware, conversational in tone and humorous, inviting readers to laugh with, not at, their subjects. The characters are recognisable and the pamphlet shares their lives, like striking up a conversation with someone you’ve sat next to in a pub or cafe and discovering how much in common you have.
Emma Lee, “From This Soil” Casey Bailey (The Broken Spine) – book review

This summer, as my day job eased its clutches for a while, I’ve been thinking about time in relation to book publicity and reception. For me, the main pleasure of a review is hearing from a reader: I worked for a decade, put the book out there, and wow, someone was moved to answer! Further, although I’ve been lucky in magazine reviews for all my books, I am receiving more backchanneled notes about Poetry’s Possible Worlds than I ever have about poetry collections. I wonder if it’s a genre thing. Poetry gets pretty personal, too, but most people are less confident responding to it. Or is Poetry’s Possible Worlds simply my best book? Part of the difference is almost certainly due to hiring a publicist for the first time. Yet, like most people, I can’t see the big picture when it comes to my own career.
Maybe this sounds paradoxical, but it was actually more emotional than lucrative for me to see Poetry’s Possible Worlds on the Small Press Distribution May-June top 10 bestseller list for nonfiction. It’s gone to a second printing!!–the first time that’s happened for me anywhere near this fast. We’re not talking huge numbers; this is small press stuff, remember. But it means that a boatload of work has made some difference: organizing events, pitching op-eds, querying podcasts, biweekly Zoom strategy meetings with Heather Brown, and more. Many authors fight hard for a couple of sales here and there, whether they publish with indies or the Big Four; every famous author I’ve ever talked to can describe traveling for miles to give a reading to two people. Even a little success makes me feel less discouraged about all that effort, though–less mystified, more philosophical.
Lesley Wheeler, Broadside giveaway, reviews, & long views

My delirious state has meant I’ve not read much this week. I’ve not really watched much TV either, although I did finish all 6 hours of Get Back, The Beatles’ doc on Disney+. I loved it, aside from it foreshadowing what we know is about to happen, it serves as a wonderful doc about creative process and working through things to get at the “final” version. I feel less bad about the million drafts for Trajectory (or anything else) as a result. It’s lovely to see the craft and the magic happening before our eyes, and it really is the craft and the magic in that order. Paul conjuring Get Back from the ether is a beautiful moment, but the hours of versions that follow to get it done are more instructive, but I digress.
Mat Riches, Get(ting) Back (To Fitness)

For four days, I couldn’t do much of anything without acute pain. I spent most of my hours in bed, flat on my back, longing for my ordinary, everyday life. All I wanted was to throw a load of clothes in the washing machine, run to the store to pick up food for dinner, water my flowers, wipe down the kitchen cabinets. I craved these things, the ways I have of keeping order, making beauty, caring for myself and others.
What a gift, to see how much there is to love about simply existing in our bruised, broken, shattering world.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Things I didn’t know I loved until I couldn’t do them

Paddy fields line both sides of the highway. I stop to watch the white egrets poke around in the water. The roar of the irrigation pump, the outlines of tractors and bullock-drawn ploughs, the bent backs of toiling farmers, kingfishers and drongos perched on overhead wires, large statues of village protector-deities — fierce warriors watching over people and livestock and crops, the romance of pastoral deliberation, the aroma of frothing cups of filter coffee, life as I know it fading into the distance…I can understand how this moment contains everything that came before it. And everything that is yet to come. What matters, what can wait, what we need to do, what is beyond us. That truth has never changed. In all this time. Time that knows it all.
swinging from the branch
of a tamarind tree
the chain from an old tyre-swing
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Within it, the stillness

June 5, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 22

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week found poets wrestling with linguistic unease, Pentecost, the place of rage in poetry, an invented form of English, the language of science, British Sign Language, and other challenges. But how to keep writing when so much in the news is so grim? Read on for some ideas.

Someone I know was pondering a fancy floral table centerpiece she was designing. She showed me a photo of it and said she wasn’t really happy with it. It was a series of vases holding spring flowers, all sitting on a mirrored plank. It was colorful and lively but it did seem a bit over the top. I said that I wondered if the mirror was the problem. She said, “But my intention was to blend contemporary with traditional,” i.e., the mirror was contemporary and the lovely spring sprays traditional. And I thought of the many conversations about poetry in which something similar was said in the face of suggestion or critique: oh, but my intention was X, X = the very thing that seemed not be working. I’ve said it myself many times, and the conversation always gives me pause.
What should win: intention or what was actually created?
I realize my loyalty tends to be with what was actually created. The created thing has its own life, and I tend to think we creators should honor the inadvertent creation rather than try to haul it back into what we thought we intended. I value the misintentions and the subconsciousness of what was actually created, and mistrust the perhaps overthought earnestness of intention.
Marilyn McCabe, A mighty pretty sight; or, On Intention and Creativity

Any reviewer of Denise Riley who has read her 2000 book The Words of Selves, proceeds if not with caution, then with a definite sense of unease. There are two principal reasons for this. One is that Riley’s work is difficult; she is known as a poets’ poet for good reason – her poems contain a lot for those knowledgeable about poetry to get their teeth into, but on a first reading many can appear a little like crossword puzzles to be solved, codes to be broken. And this is intimidating – to review and misread her work would be to expose oneself as an inadequate reviewer. She knows this, and comments in The Words of Selves, specifically on the interpretation of literary references: “When reviewers interpret a poem, they may confidently misconstrue an allusion. Often they’ll think up the most ingeniously elaborate sources for something in the text that had a plainer association, a far less baroque connection, behind it.” (p.74) So there is the concern of making a fool of yourself by over-reading (something I’m sure I’ve been guilty of in this blog more than once); that’s the first reason. The second is that much space is given in The Words of Selves to questioning and problematising the lyric I, and Riley is skeptical, even scathing, of biographical ‘selves’ in contemporary poetry: “Poetry can be heard to stagger under a weight of self-portrayal…Today’s lyric form (is) frequently a vehicle for innocuous display and confessionals” (p.94) And yet, for Riley’s reviewer, the fact of her son’s tragic death and the fact that she has written in prose and poetry about this, leaves the poet’s biographical self very close to the surface, and (the reviewer might feel) liable to breach at any time. How then to know at what point the real Denise Riley steps back and an imagined subject takes over? As one of Riley’s great philosophical concerns is the means by which language creates the Self, the uncertainty that Lurex (Picador) creates in the reader around what is being said and by whom, is unlikely to be coincidental.
And this sense of unease is not entirely out of place. Riley herself writes of the “linguistic unease” of the writer, and so there is some solidarity perhaps between these two unequal partners in the generation of a text’s meaning, the writer-poet and the reader-reviewer. If we can proceed together with a joint feeling of guilt and inadequacy, the job of searching for meaning might not seem so lonely.
Chris Edgoose, Dark yet sparkly – Denise Riley, Lurex and ‘the flesh of words’

My life has been a wonder of surprise and intention. Not so unusual, right? We all experience unexpected events and make decisions. But wonder is hard to remember and easy to lose. I’m lucky—poetry requires wonder. I think my Poet Sisters would agree.
In 2016 I took an online class through The Loft in Minneapolis. That alone was strange because I’d lived 45 minutes away for five years and didn’t sign up until I moved 450 miles away. The instructor, poet Amie Whittemore, guided us to give kind and specific workshop critiques. She helped us build community. By the end of the class, several of us had formed a bond and decided to continue workshopping poems.
We recently celebrated our five-year anniversary as a group. I don’t remember who came up with Poet Sisters. It sounds like a gathering of oracles or perhaps muses. Sirens, even—calling one another to days of writing and reading poetry. Our structure is simple: share one poem a month for feedback via email. We’ve been able to meet in real life, once for a one-day workshop and another time at a writing retreat where we shared a cabin “up north” in Minnesota. We’ve had video-chats during the pandemic. Sometimes we share submission calls, poets and poems we love. We encourage craft and a belief in ourselves as writers. We cheer every acceptance and accolade. Since we’ve begun this journey together, one of us has become her state’s associate poet laureate, three have books in print or forthcoming, and another has a full collection ready to go.
Lynne Jensen Lampe, Sisterhood of the Raveling Poems

We practice separation. Disentangle the cold
waves. The wind pauses, faithless. I marinate days in nights filled with
brine. What happens when an unexpected transformation lets us in
on its secret? I read the poem again, sticking my voice on the words.
Love waits. Silent. ‘Leaving’ sounds the same in every language.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, One of them is real

Words have failed so profoundly that I’m out in the garden instead, or indoors cleaning my bathrooms or reading books. Books–always my solace when my own words fail.
My latest good read is David Crystal‘s 2004 The Stories of English, already out of date in its last chapter–a fact I’m sure he gleefully acknowledges. I adore his love of how language evolves and find his non-prescriptivist approach refreshing and necessary if we are to keep literacy and communication alive. This book gave me so much information, enriched the knowledge I already have about our language, and made me laugh, too. Granted, it is word-geek humor…but that’s how I roll.
And I needed a few laughs this past week or so. My heart aches; I am sore afflicted for more reasons than I care to explain at present, though the headline news certainly has much to do with my mood. Crystal’s book got me thinking about the course I teach (come fall) and how I’ve already toned down the prescriptiveness in order to convince my students they can write and can be successful with written communication; that they are not “wrong,” just that their audience for written work differs, in college, from high school and from text messaging and other forms of writing. Crystal says we who teach English need to get over the concern about split infinitives and pronoun antecedent agreement and focus on clarity and genuine expression. I have no argument with him there–but many people I know would quibble and complain. And the English lexicon offers us so many options for how to say we disagree!
Ann E. Michael, Words fail, & yet–

calm lake
holding a stone
forever
Jim Young [no title]

Today is one of the big three church holidays; today is Pentecost. For those of you who have no reference, Pentecost is the day that comes 50 days after Easter and 10 days after Jesus goes back up to Heaven (Ascension Day). We see a group of disciples still at loose ends, still in effect, hiding out, still unsure of what to do.
Then the Holy Spirit fills them with the sound of a great rushing wind, and they speak in languages they have no way of knowing. But others understand the languages–it’s one way the disciples argue that they’re not drunk. And then they go out to change the world–but that’s the subject for an entirely different post.
You may be saying, “Great. What does all that have to do with me?”
I see that Pentecost story as having similar features to the creative process that many of us experience. If you replace the religious language, maybe you’ll see what I mean.
Often I’ve felt stymied and at loose ends. I think back to times when I’ve known exactly what to do and where to go next. I find myself missing teachers and other mentors that I’ve had. I may wallow in feelings of abandonment–where has my muse gone? Why don’t I have any great mentors now? Have all my great ideas abandoned me? What if I never write a poem again?
And then, whoosh. Often I hit a time of inspiration. I get more ideas in any given morning than I can handle. I jot down notes for later. I send of packet after packet of submissions.
Some times, it feels downright scary, like something has taken possession of me. But it’s a good spirit, and so I try to enjoy the inspired times. I’ve been at this long enough that I know that these inspired times won’t last forever.
The good news: those inspired times will come back, as long as I keep showing up, keep waiting, stay alert.
That’s the message that many of us will be hearing in our churches today. And it’s a good message to remember as we do our creative work.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Pentecost for Poets and Other Creative Souls

Chaplets of roses grew threadbare
like linen; all night a bee drowsed as if stoned on the edge
of an ivory blanket. What else crept under carpets of clover
toward our trim hedges? Every night we went to bed
like apostrophes folded into each other. That is to say,
even in sleep our hands spasmed in terror or prayer.
Call it anything but casualty, accident, or fate
— none of us grown wiser for turning away.
Luisa A. Igloria, Collateral Damage

I have a poem, ‘Accommodation Strategy’, in the second issue, here, of Public Sector Poetry, which is a rather niche journal for people like me who work in the public sector and also happen to be poets. The events of the last two years have already rendered my poem’s content out of date, but it represents a certain point in time. It just goes to show that local government is rather more fluid and dynamic now than when I started it in an eon ago.
Matthew Paul, Public Sector Poetry

Now I’m no huge Eliot fan but I do dip into the Four Quartets every now and then. I’ve never got to grips with The Waste Land, but I’m a sucker for manuscripts that show different versions, crossings out etc. It’s like getting into the poet’s head. And this edition shows every page, with annotations from both Ezra Pound and Valerie Eliot. It’s extraordinary. And I’m now enjoying going back to the poem armed with more insight into its genesis.
Meanwhile our Planet Poetry guests continue to challenge (and delight) me – in the last episode I talked with the effervescent Caleb Parkin and his excellent book This Fruiting Body, and my most recent interview was with Fiona Sampson. I admit I was nervous, interviewing a poet with such a formidable CV (29 books for starters). But Fiona was delightful and fascinating. I’m not sure yet when the interview will ‘air’ but it’ll be worth listening, I guarantee.
Robin Houghton, Currently inspired by…

Yesterday, I woke up to a mild sunny cusp of June day and was greeted with already a dozen or so submissions waiting in my inbox of new things I can’t wait to read. Yes, it’s that time again, the open submissions window for the dgp chapbook series, and one that feels a little less overwhelming now that my inbox is less of a morass and there is a bit more time weekly to devote to the press operations (including hopefully being able to read things throughout the summer as they come in and not just in a mad dash in the fall.)
Today, I devoted an entire day to cover design exploits on handful of books that are in layout stage and it was nice to be able to actually finish what I was intending to do without running off to do other things like work or errands. While my weekend will be focused on my writing and the next couple days devoted to freelance work, I at least will return to editing work mid-next week not feeling quite as behind as before and a couple new things are almost ready to start printing.. Tuesdays are for author copy and order fulfillment and shipping things. While initially I was doing a bit off all things each day, I find I am more productive if I center my days in a certain kind of task, even if it takes the majority of the day.
My enjoyment of different parts of the process has increased, even rather staid unexciting things like copyediting and typesetting feel more focused and grounded now that life is a little less hectic and subject to daily chaos. Or if it’s chaos, it’s more definitely orderly and self-guided chaos.
Kristy Bowen, dancing girl press notes | june 2022

PP: Your poems are dense and agile, pivoting yet holding together in leaps. Do they come together assembled from pieces or come out of a passionate stream-of-consciousness?
SW: They tend to come out in one fell swoop. But it’s messy! I edit very slowly and very particularly. Have you heard that quote? A poet will move a comma in the morning and a comma at night and say, Oh what a day’s work! My friend’s dad told me that. But sometimes there are new waves hiding behind commas, cracks in the rocks, pieces hiding behind other pieces.
PP: Do you have writing rituals that help you into the writing frame of mind or do you write in stolen moments?
SW: Definitely stolen moments for poetry. Middle of the night, subway rides, grocery stores. I want to try the writing desk routine life someday but that day has not come yet.
For editing or prose, I can sit at a desk or in bed and crank something out. But my poetry is much more chaotic. Like catching sight of a bird and having to drop everything to chase it before it’s gone.
Pearl Pirie, Mini-interview: Sanna Wani

I will just continue to spread out flat, letting all the knots work their way out of my body and mind: a pretty little map of thoughts, lyrical as loops of string caught in school glue.
School glue in an amber bottle with a rubber tip, that would open like an eye when pressed. Or a mouth. Or a seal’s nostril.
There was a smell that I can’t quite remember, no matter how hard I try to conjure it.
It is inexplicable what sticks in my memory and what doesn’t. Last night, trying to sleep I remembered when E. was small – three or four – and while his older brother pinned my legs, E. sat on my chest and leaned over my face, inhaling so that his nostrils pinched shut again and again, like some kind of amphibious, alien creature. I laughed until I peed my pants a little.
Isn’t that something? How a memory of uncontrollable, full-body laughter can make you cry?
That school glue I used in elementary school didn’t work well. Nothing ever stayed put. I’d get home and the string had come loose in spots and created its own patterns. I guess it was an early life lesson: everything unravels, falls apart, and reconfigures according to its own mysterious will.
Ren Powell, An Amphibious, Alien Creature

I travelled to London by train and as I approached Wellington, near Taunton in Somerset, I saw an abandoned factory with most of the glass missing from the windows. This set me thinking…
summer project
we broke all the glass
in all the windows
no one stopped us
it took time
but the sounds were so addictive
the crack and cascade of glass
eyeless in autumn
the snow went wherever it would
when summer came round again
there was nothing to show it had ever been there
Paul Tobin, EYELESS IN AUTUMN

I love reading poetry anthologies.
I know they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea–there is something to be said for reading a collection in one voice–but I feel like it’s like being in an MFA classroom again–all these different voices mingling together, bouncing off each other. I love that I find new-to-me poets in anthologies–I always keep a list of author names from the poems I loved best, then look up their collections to read next. I love how it takes a theme and looks at it prismatically, through many different perspectives and cultures.
One of my favorite anthologies is Joy, edited by Christian Wiman. I also enjoy The Child’s Anthology of Poems ed. by Elizabeth Sword (I use this book with my children, but it is good for anyone). Recently I’ve read some anthologies ed. by James Crews, Healing the Divide being the most recent.
Renee Emerson, anthologies

Winner of the 2019 Burnside Review Press Book Award, as selected by poet Darcie Dennigan, is California-born Massachusetts poet and research scientist Angelo Mao’s full-length debut, Abattoir (Portland OR: Burnside Review Press, 2021). Constructed as a suite of prose poems, lyric sentences, line-breaks and pauses, Mao’s is a music of exploration, speech, fragments and hesitations; a lyric that emerges from his parallel work in the sciences. “They have invented poems with algorithms.” He writes, as part of the untitled sequence that makes up the third section. “They can be done with objectivity.” Set in four numbered sections, the poems that make up Mao’s Abattoir are constructed through a lyric of inquiry, offering words weighed carefully against each other into observation, direct statement and narrative accumulation, theses that work themselves across the length and breath of the page, the lengths of the poems. “The first thing it does / Is do a full backflip,” he writes, to open the poem “Euthanasia,” “Does the acrobatic mouse / Which rapidly explores / The perimeter comes back / To where it started / To where it sensed / What makes its ribcage / Slope-shaped as when / Thumb touches fingertips [.]” This is a book of hypotheses, offering observations on beauty, banality and every corner of existence, as explored through the possibilities of the lyric.
rob mclennan, Angelo Mao, Abattoir

In May 2019, we spent three weeks in Sweden. While there we went on several boat trips in the Stockholm area and along the west coast. I took quite a bit of video footage with no particular project in mind. But when I returned home, it came together in this video A Captain’s… using audio samples recorded in an old windmill on the island of Ölund.
The text had been published a while back and uses an invented form of english that captures the sound and feel of old nautical terminology. It imagines a captain trying to justify his privileged, colonialist position, while facing the immense and unknown dangers of the ocean.
The title comes from Australian rhyming slang: “A Captain’s” = “A Captain Cook” = a look. Captain James Cook was the celebrated English explorer who claimed the eastern seaboard of Australia for the British Empire in 1770, almost totally ignoring its long-standing occupation by First Nations people.
Ian Gibbins, A Captain’s…

The language of science is often mysterious, especially to non-scientists, of course. But there’s also often a richness of imagery and sound that feels related to the poetic. A mouth feel that is satisfying. A rhythm that makes us notice and relish in its language. My friend, the film maker Terrance Odette, posted the title of an article noting that “poetry is everywhere.” Well, that’s a challenge I couldn’t resist. So I made a poem playing with the sounds of this title. I mean, sure, heteropoly acid negolytes could enhance the performance of aqueous redox flow batteries at low temperature. Obv! That’s what we’ve all suspected all this time, but isn’t it true that “Follow-through is a poor bedfellow for the beauty of this testimonial”? Right? We poets bring the truths.
Gary Barwin, Poor Bedfellows of Science

Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gentle into that good night has bothered me for many years.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It bothered me more when, in my 30s I sat with my dying father. All my dad wanted in his last days was release from pain. Imagine the sheer tone-deaf selfishness of that injunction in his ears. All I can hear is a young man’s impotent rage against the loss of his father. It makes me wonder about rage and poetry. Among other things. […]
Rage makes you incoherent. Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting. The gift is to find the right channel. I thought I’d cool my head and calm myself down by reflecting on the the rage I feel about the apparently untouchable sense of entitlement that characterises the last ten years of the contemporary Tory Party in power, and then how more or less by accident, I found a way of channelling it. The answer for me lay in the Greek Myths, the stories of the Greek pantheon, and particularly the version created by Garfield and Blishen in The God beneath the Sea.
John Foggin, All the rage

My touchstone here is something I learned in the 1980s, during my junior year at Stony Brook University, when I took my first poetry workshop ever with June Jordan. Both in class and in the individual conferences she had with me, Professor Jordan spoke about what poetry was in a way that touched deeply the part of me aching to tell the truth about my life. I do not remember her exact words, but these two quotes, from her introduction to June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, capture the essence of what she said:
You cannot write lies and write good poetry.
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. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.
This does not mean, of course, that writing essays is not political, that essays cannot also be about discovering the potential in telling the truth, but it’s hard to imagine an essay rescuing a love affair or preventing a suicide, at least not in the way Jordan seems to be talking about here.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Deciding whether something should be a poem or an essay

I’m writing these words in the dead of night when destiny is busy sharpening its knives, and the sirens are sleeping.
There is a place we can unname and unweight our burdens, a place we can dig down deep into the ash for those unspent remains of humanity.
In that space, certain syllables defy gravity. Defy bullets and burning.
Hope is one syllable that comes to mind. Dream, another.
Rich Ferguson, When Destiny Sharpens Its Knives

On the one hand, I’m wary of trying to be too focused: one of the things that makes a blog a blog, if it’s just you writing, is that’s it’s unplanned. On the other, the blank screen is as intimidating as the blank page. It helps to have a sense of what you’re trying to do.
Also: however personally fulfilling it might be, keeping all your options open tends to be a pretty inefficient way of finding readers, who tend to want to know what to expect.
On reflection, there are a couple of themes I keep coming back to.
The first is simple: personal responses to individual poems. These are what got me blogging to begin with. They continue to get more hits than anything else on here: so there’s a demand. The truth is they are somewhere between a response and an analysis, which may explain why people go back to them (they’ve Google-searched the poem).
But they are personal, too, if only because I’ve chosen to write about these poems. I increasingly think sharing your enthusiasm for individual poems is central to what this thing called poetry is, and probably the best way to keep the love of it alive (if you believe E. M. Forster, the only way). I enjoy them, too.
Jeremy Wikeley, Back to Basics

I walked into the middle of a Ted Hughes poem the other week. An early morning dog walk, like any other, except that suddenly I was looking at the most enormous fish, the fish of legend, the fish of myth, a fish I had met before but only in my mind’s eye. It was put there by Hughes’s own reading of the poem, from the flock wallpaper Faber and Faber cassette shared with Paul Muldoon. It’s also in my ancient copy of River, the original coffee table edition with photos of the Exe and Taw and Torridge.
But here it was in the flesh, on an ordinary Tuesday, the film of the words I had driven to, cooked and made coffee to, happening actually yards from where I stood in a Devon field not a mile from the city centre. The poem is clear: this is an October salmon, not mid-May. But I swear the fish was the same. It all came back, as we say, flooding. The fish is dressed by death in ‘clownish ceremonials, badges and decorations’, its ‘face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility’, its ‘whole body/ A fungoid anemone of canker’. As Seamus Heaney has said, to hell with overstating it! Sometimes that is what is required.
Other lines quickly joined them as I stared, daring to inch the phone out of my pocket for a surreptitious photo, lest I spook the moment. ‘Ravenous joy’ (‘The savage amazement of life,/ The salt mouthful of actual existence,/ With strength like light’) ghosting a dying fall (‘This was inscribed in his egg’). He was probably hatched in this very pool. Fundamental accuracy of statement (Pound), never weighed more.
Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: An October Salmon, by Ted Hughes

DL Williams’s “Interdimensional Traveller” explores dimensions, particularly the two dimensional world of poems on a page and the three dimensional world of sign language. There is a QR code link to the YouTube channel where the poems appear in BSL (eventually all of them will) and also QR codes with some of the poems that links to the individual poem. This is not done in a binary spirit, where sign language is put in competition with English, but as a translator and interpreter, building links between these dimensions. An early poem, “Bilingual Poet’s Dilemma”, will be as familiar to translators as to sign language interpreters,
“What’s beautiful in a Sign
is boring in a line;
what’s pretty in a line
is confusing in Sign,
and if the twain should meet,
wouldn’t that be a feat?
So tell me, please,
which language should I use?
Which one should I choose?”
British Sign Language is not English in signs, or Sign Supported English, but a language in its own right with grammar and sentence structures that differ from English. Sign language is not universal, each language has its own version. In languages, words rarely stand alone with the same meaning each time, but pick up meaning according to the context used. A word such as ‘beacon’ may mean light, warning or hope and an interpreter has to judge whether to only translate ‘beacon’ as light or whether one of the other meanings may be appropriate. A phrase in sign language that looks like an elegantly choreographed ballet for hands, can be rendered simplistic and boring on a page. A sentence that starts in the present tense and moves into the past tense to signify a memory, is tricky to render in BSL. These issues throw up dilemmas for interpreters. However, if you are bilingual and can move back and forth between languages, how would you choose one over the other? If decide to use the best language for the poem, how will an audience react if some of your poems are in BSL and others in English? How can you interpret for the part of the monolingual audience who need interpretations?
Emma Lee, “Interdimensional Traveller” DL Williams (Burning Eye) – book review

extracting birdsong from background noise
Jason Crane, haiku: 31 May 2022

I have to admit that I love all the written aspects of writing poetry, of publishing work, but I still fret at the idea of organized readings, even after all the opportunities I’ve had to do so. The idea of talking for 15 minutes still makes me balk initially until I resettle into the reality than time flies when I’m reading, really reading, my poetry. And usually, before I know it, I’ve cleared 15 and am headed into 20. The thing of it is though is overcoming that block, “Oh, I can’t do that,” and instead jump in. When it comes down to it, I’ve never had a negative experience in a reading, in fact it becomes one of those moments in which I’m truly present. There’s great beauty in that, but also in the look-around the room and seeing who is there to hear you read because they want to be there, be it friends, writing group, fellow writers, teachers past and recent, even someone you’re sweet on. There’s a sweetness to it all that can’t be replicated under other circumstances.
Kersten Christianson, Tidal Echoes 2022

Last week’s post on First Loves led to a wonderful discussion during Fridays at 4. This week I want to continue that feeling, but with a later poetry love of mine, the work of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (Vee-ZHWA-vah Zhim-BOR-ska). I can read her work only in translation, and the general agreement is that the best are those by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislav Barańczak. Their versions are the ones that appear below.
I was completely smitten the first time I saw these titles, and then the poems that followed: “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition,” “The Letters of the Dead,” “In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself,” “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” on and on. What drew me? The tone of voice, that speaks about mortality with matter-of-factness, even humor. The moments she chooses to write about, from dramatic (“The Terrorist, He Waits,” ) to the minute, the daily (“The Silence of Plants,” “A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth”). That she writes about writing poetry, something not typical of American poetry (“In Fact Every Poem.” “To My Own Poem,” ‘The Poet’s Nightmare,” “Some People Like Poetry.”) The surfaces are deceptively simple, the depths infinite.
Sharon Bryan, Wisława Symborska

I had a good conversation with a friend who just had a book come out. She has been doing a ton of readings—both in person and on Zoom—and was just two weeks into her book’s launch, but was feeling overwhelmed. When is enough enough?
My attitude towards this, when I talked about it in my book PR for Poets, is that no one will ever say “you’re doing enough” so you have to decide. If you love doing readings, or social media, or sending out postcards, do that. Poetry has a longer shelf life than most things, so don’t worry if in the first month you haven’t gotten to everything – interviews, podcasts, blog posts, readings, etc – all of it takes it out of you, especially in the third year of a pandemic and people are just starting to go to bookstores in person again. So be kind to yourself, set boundaries. Don’t say yes to everything. And try to celebrate the small wins.
As I am finishing up my final version of Flare, Corona for BOA Editions, a lot of anxieties have come up. Is this grammar okay? Why did I leave punctuation out of this part of the poem but not this other part? Have I forgotten people I need to thank (probably!) or acknowledgements for poems that might have slipped through the cracks? I really do need to turn it in to typesetting but there is so much you want to all of the sudden fix about your manuscript. Since this is my sixth poetry book, I can say yes, this is also a normal part of the process. I get very insecure about my book right before it goes out into the world. I loved the book so much while I labor-intensively (and money intensively) sent it out to publishers. I loved it when it was taken. But now, I see nothing but flaws.
I also got a few acceptances this week that would normally be big deals to me but it felt hard to celebrate with so much other bad stuff going on. The world feels very dark and dismal (and it’s not just the abnormally cold rain, though that hasn’t helped). If you are struggling, please reach out for support and take good care of yourself. Please remember you are making a difference in the world, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Maybe take a break from social media and news. A friend of mine reminded me to submit poems (which I hadn’t been) and give myself time to write (which I also hadn’t been doing much of). Put at least one positive thing on your calendar just for fun. Wishing you as good a week as possible.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Three New Poems in Bourgeon, How to Cope with a Rough Week, Talking Publicity Efforts and Finishing Up Manuscripts and Other Poetry Things

But magazine can also mean
a chamber for holding cartridges
to feed automatically
into a gun, which reminds me
of the article I don’t need
to re-read — the one where
a radiologist describes
the slim silver line sketched
by an ordinary bullet,
versus the way
one fired from an AR-15
ripples waves of flesh
like a cigarette boat
traveling through
a narrow canal
turning any part of us
into smashed overripe melon,
nothing left to repair.
Rachel Barenblat, Magazine

We are sad on the ground, but still, our messages need to get out, we writers, we artists, we citizens. I don’t know that we will change this world, but our messages matter, they exist and are relevant all the way into someone’s near future. (“Someone told me / of course my poems / won’t change the world. // I said yes of course / my poems / won’t change the world.” — Patrizia Cavalli
Your art isn’t the phone. Poetry isn’t a text message. “Don’t use the phone,” says Jack Kerouac, “People are never ready to answer. Use poetry.”
I’m currently reading Lesley Wheeler’s Poetry’s Possible Worlds, and loving it. (Will write a longer post on it next week if all goes my way). In it she says, “A poem makes a lousy telephone.” Instead, she says, “by reading a poem, you’re entering a transportation device. You interact with the text to get somewhere, but it has a mind of its own and will match its will to yours. Rather than efficiency, you choose a complex, unpredictable experience.”
The message is, Keep sending your messages. Your words are wings; your wings are words. We are living in complicated times. We are living in times where the language and rhetoric of disinformation, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, racism etc are overwhelming. In the recent past, I have thought to myself, what is needed is more nuance. And yes? but also, I was re-reading Rachel Blau Duplessis’s Blue Studio in which she asks, “Can one be rigorous and empathetic? Antisimplistic, but with clean lines? Can one illustrate opacity and confirm clarity at one and the same time? You’d better believe it.” Can we appeal to the larger crowd out there with a message of community still? With a message of doing right? I really don’t know.
Shawna Lemay, Of Messages and Messengers

The three children smiling in the photograph are buried in the kindergarten garden.
A woman tends her allotment to the sound of explosions and sirens.
An ant crosses the table in the garden where I write.
I walk to find peace.
Old bikes propped on bay windows in tiny, slabbed front gardens.
You are somewhere close to the border now.
Yesterday they bombed the tracks.
A pigeon stops singing the way pigeons do
as if they forget the point of the song.
Bob Mee, BLACK WATER

Dream fluff shadows a thousand
skin lathered summers,
whispering sea spray, waxing
ebb shine,
an urge of fingers in hair
and salt on tongues.
Oh summer, bare your dreams
on the wind,
Crush on me again
Charlotte Hamrick, Riptide

May 15, 2022May 15, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 19

How does it begin? Wasn’t failure the first consciousness, wasn’t death the first precept. We know these things like the taste of our own mouths. Not as a taste, not as knowing. Still, we elevate their antonyms — a god, a love, a lover, a time — we embellish them with the infinite, the eternal, one thing containing the other, with victory. How else should we process our own defeat?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, How does it begin?

how you are
lonely in a crowd
like the moth
inside the cage
of hands
and each wingbeat
sheds more
of your powder
and you can hear
the calm voices
and the shared
laughter and
they think that
you’re with them
out in the light
but where you are
is entirely dark
Dick Jones, how you are

Busy times in my body and brain. Attended the funeral of a young co-worker yesterday. Heartbreaking. I loved learning about, and hearing, the country music songs she loved.
In the afternoon, I helped to pot tree seedlings to be planted in the fall. Part of a big tree-planting surge: 11,000 seedlings (stick stage) were planted this spring. These that have budded and begun to leaf need to wait for the fall. Hot, fun work, in good company, outdoors.

Then, there was a Zoom discussion of Book VII of Paradise Lost with an international bunch of people–mostly Chicago and Canada, but some were actually in Portugal for earlier Books, and some were walking El Camino in Spain while we were between Books.
Kathleen Kirk, Wild Columbine

I read somewhere that someone
thought eukaryotes anyway would make it through a nuclear winter.
And from there the game could begin again. We’ve still
got billions of years: plenty of time. Though I’m sorry about the cats.
So then I think: do I care what happens to the creatures
who finally make the leap? Make it for real, I mean? And I thought
well, I do if they’re good. And there I paused: a new scent
was on the wind. If they love what’s beautiful and worry what’s true:
well, sure I care. And I wonder how to leave them a message, and then
I wonder what message I would leave? “Be careful, dears, there’s
a tricky part that comes when you industrialize”? “Put your house
in order before you learn how to burn it down”?
Dale Favier, After Winter

Dear false future, the shells of seeds
you crack open with your teeth make
a small, damp pile in the trash can. Each
is a world you pried open to extract
its only treasure. How many martyrs lie
buried without headstones? Meanwhile,
your blind mother and your bloated
father have their hair washed twice
a day, their organs flushed and pickled,
pearls sewn into their thumbs.
Luisa A. Igloria, Election Results

I wrote this poem in 2019 after the Georgia State Assembly passed a law that would ban all abortions after a so-called fetal heartbeat was detected in an ultrasound.
Camatkarasana, roughly translated as Wild Thing, is a sort of one armed backbend that one of my yoga teacher enjoys guiding us toward.
She has a unique way of describing what is going on inside the body and how to harness that energy toward achieving greater strength in the pose. It’s a difficult pose to achieve and requires strength, flexibility, and confidence, but once you do achieve the pose, the body becomes flooded with energy.
My heart is very heavy with sadness for women now that the leaked draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade has been published. We ARE wild things, strong and capable of determining what happens to our own bodies. I’m full of fury that forces in our society want to take this right away from us.
Christine Swint, The Yoga Teacher Guides the Women in Camatkarasana In the Season of Fetal Heartbeat Bills

These years are wilderness
and sometimes I struggle to hear
the still small voice
calling me forth
from my armchair, calling me
into humble not-knowing
and into the splendor
of not making myself afraid.
This work isn’t new, and
we won’t complete it: that’s ok.
Yes, there were leeks
in the beforetimes. I miss
them too. But then I remember
not everyone got to eat
even then. We can do better.
It’s all right to feel fear
as long as we put one foot
in front of the other.
There is no path to Sinai
other than this.
Rachel Barenblat, Not Knowing

I spent the better part of yesterday sorting books. It is clear to me that we are moving into a phase of life with more moves and less book shelf space, so it’s time. I started the day feeling a powerful sense of catharsis as I sorted through books, and I ended the day in tears and exhaustion. It’s a strange process the sorting of books. Let me record a few reflections.
–I used to keep books thinking that I would reread them, but it’s become clear to me that I usually check out new books from the library rather than read my old books. I used to think that I would have complete collections of authors’ books, and in my 20s that seemed perfectly reasonable. Now that plan will require a lot of bookshelf space. All of this to say, I’ve been hanging on to a lot of books that I no longer need to hang on to. Getting rid of those was the easy part. […]
–I am now comfortable getting rid of books even though I once spent lots of money on all these books. I supported individual artists by buying the books, but it doesn’t mean I need to hang on to them forever.
–Along the way there were sadnesses as I looked at inscriptions and thought about the people who once bought me books as presents. I tried to feel gratitude for all the people who have loved me in this way while also letting those books go.
–Every so often I saw the handwriting of people who had borrowed my books, people who had permission to write in them. One of my best friends, who has since died, borrowed my Norton anthologies when she returned to school to finish her BA, and her writing is all over the books. Those are tougher to let go.
–A lot of these books represent hopes and dreams, even though I’ve moved on to different hopes and dreams. There’s a sadness to seeing them, even though I’m fairly satisfied with how my life is turning out. Those books are going away. Perhaps they will help someone else who has those hopes and dreams of my younger self. […]
–Part of what makes letting go of books so hard is wondering what will happen to them. I’ll take them to the local library where they will probably end up in a friends of the library sale. I want to believe that readers will find them. I wish the library would keep them but I know that they don’t really have room for the resources that they have right now, and the move is on to more electronic resources and less paper.
–It’s the largest sadness: realizing that we are not part of a culture that values books very much and an even larger sadness in realizing how little we value ideas, book length ideas.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Sorting of the Books

And so what every library worker knows and works toward, and really this is one of my life’s main raison d’êtres, is the perfection of the reference interview. Which is ever unattainable, a work in progress, the holy grail of library work. Because, as in most conversations, a lot of what happens is sidelong. Sure there is often the straightforward person who comes in wanting X book, asks for X book, and walks out with same. Wonderful, that! But often the person arrives looking for something that they can’t say, or don’t know how to say, or want to say but are too uncomfortable to say, or don’t even know that they can ask for this thing that they need. So, it is this really delicate back and forth, that must be purely openhearted, and orchestrated to not presume, to not overextend, to probe but with good intent, with a mind to privacy, a mind to empathy, and with a great deal of instinct, as to when to be blunt, or ask the really dumb or super open ended questions, when to be silent, when to nod. It’s an exercise in hope and humility and curiosity and must be filled with a genuine interest in the human before you.
Shawna Lemay, The Imaginative Listener

We disagree over documentation: starlight at noon,
a crescent sun, too many back-shadowed moons.
Trees fall. Embers singe our concentration,
re-ignite our concerns amid the smoke screen.

Yet we see no conflagration, feel no coals against
our backs (perhaps only rosellas carry flame,
only crows transmit distress). Moths, bees, ants
swarm around our feet, now rain graces our lips.
Ian Gibbins, An Introduction to the Theory of Eclipses

the sound of
data processing
house sparrows
Jason Crane, haiku: 13 May 2022

Sometimes I wonder if collecting useless facts is a form of hoarding. Controlling. Yesterday I listened to a podcast while I ran (the first time post-covid infection). I listened to Lulu Miller read her own brilliant essay titled The Eleventh Word [podcast ]. She explores the idea that our naming things actually creates an environment of fear: that by naming things, we create the illusion of control, but when that inevitably proves false we feel disoriented and afraid.
She gets this idea by observing her son as he acquires language and fear of the unknown at the same time. While I’m no neuroscientist, I think it’s more likely that the child’s brain develops the ability to predict and reason at the same age.
But the correlation here is fascinating and her argument poetic. There may even be some truth to her idea. I remember reading a long time about research that said there are emotions we don’t experience until we know a word for them. I remember it was all very controversial. But I suppose that would support the idea that we would be fearless without language?
I do know there are all kinds of research about using a second language, and the relative emotional/objective value of doing so. I have had students who keep diaries in English and tell me it is because they feel distanced from the difficult subject matter. It’s easier to think about it.
This is especially interesting because when I taught younger kids, I noticed that their “imaginative” language was English, though their day-to-day language was Norwegian. They would tell me that they were more creative in English: it was “easier”. They credited the language itself, not their relationship to it. I’ve always thought that was interesting. At first, I thought it was because they simply lacked the critical skills to evaluate their creative work. They felt freer because they felt an innocent sense of competence (invariably these kids were better at English than their parents and teachers, for example). But I think it is more than that.
Ren Powell, A Little Clutch of Deceit

Not just smoke and mirrors, but smoke and mirrors watched through another mirror, and another, and so on until the reflections themselves become a new reality, and there you are, lost, lost, lost. You can spend your lifetime feeling your way through the reflections one at a time, until you get to the end at last, and it is just a barren field. But is it? Look closer, the field isn’t barren at all. Small things do live there, rodents and insects, small plants missed at harvest, left ungleaned. There is life among the small things, life upon the dirt, and that, my friend, is where you can start over.
James Lee Jobe, No one tells us that life is often a barren field.

after travelling
to the secret garden
it was no more
but the path went on and on
perhaps that is the secret
Jim Young [no title]

Not far from the city centre, down Mill Road, you’ll find The Bath House. It was built in 1927 as an amenity for the poor who lacked their own facilities. In 1969 a sauna was added. In 1975 when it was about to close, baths cost 10p. It’s mentioned in the odd biography and in literature – see for example Matt’s Simpson’s poem, “The Bath House”. It became a community hub where I spent much time in the Friends of the Earth office.
From the Bath House follow Gwydir Street nearly to its end and you’ll come to this shop front. The faded sign at the top reads “Roll on blank tapes”. It must have closed decades ago because it sold blank cassette tapes. I think I might have bought a tape there. Whereas the concept of a bath house might be understood by the youth of today (from Roman history perhaps) the notion of tape may puzzle them. Part of my first job in Cambridge was to do computer back-ups onto a foot-wide reel of half-inch tape.
Tim Love, Old Cambridge

How often do you consider changing your horizon? Since travel has been off the table for many of us during the pandemic, the way to change one’s horizons is considering a new hometown. For us, we’ve been thinking about moving to a smaller town – La Conner, Washington is this week’s pick.
We scheduled a time to look at a house whose best feature was its outdoor space – lots of landscaping flowers, lots of birds, and a backyard that looked onto protected land. Sitting out in those gardens – with a view of the water – was heaven. Talk about the temptation to impulse buy! But this is a house, and a big time town change, so we can’t just sign on the dotted line because the flowers and birds were showing off. There was also a guitar festival going on – and there is a local poetry festival that happens every two years – I mean, artistic and culture scores are pretty off-the-charts for a small town. Plenty of art galleries, a Northwest Art Museum, and cute shops and restaurants along the water, the Swinomish Channel. Woodinville, known for its wineries and restaurants, is no slouch in the food and wine departments, but lacks that grass-roots deep community caring about music, visual art, and literature.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Changing Horizons, Considering New Hometowns: La Conner Edition, Moving Forward with Flare, Corona, and More Birds and Blooms from Woodinville

The Planet Poetry podcast has kept my busy lately, I think Peter and I have settled into a relaxed schedule whereby we try to produce a new episode every three weeks but if life gets in the way then four is no biggie. It’s very satisfying to research possible new guests, read their work and prepare questions we want to ask them. Then there’s the editing and then recording all the other segments of the ‘show’ in which Peter and I chew the cud and usually go a bit off-piste (interesting mix of metaphors there, are we Tyrolean cows?) If you’re a listener, thank you! We’re certainly chuffed with the quality of guests we’ve managed to ‘bag’. Last week it was J O Morgan. Apart from numbers of downloads, there’s not really any way of measuring the pod’s ‘success’ or otherwise. Ideally we’d like to get mentioned on the BBC Radio Podcast Hour, so if you have any contacts there, let me know.
I’m at a slight hiatus as regards writing. I’ve stopped fiddling with the ‘collection’ poems for now, having had some very useful feedback. Now I need/want to move onto new material. I’m doing a fair bit of background reading at the moment. The other day I was deep into an article about lighting and ventilation in British offices from 1950 to 1985. I know! But it’s actually very interesting. Then there’s the book on Roman Britain. What on earth is on the boil here? We’ll just have to wait and see. I have booked myself onto a untutored week at the Garsdale Retreat in September, during which I want to be planning and writing for the next book.
Robin Houghton, Chewing the cud & going off-piste

I’m getting very close now to the launch of Poetry’s Possible Worlds and therefore working hard on Poetry’s Possible Publicity. The task is a supermassive black hole tugging at my effort and energy, most of which will vanish without a trace–but I still believe in putting it out there. As Claudia Emerson framed it to me a million years ago (she was a visiting prof here long, long before her Pulitzer), promoting a book is part of the respect and caretaking an author owes to the writing itself. I labored over the book mightily for ten years; I can spend some more hours giving it its best chance. […]
I’m setting up events for summer and fall and would very much welcome venue ideas and news of other soon-to-launch books that might resonate with mine for a bookstore event. Poetry’s Possible Worlds describes reading poetry during a time of crisis, so it’s memoir, criticism, and an exploration of the effects of reading on our minds and bodies. It’s also a speculative book (about poetry’s genre kinship with fantasy), a grief book (beginning with my father’s death and ending with my mother’s final illness), and a story of real and figurative travel (my Fulbright to New Zealand, among other journeys). At one point this constellation of topics bewildered me–how do I pitch this monster of a book? Mostly, now, it feels like an opportunity for connection.
Lesley Wheeler, Countdown…and teaching ideas for Poetry’s Possible Worlds

I have an e-chapbook – Magnetite and other poems – out now from Wild Art Publishing. It collects bird-themed poems from my three full collections along with a couple of newer poems, and matches each piece with superb bird photography from Rob Read (the man behind Wild Art), David Tipling, and others.
Most of the poems that I’ll be reading at my Cheltenham Poetry Festival reading next Monday will be from the book, so come along to the (online) event and get a taste of the book.
Matt Merritt, New e-book out now!

First off, thank you to everyone who has shown support for Rotura (Black Lawrence Press)! Whether you’ve snagged a copy, read some of the poems online, or heard me at a virtual event, the support and connection mean a lot.
Speaking of poems online, happy to share that three poems from Rotura were featured in last month’s issue of Poetry is Currency.
Continuing the Rotura-related thread, I am excited to share this interview for Mass Poetry’s “Getting to Know” series. I share a bit about origins and influences as well as insights about the new book.
Lastly: poet, scholar, and dynamic human being, Urayoán Noel, was also kind enough to include Rotura in his article “‘La Treintena’ 2022: 30+ Books of Latinx Poetry.” Honored to have Rotura featured alongside recent collections by Raquel Salas Rivera, Rio Cortez, and Darrel Alejandro Holnes among other essential, vibrant voices.
José Angel Araguz, updates & sharing

Well, I was really chuffed when this was published in The North .67 and finally in my new collection Pressed for time. Which brings me back to May 3rd when we had a live launch for the collection in the lovely venue which is Brighouse Library and Art Gallery . For a week before, I was awake nights wondering if it was true, and if, because I’d done it before I could still do it. I was absurdly nervous about the whole thing, apart from the usual business of wondering whether anyone would turn up. I was nervous enough to write a script for my bits of the reading. These days I’m usually in bed by 9.00pm. Would I have the energy? I haven’t read aloud to a live audience for two years and more…….and so on.
What actually happened was that twelve Calder Valley Poets rocked up to do support readings; former students and ex-colleagues from the 1970s (Northern Counties College) and 1980s (Boston Spa Comp) turned up out of the blue; poets and friends I’ve not seen in yonks came along; eldest son, daughter in law and grandson came along (and filmed it all); we sold a shed-load of books. It all went like clockwork thanks to my editor Bob Horne’s careful planning. To top it all, my friend, mentor and inspiration Kim Moore arrived (a five hour round trip from Barrow!) and read three of my poems from the collection, so I heard them as if I’d never encountered them before. Wow!
Nervous? The script went out of the window. I’d forgotten what a live audience can do. I’d forgotten how it feels, the buzz, to be flying. There’s an electricity that energises you, that overrides two years of lockdown and chemo, and I thank my stars for it. I was reading a Facebook post today from Gill Lambert, the Leeds/Airedale poet who launched her new collection A small goodbye at dawn in Haworth. She’s flying, too. Suddenly there are launches everywhere. We’ve been let out. We know how the Mole felt. We’re learning the synergy and language of company again, the sound of voices.
John Foggin, Reading allowed or The Company you keep

I am still paused in my next writing exploit and plan to give myself until June 1 to figure out what I am doing, what exactly I’ll be working on over the summer. Will it be more of half completed unnamed mss #14 (I kind of have a name, but am still trying it out in my head). Or will it be the epic project, which as its name suggests, feels like a huge undertaking I am not sure I am ready to embark on just yet. Toward the end of the summer, I’ll start working on edits and finalizing automagic, which I would love to release around Halloween given its spooky, Victorian feel. However, I am still recovering from the final sprint that was animal, vegetable, monster. Over the last couple days, I excitedly sent off signed copy orders that are still filtering in. If you haven’t ordered, keep an eye out this week, since I’ll be doing a 3-in-1 sale with other recent books.
I’ve spent this week knee deep in furniture styles (Jacobean, French Provincial, Victorian, Eastlake) and architecture details, as well as another assignment on vintage vending machine cards (this time devoted to TV westerns.) On Monday, I was downtown and thought I smelled lilacs, but realized they were the hyacinths in the planters around the perimeter of the Cultural Center. I was able to sit in the park a little more comfortably than last week under a rein of white petals from the trees, that are now filling in everywhere you look. I swear to god a week ago it seemed like spring would never come, but then it always does in a just a couple of warm days and spreads like wildfire.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 5/14/2022

I wrote the first draft of this poem many years ago, when I was a new mother with a full-time teaching job who struggled to find time to write. At the time, my self-respect seemed to be directly correlated with my ability to produce perfectly finished poems, which rarely happened. Hence the constant state of frustration, tiredness, and befuddlement. Oh, and I should mention being saddled with an undiagnosed blood disorder that cast its own pall over pretty much everything I did. It took another decade to sort that one out. I think I may have sleepwalked through months at a time during those years, because there are whole stretches of my life that I cannot account for. But I’m grateful for this poem, which is like a little anchor I hold on to, a reminder of who I used to be, this younger endearing self I still carry inside me. I wish I could have told her, “It gets better, just wait. Keep writing.” […]
Fingers and palms are the best
to write on: phone numbers,
directions, arrows
to a lover’s heart, poems,
like now, when you’ve run
out of paper, tablecloth, napkins.
Wave good-bye
to your vanishing hand
with your writing one.
Romana Iorga, Writing Yourself Out

I wrote 30 poems in 30 days, and here are my take-aways:
1. When you write a poem every single day, you look for poems everywhere.
Interesting words, phrases, situations–everything could be the “moment of the poem” for that day.
2. You learn how much time you Actually have for writing during the day.
Turns out, most days I do have writing time–the days that I didn’t, I made the time.
3. Your poems become less precious.
Yes, many of my poems were throwaways! And that is ok–not every word leaked from my pen is pure gold.
4. You find veins of interest / connections in poems.
For me, I found a vein of writing interest about mid-month that I’ve followed, and I think could turn into a chapbook at some point.
5. You learn the value of a writing buddy.
If I didn’t have a friend to send my poems to each day, it would have been so much easier to give up! Having a writing community or even just one writer friend to cheer you on can make a huge difference.
You don’t have to wait til April to write a poem a day!
Renee Emerson, What I learned from writing a Poem a day during NAPOWRIMO

Everything about Garden Time entranced me: Merwin’s sure hand at meter and enjambment, the lack of punctuation that made his poetry seem simultaneously innocent and wise, and the way he was able to inhabit his environment without enforcing his will on it. The book foreshadowed a series of tragedies: with his eyesight failing, Merwin dictated the poems to his wife Paula, who died a year after the book was published. Then Merwin himself died peacefully in his sleep two years later at the age of 91.
The first draft of the poem that emerged as I was reading Garden Time sounded like a bad Merwin imitation: unfocused, weirdly enjambed, and self-consciously metered, as if I were trying to write a free-verse Petrarchan sonnet. But the seed of what the poem might become, if I paid enough attention to how Merwin’s poems operate, with their subtle movement and emotional distance, kept me going.
Somewhere between the fourth or fifth draft, the presence of my late father arrived; I gave him a Merwin-esque temperament and allowed him to say a few wise-yet-innocent things. In keeping with Garden Time, I set the poem in a garden, one of my favorite places on Earth: Tilden Park Botanical Garden in Berkeley, CA. A memory surfaced: thirty years ago, when I lived in Los Gatos and he lived in Berkeley, I took a day off work and met him there, and we spent the day wandering the paths of the garden, pausing every now and then to read the plants’ captions. I remembered, with a stab of the most overwhelming nostalgia, that it was an astonishingly beautiful summer day and that the California native rose, rosa californica, was in bloom,and that my dad pronounced the day “perfect.”
On the strength of this memory, the poem took off, zipping away from its roots as a heavily-influenced piece of writing and demanding its own voice. In early drafts, I’d refrained from adding any punctuation, but now inserted commas, periods and ellipses where needed. I double-spaced the poem and let the line lengths meander, some long, some short. The finished poem still contains its Merwin influence, but it’s a whole new entity unto itself.
Erica Goss, Embrace Influences

How would you describe poetry’s role in your life? As a job, a hobby or a vocation?

For me, it’s definitely not a job. However, the fact I don’t use poetry as a means to generating my primary source of income doesn’t mean it’s any less important to me, nor does it mean my own poems are any worse (or better!) than stuff by people who do. Moreover, in my own personal case, viewing poetry as a job would kill off my capacity to write. This is because poems are ring-fenced in my mind as one of the few parts of my life in which I can do as I please without worrying about the fallout!

But then the term ‘hobby’ makes my hackles rise immediately. It insinuates I might be playing at being a poet, categorising my writing alongside stamp collecting or trainspotting. And it also gives the impression that poetry plays a secondary role in my life, which isn’t true.

And what about ‘vocation’? There’s a concern it might sound pretentious or feel like a pose, but it’s the word that works best for me. It doesn’t mean I necessarily spend umpteen hours a day writing poetry, but then I’d argue anyway that the genre doesn’t require or even benefit from lengthy periods at a desk. Instead, poems are often better for being filtered through lived experiences. My life feeds into my poetry and my poetry into my life. And that interwoven relationship is the reason why writing poems is a vocation for me.
Matthew Stewart, Job, hobby or vocation?

Don’t get too
comfortable
on the mountain —
that’s not what
it’s there for,
the old monk told
his students.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (201)

“Rookie” selects poems from Caroline Bird’s previous six collections, “Looking Through Letterboxes” (2002), “Trouble Came to the Turnip” (2006), “Watering Can” (2009), “The Hat-stand Union” (2012), “In these days of Prohibition” (2017) and “The Air Year” (2020). The last won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and she’s previously been shortlisted for The Polari Prize, the Costa Prize, the T S Eliot Prize, Ted Hughes Award, Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and has won an Eric Gregory Award and twice won the Foyle Young Poets Award and Dylan Thomas Prize. Bird was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics. The selections run chronologically. […]
“Rookie” is a carefully curated selected, showing Bird’s progression from teenage poet to mature adult. Underneath the successful humour, serious points are made about finding one’s place in life and dealing with the external highs and lows along with the aspects of your own personality you don’t want to put under a spotlight, but you also know if it weren’t working overtime backstage, the bits of you that you’re happy to put centre stage wouldn’t exist. It’s a great introduction to Bird’s work which is packed full of substance.
Emma Lee, “Rookie: Selected Poems” Caroline Bird (Carcanet) – book review

17 – If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Oh dear, I think I’m pretty good at teaching. I can’t imagine doing something else. But that’s different from being a writer. It’s a dream to be a writer who can live on one’s publications; that’s not common as a poet. If I “had not been a writer,” I would be a different person. I’d like to think that I would do work for women’s rights. I would have ended up being that strange woman who lives alone in the woods, and people say, Stay away from her. She’s reading and talking to herself.
18 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
There is no choice. Writing is hard, relentless, absorbing, possessive. When I’m working on a book, I feel bothered by it, “bothered by beauty,” as John Ashbery wrote. “No layoff from this condensary,” as Lorine Niedecker writes. When I’m writing, I’m also at my most happy—being alone and thinking and worrying over words. I often wish I wasn’t a writer; I have a naïve fantasy that I would be happier and calmer if I wasn’t. To have one job. I’m not good at other things, such as playing the flute or singing or surgery, so I’m sticking with poetry.
19 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was FIGHT NIGHTby Miriam Toews. Hell yeah! That is book is a force. I loved it with all my heart: its characters, its style, its structure. The last great film I saw is The Apartment, the Billy Wilder film from 1960, which I had never seen. I love Jack Lemmon’s physical comedy, his nervy, earnest, wiggly energy. I loved the pristine secretaries battling for dignity and love within the patriarchal structure of the office. I loved the lightning-fast banter, the comebacks, the Tiffany lamps and Modern art stuck to the wall with pins of his apartment. Most of all, I loved Shirley MacLaine’s performance. Her wholehearted longing, her honest tears, her warm demeanor in the Elevator Operator uniform. I feel like we all still work at Consolidated Life.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Camille Guthrie

We aroused and blaze-glazed cartwheeling denizens of equanimity, fierce galaxies of harmony in our hearts.
Idealistic and unjetlagged, we kung fu lassitude until it mimics the nimble ongoings of a poem’s quintuplets.
We residents of Shakespeare-tilted universes all verbed-up, whirlwinding and willing to xerox our unrestrained yodels
to create playful new zodiacs of zest.
Rich Ferguson, How we roam the alphabet’s wild jungle

I know a woman who once hated her ex with such fury that she soothed herself by imagining all the ways she might kill him. She and he did the acrimony dance through lawyers long after their finances were left in ruins. Somehow they both believed they spared their daughter, having agreed to remain cheerful in her presence. The girl surely saw the grimaces inside their smiles.
Their loathing simmered for years until their child, at nine, was diagnosed with cancer. Both parents went to her appointments and treatments. They cried and prayed and hoped together. Their daughter survived. She grew up smart and strong. She recently got engaged.
My friend is happily remarried and her ex lives with a much adored life partner. The two couples have been vacationing together for years. They laugh, they reminisce, they dance in ways that give each couple space. They talk about buying a big house or property with two homes so the four of them can move in together. They imagine a backyard roomy enough for their daughter’s wedding. Imagine it scattered with trees perfect for their someday grandchildren to climb. They message each other real estate listings all the time.
I think of countries around the world that were once at war, but are now on friendly terms. They read each other’s literature, savor each other’s cuisines, celebrate each other’s accomplishments. Tourists visit parks where war memorials stand under flowering trees. Suffering and loss can decompose over time into something nourishing, as nature so patiently shows us.
Laura Grace Weldon, Hate Is Biodegradable

The girl is thinner, lets the water of the river drift through her tiny hands.
What can I tell you that you don’t already know?
There are explosions somewhere close.
The girl looks up at her mother.
Aristotle tends his bees somewhere in the future.
People clear away rubble.
Some even make music and dance.
I’m sorry this is not enough.
That old line again:
Give peace a chance.
This poem is for you, about you.
Bob Mee, STREAM-WRITING IN A TIME OF WAR

talk to the wasps
trapping ideas
hunting for the impossible
Ama Bolton, ABCD May 2022

May 1, 2022May 1, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 17

As Poetry Month wound down and May loomed, this week saw a profusion of flowers—alluring yet haunted by death and illness. There were poems to share, new and forthcoming books to celebrate, issues of craft to be hammered out and philosophical positions to be honed. A banner week, in other words. Enjoy.

There are flowers,
so many flowers, so many,
so much to do. Floating. Air borne,
weightless and whimsical. Silly
heart. What are you doing? And then
it rests. Suddenly. My son folds
his arms around me and doesn’t
want to let go.
PF Anderson, Untitled

It’s been a strange, sort of “lost” week, and it’s not over yet, so not even fully lost. I’ve been busy, reading and writing, resting and drinking fluids, but time keeps folding over itself, like laundry, and drifting away, like lake waves… Despite relentless masking and a double booster, I did test positive (home test), and am in my isolation week before resuming my life in the community. Still writing a poem a day for April, National Poetry Month, and that, too, will slip away…on Sunday, right? May Day is coming.
On my first day of very mild illness, it was 80 degrees outside, and I rested on the glider, wrapped in a comforter, reading, journals at hand for any random poems or diary thoughts. A strong southerly wind blew over me. Out in the yard, my husband, mostly recovered from his own lost week, picked up sweetgum seedpods in the yard. Then it turned chilly for a while…
And now, suddenly, violets are blooming everywhere in the grass! The yellow tulips are fully blown, and the pink just beginning. My dark lilacs are also beginning their fragrant opening. Lily of the valley and hosta are spiking up in their distinctive curls! A little of the two-toned hosta has uncurled, green and white. And where are my celandine poppies? Did they not return this year? But my “library lilies,” rescued from a revamp of the library’s gardens, have auto-renewed themselves (ha!) and will give plenty of yellow blooms later in the summer. As much of my reading this lost week assures me, nothing is really lost…
Kathleen Kirk, Isolation Week

Each day flowers turn
petals from east to west, trees
add rings in a seasonal birth
and death. But we are like laundry
on the clothesline being washed
and worn, shedding our skins
without renewal. Our dissatisfaction
is rooted too deeply. Birds scatter
seeds from forest to seaside
safeguarding continued resurrection
while we flap and stumble
on wings we broke ourselves.
Charlotte Hamrick, NaPoWriMo 2022 day 30

Wasps and monkeys regularly cross each other’s paths in this forest that seems to have no end and no beginning. Pink azalea and bougainvillea bloom poisonously. Snakes cannot be seen but their slithering can be traced on the ground at which nobody looks. Peacocks stand here transfixed for hours observing their reflection on the slanted glass. There is a fountain near the hidden piazza from which prosecco flows. Trees as old as souls live here. Any moment, ripe jackfruits and unripe mangoes could fall on you. Jasmine perfumes the air like gas.
The native inhabitants of this forest have never seen the outside world nor do they wish to. At night, they dream of the rings of Saturn.
This enchanted forest has a secret name that cannot be revealed. I am here as a spy. I will report back to myself my findings.
Saudamini Deo, Delhi and other forests

If the child says My window
is a sheet of paper without anything
written on it, then it means it’s ready
to catch the moon’s milky script,
the emerald peacock’s baby-cries or
its feathered drumroll. If he says
The night light is a little boat no larger
than a apricot in a dark-blue ocean,
right away I’ll trawl the waters with
my upstretched hand to feel
the wind lick my fingers with its
warm tongue.
Luisa A. Igloria, The Window

Sometimes having enough energy/stamina/dedication/obstinance to get through it all is a victory. When the plague burns through everything, no one said what is left standing is going to be a towering superhero. Sometimes it is a tiny, blind inchworm. Swaying just a little. Getting on with it.
The children’s song comes to mind. Measuring a marigold. I know very little about gardening or flowers in general, but I do remember the marigolds in the kitchen garden. How they took over. Beautiful but invasive. They just keep coming up through the soil, self-seeding. Inch after foot after yard.
That’s a lot of busywork for an inchworm.
Ren Powell, Theater of Cruelty

At 4:16 this morning a M3.6 earthquake shook me awake it was reported to have hit between Mount Vernon and Seattle which is basically my house. I made it through a cold and rain soaked April by reading and writing poetry drafts an exercise in humility and endurance. I missed six days but I kept going. It was glorious to jump start the part of my brain that wants/needs to find comfort in playing with language. I took that picture of a daffodil field at the Skagit River between the touristy tulip farms and La Conner. There is a nursery out there that I love to wander in even when the cold wind whistles through.
I have planted herbs in a pot some chives and tarragon and catnip chocolate mint and peppermint in another. It’s been too cold to plant much else. Lilacs are just now beginning to open around the island. I have a new dermatologist so now I’m trying a cheapo version of some fancy medicine for rheumatoid arthritis though I am not convinced that I have it. My joints ache all the time but doesn’t that just happen when you get old and as of today I am the proud owner of of a Delta dental insurance policy that covers one half of dentures and a bizarre mix of other things some teeth to be extracted some not sometimes pain meds sometimes not if it’s Thursday and the dentist’s dog barfed on his kitchen floor that morning you don’t have insurance for that day etc but at least I moved forward at least I did something. Beethoven said Art demands of us that we do not stand still. I’m locked into the policy for a year. Maybe I can find an adult to explain it to me. In the meantime I will continue to wear a mask to hide my awful broken mouth while I shop for a dentist who does not live “out here” as in here in the random wilderness. Except for a strange bout of laryngitis that was caused by bad air quality in Seattle a place that used to have the cleanest air in the world I haven’t been sick in two years. It’s been a while since I posted here and this sounds boring to me but here I am snaggle toothed and still crazy.
Welcome to May the most glorious month of spring.
Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report

How will you spin fermented want into a poem? Doesn’t
ugliness propagate inside a clever turn of phrase? How can
you return to the place where it all began to go wrong? Don’t
understanding and awkwardness have different half-lives?
Can you imagine holding the sea to account? As if the waves
have learnt to settle scores with the daytime moon?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, The unanswered grumble

Moored at portside, we ponder the uncertainty of what lies ahead. We know there are dangers: the ocean, quiet for now; impenetrable fogs; beasts watching us, lurking in anticipation; perhaps only the monsters of our imagination, the destruction wrought by our greed and disregard for the natural world.
The video is composited from footage from around Port Adelaide along with algorithmically generated animations. The soundtrack is built up from samples recorded at Birkenhead Bridge, which is seen in the title sequence. The audio samples were used to construct a soundscape for Water Under the Bridge, an installation with Tony Kearney, as part of BRIDGE, The Packing Shed, Hart’s Mill, Port Adelaide, Adelaide Fringe Festival, 23rd February – 11th March, 2018. The text in the video is adapted from The White – A Note on the Text originally published in e•ratio 26, 2018, inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale.
Ian Gibbins, The Port Trilogy

While we were staying at the lake, another close friend of our family also died. Ray lived a few houses away, and was in his late 80s; the friendships between our families span three generations. We were able to see his children; we all tried to help each other and talked about the strange feeling of watching our parents’ generation, who have been such strong and constant figures of our childhoods and the long subsequent years, now pass the torch to us when we’re all getting on in age ourselves.
The late spring weather was pretty wretched — grey and rainy, with days of windy snow squalls — but the lake was a reassuring presence. Every morning when I got up, I’d spend some time looking out at the water and its changing moods, and every evening when it was possible, my husband and I took a walk around the lake at sunset, looking out at the fields as the farmers began to plow, watching the migrating geese and a group of mergansers that had stopped at the lake for a while, and, to our great excitement, observing a bald eagle nest with vigilant adult birds, at the top of a tall pine tree.
Beth Adams, Changes

spring morning
the graveyard fills
with butterflies
Caroline Skaane, a few recent poems

You’ll carve your spine into a divining rod and learn to guide yourself towards calmer, more faithful waters.
All the bizarre and beastly skins you’ve inhabited, you’ll no longer recognize.
You’ll wish them well along their journey, but explain you’ll be taking a different path.
Soon this transformation will be complete, and you’ll become the road sign that says,
rest area ahead.
Rich Ferguson, Though certain pains may shadow you now

Last weekend I had the great joy to read my poem at the Hoffman Center for the Arts in Manzanita, Oregon, which is just up the road from where I learned to read and write at Garibaldi Grade School. To feel the trajectory of my writing come back to where it started 60 years ago was a homecoming of sorts, and the loss I felt as a child leaving the North Coast was replaced with the understanding that this place had never left me.
Judge Lana Ayers who selected my poem for the 2022 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize had this to say about “Birthday Fires”.
“Birthday Fires is a marvel of imagery and complexity in 9 couplets. The fires are birth, creativity, life. The poem reminds us that even as hardships and sorrows sap joy, we can still celebrate and make our own light, as in the final captivating image of the poem.”
Carey Taylor, Full Circle

National Poetry Month comes to a close this week, as does my experiment with revising someone else’s poem. It was a fascinating practice, because it involved a kind of interpretation and re-imagining, taking–in this case–a poem written in Portuguese in 1928, and seeing whether through revising, I might make it mine (if not make it new). In slightly less than a month, I reworked the poem ten times. That’s a pace much quicker than I generally revise my own work. Which also made for an interesting process.
No judgment on the outcome, such as it is. The purpose of the prompt was to keep me writing and to remind me to get revising my poems, and it did have the intended effect. When emotional, physical, job or life obstacles clutter the writer’s terrain, attending to a writing project–however arbitrary–can have a salubrious effect. Or at least grease the wheels a bit. […]
One of the things I take away from this effort is that I do have a recognizable voice in my work. That was something I fretted over for many years, the concept of possessing a poetic voice. I have written in so many styles and taken different approaches to work and, for awhile, topic, that younger me worried that I had not developed a voice. Apparently someone long ago convinced me of the importance of having a recognizable voice; now, I barely recall why lacking it would feel like such a terrible thing. But reading my revision of Pessoa’s original, I sense his idea but hear my voice and my interpretation of his idea.
I’m not sure this is the final draft–whether this poem is finished or not, or whether it ever will be. I thank Pessoa for providing the starting point for the experiment and for making me stop and consider whether memory distinguishes who I am from who I was.
Ann E. Michael, Revision revisited

While I was excited to focus on my movement practice after spending so much time on writing, and while I am also looking forward to a new city, my poetry life had gotten a little stagnant. I was still writing, submitting, and publishing haiku, and became an active member of the Austin Haiku Study Group. But I was looking for more.
About a month ago, my waiting paid off. I got the idea for a new project: The Culinary Saijiki. As most people who read this blog probably know, I’m a big fan of food (eating more so than cooking). I’m also interested in the ways in which English-language haiku practitioners approach the seasons in their haiku practice. I realized that food is one way in which people can connect to the seasons, and decided I wanted to go deeper into exploring that connection. I launched the first blog post earlier in April. (I planned to announce it here that same week, but hey . . . I’m moving and wrapping up the semester. Things are a bit hectic.)
In addition to the blog, I’ve also decided to start a companion podcast, where I talk to haiku practitioners about the ways in which food shows up in their work.
Allyson Whipple, Introducing the Culinary Saijiki

“Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter” is an exploration of connection, roots and family relationships through the nourishing qualities of food. Sarah Mnatzaganian’s poems are tender and compassionate. Family is a symbol of support and love that allows its members to find their own way.
Emma Lee, “Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter” Sarah Mnatzaganian (Against the Grain) – book review

I wanted to do a quick reading report on Mary Biddinger’s newest book from Black Lawrence Press, Department of Elegy, a wonderfully nostalgic/anti-nostalgic, goth, reminiscence on a Gen-X childhood and young adulthood punctuated by midwestern vacant lot landscapes and marvelously bad decisions. I am loving it – it might be my favorite book of hers yet, so if you are on the fence, get it.
And just to punctuate this, here are some of my favorite lines from the book, from the poem “Bitch Wire:”
“Like many, I poured my best years into
a springform pan, but they were stupid years.”
I laughed out loud at this, and since I also spent a lot of my teen/young adult years making good and bad decisions in the Midwest, I felt like this book was something I could really identify with. Also, once again, kick-ass cover art.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Poem in Jet Fuel Review; Reading Report: Mary Biddinger, and Sun, Spring and Apple Blossoms Pre-Birthday

If you follow my blog regularly you will have seen that I have been delving into my own practice, exploring what it is to write poetry and how I can break out of some of the habits I have fallen into as a poet. I have been learning to take risks with my own work. I have thought about this development in my own writing as a slowing down, a cessation of striving for publication and success and a re-evaluation of what I want to achieve as a writer, and as a person. The two are not mutually exclusive. Happiness and contentment make me a different writer, they make me a better writer, I think. In my quest to find my own way I’ve been reading books and essays by poets and writers who have explored the impulse towards creativity, and I have been reading about the range of expression that poetry brings, how different art forms merge, and particularly about process; how we think our way to the poem. It has done me good. For me, learning your craft should be more than just creating the impulse to write, or finding a muse or being inspired. We can learn so much by listening to other poets not just reading their poetry, but talking about their process.
Wendy Pratt, A New Venture – Writers on Writing: Poetry

My mother died a year ago April 30th, so I’ve felt haunted these past few weeks. Many kind friends have been checking in with me; for now I’m just saying “okay” and wondering afterward what I meant. Truly, I’ve watched people go through life-rocking grief that lasts years, and that’s not me. My mother died sooner and with more suffering than I wished, but she was 81 and in pain and ready to go. I unpredictably have bad days during which I can’t concentrate and have a hard time being around other people–I call them “grief days.” I suspect this time of year will often conjure her difficult final weeks. Yet most of the time my memories and dreams focus more happily on earlier parts of her life. She feels near.
A friend recently said that she can’t mourn her mother even a few years later; there was too much trauma there. My father, ten years gone this May 30th, wasn’t someone I could grieve, either. From my twenties on I was aware of mourning the father I didn’t have–feeling sorrow even more acutely as I watched how loved and supported my kids felt by their dad–but my father was a storm of a person whom we were relieved to see pass. That’s the main personal narrative of my new book, Poetry’s Possible Worlds: learning the extent of his lies, watching the damage he did as he flamed out, and coming to see the ways his life and death reverberated in me, my understanding guided by poems.
The thing is, my mother was, of course, implicated in my father’s violence. I’ve just published a pair of poems about those times in Couplet, an exposure that would have been difficult when my mother was alive and still feels surprisingly risky. Even calling my father “violent” has been a struggle. My mother occasionally slapped us, but to me it felt fundamentally different, just what temporarily angry parents sometimes did in an age when spanking wasn’t taboo. My father’s violence came from a different place; sometimes it was cool, strategic. We never sustained the visible injuries a social worker would have recognized (or rarely? I’m not positive), but it was clear he wanted to hurt us and approached that line too often. His unpredictable temper, so difficult to read, helped wire my brain. I’m still more likely than some friends to sense dishonesty and possible physical threat from others. I trust those instincts.
Lesley Wheeler, Poetry and the truth of it

Having recently read a few gorgeous lyric poems that failed to transport me anywhere at all, I found myself (yet again!) wondering why.
Once more, I reached the conclusion that supposedly universal lyricism without context is just beautiful language that floats in a vacuum without an anchor. It’s to be admired rather than absorbed.
In my view, one ideal way to achieve universality in a poem is via a specific frame of reference. This is crucial to the ability of a poem to create a credible new reality that enlightens and transforms the reader’s pre-existing imaginary world.
Contrary to certain critical beliefs, the specific is a pathway towards the universal and never deserves to be disparaged as unambitious. In other words, so-called anecdotal poetry is capable of generating power that reaches far beyond its initial modest confines. The supposed anecdote is simply a point of departure…
Matthew Stewart, The specific as a pathway to the universal

Let us take, for example:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils…
This poem immediately demands the reader think about specifics – specifically specific ways of doing things, and daffodils.
What are the problems with that?
Firstly, it prevents the reader exploring their own ideas of how, for example, to wander in a lonely manner, or what they might see when doing so.
If one instead said:
I wandered lonely as a wandering lonely thing
and:
A host of things you could see a host of
then the reader’s imagination is allowed to run free inserting his or her own images as applicable to their own experience.
Even better:
I did something in the way I like doing it
and:
I could see what I wanted.
thus not restricting them to wandering, being lonely, or seeing too many things at once.
Secondly, the nature question. These nature specifics – and they appear in an awful lot of poems – also exclude those readers who do not have access to ‘nature’.
The city dweller is lucky if they’ve ever seen a vale or hill, and their knowledge of daffodils is likely to be either of that circle of yellow planted by the council on the concrete roundabout where the turn-off for Tesco is, or the drooping yellow things they’ve taken out of the green bucket outside the petrol station as a last minute present for Aunty Nora. These daffs are not dancing in the breeze – they’re gasping for air.
So what is this poem supposed to mean to these people?
To sum up: such specifics limit the imagination of the reader and are also exclusive.
While I’m at it, may I suggest that poets are a bit too obsessed with loneliness, solitude, lying on couches, and being vacant and pensive. They should get out there, get some mates, and get a life. And if they can’t be bothered to get off the couch (ok, fair enough), at least watch something decent on Netflix.
Sue Ibrahim, The dangers of specifics and specifically the specifics of nature in poetry

All of us who read poetry spend a lot of our time re-reading. Whether it’s a poem we’re new to or one we’ve known for years, the impact changes from one reading to the next–something comes clear that wasn’t, it means something different to us at different times in our own lives, it thickens as we know more of the historical context, or look up a word or an allusion, see a pattern we’d missed. Sometimes it thins as we realize it’s all dazzling surface, no depth. Sometimes it’s just incremental changes, but sometimes it’s a real shift from something we disliked to something we find deeply moving.
One of the most significant examples for me was Wallace Stevens’ poetry. I loved the words and images, but I could not find a way in, a way to take hold. I kept reading for the surface beauty, and because all my teachers said he was a great poet. Eventually something clicked, I started to see and hear them as whole poems, and he became one of my central poets. I never understood why everyone assigned W. C. Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” until I knew the historical context of imagism and free verse lines. I loved the music and beauty of his poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” without paying much attention to what it was saying, the way I listened to rock songs, until someone mentioned it was about a man asking for his wife’s forgiveness. Then I liked it even more, for a few minutes, until I re-read the poem and discovered that the speaker ends up forgiving himself.
I liked but didn’t sense the power of Dickinson’s poems until I read them without the reductive punctuation that had been added by editors. And just last week I came to see how much deeper one of Whitman’s short poems, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” is than I had ever thought when I did a little discussion with the poet Kevin Prufer and he drew an illuminating diagram of it.
Sharon Bryan, Poems You Changed Your Mind About

The latest from American poet Solmaz Sharif, following her Look (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], is Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022), a collection of poems that masterfully examine one’s ongoing relationship with an adopted country and culture that requires constant adaptation, an America that seems to be built on the very foundation of reminding citizens that they don’t, or shouldn’t, belong. Sharif examines that painful space of absence, especially through the extended poem “Without which,” “A without which / I have learned to be.” Or:
Of which I am without
or away from.
I am without the kingdom
]]
and thus of it.

Her poems spool, and loop, return to movements monumental and jarring. Hers is a careful, considered lyric, one that slowly places one thought beyond another, composing her pauses and silences as carefully as her lines. Hers is a lyric of phrases, expositions and first-person narratives; a book of boundaries and borders, cultures and collisions, and of lines occasionally drawn in the sand. “Upon my return to the U.S.,” she writes, to open the poem “He, Too,” “he / asks my occupation. Teacher. // What do you teach? / Poetry. // I hate poetry, the officer says, / I only like writing / where you can make an argument. // Anything he asks, I must answer. / This, too, he likes.” Hers is a lyric of phrases and short turns, accumulations, pauses and open spaces. Sharif writes around the spaces left from and through absence, of belonging, exile, colonialism and othering.
rob mclennan, Solmaz Sharif, Customs

I knew Sharon Hashimoto in graduate school, and have long been an admirer. Her first book of poetry, The Crane Wife, was a co-winner of the 2003 Nicholas Roerich Prize, originally published by Story Line Press and now reprinted by Red Hen Press. It was a privilege, this morning, to read her 2021 book, More American.
Samuel Green, the inaugural Washington State Poet Laureate, writes of this book:
I often wonder whether the urge to share joy isn’t one of the most primal human urgencies. Perhaps that’s behind the impulse to read so many of the poems of Sharon Hashimoto’s More American aloud to someone else. “Old memories are ghosts we walk through,” she says in one poems. Hashimoto knows how to let those ghosts bear witness without nostalgia in poems of reconciliation, tolerance, forgiveness, and the sort of love that understands it might never be seen for what it is… (back cover)
And that comes as close as I can to explaining why I’m sharing this book with you. Hashimoto has crafted poems here that collect and treasure family voices, stories of internment and military service, education, and a grandmother, peeling onions, or rising from her bath. Every subject is given such poise and dignity, even when buttocks and breasts are “plump bags,” “socks stretched.” It is a book of family, and a book of witness to that family’s particular (and particularly) American history.
It’s also exquisitely crafted, both the book and the individual poems. In the first section, “Japanese-American Dictionary,” I found myself reading aloud, just for the pleasure of Hashimoto’s words, carefully chosen like ingredients her grandmother uses in her recipes: “shoyu-soaked ropes, / chicken sizzled in garlic and fat. Home // was smell: seaweed, ginger, and rice wine / vinegar” (“Oriental Flavors”).
Language abounds here. “What I knew of Japan / was in my parents’ faces: / okasan, ojisan—the baby sounds / I sometimes used for mother, father,” as we hear in another poem (“A Matter of Loyalty: Question #28, A Nisei’s Response”). These ghostly voices, though, are what I believe will stay with me.
Bethany Reid, Sharon Hashimoto, More American

A short post this week. Three tantalising teasers before the launch next Tuesday of Pressed for Time (Calder Valley Poetry). Shortly there should be a link via the Menu (top of the page) to My Books which will hopefully take you to the PayPal facility. Once it’s up, check out the special offer, available up to may 14th. In the meantime, here are three more poems which I hope will balance the bleakness of some of the work. […]
A poet in Hessle watched a man who pushed
a lawnmower down the cobbled street,
and wished him grass. He saw how a roofer’s trowel
makes diamonds of a slanting sun. Everywhere,
they told me, there’s a view. Something going on.
John Foggin, Pressed for time……….

This little monster offspring is now available for order! Get it here: https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/animal-vegetable-monster-kristy-bowen
What does it mean to be an artist in a world full of monsters? What does it mean to be the monster? This collection rifles through dusty museum halls and neglected cabinet drawers to get at the nature of art and creation in the face of danger—to the body, the heart, to the earth—and how art can both save us and destroy us at the same time.
Kristy Bowen, animal, vegetable, monster

In some people’s minds his work is considered, well, uncool. Ubiquitous and made into too many copies in bad frames. But I love the work of Andrew Wyeth. I love the strange palette, the odd perspectives, the vast spaces in his work, the shadows, the splatters. I read an article recently that cited Wyeth as saying he considered himself an abstract artist, concerned with how things fill space. This explains his centralization of views through windows and doors, his treatment of walls and fields as vast and interesting subjects, and how often his paintings seem about to tumble off the canvas. And somehow this got me thinking about line breaks.
Line breaks too can serve to disequilibrate the world in interesting ways, can make a wall tilt or roll or file down to a slender needle. I’m speaking both literally and figuratively. The great power of a line break is the exertion of tension, or its release; the creation of anticipation, of momentary confusion, of a headlong rush or a disconcerting pause. They’re fun to figure out too, in the writing/revision phase.
Marilyn McCabe, The break of noon; or, Line Beginnings and Breaks

When I fell on April 15th and hurt my wrist, I had some seminary assignments I needed to complete. I thought about asking for an extension, but in most of my classes we only get one extension, and I worried that I might need an extension more later. So I decided to see what the dictate function of Word would do.
In the early years of this century, I had done some work with voice recognition software, but I had to make so many corrections that it just didn’t seem worth it. That technology has come a long way. I have been doing all sorts of writing in the past several weeks, and I am amazed at how few mistakes I have to correct.
I’ve written comments for my students’ essays as I’ve graded them, and it’s much easier with voice recognition software. By easier I really mean it’s faster. I’ve responded to emails this way too. It requires some cutting and pasting, but that’s OK.
As I’ve been writing papers for seminary classes that I’m taking, I’ve been trying to observe the process. Do I write differently? Am I formulating thoughts differently? So far the writing process itself seems similar, whether I am typing directly or speaking out loud and watching the words scroll across the page. I go back to correct errors as I notice them with either process. I don’t think that one process or the other generates more errors.
Will I continue using this feature once I have regained the power to type the way I was trained? Maybe. It’s good to know that it’s available and that it works so easily. I do miss the ability to write with any kind of background noise; I can’t listen to the radio for example.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Voice Recognition Software

How to Reject My Work: I accept rejections only through my electronic rejection system (SUBMITTABLE) or via Email. I do not accept rejections delivered in person, through word-of-mouth, or through openly mocking me on social media.
Timing: Rejections may be received year round, though I may experience high volumes of rejection on days I am feeling insecure about my writing.
Simultaneous Rejections: I do so hope you are rejecting at least a couple other writers at the same time.
Response Time: Please reject me within the year. If it has been over a year, I will consider myself rejected. Please reject me before announcing contest winners on your Twitter account or website.
Rejection Fees: Magazines are always free to reject me without fee or consequence, in an effort to promote literary community.
Payment: I am currently a non-paying market.
Formatting Your Rejection: All rejections must be in 12-point Times New Roman font, with 1-inch margins. Form rejections must include one of the following signal words or phrases: Unfortunately, Although, Best of Luck, Elsewhere, Regret. Please include the correct author’s name with REJECTION in all caps in the email subject line (“Emerson REJECTION”). As tempting as it may be, please restrict yourself to rejecting me one submission at a time.
Thank you for your interest in rejecting my work; best of luck elsewhere!
Renee Emerson, Rejection Guidelines for Literary Magazines

in the rain
the lonely sound of a bell
how far it travels
Jim Young [no title]

Diane LeBlanc: The first poem in The Curator’s Notes, “My Mother Was Water,” introduces some of the collection’s central motifs: water, a mother/daughter relationship, origin stories, exile, survival. It serves as a preface or frontispiece. I always wonder if poets choose a poem with great weight for that position in a book, or if a poem gathers force when situated alone before a series of sections. What can you tell us about that poem and about its place in the collection?
Robin Rosen Chang: “My Mother Was Water” was actually the working title of my collection. However, I felt that, as a title, it incorrectly implied that the collection was all about the mother figure. On the other hand, the poem works well as a prefatory poem because it introduces many of the book’s themes. Through this poem, the reader is presented with the importance of stories—origin stories, stories we inherit, stories we adapt, stories we ourselves curate—as well as the types of relationships that are prominent in The Curator’s Notes, namely those between mothers and daughters and between women and men. It also serves as a launching point for my own origin story, while foreshadowing some of the turbulence that ensues.
Diane Lockward, Terrapin Books Interview Series: Diane LeBlanc Interviews Robin Rosen Chang

Forgetting where the car is parked
means something important left undone.
The structure deflated like punched dough
means vulnerability and self-blame.
The taxi that makes stop after stop for hours
is the same as the airport with no signs:
what made you think you had any control
over where you’re going or when you arrive?
The suitcase that won’t hold everything
means the same as the one left behind.
The empty hot tub at the top of the house
is ambiguous, but skylights mean hope.
__________
None of these statements accord with any school of dream (or poem) interpretation I know. I’m also not sure how I feel about placing any single interpretation on a dream or poem. But both are worth holding up to the kaleidoscope, turning them to see what we learn from how the shapes (re)align.
Rachel Barenblat, Interpretation

a mother’s cancer, wired for electricity, wires that were her last connection to this world, then her poor ghost, wired for sound.
a bell on the neck of the goat, it sounded evil and looked dull. the poor goat had to listen to it clang with every damn step for its entire life.
lovely, lovely, lovely. above, a blue sky heaven with perfect white, fluffy clouds. below, the slums and the suffering on the streets of the city.
a dead, beached whale, lit with floodlights, the rotting continued through the long sinews of the night, broken by the sound of the waves.
the dreams that were cast aside, sins that were never forgiven and never forgotten. yesterday became today, but why?
poems about beauty? sure. why not? but poems about the ugliness, too. don’t just tell a little. tell it all. every damn bit of it.
James Lee Jobe, ugly, ugly, ugly

There is a suddenness to beauty, a shock to it. I sometimes think I’m quite dulled to the world these days, but then it happens, I’m pulled through, and that reminds me what I’m here for. What tasks are important to me. And that’s not just writing or photographing, but trying to make the world slightly better, however I’m able. And so my mind is slightly shifted, and I can go on.
Joan Chittester has said, “It is Beauty that magnetizes the contemplative, and it is the duty of the contemplative to give beauty away so that the rest of the world may, in the midst of squalor, ugliness, and pain, remember that beauty is possible.”
And maybe that’s the number one rule of beauty school: it is your obligation to keep giving beauty away. Or, as I often say here, you are required to make something beautiful. Which, can I even say that often enough? I think not.
Shawna Lemay, Beauty School

I’m grateful for another month filled with poems. Thank you to Maureen Thorson and our NaPoWriMo fellowship for this journey. We got all the way to Mordor and discovered there was no Sauron waiting for us, no Mount Doom, no ring that needed to be destroyed. The journey together was the purpose of it all and reaching our destination, the reward. I’m so glad I joined this year. Have an amazing year of writing and living life to the fullest! See you in April 2023.
Romana Iorga, NaPoWriMo Day 30, 2022

November 28, 2021November 28, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 47

to live among & within & through words or more vitally, caring attention—that’s the daily practice, not writing poetry 24/7. but living with poetry brain, which could be the same, depending on the day, as laundry brain or long-talk-with-good-friend brain or soup brain
Chen Chen, i mean what could be more BEAUTIFUL

I mean, first of all, I’m proud to have published works in the plural about which to have opinions! And I really liked the process behind that most recent collection, and I’m pleased with its innovation: poems that unfold as erasures of themselves, with an essay that scrolls across each page. But I don’t really think the poems, for the most part, work. I’m really pleased with the video I created that allows the erasures to disappear on the screen. That took a shit-ton of work to figure out. This collection won a contest to get published, so SOMEONE liked it enough to make it the winner, and for that I’m very grateful. So much to feel good about!
But the actual poems? Eh.
I have to assume that all artists who have created enough stuff look back at some and think, oh, dear, what was I thinking. I won the important battle I often have with myself: I loved the process.
What’s the takeaway? Well. I’m not sure. You win some; you lose some? Sometimes even if you win some, you lose some? Love the process, beware the product? Good process doesn’t always assure good outcome? (Conversely, I presume, good outcome can be birthed of crappy process?) All of these?
Marilyn McCabe, It’s not unusual; or, On Artistic Regret

I realized this weekend that November is the 15h anniversary of the release of the fever almanac, my very first book progeny. In November 2006, amidst a fall which included heartbreak (and the start to a long dysfunctional entanglement that took years to disentangle) I was mostly euphoric and very sick –with what turned out to be mono, though I didn’t know it yet. As fitting to the title, the time around the release was a sort of fever-both literally and metaphorically. The trees were crazy gorgeous that year. There was a fire a block from Columbia that sent us home and whose smoke gave me a headache for two days. I was falling for someone I would find out later was married and a compulsive liar, but that November I was still under the illusion that he was my soul mate, despite inconsistencies and occasionally missed dates. While I had dated a bit before, had myriad flings, and even had a 4 year open relationship that had dissolved in the summer, I was convinced this was wholly different. the fever almanac itself was mostly a collage of bits of my romantic life in my twenties, with some spinning for the sake of art. I had not yet really had my heart broken to that point. In some ways, it was whole book yearning for that sort of loss–losses that would inevitably come later. Kind of 13 year old me listened to sad songs and thought about being devastated. The devastation was the point. The wreckage, while just theoretical at that point, the goal.
But the book, the book was beautiful.
Kristy Bowen, november and other fevers

My reading of late has been my usual mixture of systematic delving into poetry collections with non-fiction on the side. I hugely enjoyed Henry Shukman’s One Blade of Grass, which made me question, in a good way, the value of writing poetry in the grand scheme of things, but also flagged up the importance of meditation: how it had helped him with the clarity of his poetic vision, back in the days when he still published poetry. It’s a real shame for me that he no longer publishes his poems, but his book explained over the course of many years’ spiritual journey why he doesn’t.
I’ve been intrigued too by the poetry of Gillian Allnutt, whose 2013 collection Indwelling I bought in Nottingham a few months ago. Her poems are sometimes so short and gnomic that I find them disconcerting, in a beneficial way. Whilst at Lumb Bank, I took the opportunity to read more of her books and will continue to seek them out. I’ve enjoyed too, a conversation she had with Emily Berry, here, and another with wonderful Geoff Hattersley, here. In the latter, Allnutt compares the gaps in her poems to the holes in her mind which she wrestles with during meditative practice.
Matthew Paul, November news

After a variety of solo and collaborative chapbooks, including his full-length collaborative volume with Gary Barwin, A CEMETERY FOR HOLES, poems by Tom Prime and Gary Barwin (Gordon Hill Press, 2019) [see my review of such here] (with a second volume forthcoming, it would appear), London, Ontario poet, performer and musician Tom Prime’s full-length solo poetry debut is Mouthfuls of Space(Vancouver BC: A Feed Dog Book/Anvil Books, 2021). Mouthfuls of Space is a collection of narrative lyrics that bleed into surrealism, writing of existing on the very edge, from which, had he fallen over completely, there would be no return. As a kind of recovery journal through the lyric, Prime writes through childhood abuse, poverty and trauma. “I am awarded the chance to die / smiling,” he writes, to close the short poem, “Capitalist Mysticism,” “clapping my hands [.]” Prime writes a fog of perception, of homelessness and eventual factory work, and an ongoing process of working through trauma as a way to return to feeling fully human. “I died a few years ago / since then,” he writes, to begin the opening poem, “Working Class,” “I’ve been / smoking cheaper cigarettes // I like to imagine I’m still alive / I can smoke, get drunk / do things living people do // the other ghosts think I’m strange / they busy themselves bothering people [.]” Or, as the last stanza of the poem “Golden Apples,” that reads: “if I loved you, it was / then, your pea-green coat and / fucked-up hair—staring out of nowhere / your cold October hands [.]”
Through the worst of what he describes, there remains an ongoing acknowledgment of beauty, however hallucinatory or surreal, and one that eventually becomes a tether, allowing him the wherewithal to eventually lift above and beyond the worst of these experiences. “we trudge across fields of hornet tails,” he writes, as part of the sequence “Glass Angels,” “planted by hyper-intelligent computer processors— / the moon, a Las Vegas in the sky // glow-worm light synthesized with the reflective / sub-surface of cats’ eyes [.]” Despite the layers and levels of trauma, there is a fearlessness to these poems, and some stunning lines and images, writing his way back into being. “life is a ship that fell / off the earth and now // floats silently in space,” he writes, to close the poem “Addictionary.” Or, towards the end, the poem “Immurement,” that begins: “I’m a large Tupperware container filled with bones [.]” The narrator of these poems has been through hell, but he does not describe hell; one could almost see these poems as a sequence of movements, one foot perpetually placed ahead of another. These are poems that manage that most difficult of possibilities: the ability to continue forward.
rob mclennan, Tom Prime, Mouthfuls of Space

[Matsuki Masutani]: When I was told I had cancer, I panicked. I had no idea what it was like to be a cancer patient. I thought I could avoid cancer by avoiding the word cancer. So I wrote chemo poems to show what it is like to have cancer for people like me. That was a new beginning for my poetry writing. I was seventy-three.
[Rob Taylor]: Has Parkinson’s changed what you want to write about in your poems?
MM: After my cancer treatment, I thought I would go back to normal, but Parkinson’s changed all that. I felt it wasn’t fair. Once I’d adjusted to it, I noticed that the world had changed. There is a lot of sickness, suffering and death in the world. This is depressing, but I found it made life somehow more real and sacred. This is the world where angels appear and miracles happen.
Rob Taylor, Salvaging My Old Dream: An interview with Matsuki Masutani

We don’t typically imagine having to perform acts of intimate care for another, yet, when put in that position for someone we most love, we get on with it as if we’d forgotten we couldn’t imagine doing it. There’s a tenderness here, undermined by the pulsing cut where the imagery is more of passion and desire.
“a single window” is a generous opening into a confined world of disability and chronic pain and pain management. Through it, Daniel Sluman demonstrates that this small world is still full of complexity, love, compassion and tenderness as well as sadness and the trials of managing the side-effects of drugs and lack of outside care. He shows that intimacy and love are still possible in the bleakest of moments and the will to survive can renew. “a single window” is not a polemic or a rant. The poems are closely observed and crafted reflecting the isolation and resourcefulness central to the lives of too many disabled people.
Emma Lee, “A Single Window” Daniel Sluman (Nine Arches Press) – book review

So in ‘The Informer’ the narrator (in a Kafkaesque sort of world) has been invited to attend a ceremony to select the ‘finest informer’. There appears to be a confident pride in the way he dresses up for the occasion. In the hall, the candidates (those you expect to be on the ‘inside’) are in fact excluded. It turns out, in a detail suggestive of the elusive nature of truth and the levels on levels of surveillance in such a repressive society, that all the seats are to be taken ‘by the officers responsible for informing on the ceremony’. There is a calculated bewilderment to all this as is also revealed in the oxymoronic title of the eponymous poem, ‘The Kindly Interrogator’. Nothing so simple as a caricatured ‘bad cop’ here:
He’s interested in philosophy and free verse.
He admires Churchill and drinks green tea.
He is delicate and bespectacled.
He employs no violence, demands no confession, simply urging the narrator to ‘write the truth’. The narrator’s reply to this epitomises the uncertainties a whole society may come to labour under. He cries, ‘on my life!’. Is this the ‘I will obey’ of capitulation or the ‘kill me first’ of continued resistance? Is this the repressed and persecuted ‘life’ of what is, of what is the case, or an expression of the inalienable freedom of the inner ‘life’? [Alireza] Abiz is very good at exploring such complex moral quandaries and boldly warns those of us, proud and self-satisfied in our liberal democracies, not to imagine ourselves ‘immune from [the] temptation towards unequivocality’. Fenced round with doubt, with a recognition of the need for continual watchfulness, with a suspicion of the surface of things, perhaps these poems never really take off into the kind of liberated insightfulness or expression of freedom gained that the Introduction suggests a reader might find here. Abiz – the ‘melancholic scribbler of these lines’ – is the voice of a haunted and anxious conscience, a thorn in the side of repressive authorities, as much as a monitory voice for those of us easily tempted to take our eye off the ball of moral and political life nearer home.
Martyn Crucefix, The Kindly Interrogator – the poems of Alireza Abiz

I’ve been intrigued of late by the increased incidence in magazines, and also in workshops, of prosepoems (which is sometimes indistinguishable from flash fiction), and also the business of playing with white space, breaking up lines, making apparently abitrary line-breaks. I’m happy to accept that rules are there to be tested and stretched and broken, if only to see ‘what happens’, though less happy to see an accompanying tendency to view regularity, orderliness, evident craft and form as a bit passé. I guess my ‘rule’ is simply to ask: does it work? I’m spectacularly conscious that at the moment a lot of what I’m trying to write doesn’t work. I didn’t set out to do it, but a lot of what I write has ditched the word play, the allusiveness, the obvious rhythms and the imagery that I used to enjoy. It’s gone more reflective/introspective/personal/conversational but that’s a lot harder to do than the complicated stuff. It always was.
Whatever. I’m a regular reader of Julie Mellor’s poetry blog, and also of Anthony Wilson’s latest Life-saving lines after his welcome return to blogging. I learn a lot from their willingness to share their struggles to find new directions and forms, whether it’s haiku or finding a language that will share the experience of depression. It’s humbling.
John Foggin, Breaking the rules…harder than it looks

The full haiku was going to read:
the neighbour’s pine
wreathed in sky
snowswirl
However, too much text made the photo very busy so I plumped simply for snowswirl (with more than a nod to John Wills’ iconic poem:
rain in gusts
below the deadhead
troutswirl
(in Where the River Goes, edited by Alan Burns, Snapshot Press 2013).
I’m now hoping for a quick thaw – it’s been so cold this weekend!
Julie Mellor, snowswirl

I have been thinking a lot about the poetry of Julia Darling this week. Her work became essential to me a year before I had cancer, when a friend introduced me to her first book of poems Sudden Collapses in Public Places. And when I entered remission, hers was the first poetry I read with my rediscovered concentration.
Lately, I’ve been rereading her posthumously published collected poems Indelible, Miraculous, which is as accurate a title of self-description as I have come across. As the Arc Publications website says, her later poems are about her experience of breast cancer but are not morbid and not only aimed at women. If you do not know her work, it’s time you did.
In particular I’ve been thinking of a line towards the end of that collection’s title poem. It’s a poem of ‘early morning’ virgin spaces: a ‘cold’ pane of glass; an ‘untouched’ patch of grass; a ‘deep pool of silver water’; a beach swept clean after a storm, ready for new footprints. The poem is one of direct address, to the ‘indelible, miraculous’ friend of the title. While never less than affirming of the Psalmist’s knowledge that ‘joy comes with the morning’, it is also a poem of sending out, of encouragement to keep living, even though that will mean ‘danc[ing] alone’.
The poem is able to assert that ‘we all matter’ and ‘we are all/ indelible, miraculous’ because it has successfully persuaded us, via its gorgeous language, of the never-ending tension between celebration and lament. This is what I go to poetry for: an awareness that affirms life in all of its complexity.
Anthony Wilson, We all matter

One of the beauties of my pandemic-long poetry practice has been finding a poem by a different poet each week to use as a model—sometimes more of a jumping-off point—for my own work. This week it’s a poem by Gregory Pardlo who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for his book, Digest. After reading this NYTimes piece, and having a look at him at Poetry Foundation—“The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s ‘clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private’”—I’d like to read more. […]
I admit that I’m struggling with what I’ll write in response to this assignment. I mean, how do you follow, “I was born in minutes in a roadside skillet,” or “I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry”? How about “I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves”?
But I’m about to open my notebook and see what will happen.
Bethany Reid, Written by Himself

In some ways, spending a Thanksgiving where sickness and death keep intruding is a potent reminder to be grateful for the time we are given and to keep trying to make the most of it. Small children do that too, and I confess that I prefer the small child to deliver the message that time is fleeting.
As I’m writing, I’m thinking of other messages that came our way during the day. I’m thinking of Shanghai Rummy, and the message that even if you’re winning or losing, one decisive round can change the outcome; it’s a hopeful message or a sobering one, depending on which hand you held. I’m thinking of the minimalist fire pit my spouse made and the fire that refused to catch flame. I’m thinking of the bird that baked for hours but the juices still didn’t run clear at meal time; however, fifteen more minutes at higher heat made for a cooked turkey that was still tender.
I suspect that every day is full of these kinds of reminders and metaphors, if only we had the eyes to see. When people wonder why I continue to write long blog posts, that’s one reason, that it helps me to pay attention.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Important Reminders from a Stranger Thanksgiving

My old dog whimpers when we come in the door on Friday after two nights gone. She’s too fragile to travel now, and she stayed home with my son, who spent the holiday with his dad and his siblings who have a different mother. I have to hold her for a good long time before her body stops trembling. I wonder what she felt while I was gone, if she wondered if I’d return. I hope not.
That night we watch Ted Lasso who says, about parents, that he has learned to love them for what they are and forgive them for what they’re not, and I wonder how things might be if more of us could do that about all kinds of things. I wonder if we could, or should. (I wonder if my children will do that for me.)
Maybe that’s an idea that makes it easier for those with relative comfort to remain comfortable.
Maybe not.
I don’t know.
My son sits down on the couch next to me, to check in with his old dog who isn’t leaving my side. I’m so grateful he was able to care for her while I was gone. I’m so grateful he’s here.
I think about the year he was in second grade, when, the week before Thanksgiving, I read him a story about Natives and Pilgrims and the origins of the holiday, and he told me it made him sad, that he didn’t feel good about the holiday. As his nose touches our old girl who now, like a baby, wakes mostly just to eat and poop, I remember all the versions of boy and dog each of them has been, and I want the moment to last forever, even as I know that all I might hope to hold onto is an image of it, and that the wanting has turned the moment to memory before it is even over.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Why I celebrate holidays I no longer believe in

Speaking of thanks, Jia and I were also extremely grateful for this amazing review of Gravity & Spectacle from Shannon Wolf at the Sundress Blog:
“There is something both cheeky and somber about Baker and Orion’s united perspective.
Orion’s poems are as close to punk rock as we can get in 2021.”
You can read the full review at https://sundressblog.com/2021/02/08/sundress-reads-gravity-spectacle-by-shawnte-orion-and-jia-oak-baker/
Wolf mentions that a few of the poems reference legendary skateboarder Rodney Mullen, so here is some of that backstory: The central art piece in all of Jia’s photographs was made by artist JJ Horner. Since JJ co-founded the skate company Pyramid Country. We wanted to make sure to pay some homage to those roots, through our photos and poems. So we made a few trips to the skatepark next to Cowtown Skateboards.
Since Rodney Mullen is brilliant on a skateboard and in conversation, I tried to cut-up some fragments of language and phrasesfrom his interviews and biography “The Mutt: How to Skateboard and Not Kill Yourself” and shape them into new out-of-context found poems… the same way skateboarders use his techniques as building blocks for new tricks.
Shawnte Orion, Thankful for this Book Review from Sundress and some Rodney Mullen clips

Much to my delight, the video I made with Tasos Sagris and Whodoes, The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself won the Avant-Garde prize for the top film in Fotogenia 3 international festival of video poetry and divergent narratives, held in Mexico City 24-27 over November 2021. The whole festival was a magnificent feast of diverse forms and voices. The finalist list included some of the best videos I’ve ever seen. So to come out on top is incredibly humbling. Massive thanks to Tasos Sagris and Whodoes for entrusting me with their fantastic words and music and the Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens for supporting the project.
The video was a major technical challenge that developed out of the collaborative nature of the work. Capturing the feeling of Tasos’ poem and the mood of Whodoes’ music required careful scripting. Nearly all of the footage was taken specifically for this project. An important part of the video includes a series of animated faces that were derived from a library of source images generated by artificial intelligence. Nearly every scene is composited from multiple sources – with a few exceptions, none of the scenes exists at they look here in real life. The irony is that the real people, observed going about their business, often appear twice in the same scene, side by side, or following themselves. The AI generated faces watch on from window and picture frames. Is this the life we live? Are these the people we meet again and again? Who can decide between the imaginary and the real as we traverse a world full of conflicting desires, politics, dreams?
Ian Gibbins, The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself wins Festival Fotogenia 3!

We took the endless road,
no signs, no map, not a single soul.
The winter around us
grinding his teeth to the unlucky ones,
the ones with no caravan.
Magda Kapa, Caravan

We had a mild autumn that seemed to stretch longer than usual. Today, a dusting of snow and temperatures not much above freezing, gray sky, a meadow in beige-brown hues and the trees mostly leafless. According to the Chinese lunisolar calendar, the next few weeks are 小雪 xiǎoxuě, or “minor snow;” it is already winter. The jiéqì seasons follow the agriculture of northern China’s plains, and it’s striking to me how closely they resemble the agricultural seasons here in eastern Pennsylvania.
Lately, I feel the seasonal transitions physically. My body responds to the changing weather–not always a good thing, but not necessarily a bad thing, either. It connects me with the environment, reminds me of my necessary relationship with the world and its many beings and aspects: seasons, weather, water, plants, insects, bacteria, trees, other humans…
More than ever, I recognize the value in those relationships and treasure how varied they are. And I am just another part of the things I love and experience.
Ann E. Michael, Minor snow

we need witnesses for our being
for our enduring
not for the parts we share but
for what we speak with the moon at
two in the morning
for what has broken and healed and
broken and healed
scar tissue plump with unwritten stories
for the falling, for the failing,
for the days we built ourselves
calloused hands shoring up our souls
an old sweater stuffed into the hollow
left by a missing brick
#RIP my friend
Rajani Radhakrishnan, #RIP – my friend

At the intersection of Bull and Rutledge,
a woman stepped off the curb
on her way to the river.
At the intersection of Franklin and Center hill,
the sirens met the soldiers.
At the intersection of Laurel and Eastern,
I fell in love with geography.
At the intersection of sense and syntax,
I visit the house of silence.
Where paradox crosses paraphrase,
I write.
Anne Higgins, First Boy I Loved

In the middle of all of this I went in for my now standard one day a week in the office with a view to bringing home some of the stuff I’ve accumulated over years. Our floor is being closed down as work wind down our occupancy of our current building, and so I looked a bit like I’d been made redundant as I lugged a cardboard box of rangham* home.

The box mostly contained work-related books (Statistics for Dummies, etc), pens, mugs and the like. But I also remembered to rescue the poem that I had pinned to the divider.
Contingencies – Aidan Coleman

Your
sentiment

tangles
with data

where
analysts

covering
bases

uncover
fresh

affronts
A well

rounded
baby

wakes
assuming

parents
I don’t know or remember how I first found this poem, but it fits perfectly with my day job – where sentiment tangles with data. I know nothing about Aidan Coleman, but I now discover he has a wikipedia page that I’m sure wasn’t there when I first found this poem (about 5 years ago, I think). It looks like I shall be working out how to buy books in Australia.

* I’m not sure I’ve spelled this right, but it’s a word my wife taught me that means detritus and accumulated dreck.
Mat Riches, Why MBA…

Over my own life, writing these journals (especially the blog) has changed and helped me, and the bonus is that through the blog, I’ve met you. For although I value and crave solitude and contemplation, I’m not a hermit by nature, but someone who needs and loves other people, and wants to talk, interact, and share. I also have a degree of healthy skepticism about my own thoughts; it’s through reading and conversation and argument, as well as reflection, that we’re able to sharpen our ideas and come to a greater understanding of what it means to be human, and also how to be a human in this ever-more-complicated world.
Where to find that balance and space is a question for all of us to ask, and the answers will differ. I do see that, for me, a withdrawal has been necessary, partly because too much noise and too many words dissipate my reserves of creative energy and positive thought, and partly because the companies that control those spaces have become increasingly predatory and toxic; I can’t continue to participate and hold onto my integrity. That means accepting less interaction in a quantitative sense, but nurturing and being grateful for higher-quality interaction here, or in letters, calls, or in person.
But there’s more to it than that. To be honest, this period of time has been one of the hardest in my entire life. I was OK for the first year, and then things started to feel much more difficult — though they are now feeling less so. At times I’ve felt despair about both the present and the future, as have most of us — but I haven’t wanted to write about that here, where I know people often come to feel a little better, or to see something beautiful, or to be encouraged. And also, in real life, I’ve been responsible for other people and groups, and that has taken precedence. I simply haven’t had much creative time or energy, or anything extra to give. Is that an apology? Yes…but it’s also a statement about the reality in which many of us have been living. Things changed for almost all of us, and they may not be going back to the way they were. Loss, grief, letting go, and acceptance are all part of that, even as the world seems hell-bent on returning to “normalcy”.
Looking back ten years into that old computer was instructive, as I consider the next decade. For me, it comes down to this: if I’m fortunate enough to still be here, ten unpredictable years from now, I don’t want to look back and realize I wasted whatever precious time I had, either for myself, or for the people and purposes that go beyond me and give life meaning — of which this blog and its readers have been one. That means making decisions, setting clear priorities, and cleaning out my spaces so that there is room, both figuratively and literally, to grow and change, and — one hopes — to have something to say.
Beth Adams, Looking Back at Ten Years Ago, and Facing Forward

E. is putting in a new ventilation system in the house, which means he has taken down some of my bookshelves in the little library. Books are piled on my desk. The little rug is folded and laid on my chair. And the floor is littered with power tools and bits of shiny who-knows-what.
And it has been an excuse for me not to write in the mornings.
Now I find we are well-past the midpoint of November and my mind is months behind in terms of getting myself together. Leonard is still struggling with the fact that E. and I are back at work most days. He’s still having accidents if we leave the house in the evening, or – weirdly – when I am gone for days and then return. He’s taken to pinning me down on the couch and refusing to let me even look up.
I get it.
I pull the thunder-shirt tight across his belly. Then I wrap myself in a huge sweater and sit down in the office to try to write. The walls are white, not the deep green of my library. I hear the traffic, not the blackbirds. And I tell myself that this is okay. I tell myself to take a deep breath. I inhale the damp from the rosemary oil. What are the morning requirements, really?
Ren Powell, Clinging to The Good Life

But despite all this bad news and dismal cold wet weather, I feel…cautiously optimistic about next year. It is a fact that most viruses evolve towards becoming more transmissible and less deadly. Pfizer has an anti-viral pill I’m feeling positive about with good data, even though the FDA hasn’t approved it YET. (Faster, FDA!) Scientists are continuing to figure out what works and what doesn’t with this coronavirus thing. It has been two years since I first read headlines about China putting a doctor in prison for talking about a strange new virus (and I wrote the poem “Calamity.”) Vaccine makers are already looking at updating the vaccines.
We’re spending the holidays in a pretty isolated manner again this year, which is not ideal. I have an inkling, however, of hope, of light at the end of the tunnel. I have a new book, Fireproof, coming out with Alternating Current Press after my birthday in 2022, which will be almost five years exactly since the release of Field Guide to the End of the World. I know in a poet’s life a new book is a big deal, but especially during the pandemic, not a big deal to the larger world, but still, I feel a little excitement. I don’t know if my readings will be in person or on the dreaded (but now normal) Zoom. Will I be able to celebrate with friends and family in person in late spring? I don’t know if the “roaring twenties” of our century will ever actually roar. But I hope so.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Holiday Weekend, Sign Up for a Speculative Poetry Class, Interview with Jason Mott at The Rumpus, New Poem in Los Angeles Review, Pushcart Nomination at Fairy Tale Review, and Feeling Hopeful Despite

Some magic in the landscape has put me under a spell. I see your face on the tip of a bare, winter tree branch; an oak tree that is full of faces, and every one is different! There is a magic in this valley that captures me. The midwinter Tule fog on the marshes and the rivers is an old friend come to call. We pour the tea and sip together, friends under the same spell. Yes, I love the valley, and I love the cool winters that we have here, and I have seen many of them.
James Lee Jobe, magic in this valley

the man
with a book on his face
has rich dreams
Jim Young [no title]

I will take all the pages from my books and build trees—
abundant trees, robust trees, indomitable trees.
No winds can move these trees because they’ve been made mightier by Corso, Vollmann, and Joyce Carol Oates.
When birds build nests in these trees their young will be well nourished by Neruda, Audre Lorde, and Langston Hughes.
And when axemen try chopping down these trees, they’ll be obliterated by Burroughs, Bukowski, and Zora Neale Hurston
before they can even swing their axes and yell:
“Timber!”
Rich Ferguson, These Trees

Allen Ginsberg into
Charlie Parker into
snow against the windshield
Jason Crane, haiku: 26 November 2021

Three books that are really hitting the spot for me of late are The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker, The Lightmaker’s Manifesto by Karen Walrond, and a book I’ve mentioned several times before here on TwB, On Art and Mindfulness by Enrique Martinez Celaya. What they all have in common is that they question the way we always do things and ask us to re-imagine our practices, whether in life, art, or work (and don’t those three things often overlap anyway?).
In a recent conversation with Kerry Clare about my own book, Everything Affects Everyone, we talk about something I’ve often said here which is, what happens when we consider the opposite? It’s a bit of a mantra I have for myself: “Consider the opposite.” It’s a phrase that helps me get out of the mud sometimes, and has helped me conceive of and form a lot of my writing. These three books have me looking at things from a fresh angle.
Shawna Lemay, On Gathering, Making Light, and, On Doubting Your Integrity — 3 Books to Light the Way

Unbearable things: how a voice can speak
into your ear about where its mind has gone,
how its body was left behind. How sunlight
passes through a prism and breaks.
And still we call it beautiful.
Luisa A. Igloria, Prism

Walking through Paris in the (imagined) aftermath of a pandemic, I had the uncanny feelings of déjà vu, that things had disappeared and been replaced, leaving behind a residue of scented melancholy. The gap between then and now ignited a play of imagination, of desire. I had the sense that a great poet had walked this terrain before….voilà Baudelaire!
Baudelaire, delicate but so durably modern, was a visionary of things shadowy, emotionally complex and fugitive, errant. He was a vagabond in the city he inhabited, an internal exile as he moved roughly every two years due to poor finances. An exhibition, “Baudelaire, la Modernité Mélancolique” at Bibliothèque Nationale lists some 20 of his addresses all over the city. More trenchant, he retained memory of Paris as it was cut asunder by Baron Haussmann and remade for a new world. The poet was brilliant at giving presence to things absent. He created images that were less precise rendering than color of a memory.
Baudelaire sang. One of the youthful letters in the show, he complained to his mother that erased his primacy in favor of her new husband. The calligraphy of “à moi, à moi” — what about me! — soars with doubled underlining and accents graves that fly like the crescendo of musical notations. The emotion is real, the emotion is all.
Jill Pearlman, Baudelaire Walks Pandemic Paris

A shed, far back in the wood, with doorhandle hardware as elegant as utilitarian New England always is, and extra-braced with a stick as New England sheds must be: inside, water. Risen above the stones of the stone well walls. Deep, dark, green; coolness rising with that cleanest scent of what sustains us most essentially.
The color here—especially now, in late November, when color is merging into itself to become one single ochre, then russet, then brown, then greyish sludge—does something to me. The waters rushing belowground, too.
I am steeply affected by reminder of thriving land, wild and alive, and what it is to be rooted in it, making art. By reminder of color palettes unlikely and yet truer than reality, more the thing than the thing itself: a soul rendering of what it feels like, that light, that tree, that slant of earth, that red, that death, that falling ecstasy.
JJS, paint, water, well

won’t we sleep every night of our death :: one stone away from the moon
Grant Hackett [no title]

October 24, 2021October 24, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 42

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week, poets have been pondering questions of audience and language, questions of vocation and avocation, questions of travel, and more. Enjoy.

As the exhilaration of bringing forth a new book begins to settle, it presents the writer with another empty page. The writing has to being again and the poet, like a child, stares out at a freshly scrubbed world, learning anew, words and meanings, tasting phrases and metaphors, slowly, as if the morning is a foreign language, strange and tempting yet utterly incomprehensible.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, What happens next?

This morning I was thinking about books and time and the way we change as authors–not only in the style of our writing, the subject matter, our obsessions, but also how we approach the art form–the commerce (or lack-of)–the bizness of this thing called po. The poet who wrote the fever almanac, who compiled various versions, combined and recombined manuscripts. Who sent it dutifully off to first book contests and handed over those shiny paypal funds. She wanted to gain some sort of entry so badly. Wanted legitimacy, whatever that meant. And doors opened, not at all where she expected.
But once inside (I say this as someone who probably only made it into the foyer of the poetry establishment, not the house proper) things weren’t all that different. Most people in her life barely knew she wrote–let alone a book. She still went to work and cleaned the cat boxes and cried on buses The poet who writes books now, wants something else, but something almost just as elusive–an audience. Sometimes, those two things go hand in hand. One leads to the other–and sometimes it flows both ways. Sometimes, you get stuck between.
I like to write now, not with an eye to the editors, the gatekeepers, the people who will grant permission to various hallways and rooms, but my perfect reader. I like to think she likes the same things I do. The weird and spooky and heartbreakingly beautiful. Maybe she’s a poet, or maybe just some other creative soul in another discipline. Her age doesn’t really matter. She’s something between an old soul and a child of wonder. She lives mostly in her head, though sometimes, through reading, inside the heads of others. She wants everything and nothing, but mostly a lot of sleep. A cat (or several). Some coffee. She probably has a job–something bookish. Or arty. A librarian or an English teacher. She’s seen a lot of bad relationships but also some good. She has a couple friends or many in a loose sort of way. Many would say she’s quiet, but can be quite loud when she wants.
As I think about my books, the ones I’ve written but have yet to publish. The books I’ve yet to write that are no more than an idea. A scent in the air. A change of wind. I picture her, probably not in a bookstore, but opening an envelope in the foyer of her apartment building and slipping out a book–my book. Grazing her finger along the spine. Because she probably reads a lot, she won’t read it straightaway, but stack it neatly with others.
Kristy Bowen, the reader

So almost everyone I know in real life is not only not a writer, but has little to no interest in poetry at all (Writer friends: this post doesn’t apply to you).
However, when I come out with a book, they feel compelled to try to read it because they are nice to me. I actually feel really awkward when my day-to-day people read my book though–even my day-to-day people I’m very close to and know more about me than I would ever write in my books.
Why is this?
I think it is because I feel like an everyday-person reading my poetry might misunderstand it or misinterpret it but think the poetry is more my authentic self than the self I share with them (which is much more authentic than my poetry–minus my unpublished collection of poems about Kit which is practically my blood on a page and possibly too raw to ever find itself in a full-length published book form).
I guess that I also think that they just won’t like it–and I’m not sad/upset/bothered at all that they won’t like it, I just expect most people to not like or “get” poetry. I could probably find a poem in each of my books that I think most of my friends and family would like, but I know for sure they won’t like the whole collection (this is maybe a question of accessibility to the everyday reader and not the specific Poetry reader?).
Anyway. If you are my sister or my friend from church or co-op or my next door neighbor or anyone I see for playdates and coffee, I’m not saying you can’t read my book, but it won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t.
Renee Emerson, why I don’t want you to read my book

In one of the lectures given while he was Oxford Professor of Poetry, on ‘clarity and obscurity’, the now Poet Laureate Simon Armitage recalled attending a poetry reading with a non-poet friend (all the lectures are available to listen to here).
After the reading, the friend asks Armitage about the mini-introductions the readers had given to their poems: why, his friend wants to know, don’t they put them in the books? In reply, Armitage reels off various defences – a book is a privileged space, that any one explanation might preclude other readings.
“I still think they should put them in the books,” his friend says. “Or in the poem.”
While he doesn’t go as far as advocating for written intros, Armitage goes on to describe how poems can be more or less generous with the information they offer, and suggests that the modern tendency to hold something back – those references which have a personal, or particular, but unexplained resonance – is an attempt by poets to recreate the kind of enigma which form previously provided.
Free verse is sometimes defended as a more inclusive way of writing, so it is curious that it often goes hand in hand with obfuscation, deliberate or otherwise. What, Armitage asks, if obscurity is just another ‘club membership by which the ignorant and uninformed are kept outside the door’?
Several of the examples of the poems Armitage discusses are ekphrastic poetry: responses to works of art. He shows how some contemporary examples require the reader to be familiar with niche works of art (allowing for the fact nicheness is relative). Other poems do not even reference the work they are responding to: only someone ‘in the know’ would know the poem is a response at all.
What, Armitage asks, is the thought process behind deciding not to give the reader this kind of information? And what does that say about our responsibilities as readers?
Jeremy Wikeley, Are we being educated here? [h/t: Mat Riches]

Upon reflection, the reason I feel I haven’t been doing creative work is that I am not generating many new poems right now. Some, but not many. But let’s re-think the process of revision: it’s a process of deciding upon the order poems should appear in a book, and which of the poems ought to be there to speak to one another, to resonate with one another (and with the imagined future reader). Hey, I am using my imagination here, and I am doing creative work. If all I ever do is generate new poems, those poems won’t have a chance to go out into the world and endeavor to speak to other humans.
Figuring out how to make that happen is the creative work of revising, editing, rethinking. Imagining the reader. Striking the tone of each individual poem to see whether it adds harmony, or works with a fugue-like trope, or changes the mood to minor, or unleashes a surprise. The book of poems can have an arc or act as a chorale or zigzag about to keep the reader on her toes.
The collection of poetry, when it is not yet a book, presents problems the writer and editor must solve. Problem-solving requires creative thinking–I tell my students this almost every time I see them in class!
Will the manuscripts find homes? That’s a different “problem.” Meanwhile, more new poems, more revisions, maybe more manuscripts ahead…while I await the first frost, while the leaves turn and fall. All part of the cycle.
Ann E. Michael, Collecting & creativity

I am happy writing what I consider to be poems, short or long, sometimes very long, primarily because they take me on a trip. I can let my mind go where it will, trusting in the process enough to bring out something that, hopefully, challenges and therefore interests me. And hopefully, anybody who reads it.
A novel, though… not a chance, I thought.
And so why have I written only one poem in the last couple of months – and am 77,000 words into a story that has, so far, maintained my interest – and that I badly want to complete. Perhaps it’s because I don’t know what I’m doing. By that I mean I began it with no plan, no plot, no idea how long it would be, where it would end, if I might like it or not. I had an image of twin boys raised in a wet landscape by dour, religious parents who led lives that were separate from others around them. One boy spoke, the other did not.
I gave the boy who spoke the temporary/working name Josef and wrote the first sentences as follows:
“Josef, they said, you have to take care of your brother, you have to take him with you.
In those days, my name was Josef.
What, all the time?
Wherever you go.“
I had no idea at all what would come next. I made a deliberate effort to write slowly, to settle into the world I was somehow creating. Where was it? I didn’t know. When was it? I wasn’t sure. When I stopped at the end of the first session it was because I didn’t know what to write next. And somehow, eight weeks on, it’s at the point where it feels it might end soon. How I don’t know – and don’t want to know. When it’s done I will allow myself to go back and edit. Until then I’ll go where it leads.
Will it work as a piece of writing? I don’t know, which is the fun of it. If it does, then a couple of bottles of red may be consumed. If not, then maybe a couple of bottles of red may still be consumed.
Bob Mee, ON NOT KNOWING WHERE A PIECE OF WRITING IS GOING

Write it fast,
the first draft,
and make up
the rest of it
later on,
the old monk told
the novelist.
Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (38)

[L]anguage is a golem, a superhero, a doula, the moon. Language is a kid dressed with astounding style and agency, a kind of fatherhood of the world. And motherhood. Language is a map, a legend, a rocket, a secret plan, a beloved city, an entire cosmos, a marvellous escape and a transformation.
Gary Barwin, Some words on Michael Chabon

on exploring Charles Causeley’s house
we might be buyers with money to burn
this could be a viewing
house all shipshape
bristol fashion
I am in the footsteps of a poet I don’t know
a most modest master
so I search for clues
open drawers look in wardrobes
but you cannot wear another’s words
purloin their inspiration
it doesn’t work like that

*
I think tomb robber is about right for how I felt. I was conscious of the fact that I was looking for inspiration in the very place where most of his ideas coalesced. It was a unique experience and thanks to Annie for organising the weekend.
Paul Tobin, PURLOIN THEIR INSPIRATION

the eternal search
other words for other things
wish coin in the fountain
his mind turning inward
from down in that well
the bucket brought up silver
but when the sun went in
down the bucket went again
perhaps what darkness offers
is the eternal state
Jim Young, reading r s thomas

I’ve reached that time in this thinking aloud post when I wonder what quite it is I’m trying to say. I think I’m just writing in this blog when it’s drizzly and drab outside, after not properly blogging at all for a while, without a proper plan. I hope that’s allowed. Perhaps I’m thinking that writing is a solitary, strange, not always chirpy business, mostly a means of receiving mildly disappointing news. Sometimes, I wonder what it is all about at all. But so many of us just keep on with it, don’t we, in spite of everything.
Josephine Corcoran, End of month, rainy Sunday blog

TRANSBORDA III Q-TV: the response of video art to the quarantine times is part of the Festival of Books and Movies – Alcobaça in Portugal, 1-21 November, 2021. Curated by Alberto Guerreiro, the event features a diverse international line-up of video artists. Amongst so many good friends and colleagues, I’m delighted that two of my videos are on the program: ISOLATION PROCEDURES and future perfect. I also have a component in the international collaborative project, Chant for a Pandemic by Dee Hood.
ISOLATION PROCEDURES was recorded during the 2020, mostly on location at Sleep’s Hill, Blackwood, and Belair, South Australia, where I live, under partial lockdown conditions. The audio samples are made from birds, frogs and voices in the immediate neighbourhood. The text samples advice from various government, business and community organisations. “WE ARE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE… MAINTAIN YOUR SOCIAL ISOLATION…” After the pandemic has passed, the lockdowns persist: this is the new normal…
In future perfect, we see and hear words stripped of their ornamentation, pared back to monosyllabic cores… Are these the roots of language? Or are they the skeletal remains of a lost form of communication? Who is trying to speak here? What exactly are we being told? Perhaps a coded message. More likely, a cry for help.
Ian Gibbins, TRANSBORDA III – Q-TV: the response of video art to the quarantine times

One year in Theater History, I stupidly stumbled into a discussion about the “facts” of theater history being theories. And that theories can change with new information – thus changing the “fact”. But I can’t get it out of my head that even though I know the hard sciences work this way as well, I want something to be a real – hard & true – fact. Not something made true by the loudest voice, or the most votes.
This fact today: from where I stand, the Hunting Moon is waning in the pale morning sky. The wind is blowing. Leonard is sleeping by my feet. I am yearning for all the vague atmosphere that the word village brings to mind. I want to live there.
And I want this person in my Facebook feed to be comforted somehow. By someone real. To be held – not in thoughts – but in body.
Ren Powell, Facebook is not a Village

It’s been a blustery week – the Pacific Northwest hit with “bomb cyclone” weather patterns – right now, I’m typing as my power is flickering on and off. We tried to make the best of the brief mornings and afternoons of slightly better weather whenever we could. […]
[W]e got a chance to visit with my poet friends (and Two Sylvias Press editors) Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy, who came and met me at the ferry arrival area. We shared carrot apple ginger cupcakes in a gazebo overlooking the water and got caught up on writing news in the brisk outdoors. I also picked up a pack of the Two Sylvias Poet Tarot set. It was great seeing friends IN PERSON again. I forgot how great it is socializing in real life, especially with other writers!
Then we traveled on to see my little brother Mike and sister-in-law Loree at the new house they’re renting on the Hood Canal, stopping along the way at a local park to unpack a thermos of hot cider and snap a pic – only to see a sea lion fighting with seagulls right behind us. We had a good visit, sat out on their beautiful deck overlooking the Hood Canal, had a little dinner, then made the long trek back to Woodinville. Once again, great to see actual family in human form, instead of just over the phone or over a screen.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Blustery Week, Ferry Foibles, Visiting Friends and Family Over the Water

I’m buried, overloaded, drowning in work, but how could I turn down an invitation by a fellow Singaporean to try some cheap and good Chinese food in a place that I knew nothing about? Spicy Village is an unassuming establishment on Forsyth Street, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, whose claim to fame is its da pan ji, or “spicy big tray chicken,” a dish from Xinjiang.
I did not do my research beforehand, so I did not know about the chef’s specialty. Instead, I had soup dumplings (delicious but small), spicy beef brisket hui mei, or handpulled wide noodle (chewy good), and fish balls stuffed with pork (yummy), as my friend and I chatted about the various business scandals that had broken out in Singapore, about FICA, about Singaporeans in NYC doing this and that, and about the trials of New York real estate.
As the evening went on, I was feeling strangely revived in that tiny, five-table restaurant, with eye-watering fluorescent lighting and a sullen waitress. It had something to do with the food, something to do with the company. When I peeked into the kitchen, and saw three cooks, two women and one man, pulling the dough in their hands into long strands of noodle and talking with great animation, the sight was mysteriously energizing.
Jee Leong Koh, Spicy Village

i’m earlobe to your earhart. i’m astroturf to your astrophysics.
jack o’ lantern to your geranium, chthonic to your tonic.
i’m bray to your brie. knurl to your nureyev. i’m squeegee to your tuileries, caw to your kalimba.
i’m dishcloth to your dish antenna. baywatch to your beethoven. i’m dog-tired to your catalyst.
i’m small time to your bigfoot.
Rich Ferguson, you say catechism, i say cataclysm

I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life, but at least I’m doing something. Which is a huge relief. I don’t think I knew just how much being dead in the water was distressing me, till I got a little way on the ship. Just to have a wake again, and the sea whispering under the planks. And maybe, after all it doesn’t matter so much what I’m doing: I’ll figure out what I’m doing partly by doing it.
At present, the most important thing would be either Python or the blog, I guess. The blog. I love writing and being read: but it may be that the blog is a dead end. Blog readership is falling off, for one thing; and for another, I am constrained by my past there, by the speaking voice and choice of topics my readers are used to. How many times can I run my stumbling toward enlightenment schtick? Okay, I’m overwhelmed by the intensity of beauty, and I can’t summon what it requires of me: what good does it do to say that over and over (and to exaggerate it)? My handful of readers loves it, but that doesn’t make it the right next thing to focus on. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea. Maybe the time has come to leave them.
Dale Favier, Getting Meta

Beady unblinking eyes, some red and some white, stare out from my phone charger, coffee maker, speakers, PC, printer, and elsewhere. The average U.S. home has about 40 electronic devices draining power, accounting for around 10 percent of one’s energy bill. Some call this leaking electricity or vampire energy.
Things I used to get done on a regular basis now seem to take forever. I never used to squeak right up against deadlines, beg out of regular obligations, fail to answer necessary texts, forget things like sympathy cards. Never, ever. But I have the last few years, excoriating myself all the while.
Adding up U.S. households, all this leaking energy totals the output of 26 power plants. This in a time when people in the U.S. use more electricity, per capita, than nearly anywhere else in the world.
Sometimes I cancel a walk with a friend, a walk I’ve been looking forward to, because I just can’t muster up whatever it takes to get myself out of the house. Then I wonder what the heck is wrong with me when surely both my friend and I need the restorative pleasure of time in nature.
Laura Grace Weldon, Steadily Drained

The light on the window sums it up:
This is the year of drought in the city—
Days are endless as the land endures the heat.
Buildings bare sockets, hardly dent the glare
Of the sun harsh on stumps of shrubs, moving

Vehicles:
The river of lives dry and ache of thirst.
Uma Gowrishankar, The Maxim Drawn from Clearing-nut Tree

Word of the Day 18: ‘stour’. Stour has many meanings, but I’ve always heard it connected with dust and dirt. I was excited to learn that my mother-in-law called her vacuum a ‘stour sooker’ which was similar to the Norwegian I learned ‘støvsuger’. I think my MIL would have done well in Norway, with her Scots vocabulary, there’s so many words in common.
A short poem by William Soutar, who was best known for his bairn-rhymes. He was part of the Scottish Renaissance with Hugh MacDiarmid and had a short tragic life. His poems capture the fleeting beauty of life that passed his sick-bed’s window.
Nae Day Sae Dark
Nae day sae dark; nae wüd sae bare;
Nae grund sae stour wi’ stane;
But licht comes through; a sang is there;
A glint o’ grass is green.
Wha hasna thol’d his thorter’d hours
And kent, whan they were by,
The tenderness o’ life that fleurs
Rock-fast in misery?
Gerry Stewart, Scotstober: Days 17, 18, 19 and 20

Back in the 1990s, one of my first published poems appeared in Poetry Scotland. It was chosen by Sally Evans, a co-founder and editor of the magazine, who’s still a stalwart of the poetry scene in Scotland. In fact, I was delighted to meet her finally in person at StAnza 2019 and thank her for her encouragement all those years ago.
Since 2020, Poetry Scotland has been edited by Andy Jackson and Judy Taylor. They’ve kept its unusual format – an A4 broadsheet – while its aesthetic has also been maintained and tweaked to bring it bang up to date (see their website here). As a consequence, I’m delighted to have a new poem in their latest issue, nº102, which is out now. High-quality printed journals still have an important role to play in contemporary poetry, and I hope Poetry Scotland will be around for many years to come…!
Matthew Stewart, Poetry Scotland

[Rob Taylor]: Assuming the poems with place names as titles (like “Manitoba”) were written in those places, you traveled over half the planet in writing this book! At one point you mention that your browser has “thirty flight search tabs” and that you own “more bathing suits than underwear,” so I suspect travel has been central to your life and identity (you note at one point that travel “becomes my greatest escape”).
[Cicely Belle Blain]: The ability to travel freely to so many places is definitely a huge privilege and something I understood to be a privilege from a very young age. My family made a concerted effort to provide us with the opportunity to travel, even at the sacrifice of other luxuries. I remember in ninth grade my teacher asked me why I didn’t choose geography as a subject to pursue and I replied that I felt like I already had front row seats to the best geographical education. I have always valued and appreciated my parents’ willingness to take risks—they’ve moved from the Netherlands to Italy to Kenya in the time I’ve lived in Canada.
RT: We’ve all had to live life differently since the onset of the pandemic, but I wonder if that isn’t particularly true for you, having lost your ability to travel. How has your time been during the pandemic? Has the requirement to stay in one place caused you to look at the world, or yourself, any differently?
CBB: Over the past year the value that travel holds has changed. It is no longer about exploration and fun and leisure, but about connecting or reconnecting with people, ancestors or culture. This has allowed me to view travel less from a Western perspective of ticking things off a bucket list and more as a sacred opportunity to find parts of me that are missing. I hope when the pandemic is over, I can dedicate my future travels to places like Gambia, Jamaica and other lands where my ancestry lies.
Rob Taylor, Achieving An Equilibrium: An Interview with Cicely Belle Blain

Why Palermo, a friend asked when I was making plans. To gather the last strands of summer sun, like harvesters with a basket, I said, or something such. Everything sings in the sun. Instead, there has been some sun and much storm. The stone streets gleam slick and gray between the medieval buildings; the streets with arms extending out like a wet octopus.
I might have said more interesting things: I love the mash-up of cultures, the never-finished project of culture building. When I was 21 and dizzy with discovery, I said this was the first Arab country I’d been in. Was it the pressure of colors — greens, pinks of fish, oranges, figs, the persimmon I ate everyday with fresh ricotta and semolina bread on a park bench? Even locals here still talk of their Arab city — the gardens made urban market, sumptuous and overflowing in crowded alleys with fruits, fish, vegetables. It’s a vision of possibility – a world of overflowing excess – that exists, and exists, no less, in the shadow of crumbling buildings!
The streams of cultivaters — Carthinigians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Arab, Normans, Italians, Cosa Nostra – are all still felt. Along with palm and orange trees, cats, graffiti, conversation, cars, garbage. This fertile energy threatens to overflow at all moments, is always almost too much, pulls back with its own logic. To know a thing, you put yourself in the middle. That’s the beauty of it.
Jill Pearlman, Why Palermo

parked
beside a stream
of traffic
Jason Crane, haiku: 23 October 2021

And we came home with pockets packed with seeds
prickly chestnut hulls leaves and stones
a sliver of slate and the shell of a stripey snail
grains of Quantock soil under our nails
and the day was round and perfect as an egg
and contentment ran like a robin’s song in our veins
Ama Bolton, Desire Lines, continued

This pamphlet is subtitled “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals reimagined” and was published to coincide with the 250th anniversary of her birth. The journals are packed with description of the natural world and her thoughts and feelings, written over the period 1798 – 1803. Sarah Doyle calls these collage poems rather than found poems because, although the words are Wordsworth’s, the poet has reshaped the prose into poetry and added punctuation where necessary for sense. The original spellings have been kept rather than modernised. The language is far from prosaic. The first poem, “One only leaf,” is short enough to be quoted whole,
“upon the top of
a tree – the sole remaining
leaf – danced round and round
like a rag blown by
the wind.”
Emma Lee, “Something so wild and new in this feeling” Sarah Doyle (V. Press) – book review

I was very saddened to hear of the death of Brendan Kennelly this week. He had been a long-standing presence in my poetic universe, and was part of the constellation of poets collected in that life-changing anthology Poetry With an Edge which I devoured in the early nineties having decided to put poetry at the centre of my life. (If you are new to this blog, I have written about his poem ‘May the Silence Break’ here, and, more recently, ‘The Gift’ here.)
That final phrase belongs to his compatriot Seamus Heaney, who has also been in my thoughts recently, namely the austere quatrains and ‘inner émigré’ monlogues of his fourth collection, North. The line that’s been nagging away at me is from the poem ‘Fosterage’, part 5 of the ‘Singing School’ sequence. The poem is one of three that Heaney wrote in celebration of his friend and teaching colleague the short-story writer and novelist Michael McLaverty.
The poem contains a model of Heaney’s ability to make poetry out of everyday speech:
‘Listen. Go your own way.
Do your own work. Remember
Katherine Mansfield—I will tell
How the laundry basket squeaked … that note of exile.’
I first read it having just finished a big Katherine Mansfield phase, and was sure that the universe was trying to tell me something. The lines ‘Go your own way./ Do your own work’ in particular have been copied into more commonplace notebooks and quotebooks than I can remember.
Anthony Wilson, Do your own work

When I come to write my memoirs
I shall hesitate over many things. Pens
for a start. Inks. Nibs. And paper. Lined or plain?
And a routine. A fixed time every day, like Trollope?
Stop after two hours, mid-sentence, regardless.
Or after two thousand words. Or as things dictate?
Middle of the night, esprit d’escalier. Perhaps
a dictaphone? Though transcription is a bore.
An amenuensis would be nice,
but who would you trust, and they’d want paying,
regular hours. Food and drink and board?
Who knows. Anyway, that’s out.
Notebooks, perhaps. But not Moleskines, in case
people notice, and ask if you’re a writer and then
tell you that they do a bit themselves
and wonder if you’d like to take a look,
and tell you how they’re fascinated
by Temperance, or the evolution of the urban bus.
John Foggin, Stocking fillers [10]. Kinda blue

I’m very pleased to see the newly-released full-length debut by Bronwen Tate, an American poet recently transplanted into Vancouver for the sake of a teaching gig at the University of British Columbia. After the publication of a handful of chapbooks over the past few years, including titles published by above/ground press, Dusie Press and Cannibal Books, comes the full-length The Silk The Moths Ignore (Riverside CA: Inlandia Books, 2021), winner of the 2019 Hillary Gravendyk Prize. Through her book-length suite, Tate speaks of children, echoes, stories; writing from the inside of a curiously-paired bubble of text and pregnancy, each of her narrative threads swirling up and around the other. “Any creature with the head of a man will face you differently. Bind the book of autumn,” she writes, to end the poem “NEWS KNOWN / SOONER ABROAD,” “ember-leafed difficulty. Pea coat in the closed, embarrassed, left diffidently. // Can a heartbeat quicken? Mismeasured, I bargained, unmeasured, immeasurable. // Any foreign city can be a mellifluous note. // The true sky was grey.” There is such an interesting and intense interiority to these poems, writing through the blended swirl surrounding pregnancy and mothering a toddler, and reading and thinking. Through Tate, the considerations of writing, thinking and pregnancy are singular, shaping lyric sentences that are attuned to the shifts within her own body. “I could not say I had a daughter. I had a syndrome,” she writes, as part of “THE BEAUTY OF BEINGS UNLIKE / THAT OF OBJECTS,” “missing chromosomes nature mostly culls. A colleague tells me she studies what for me was a sentence. // I had that, I answer. Lost it. Her.” And yet, these poems were not prompted by such shifts, but through an entirely different kind of shifting perspective, as she offers as part of her “ACKNOWLEDGMENTS”:
Many of these poems began with reading Proust in French, which I read well but not perfectly, in search of words I did not know and could not make a confident guess at. I used these words, my guesses based on context, strange collisions, their etymology, French dictionary references (sometimes only to the Proustian sentence in which I’d encountered them), and the guts of my beloved OED for drafting material. While much of what this process generated has been trimmed away in revisions, I’ve gratefully retained some plants, some syntax, some atmosphere, and many titles.
I am fascinated through the way she shapes her poems, whether prose poems or her prose-attuned lyrics, attentive to the shape of the sentence and the accumulation of phrases, and the deep music of her flows and shifts and pauses, breaks. “Now bathysphere,” she writes, as part of “SWEET TEA,” “I house a slow advance. Brain and bone.” Or, as she writes to open the prose poem “AN EMPTY MEASURE IN MUSIC”: “That the dead could linger. Measure to the first knuckle of my littlest finger. Hand-worked guipure, light wool for a shawl. My body a shroud, lost all, lost all. Flicker, spark, and softest fall. // I count the beats in stillness.” Through Tate, we experience a lyric where language and the body intersect, and meet; a confluence of words and cells, each offering their own set of simultaneous possibility. She presents both an abstract and deeply physical and straightforward narrative space, one that articulates how perspective adapts, shifts, stretches and reshapes, from the immediate of the body to what that represents, moving through and against the language of Proust, and such a generous and affirming song of being.
rob mclennan, Bronwen Tate, The Silk The Moths Ignore

–This week brought us the latest adaptation of Dune. At the same time I was watching Bosom Buddies, I was reading Dune. Do I remember the plot? No, but I do remember my dad telling me to give it 100 pages before giving up on it. I did, and I was hooked, and for years, 100 pages before giving up became my rule for reading. My other Dune memory is 10th grade art class, where we had a teacher who just left us to our own devices with all the art supplies, and I drew a picture based on my reading. One of my classmates told me it was derivative of Star Wars, although he wouldn’t have used the word “derivative.” I can still see the hooded figure (bonus: no need to draw a face!) and the swirling desert colors and the burnt orange of the sky. Will I go see the movie? Doubtful, but it does sound intriguing.
–Another book I read in early adolescence was The Diary of Anne Frank. On Wednesday, I went out for my early morning walk at 5:50. Slumped against the concrete column of a downtown building was a man, sleeping in an upright sitting position. On one side, he had a mostly empty bottle of vodka, on the other a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank. I continue to think of him as a metaphor of the human condition, but I’m not quite sure what the metaphor is saying.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Echoes of Early Adolescence

Famine towns spring up,
the farther north one goes.
Flood towns cascade
farther south. The diorama
is a rediscovered art form.
Each boiled grain spared
from a meal affixes moss
to twigs. Once, we had
windows of scalloped shell.
Once, we had capes of bamboo
leaf. Every street corner had
a tiny bread-shrine whose lights
came on behind brown paper
curtains at the crack of dawn.
Luisa A. Igloria, What World

Friday means challah dough rising while I work. Today it also means red beans soaking for mashawa, a soup from Afghanistan. Later I’ll add quick-cooking yellow lentils, bright like the leaves carpeting the grass outside my kitchen window, and tiny moong beans in dull Army green. I wonder what color camouflage American troops wore in Afghanistan over the last twenty years. I know that trying a recipe from someplace doesn’t mean I understand anything about what it’s like to live there, or to flee from there, or to yearn for a there that maybe doesn’t exist anymore. No matter how many news stories I read, I can’t entirely bring the other side of the world into focus. At my work email address, I read and forward another email about resettling refugees. Outside my window the hills are dressed in autumnal tweed. Maple and oak and pine trees rustle. Central Asia couldn’t seem further away.
Rachel Barenblat, Soup

Moonlight, waxing toward full, sweet
Nightfall after an easy Indian Summer day.
My parakeet sings along to the jazz on the radio.
The darkness grows like a healthy child.
James Lee Jobe, the darkness grows